The collaborative making of an encyclopedia: Research opportunities to foster commons-based knowledge production

To meet Dario Taraborelli, please contact Roberto Casati: roberto.casati@ens.fr.

Abstract:

In its first 17 years of life, Wikipedia has become much more than the “online encyclopedia that anyone can edit”: it’s a multilingual reference work, consistently used by students and practitioners, by professionals and journalists across the globe; a platform that shapes and sustains the dissemination of scholarly knowledge at scale; a primary data source some of the largest companies in the world rely upon to power their linked data and knowledge graph technologies; and one of the most popular linguistic corpora in academic and industry research. However, to live up to its ambition to represent the "sum of all human knowledge", Wikipedia along with its sister projects constantly faces challenges of inclusiveness, representation, bias and quality control. In this talk, I’ll give an overview of research opportunities to address these challenges, and sustain the work of the volunteer contributors behind free knowledge. I will talk about our current priorities in the Research team at the Wikimedia Foundation, and how we work to make the output of our research reusable and reproducible by others.