YouTube video by Citizens and Technology Lab

Note: I have not published blog posts about my academic papers over the past few years. To ensure that my blog contains a more comprehensive record of my published papers and to surface these for f…

With over 50 million observations per year, iNaturalist is one of the world's most successful citizen science projects, uniting millions of people worldwide in observing, sharing, and identifying natu...

A site-wide comparison with Wikipedia sheds light on what Elon Musk is trying to do

Another year, another map, and another Birthday for Wikidata. Last generated in 2024 by @tarrow and @outdooracorn, this year I have put the work in just ahead of the 13th Wikidata birthday to have a look at what's changed in terms of items with coordinates this past year on Wikidata. And here it is! But really you need to look at the diff between previous years to see what has changed!

Background Wikipedia is a highly used, free, online encyclopedia with known gender disparities across its biography content. Editing Wikipedia has entered STEM classrooms as a writing-focused and sometimes equity-focused assignment. This paper presents a Wikipedia edit-a-thon event at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, Massachusetts focused on improving articles about women in STEM. This edit-a-thon promoted cross-disciplinary collaboration and community building with faculty and undergraduate students across eleven courses and disparate disciplines and offices at the university. Results Edit-a-thon attendees edited pages on women in STEM and listened to five-minute lightning talks by women in the university community: students, former faculty, and administrators. The impacts of the event include the addition of more than 15,000 words and 100 references to more than 100 articles on Wikipedia. The event supported a variety of student learning outcomes in participating courses across disciplines in the sciences and humanities. Conclusions A Wikipedia edit-a-thon supported student learning across multiple subjects while contributing to underdeveloped biography articles about women in STEM and helping students find a voice in the Wiki space. The edit-a-thon has potential as a cross-curricular touchpoint and to support equity and representation work.

Communication professor Benjamin Mako Hill studies why successful peer-produced websites (like Wikipedia) eventually struggle to maintain their openness to new contributors.

I like the internet

This article examines how Wikipedians embed their sovereign authority within the development of the site’s multilingual policy environment. By drawing on the co...

The ADL would have us believe Wikipedia is riddled by antisemitism. The reality is more complicated, writes a scholar whom the ADL has cited.

The use of Wikipedia citations in scholarly research has been the topic of much inquiry over the past decade, however little is known regarding perceived Researchers trustworthiness of Wikipedia citations and representation of their work. This cross-publisher study (Taylor & Francis and University of Michigan Press) aimed to investigate author sentiment towards Wikipedia as a source of trusted information. Methods A short survey was distributed to 40,402 authors of papers cited in Wikipedia (n=21,854 surveys sent, n=750 complete responses received). The survey gathered responses from published authors in relation to their views on Wikipedia’s trustworthiness in relation to the citations to their published works. The unique findings of the survey were analysed using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods using Python, Google BigQuery and Looker Studio. Results Overall, authors expressed positive sentiment towards research citation in Wikipedia and researcher engagement practices (mean scores >7/10). Sub-analyses revealed significant differences in sentiment based on publication type (articles vs. books) and discipline (Humanities and Social Sciences vs. Science, Technology, and Medicine), but not access status (open vs. closed access). Conclusions This study provides unique insights into author perceptions of Wikipedia’s trustworthiness. Further research is needed to deepen the understanding of the benefits for researchers and publishers including academic citations in Wikipedia.

May 21st – 22nd, 2025

by Narges Chinichian*, Hannah Doyal* and Taha Yasseri

As a collaboratively edited and open-access knowledge archive, Wikipedia offers a vast dataset for training artificial intelligence (AI) applications and models, enhancing data accessibility and acces...