Enhancing “Representational Equity” on Wikipedia

In 2018, Heather J. Sharkey, professor and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, was reading an article in The Washington Post about Donna Strickland, who, days earlier, had won the Nobel Prize in physics. This particular story was not about Strickland’s award or accomplishments, but rather that Wikipedia—the online encyclopedia created and edited by volunteers around the world—didn’t have an entry about her until the day of the award announcement.

This revelation was the beginning of Sharkey’s deep engagement with Wikipedia as an author, partner in the Wikipedia Student Program, and now, one of six faculty from higher education institutions named to the inaugural Wiki Education Humanities & Social Justice Advisory Committee, funded for three years by the Mellon Foundation. Its goal: to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of historically marginalized populations and subject areas.

“It really concerned me that this remarkable person did not have a Wikipedia page, and that, as the Post article noted, only 17 percent of Wikipedia biographies were about women as of 2016,” says Sharkey, who, until that point, had enjoyed Wikipedia as a resource and was a small-money donor but otherwise hadn’t given it much thought.

“Many of us have this assumption that every notable person will have a Wikipedia page; it’s surprising to realize that this isn’t the case,” she says. “A Wikipedia page lends an authoritative presence. So, when a figure doesn’t have one it signals, often erroneously, that they aren’t important.”

Intrigued, Sharkey did some research and learned that Ph.D. students in Penn’s History of Art department were working on a Wiki Education initiative to increase coverage of female artists on the site. She applied to the Wikipedia Student Program and received funding to lead a class of graduate and undergraduate students focused on authoring new articles about notable women. The class ran in 2019, marking the centennial of women getting the right to vote in the United States. Students contributed articles on missing figures such as Florence Shotridge, an Alaskan Native ethnographer and weaver who worked for the Penn Museum from 1911 to 1917.

This was the beginning of an ongoing partnership between Sharkey and Wiki Education, with many classes and an edit-a-thon co-hosted with the Penn Museum during the pandemic to enhance representation of women on Wikipedia. Sharkey also volunteered to attempt the same for the representation of Black scholars and scientists.

Since 2019, Sharkey has incorporated the Wikipedia Student Program into 11 Penn courses with 135 total students. To date, they have added 58,500 words and 764 references to Wikipedia. The articles they’ve edited have been viewed a combined 4.6 million times. (For more about the influence of this work, see “Writing for Wikipedia” from August 2023.)

I’m more and more committed to the idea of public-facing scholarship and digital citizenship and working with Wiki Education has sharpened my focus on that. I find this work to be a public service that is intellectually exhilarating, and my students share my enthusiasm.

“We are so impressed with the impact of Heather and her students’ work on enhancing public access to knowledge and often specifically enhancing information on historically underrepresented populations and subjects,” says Colleen McCoy, Communications and Outreach Coordinator of Wiki Education.

Sharkey’s commitment to the cause is a big reason she was named to the Wiki Education Humanities & Social Justice Advisory Committee. In this role, which involves colleagues from Brigham Young University, Chapman University, Arizona State University, the University of Maryland, and the University of Alabama, Sharkey will present about the program and related research at humanities conferences around the country, including for the American Historical Association in May 2024. She will review new Wiki Education resources associated with humanities and social justice, as well as facilitate a Teaching with Wikipedia workshop at Penn and advise the Knowledge Equity Initiative of the Wikipedia Student Program.

“I’m thrilled to be working collaboratively on this. It’s so important to have scholarly input from institutions that span the educational and intellectual landscape of the country,” Sharkey says. “I’m more and more committed to the idea of public-facing scholarship and digital citizenship and working with Wiki Education has sharpened my focus on that. I find this work to be a public service that is intellectually exhilarating, and my students share my enthusiasm.”

Through this appointment, she’ll also continue the work with her students to keep expanding the “equity of topics considered worthy of inclusion” and the “representational equity of different peoples.” Of late, these efforts have entailed writing many new Middle East–related articles on Wikipedia that didn’t previously exist in English, in particular biographies of underrepresented Middle Eastern women like Nawal Nasrallah, a U.S.-based Iraqi food writer and historian, and studies of historic buildings in the region. Her students have also added many images to Wikimedia Commons.

These contributions are making an impact, says colleague and friend Richard Zettler, Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Associate Curator-in-Charge of the Penn Museum’s Near Eastern Section. Zettler, who studies Mesopotamian archaeology, has suggested multiple historical buildings to Sharkey that did not previously have English-language Wikipedia articles about them, including Beit al-Tutunji, a 19th-century historic home in Iraq built for the Ottoman governor of Mosul. It suffered heavy damage after the Islamic State (ISIS) occupied it from 2014 to 2017, and Zettler and colleagues worked to restore it, in collaboration with the Iraq Heritage Stabilization Program and the University of Mosul. Beit al-Tutunji officially reopened to the public as a heritage site in March 2024.

The Wikipedia contribution about Beit al-Tutunji was “beautifully timed” with the public reopening, Zettler says. “It’s wonderful to see Heather and her students conducting rigorous academic research and making solidly academically based contributions to Wikipedia for greater public understanding.”

Thanks to the role on the Wiki Education Humanities & Social Justice Advisory Committee, that greater public understanding will continue expanding to many more people and places, if Sharkey has anything to say about it. “The importance of Wikipedia for informing everybody, but especially people in under-resourced places, cannot be underestimated,” she says. “I’m really proud of what my students and I have done.”