What is worthy of a digital page in the world’s largest and most-read encyclopedia is decided by roughly 270,000 active volunteers, enthusiasts who populate the online resource with information on anything from 19th-century medicine to TikTok trends. Inevitably, some subjects are sidelined – the global south, notable women – but a new batch of Wikipedian recruits are waging war on one neglected topic: the arms industry. Last week, in a classroom in central London, two dozen volunteers huddled around laptops and free servings of vegan Ethiopian food for what is known as a “wikithon”, an event of collective and in-person Wikipedia editing.
Some were veteran editors in their 70s, others young students who had never registered an account before. But their targets include subjects such as Palantir, Project Maven and Nitro-Chem. The intention of the wikithon, started by fellows from the n-Space programme at Somerset House Studios, was “to put better quality and more well organised information on the arms industry in the public domain”, the specialist technician said.
Attenders at the monthly event are trained in how to add to the internet’s most popular reference site. But while editing Wikipedia is surprisingly simple – just a few clicks to publish a change – ethical complications quickly bubble up. Cameron said attenders’ chosen subject matter meant that it was “really important” that they followed Wikipedia’s standards to the letter.
This is an event really about factual information on Wikipedia,” she said. When it comes to information, Wikipedia’s rules demand that no original research is included on its pages and conclusions are not drawn. The main goal of the arms industry wikithon, then, was to pull together publicly available information from other sources into one place.
Wikipedia has been repeatedly criticised for its lack of diversity in editors and its coverage. It has been accused of geographical bias towards the west, with most articles focused on the US and western Europe. Similarly, just 19% of the site’s biography entries are for women.
In 2018, the female Nobel prize winner Donna Strickland, a physicist, was deemed “not important enough” for a Wikipedia entry. With a wider range of ages, genders and racial backgrounds at the wikithon, the trainee editors were helping to rebalance the scale, said Hannah Cobb, a co-founder of the event. Everyone remembers that at school you were taught not to trust it because anyone could write it.” Previous arms industry wikithons organised by Cameron and Cobb in Manchester and London have drawn in more than 60 would-be Wikipedians at a time, including activists, journalists, Quaker members – and even Cameron’s own mother.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
