Hi wiki-researcher(s),
We’re gearing up for our 2024 wikihistories symposium, this year held on June 19 in-person
and just before the International Communication Association’s annual conference in
Brisbane, Australia! You’ll find the call for submissions below and on the wikihistories
website
here.<https://wikihistories.net/conference/wikihistories-2024-wikipedia-…
Please let me know if you have any questions.
All best,
Heather.
Dr Heather Ford
Associate Professor, Digital and Social
Media<https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2F…amp;reserved=0>,
School of
Communication<https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%…amp;reserved=0>,
University of Technology,
Sydney<https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2…
(UTS)
Chief Investigator:
http://wikihistories.net | Project Lead:
www.questionmachines.net<https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/…
Affiliate: UTS Data Science
Institute<https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2…
| Associate: UTS Centre for Media
Transition<https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%…
| Associate Member: UTS Centre for Research on Education in a Digital
Society<https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%…
w:
hblog.org<https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F…
/ t:
@hfordsa<https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.twitter.com%2Fhfordsa&data=05%7C01%7Cherve_saint-louis%40uqac.ca%7Cd75bd2cfb53340aa33ea08daf50c7616%7Cc97978b1bd4c44b59bbb20215efdf611%7C1%7C0%7C638091731143530605%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=4eOUFANhnT8tF2SEBOuep3vxRzsyDV5teT86bGqBlQI%3D&reserved=0>
/ pronouns: she/her
Latest journal article: with Andrew Iliadis, “Wikidata as Semantic Infrastructure:
Knowledge Representation, Data Labor, and Truth in a More-Than-Technical
Project<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051231195552>.” Social Media +
Society Journal
Latest book: “Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital
Age<https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmi…
MIT Press
Latest media: “Friday essay: shaping history – why I spent ten years studying one
Wikipedia
article<https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-shaping-history-why-i-s…
The Conversation
Latest slides: What I have learned from studying Wikipedia
bias<https://www.slideshare.net/hfordsa/what-i-have-learned-from-studyin…
Wikimania 2023 Singapore
University of Technology Sydney
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
PO Box 123. Broadway NSW 2007 Australia
I acknowledge the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation and the Boorooberongal People of the
Dharug Nation upon whose ancestral lands our campuses now stand. I pay my respect to
Elders past, present and emerging, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of
knowledge for this place.
|| CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS ||
Wikipedia and/as Data
What is Wikipedia’s relationship to data? What should Wikipedia’s relationship to data
be?
2024
wikihistories<https://wikihistories.net/> symposium co-located with ICA Gold
Coast <https://www.icahdq.org/mpage/ica24> and brought to you by the wikihistories
project <https://wikihistories.net/> at the University of Technology
Sydney<https://www.uts.edu.au/> in partnership with the Centre for Media
Transition<https://www.uts.edu.au/research/centre-media-transition>, the ARC Centre
of Excellence in Automated Decision-Making and
Society<https://www.admscentre.org.au/> (ADMS+)
and Wikimedia Australia<https://wikimedia.org.au/wiki/Wikimedia_Australia>
Date and time: Wed 19th June 2024, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm AEST (in person)
Location: Gold Coast/Brisbane (exact venue available soon)
Wikipedia has always been a critical source of data for computer science projects,
offering data scientists a massive store of open data. Researchers and developers use
Wikipedia to work on natural language processing (NLP) tasks and applications, model user
interactions with content and other users, deliver factual statements to users in
automated question-answering tasks, and find nearby features as represented by Wikipedia
articles (Iliadis,
2022<https://www.wiley.com/en-ae/Semantic+Media:+Mapping+Meaning+on+the+…98>;
Iliadis & Ford,
2023<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051231195546>)6>).
These practitioners use Wikipedia as a store of facts assuming that it expresses an
established consensus as a result of its policies and processes. Yet, Wikipedia’s natural
language could contain meanings that resist translation into data and whose
classifications might be open to interpretation and critique (Ford & Iliadis,
2023<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051231195552>)2>). For example,
articles about complex topics such as
Jerusalem<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem> do not easily align with standard
ways of representing entities like cities. Jerusalem’s
infobox<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Infobox> reflects Wikipedia’s power to
make important decisions about how we understand facts and the meanings that are
associated with them (Ford & Graham,
2016<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263775816668857>)7>). This power is
intensified when entire Wikipedia articles are translated into structured datafied
knowledge bases of machine-readable statements – by the Wikidata project, for example,
which started in 2012 as a project of the Wikimedia Foundation (Ford,
2020<https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/4956/chapter/1879827/…)g>).
How researchers measure Wikipedia’s sociocultural biases also depends on the datafication
of Wikipedia’s content and how such processes may be questioned rather than taken for
granted. Measuring the extent to which Wikipedia represents Australians, for example,
could simply be achieved by counting articles that are categorised in the “Australians”
data category, and yet this category itself is not an objective representation of
Australianness but rather the result of particular practices that resist stable referents
(Falk et al., 2023<https://wikihistories.github.io/reports/who-counts.html>). As
Wikipedia’s content is increasingly used to power virtual assistants such as Amazon Alexa
and more recently large language model applications like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard,
Wikipedia participates in the global information ecosystem in ways that go well beyond its
role as a web-based encyclopaedia (McDowell & Vetter,
2023<https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/20807/4453>)3>). Thus, it is
important to understand Wikipedia’s relationship to data, not as a given, but as something
to be critically investigated.
This symposium will gather together social scientists, humanists, critical technologists,
and others to investigate Wikipedia’s connection to data and the importance of this
relationship for the global information ecosystem and the production of knowledge. The
workshop will be organised as a day-long, face-to-face event prior to the annual
International Communication Association
conference<https://www.icahdq.org/mpage/ica24> on the Gold Coast in Australia.
Participants will be invited to share short presentations and to participate in
discussions focused on the questions “What is Wikipedia’s relationship to data?” and/or
“What should Wikipedia’s relationship to data be?” Participants will also agree to read a
few background papers prior to the gathering. The workshop will result in a collaborative
document that maps out possible areas for researching these questions from a
sociotechnical lens and the option to continue the collaboration post-symposium.
To participate, please complete the following web
form<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf78yQus2mwGT2FOOfygisjfJw…nk>,
including a 250-300 word abstract outlining your contribution to the symposium themes.
Lead curator and contact:
Heather Ford<https://profiles.uts.edu.au/Heather.Ford>
Organisers:
Francesco
Bailo<https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/about/our-people/academic-staff/francesco-bailo.html?apcode=ACADPROFILE300808>
Michael Davis<https://profiles.uts.edu.au/Michael.Davis>
Michael Falk<https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/profile/1043380-michael-falk>
Benjamin Mako
Hill<https://com.uw.edu/people/faculty/benjamin-mako-hill/>
Andrew
Iliadis<https://andrewiliadis.com/>
Tim
Koskie<https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothy-koskie-74ba1718/?originalSubd…
Amanda
Lawrence<https://www.rmit.edu.au/contact/staff-contacts/academic-staff/l/lawrence-dr-amanda>
References
Falk, M., Ford, H., Tall, K., & Pietsch, T. (2023). How Australians are represented in
Wikipedia. Reports of the Wikihistories Project. University of Technology, Sydney.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10296217
Ford, H. (2020). Rise of the underdog. In J. Reagle & J. Koerner (Eds.), Wikipedia @
20: Stories of an Incomplete revolution (pp. 189–201). MIT Press.
Ford, H., & Graham, M. (2016). Provenance, power and place: Linked data and opaque
digital geographies. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34(6), 957-970.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816668857
Ford, H., & Iliadis, A. (2023). Wikidata as semantic infrastructure: Knowledge
representation, data labor, and truth in a more-than-technical project. Social Media +
Society, 9(3).
https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231195552
Iliadis, A. (2022). Semantic media: Mapping meaning on the internet. Polity.
Iliadis, A., & Ford, H. (2023). Fast facts: Platforms from personalization to
centralization. Social Media + Society, 9(3).
https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231195546
McDowell, Z. J., & Vetter, M. A. (2014). The re-alienation of the commons: Wikidata
and the ethics of “free” data. International Journal of Communication, 18.
https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/20807
UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F DISCLAIMER: This email message and any accompanying
attachments may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient,
do not read, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message or attachments. If you have
received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this
message. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except
where the sender expressly, and with authority, states them to be the views of the
University of Technology Sydney. Before opening any attachments, please check them for
viruses and defects. Think. Green. Do. Please consider the environment before printing
this email.