Brownstein: Concordia's Wikipedian-in-residence has a lot on her plate

Amber Berson's role is “to foster digital literacy and informed engagement with the site on campus”

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Wikipedia has changed our lives. No longer do folks have to flock to libraries to check out non-evolving encyclopedias for reference. Nor do the slackers among us have to track down outdated Coles Notes or Classic comics for background info.

That info is but a click away on a computer or cellphone. Yup, the go-to location for background material in our brave new ether world is Wikipedia, now the fifth-most popular website on the planet — according to … well … Wikipedia’s page on its list of most popular websites. The Wikipedia website, assembled and edited by unpaid volunteers, records monthly page views in the billions.

Concordia has become one of the few universities in the country to get with the program. After conducting a job search in January, it has hired its first-ever Wikipedian-in-residence, Amber Berson. Her role is “to foster digital literacy and informed engagement with the site on campus.”

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This may be but a one-day-a-week gig for Berson, but she is taking a decidedly no-nonsense approach to it. She also has her hands rather full the rest of the week.

For the last six years, she has served as the Canadian coordinator for Art+Feminism, “improving coverage of cis and transgender women, non-binary folks, feminism and the arts on Wikipedia.” Plus, she has been instructing hundreds of new editors from around the world how to be part of the Wikipedia community, in both English and French. She has also published a how-to-be-included guide on the subject, works directly with Wikimedia Canada and currently sits on its programs committee.

Not done yet: Berson is also a curator, writer and teacher of contemporary art and media history at the LaSalle CEGEP. And she’s working on a PhD in art history at Queen’s University while based in Montreal. Also, with her husband, an art historian, she is raising two young children.

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Frankly, if anyone merits their own Wikipedia page, it’s Berson — although that’s hardly a priority for her.

She has a few other projects on her plate. They include Wikipedia training courses to be “semi-open” to the public.

I will be teaching the very basics of editing, modifying and creating articles.”

“I will be teaching the very basics of editing, modifying and creating articles,” Berson says in her Mile End apartment-cum-office. “Part of that is teaching people how to read Wikipedia as well as how to write it.”

She also hopes to get involved with community-driven initiatives, such as translating Wikipedia articles into specific Indigenous languages.

But one of her principal projects will focus on trying to create “a best practices manual for feminist editing on the platform.”

Berson is fully aware of issues related to Wikipedia accuracy.

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“Wikipedia is not a marketing platform. Everything has to be neutral. Humans are verifying everything, but there are also bots, which are combing for plagiarism and which are helping the humans to assess.

“Once you know how to assess the material you’re working with and really engage with it, the quality of the material on there becomes more relevant — because you’re adding more useful and verifiable material.”

Berson’s involvement with Wikipedia really began in 2013 with the Art+Feminism project.

“It was a way of working with Wikipedia to address a problem area relating to bias,” she says. “The main contributors for a long time were primarily white men in North America, between certain ages, who mostly spoke English. And that skews content in a certain direction.

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“It’s not a criticism, but who are our early adapters of this platform? Who created policy? Who had time to do it? And remembering that it’s all volunteer-based, do women who have full-time jobs and small children have a lot of free time to edit Wikipedia? No. But single men have more time.”

In  2010, a Wikipedia study discovered that only 10 per cent of those on its platform identified as female.

“That’s very low,” Berson says. “And that is an indicator of content. Look at Wikipedia pages for baseball cards and there are huge, long entries. But look for friendship bracelets, traditionally made by young girls, and it was a stub article in 2011 — just one paragraph.

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“You also have a lot of content missing around things happening outside North America in languages other than English and about communities who aren’t in the majority. So Art+Feminism got together to train a lot of folks on how to edit and (figure out) what is a feminist edit. So does that just mean creating content about women or does that mean creating it in a specific way that changes how things are written on Wikipedia?

“So a difference is that Ada Lovelace is not the first female computer programmer. She invented computer programming. It doesn’t matter that her father was Lord Byron. That’s not why she was famous, so we take that out of the first line. We don’t erase — we just move it lower down.”

Point taken.

bbrownstein@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/billbrownstein
https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/columnists/brownstein-concordias-wikipedian-in-residence-has-a-lot-on-her-plate
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