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-and-as-data/ Please let me know if you have any questions. All best, Heather.
Dr Heather Ford Associate Professor, Digital and Social Mediahttps://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.uts.edu.au%2Ffuture-students%2Fcommunication%2Fdigital-and-social-media&data=05%7C01%7Cherve_saint-louis%40uqac.ca%7Cd75bd2cfb53340aa33ea08daf50c7616%7Cc97978b1bd4c44b59bbb20215efdf611%7C1%7C0%7C638091731143530605%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=UVF3GsmbsPqksCLwOqTbLVIYIYebejCFq0u0w1ycbAM%3D&reserved=0, School of Communicationhttps://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.uts.edu.au%2Ffuture-students%2Fcommunication%2Fabout-communication%2Fwelcome-school-communication&data=05%7C01%7Cherve_saint-louis%40uqac.ca%7Cd75bd2cfb53340aa33ea08daf50c7616%7Cc97978b1bd4c44b59bbb20215efdf611%7C1%7C0%7C638091731143530605%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=hkzKWZ04BZkXl2oZ7OOUHRDOU4I7xrTZ1RnKDtVBMMA%3D&reserved=0, University of Technology, Sydneyhttps://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.uts.edu.au%2F&data=05%7C01%7Cherve_saint-louis%40uqac.ca%7Cd75bd2cfb53340aa33ea08daf50c7616%7Cc97978b1bd4c44b59bbb20215efdf611%7C1%7C0%7C638091731143530605%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=NQkD%2BAusrNNdzMP2LKxSJ4KngvlHI7gNL4bbKEFZspE%3D&reserved=0 (UTS) Chief Investigator: http://wikihistories.net | Project Lead: www.questionmachines.nethttps://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.questionmachines.net%2F&data=05%7C01%7Cherve_saint-louis%40uqac.ca%7Cd75bd2cfb53340aa33ea08daf50c7616%7Cc97978b1bd4c44b59bbb20215efdf611%7C1%7C0%7C638091731143530605%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=ZfKmCry3GrFZ2CZdLq4SK6nhLdTR1Qtqqfg0C1leeXM%3D&reserved=0 Affiliate: UTS Data Science Institutehttps://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.uts.edu.au%2Fdata-science-institute&data=05%7C01%7Cherve_saint-louis%40uqac.ca%7Cd75bd2cfb53340aa33ea08daf50c7616%7Cc97978b1bd4c44b59bbb20215efdf611%7C1%7C0%7C638091731143530605%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=Kf5QTE%2FhW2MDZRn5dWgHBAp4S95oWbr%2FfMda8tgETtw%3D&reserved=0 | Associate: UTS Centre for Media Transitionhttps://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.uts.edu.au%2Fresearch-and-teaching%2Four-research%2Fcentre-media-transition&data=05%7C01%7Cherve_saint-louis%40uqac.ca%7Cd75bd2cfb53340aa33ea08daf50c7616%7Cc97978b1bd4c44b59bbb20215efdf611%7C1%7C0%7C638091731143530605%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=T9an9tKAeNnj1vsavLDDIYKs6DarTp6IOoVQla768KY%3D&reserved=0 | Associate Member: UTS Centre for Research on Education in a Digital Societyhttps://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.uts.edu.au%2Fresearch-and-teaching%2Four-research%2Fcentre-research-education-digital-society&data=05%7C01%7Cherve_saint-louis%40uqac.ca%7Cd75bd2cfb53340aa33ea08daf50c7616%7Cc97978b1bd4c44b59bbb20215efdf611%7C1%7C0%7C638091731143530605%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=pU%2BfGe%2Bqqtdm1H8VWQ0x0cNYFwZ6Iy4V%2B%2F6UGFFOzDI%3D&reserved=0 w: hblog.orghttps://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fhblog.org%2F&data=05%7C01%7Cherve_saint-louis%40uqac.ca%7Cd75bd2cfb53340aa33ea08daf50c7616%7Cc97978b1bd4c44b59bbb20215efdf611%7C1%7C0%7C638091731143530605%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=LaEBm4cKIY5IaKHIbYzznssTpFlJHCAGks6yFCbeP2E%3D&reserved=0 / t: @hfordsahttps://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 Projecthttps://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 Agehttps://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmitpress.mit.edu%2F9780262046299%2Fwriting-the-revolution%2F&data=05%7C01%7Cherve_saint-louis%40uqac.ca%7Cd75bd2cfb53340aa33ea08daf50c7616%7Cc97978b1bd4c44b59bbb20215efdf611%7C1%7C0%7C638091731143530605%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=HRXnPoQjZUPostX0KYupYyJXOu7J8e71AdQtDIQrNRc%3D&reserved=0” MIT Press Latest media: “Friday essay: shaping history – why I spent ten years studying one Wikipedia articlehttps://theconversation.com/friday-essay-shaping-history-why-i-spent-ten-years-studying-one-wikipedia-article-192602” The Conversation Latest slides: What I have learned from studying Wikipedia biashttps://www.slideshare.net/hfordsa/what-i-have-learned-from-studying-wikipedia-bias Wikimania 2023 Singapore University of Technology Sydney Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences PO Box 123. Broadway NSW 2007 Australia
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|| CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS ||
Wikipedia and/as Data
What is Wikipedia’s relationship to data? What should Wikipedia’s relationship to data be?
2024 wikihistorieshttps://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 Sydneyhttps://www.uts.edu.au/ in partnership with the Centre for Media Transitionhttps://www.uts.edu.au/research/centre-media-transition, the ARC Centre of Excellence in Automated Decision-Making and Societyhttps://www.admscentre.org.au/ (ADMS+) and Wikimedia Australiahttps://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, 2022https://www.wiley.com/en-ae/Semantic+Media:+Mapping+Meaning+on+the+Internet-p-9781509542598; Iliadis & Ford, 2023https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051231195546).
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, 2023https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051231195552). For example, articles about complex topics such as Jerusalemhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem do not easily align with standard ways of representing entities like cities. Jerusalem’s infoboxhttps://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, 2016https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263775816668857). 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, 2020https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/4956/chapter/1879827/Rise-of-the-Underdog).
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., 2023https://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, 2023https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/20807/4453). 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 conferencehttps://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 formhttps://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf78yQus2mwGT2FOOfygisjfJwCJLjNIpdZVW-TSr7Ho2JYaQ/viewform?usp=sf_link, including a 250-300 word abstract outlining your contribution to the symposium themes.
Lead curator and contact:
Heather Fordhttps://profiles.uts.edu.au/Heather.Ford
Organisers:
Francesco Bailohttps://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/about/our-people/academic-staff/francesco-bailo.html?apcode=ACADPROFILE300808
Michael Davishttps://profiles.uts.edu.au/Michael.Davis
Michael Falkhttps://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/profile/1043380-michael-falk
Benjamin Mako Hillhttps://com.uw.edu/people/faculty/benjamin-mako-hill/
Andrew Iliadishttps://andrewiliadis.com/
Tim Koskiehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/timothy-koskie-74ba1718/?originalSubdomain=au
Amanda Lawrencehttps://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
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