Students in the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada improved article quality on the English Wikipedia by an average of 88 percent during Spring 2012, according to new research conducted by Luis Campos, an external data analyst. In the Wikipedia Education Program, professors assign their students to improve course-related articles, with support from Wikipedia Ambassadors who help students learn the basics of Wikipedia editing.

Experienced Wikipedia editors evaluated a random sample of articles students worked on as part of the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada in Spring 2012. The metric evaluators used, with assessment areas for comprehensiveness, sourcing, neutrality, readability, formatting, and illustrations, on a 26-point scale, is based on the Wikipedia 1.0 metric used across English Wikipedia. Evaluators provided two ratings, one for the article quality immediately prior to the first edit the student made, and one after the class had wrapped up their work; reviewers also used the same metric to evaluate articles that students created from scratch. A total of 124 articles formed the sample. Altogether (counting both new and pre-existing articles), articles improved on average 6.5 points, from 7.4 to 13.98 points on the 26-point scale. The graph below shows the quality distribution of articles before students worked on them (in blue), and the quality distributions of articles after students worked on them (in red).

Article quality improvement of sample of Wikipedia articles edited by students participating in the Spring 2012 Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada. This graph shows overall improvement (both existing and new articles).

The 124-article sample included 82 existing articles and 42 new articles created by students. Existing articles improved 2.94 points on average, from 11.26 to 14.2, with the most improved article improving by 10.25 points. An example of such an article that a student improved is the article on vocabulary development. You can see the versions prior to students’ first edits and the status it was after the class finished. The graph below shows the distribution of pre-existing articles before (blue) and after (red) student work.

Article quality improvement of sample of Wikipedia articles edited by students participating in the Spring 2012 Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada. This graph shows improvement of existing articles only.

New articles had an average score of 13.55. You can see a sample of what a student contributed to a new article by reading Temptation, a Václav Havel play. The graph below shows the distribution of quality of new articles students created through the Wikipedia Education Program.

The Spring 2012 numbers show improvement over the 2010–11 quality of students contributions from the Public Policy Initiative pilot of the U.S. program, where articles improved an average of 5.8 points. We’re encouraged to see improvement in Wikipedia’s article quality through the Wikipedia Education Program.

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

This post is available in 2 languages:

Português  • English

In English:

Edivaldo Moura Santos grew up in the countryside of the state of São Paulo, Brazil. The son of sharecroppers who worked on plantations in the region, Edivaldo discovered a love for physics in his first year of high school in the small town of Itupeva. It led him to work hard and pursue a bachelor’s and then a Ph.D. in physics, and then to teach students at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Last year, Edivaldo joined the pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program in Brazil, and he’s happy to see his students enhance the information available about physics on the Portuguese Wikipedia.

Edivaldo Moura Santos

Edivaldo’s students in his undergraduate Electromagnetism course had to write new or improve existing articles on the Portuguese Wikipedia related to their course readings. Campus Ambassador Vinicius Siqueira and Online Ambassadors Lechatjaune, Giro720, Sturm, and Olcyr helped students learn the basics of Wikipedia editing.

“I think the experience was unique,” Edivaldo says. “Not having the time and format constraints of standard written assignments gives you many more possibilities in the evaluation process. For example, having to write an encyclopedic article, the students have to be able to organize and systematize ideas and concepts. And to be able to accomplish that goal, the physical concepts have to be cemented in their minds. I had much more profound discussions with some students during the semester up to the point they really understood what they would later write on the Wikipedia.”

Edivaldo was extremely pleased with the student engagement and student learning that arose from the Wikipedia assignment.

“In a specific example, one of the articles was about the idea of electrical charge conservation,” he says. “The modern view of conservation laws in physics is totally based on the concept of symmetries and such a view is seldom discussed in a first course of Electromagnetism. The student responsible for that article, however, decided to read about topics beyond the course, such as analytical mechanics and quantum field theory. I was very happy with the final result.”

A key outcome for Edivaldo is that students are forced outside of the traditional way of learning in Brazil, where evaluation of student work is limited to written exams. While he acknowledges that exams have their place — physicists, he says, do have to be good at math — he feels that exams measure students’ ability to memorize key facts rather than truly understanding the concepts. When students had to write Wikipedia articles on topics, he says, they are forced to truly learn the concepts behind the formulas. And, of course, they improve the availability of free knowledge, spreading the wealth of information available to others interested in learning about physics.

“I discuss some physical concepts with students in more detail, and make them reflect on the definitions, theorems, and experiments that ended up in their articles,” he says. “My favorite part of doing a Wikipedia assignment is seeing students improving the content of the Portuguese Wikipedia and learning a bit of physics at the same time.”

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This post is available in 2 languages:

العربية  • English

In English

Helana Fola and Mina Saber are students of French Literature at Ain Shams University in Cairo, and neither had given much thought about contributing to Wikipedia or doing translations until they enrolled in Dr. Hoda Abaza’s French course in spring 2012. Dr. Hoda had signed up to participate in the Cairo Pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program, and was encouraging her students to translate high-quality articles from the French Wikipedia into the Arabic Wikipedia.

Helana Fola

“When I learned that I would write content for the Arabic Wikipedia, I was scared,” Helana says. “How will I write information that’s will be readen by millions?”

Helana didn’t want to translate articles from the French Wikipedia; she wanted to improve content about the Arab world on the Arabic Wikipedia. So Helana created the article on the Arabic Wikipedia events of 2011 in Egypt . She revised the article over and over, and with input from Wikipedia Ambassadors and other Arabic Wikipedia editors, she brought the article up to a Featured Article status on the Arabic Wikipedia.

“My favorite part about writing for Wikipedia is that I learned something new that’s useful to me and to my community,” Helana says. She’s also working on an article that had the chronology of the January 25 revolution in Egypt and has signed up to continue helping new students in the Wikipedia Education Program as an Ambassador in Cairo.

Mina Saber

Mina has also discovered translation skills from the Wikipedia assignment in Dr. Hoda’s class. He chose to translate and expand the article on the 2012 French presidential election (French original) (Arabic version).

“I was interested to know about the election and the political parties in France,” Mina says. “Dr. Hoda gave me the idea and I wrote the article using a lot of French newspapers and French Wikipedia articles as reference.”

Mina really enjoyed working on Wikipedia, and he was looking for his next topic to work on when tragedy struck the Ain Shams campus. Dr. Alaa Fayez, the president of Ain Shams, died in a car accident, and Mina decided he would write the article about him on the Arabic Wikipedia. Mina followed that by translating a Featured Article from the French Wikipedia about the history of Jews in Germany.

“My translation skills have improved, as have my knowledge and performance,” Mina says of the Wikipedia assignment. “My favorite part was having a new experience writing long articles on Wikipedia and seeing the page view statistics.”

Like Helana, Mina is now serving as a Wikipedia Ambassador to help new students learn how to edit Wikipedia in the next term of the Wikipedia Education Program. He credits Dr. Hoda and the Ambassadors, especially Faris El-Gwely, with helping him discover a passion for editing Wikipedia.

“I really liked the Wikipedia program, and I am happy we were given the opportunity to participate in this project,” Helana says.

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

العربية

طلاب الأدب الفرنسي في القاهرة يكتشفون مهارات الترجمة من خلال مشروع ويكيبيديا

هيلانا رأفت و مينا صابر من طلاب الأدب الفرنسي في جامعة عين شمس في القاهرة، وكلاهما لم يفكرا كثيرا في المساهمة أو الترجمة في ويكيبيديا حتى التحقا بمادة الأدب الفرنسي لدى الدكتورة هدى أباظة في ربيع عام 2012. كانت الدكتورة هدى قد قامت بالتوقيع على المشاركة في مشروع برنامج ويكيبيديا التعليمي التجريبي في القاهرة، وقامت بتشجيع طلابها على ترجمة مقالات ذات جودة عالية من ويكيبيديا الفرنسية إلى ويكيبيديا العربية، أو كتابة مقالاتهم الخاصة.

هيلانا رأفت

“لقد أصبت بالرعب عندما علمت أنني سأكتب محتوى لويكيبيديا العربية،” كما تقول هيلانا. “كيف سأتمكن من كتابة معلومات سيقرأها الملايين؟”في البداية لم ترغب هيلانا في ترجمة المقالات من ويكيبيديا الفرنسية، لقد أرادت تطوير محتوى عن العالم العربي على ويكيبيديا العربية. أنشأت هيلانا مقالة أحداث 2011 في مصر على ويكيبيديا العربية ، وتعلقت بها. قامت بتنقيح المقالة مرارا وتكرارا، وبمساهمة من سفراء ويكيبيديا وغيرهم من محرري ويكيبيديا العربية، أوصلت المقالة إلى حالة المقالة المختارة على ويكيبيديا العربية.

“الجزء المفضل لدي حول الكتابة في ويكيبيديا هو أنني تعلمت شيئا جديدا مفيدا لي ولمجتمعي ،” كما تقول هيلانا. وهي تعمل أيضا على مقال عن التسلسل الزمني لثورة 25 يناير في مصر. ووافقت على الاستمرار في مساعدة الطلاب الجدد في برنامج ويكيبيديا التعليمي كسفير في القاهرة.

مينا صابر

وقد اكتشف مينا أيضا مهارات الترجمة من خلال التحرير على ويكيبيديا في صف الدكتورة هدى أباظة. ولقد اختار ترجمة وتوسيع مقالة 2012 انتخابات الرئاسة الفرنسية.

وقال مينا “كنت مهتما بالتعرف على الانتخابات والأحزاب السياسية في فرنسا، قامت الدكتورة هدى بتزويدي بالفكرة وكتبت المقالة باستخدام الكثير من مقالات الصحف الفرنسية ومقالات ويكيبيديا الفرنسية كمرجع.”

استمتع مينا حقا بالعمل في ويكيبيديا، وكان يبحث عن موضوع للعمل المقبل حين وقعت مأساة في حرم عين شمس حيث توفي الدكتور علاء فايز رئيس جامعة عين شمس في حادث سيارة، وقرر مينا انه بإمكانه كتابة مقالة عنه في ويكيبيديا العربية. تبع مينا ذلك بترجمة مقالة مختارة من ويكيبيديا الفرنسية عن تاريخ اليهود في ألمانيا.

يقول مينا عن فوائد ويكيبيديا “تحسنت مهارات الترجمة لدي، وكذلك معرفتي وأداءي، كان الجزء المفضل لدي هو حصولي على تجربة جديدة لكتابة مقالات طويلة في ويكيبيديا ورؤية إحصاءات مشاهدة الصفحة.”

هيلانا ومينا يخدمان الآن كسفيرا لويكيبيديا لمساعدة الطلاب الجدد في المرحلة التالية على تعلم كيفية تحرير ويكيبيديا في برنامج ويكيبيديا للتعليم. ويدينان بالشكر للدكتورة هدى أباظة وللسفراء، وخاصة فارس الجويلي، لمساعدته على اكتشاف شغف تحرير ويكيبيديا.

“أنا أحب حقا برنامج ويكيبيديا، وأنا سعيدة لإعطاءنا الفرصة للمشاركة في هذا المشروع،” كما تقول هيلانا.

ليانا ديفيس، مدير اتصالات برنامج ويكيبيديا للتعليم

Figure 1. One of the messages used in the test (confirmation).

We recently tested a simple change in the user interface for registered Wikipedia editors. We’re happy to report results from a trial of post-edit feedback that lead to an increase in the productivity of newcomers to the project, while still maintaining quality.

The problem

The user experience problem was fairly straightforward: Wikipedia fails to tell its new contributors that once you edit an article, your change is live and can be immediately seen by every single reader. Simple, consistent feedback to new contributors make good sense from a usability standpoint. There is also evidence from the scholarly literature that delivering feedback after successful contributions can help newcomers feel motivated to continue participating.

Our first test of a solution

In this test, we examined the effect of a simple confirmation message or a thank you message on new English Wikipedia editors registered between July 30 and August 6. We randomly assigned newcomers to one of these two conditions, or to a control group, and we consistently delivered the same feedback message (or none, for the control group) after every edit for the first week of activity since registration.

The results indicate that receiving feedback upon completion of an edit has a positive effect on the volume of contributions by new editors, without producing any significant side-effect on the quality of their work or whether it was kept in the encyclopedia.

We focused our analysis on a sample of 8,571 new users with at least one edit during the test period, excluding to the best of our knowledge sockpuppets and other categories of spurious accounts. We measured the effects of feedback on the volume of contributions by analyzing the number of edits and edit size per participant in the different groups; we measured the impact of the test on quality by looking at the rate of reverts and blocks per participant in the different groups.

Impact on edit volume

Figure 2. Log-scale box plots of edit counts of new users presented with the confirmation message (left), no message (control group, center) or the gratitude message (right) after saving an edit.

We compared the edit count of contributors by condition over the first 2 weeks of activity and found an increase in mean edit count in the two experimental conditions of about 23.5% compared to the control. The difference was marginally significant in the confirmation condition and very close to significance (p=0.052) in the gratitude condition.

We also analyzed the size of contributions by editors in each condition, by measuring edit size as bytes added, bytes removed or net bytes changed. The results indicate that both experimental conditions significantly outperformed the control in net byte count changed per edit. The confirmation condition significantly outperformed the control for positive byte count per edit, while we found a marginally significant effect for gratitude. No significant difference was observed on the negative byte count per edit (or content removal). Therefore, receiving feedback has an effect on the size of contributions by new editors compared to the content added by editors in the control condition.

Impact on quality

Figure 3. Mean success rate for edits by new users in each condition: Control group (left), confirmation message (center), gratitude message (right)

While feedback may increase the volume of newcomer edits, it might do so at the cost of decreased quality. This is concerning since increasing the amount of edits that will need to be reverted represents a burden to the current Wikipedians. To address these questions, we measured the proportion of newcomers who were eventually blocked from editing and the rate at which their contributions were rejected (reverted or deleted).

Analyzing the proportion of newcomers that were blocked since the beginning of the treatment, we found the experimental treatment had no meaningful effect on the rate at which newcomers were blocked from editing – the difference was about 7% for each group, not enough to be declared significant relative to the sample size.

We also examined the “success rate” for each user, measured as the proportion of edits that were not reverted or deleted in the first week since registration. We calculated the mean success rate per newcomer for each experimental condition and found no significant difference between either of the experimental conditions and the control (figure 3).

These results suggest that the experimental treatment had no meaningful effect on the overall quality of newcomer contributions, and therefore, the burden imposed on Wikipedians.

What’s next

The results of this first test were promising, and we’re currently working to implement an edit confirmation message for new contributors in the current editing interface, as well as in the upcoming visual editor. However, confirmation messages or messages of gratitude are just two of many different types of feedback that could motivate new contributors.

We’re currently testing the impact of letting people know when they reach milestones based on their cumulative edit count. Some Wikipedias already have community-created service awards based on edit count and tenure, so we’re extending these awards to a newer class of contributor, by letting them know when they’ve completed their first, fifth, 10th, 25th, 50th and 100th edits to the encyclopedia.

If you’re interested in participating in the research and analysis process for tests like these, please chime in and give us your feedback. We’ll be publishing open-licensed data for these experiments, when possible, on our open data repository.

Steven Walling, Associate Product Manager

Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst

on behalf of the Editor Engagement Experiments team

Sculpture of Sahasra Devata, image taken at the Crafts Museum

Imagine talking about the world’s largest free encyclopedia on a rainy weekend with a bunch of weavers, artists, potters and curators – all experts and practitioners of Indian craft traditions. Imagine hearing them talk about intricate silk embroidery, metal casting, sari motifs, Internet and their edit counts – all in one breath! This is India’s first GLAM initiative running in collaboration between the staff members at the National Handicrafts and Handlooms Museum in New Delhi, India (also known as the Crafts Museum) and the Hindi Wikipedia community. (Hindi is the language of choice for most of the staff members.)  We now have five new editors editing Hindi articles related to crafts like Bidriware, Madhubani paintings and Brocade.

It was particularly moving to see people from all walks of life, who have computer and internet access only at work, navigate the Indic keyboard layout to collaboratively improve these articles. As Krishan, a young stenographer at the museum said: “It’s not that beautiful craft traditions and objects don’t exist in India. In fact, they can be found in every house and village, but it is time to show the whole world what a rich culture we have. And, I am ready to contribute to Wikipedia so that millions of Hindi speakers are able read about them.”

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On Tuesday, July 10, the Russian Wikipedia community made a decision to blackout their project for 24 hours to protest a piece of legislation before the Russian Duma. The legislation, which has since been passed (although with important amendments) could threaten the mission of the Wikimedia projects in Russia – to spread free knowledge globally. Websites that publish facts or deemed to be inappropriate could be blacklisted and blocked from operating in Russia.

Wikimedia Russia blogged (in Russian and English) about the blackout this week.
The volunteers of the Russian Wikipedia undertook this initiative independently from other language projects and from the Wikimedia Foundation, however many in the Wikimedia movement recognize that this legislation is similar to other bills being proposed or passed around the world that could hinder free speech and produce situations where governments could censor information. Non-censorship and freedom of speech are core values of the Wikimedia movement and the Wikimedia Foundation.

The efforts of the Russian Wikipedia blackout on July 10 appear to have made a difference in the ultimate shape of this legislation. Although our projects are not spaces designed for political advocacy, Wikimedians around the world take the issue of freedom of speech in their nations, and especially on our projects, very seriously. Our projects are built on the core values of neutral point of view, non-censorship, and openness, and we continue to urge lawmakers around the world to better understand the role of the free and open web.

Group photo of Cairo end-of-term conference participants on the second day of the conference.

More than forty professors, Ambassadors, students, and supporters of the Cairo Pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program gathered at Ain Shams University in Egypt this week for an end-of-term conference wrapping up the first term of the pilot.

By all accounts, the first term of the Cairo Pilot was a success. Professors encouraged their students to edit Wikipedia in the program, with assistance from Campus Ambassadors at Ain Shams University and Cairo University and Online Ambassadors from around the world who helped students virtually. We started small; seven classes joined, with a handful of students participating in each class. For most students, the assignment was optional, either for no grade or for extra credit, which meant that fewer students actually edited Wikipedia than initially signed up, but the results are stunning even given this caveat. A total of 54 students created user accounts through the pilot, and those students edited an incredible 246 Arabic Wikipedia articles. All told, they added 1.1 million bytes of content to the article namespace on the Arabic Wikipedia, which translates to about 372 printed pages of content.

For the Wikimedia Foundation, the Cairo Pilot served as a showcase and learning experiment that will pave the way for future projects on the Arabic Wikipedia. As a pilot, the program served as a proof of concept for using Wikipedia as a teaching tool in universities in Egypt. We had no idea if students would be excited about the assignment, nor if professors would feel like it was worthwhile in meeting course goals. But over the Cairo Pilot, we learned that the Wikipedia Education Program was a good fit for Egyptian universities, and the enthusiasm displayed by students, professors, and Ambassadors significantly exceeded our expectations.

Participants had the opportunity to share learnings with each other.

Although the project only served as a feasibility study, the information students added already made a difference. Mina Saber, a student in Dr. Hoda Abaza’s French class at Ain Shams University, started the article on the 2012 French Presidential Election on the Arabic Wikipedia. Soon, an experienced Arabic Wikipedian stumbled across the article and added more content, collaborating with Mina to make the article even better. Within the 30 days of the election, the article received more than 2,000 visits, meaning Mina’s work had a direct impact on Arabic speaking people looking for information on the French presidential election. His contributions came as an extracurricular activity, but one he truly enjoyed.

“When we do it for marks, we don’t have as much enthusiasm as when we do it for ourselves,” Mina said. “I prefer Wikipedia articles because it benefits other people, not just me.”

Ain Shams Professor Dalia El-Toukhy organized a group of her postgraduate French translation students to translate articles from French to Arabic as an extracurricular activity. She’s looking forward to continuing the project in the future.

“This was the first time the effort in translation for class was useful to a large number of people,” she said. “It exposes the students’ work to real-life experience.”

Dr. Hany Hosseiny, a mathematics professor at Cairo University, agreed. He asked his students to write articles on the historical origins of math topics, including the evolution of the subject. He’d edited the Arabic Wikipedia in 2006 when he noticed some errors in the coverage of mathematics topics, but he’d fallen away from the habit until he heard about the Cairo Pilot, which he eagerly joined.

“I wanted to give my students the opportunity to see what we do not teach, the history of these topics,” he said. “Doing something like this for themselves is the best way to learn what we don’t teach outside the classroom.”

Students and professors were assisted by Wikipedia Ambassadors, who provided technical support and information about Wikipedia. And at the conference, many students reported they would like to serve as Campus Ambassadors next term, assisting more students as they learn to edit the Arabic Wikipedia.

“I feel that I am serving Egypt,” said Campus Ambassador Doaa Seif. “As an Arab, I would like to see us serving our countries. I’m looking forward to the day when we have an even larger Arabic Wikipedia.”

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

The current default timestamp on Wikipedia

Wikipedia pages each have their own history with detailed information about every revision, and this public log is one of the core aspects of the project. However, unless you find and use the special “View history” tab, the only information on Wikipedia articles that directly tells you the time and nature of the last change is on the bottom of the page, in tiny font and in UTC time.

What we tested

The new timestamp we tested

We think that information about when an article was last changed should be far more transparent on Wikipedia. For one week, we tested a new feature for readers and editors that provided a more direct window into the editing process.

On a sample of around 20,000 English Wikipedia articles, we added a much more prominent timestamp. Its text was relative to the reader (e.g, “Last updated 5 minutes ago”) and linked directly to the full revision history. Whether visitors saw the new timestamps was randomly assigned based on an anonymous token.

The results

Comparison of the click-through rates for different user groups in the experiment.

We found that adding the timestamp link as a supplementary entry point nearly doubled (+96.2%) the overall number of impressions of article revision histories (whether from registered or unregistered users). The increase was particularly strong for anonymous editors and readers, who landed on the history page more than twice as often (+120.6%); for registered users, there was a smaller but still significant increase in article history views (+42%). This result was seen even when we controlled for repeat clicks on either link. The conclusions from this analysis are described in detail on the wiki page about our experiment. We released an anonymized dataset from this experiment under a Creative Commons Zero license and we will do so for all future experiments.

Prior to this experiment, there was little to no data available about how many readers were really aware of the history tab’s location and purpose. The results we’ve seen in this A/B test strongly suggest that many people are interested in the history of Wikipedia articles they are reading, and that giving information about the last edit encouraged more people to take a closer look at the editing record.

What’s next

This is a relatively small change in the Wikipedia interface, but we’re extremely excited to see interest in deeper engagement with the encyclopedia among readers. Future iterations of this experiment may involve transforming this timestamp into a more direct call to edit articles that are severely outdated, though clearly the point at which an article becomes out of date is somewhat subjective. In the short term, we’ll be moving on to other experiments, though it is always possible that community members on Wikipedia may want to implement this feature permanently.

While our experimental features group is primarily interested in ways to engage editors, we did not try to correlate any increase in editing activity with the appearance of the timestamp, since any impact would be indirect and minor at best. If you’re interested in learning about feature experiments we plan to test in the near future, check out our documentation on Wikipedia.

Steven Walling, Community Organizer
on behalf of the Editor Engagement Experiments team

2012-07-09: Edited to expand the “results” section with more detail and a plot, and to include a link to the now published dataset

An invitation to “edit this page” is shown after users post feedback on Wikipedia (‘Call to Action 1′)

Since December 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation has been testing a new version of the Article Feedback Tool, a feature first introduced on the English Wikipedia in 2010. The goal of version 5 (AFTv5) is to engage Wikipedia readers to become more active contributors, by inviting them to provide feedback on articles they read, and encouraging them to become editors over time. 

Early tests of AFTv5 helped us answer the question of what design of the tool produces a desirable balance between volume and usefulness of the feedback collected. In this post we report results from two additional experiments designed to answer the following questions:

1. Does a prominent invitation to use the tool affect the usefulness of submitted feedback?
2. How does an invitation to leave feedback affect the conversion of readers into editors?

Our findings suggest that a prominent invitation to post feedback converts a significant number of readers into editors. These new editors appear less productive than other first-time Wikipedians; but their feedback appears just as useful, as below. These findings suggest that article feedback can increase the number of new editors on Wikipedia and can also help existing editors improve the encyclopedia based on reader feedback.

Prominence of Feedback Invitation

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A hamsa, the identification symbol of the Visual Arts WikiProject. (From the interview: “Universally, visual art involves the eye and the hand, perception and creation. [The Hamsa] seems like a good iconic representation of these principles.”)

Who wrote the English Wikipedia’s articles about Vincent Van Gogh’s and Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, or about sculpture, landscape art and abstract impressionism? There’s a good chance it was a member of WikiProject Visual Arts, a collaboration of editors who contribute to Wikipedia’s visual arts coverage. The current issue of the “Wikipedia Signpost,” the community’s weekly newsletter, has an interview with several Wikipedians involved in the WikiProject, which was started in 2005 and whose scope now encompasses nearly 16,000 articles. The interviewees include an art librarian, an artist and an art history student, but also several people who developed a deep interest in art besides their own professions. Here are some of the things they said about their work:

On motivations to contribute:

On the value of collaboration:

On the collaboration with cultural institutions (GLAMs):

On challenges:

On opportunities to get involved:

Examples of visual art covered in Wikipedia:

• 

  South Wind, Clear Sky is part of the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji by Hokusai

• 

  The Royal Gold Cup made for the French royal family in the 14th century

• 

  Graffiti in Olinda, Brazil

• 

  A mixed media collaboration by Jean Tinguely

Read the full interview with Wikipedia editors TonyTheTiger, Modernist, Johnbod, Kafka Liz, Ceoil, Lithoderm (Petropoxy) and Bus stop in this week’s Wikipedia Signpost:

“WikiProject report:Views of WikiProject Visual Arts“

and check back early next week for the upcoming issue of the community newsletter.

Tilman Bayer

Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)