On Friday 15 January 2016 Wikipedia will celebrate its fifteenth birthday. Launched on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia is ranked among the ten most popular websites and constitutes the Internet’s largest and most popular general reference work.
Wikipedia got this far by relying on millions of individual contributions by ordinary people — from all of us. To help celebrate this remarkable encyclopaedic phenomenon, the Oxford Internet Institute is holding a Wikipedia Editathon with the aim of improving content around “The Social Internet”. This potentially covers everything from Uber to sexting, from election prediction to the digital divide, from freedom of speech to Emoji, from data surveillance to the quantified self. To help navigate this sea of content, we’ll prepare a list of articles we think need improving at all levels of effort and expertise: whether writing from scratch, or updating existing articles, or simply improving grammar and adding citations. We hope that anyone interested in the Internet (and society) will come along and help us improve knowledge about it!
Of course, Wikipedia is not just the first port of call for most general information: it’s also a fascinating research object in its own right. The day will include short (and interesting!) research presentations from OII faculty, showing how Wikipedia can help answer questions like: What are the most controversial topics in different cultures, and how do editing wars get resolved? How much interaction is there between the 288 language editions? What does “the world’s knowledge“ actually look like when overlaid on a map of the world? Who determines what knowledge is recorded and why is the world not represented equally? This should hopefully give some broader context to the editing work, and spark discussion around the mechanics of working with its 10TB of data, and broader issues around global representation — whose voices are heard and whose aren’t.
Even if you’ve never edited before, or just need a refresh, or are simply curious about how Wikipedia works and what it can tell us about society, help us celebrate 15 years of this extraordinary encyclopaedia by adding your bit to “The World’s Knowledge”!
This event is being held in collaboration with the Bodleian Library, TORCH — The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, and the Quello Center, Michigan State University. If you would like to get involved remotely – either as an individual or an organisation – let us know by emailing events@oii.ox.ac.uk.
Click the links to see recordings of the day’s sessions.
| Start | End | Schedule |
|---|---|---|
| 12:00:00 | 13:15:00 | Lunch / Research presentations and discussion
|
| 13:15:00 | 14:00:00 | Martin Poulter: Outline of the editathon, and training (for first-timers) |
| 14:00:00 | 17:00:00 | Start! |
| 17:00:00 | 18:00:00 | Research presentations and discussion
|
| 18:00:00 | 19:00:00 | Drinks |
Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow
Bernie Hogan examines how to capture, represent and think about social networks, especially personal social networks. His work focuses on the role of design in social media, network capture techniques and theories of relationships.
Professor of Internet Geography
Mark Graham is an economic geographer. His research focuses on digital labour, the gig economy, and digital inequalities. He is the author, most recently, of The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction.
Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow
Dr Scott A. Hale is an Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow, and Turing Fellow. He develops and applies computer science techniques to the social sciences focusing on increasing equitable access to quality information.
Former Senior Research Fellow
Taha Yasseri analyses large-scale transactional data to understand human dynamics, collective behaviour, collective intelligence and machine intelligence.
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
Former Researcher
Stefano de Sabbata's research focuses on Internet and information geographies, as well as on geographic and mobile information retrieval. He is currently collaborating with Mark Graham on research into geographic bias in search engines.
Former DPhil Student
Heather Ford is a DPhil alumna who studies how Wikipedians write history as it happens. Her research covers online collaboration, conflict, historiography, alternative media, the Arab Spring and intellectual property rights.
