Wikipedia:Oral citations experiment/Background

Participatory design is the direct and active involvement of users in the design of products. It has the aim of improving technologies, institutions, tools, software, and the like, through co-design, so that the user is not merely an afterthought but at the center of the design process. The Participatory Design Conference (PDC) is a biannual conference on co-creation of technology and art. It has been conducted since 1990, the 2014 PDC will be the first PDC on the African continent. My employer, the Polytechnic of Namibia is the host. PDC is a quite prestigious conference. Its proceedings are Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) rated, and it is possibly the international event on Participatory Design.

As part of this conference I have conducted a workshop with scientists and experienced Wikipedians to include oral citations in English Wikipedia articles, in the domain of indigenous knowledge (IK). Participants interviewed knowledge bearers in their rural environment and created alternative article versions with oral citations as subpages of Wikipedia:Oral citations experiment in the "Wikipedia:" name space of the English Wikipedia. Content was referenced with the respective knowledge bearer's narrative.

The experiment aimed at giving examples of what wealth of indigenous knowledge exists and how this knowledge can be utilised to improve articles on Wikipedia. For a few selected articles, it allows a comparison between 'only conventional sources used' and 'enriched by oral citations'. The purpose was to fill a few gaps in the occasional discussions on the validity of oral citations: the situation that very few oral citations have ever been included in English Wikipedia articles, and the situation that where oral citations indeed have been included, their inclusion was accompanied by other (perceived or real) deficiencies.

Wikipedia at its core is a result of participatory design; essentially all writers of the encyclopedia are also readers, and many writers are policy makers. Yet through technical (Internet access), practical (hurdles for newbies) and conceptual (exclusion of oral knowledge repositories) restrictions, entire populations are excluded from reading, writing, or both. The 'participatory design' aspect of this workshop lies in combining the knowledge and skill of three distinct groups (Knowledge bearers, Wikipedians, Scientists) working on one set of Wikipedia articles.

This workshop has been inspired by a number of theoretical considerations, referenced in the link section below. The main claim is that there is something like a 'sterling' oral citation: A knower, speaking on their area of expertise, at an official occasion, in front of a general audience. As an analogy, a museum curator, explaining an exhibit in their museum as part of an official tour, would be a reliable, independent, verifiable third-party source: The next curator would essentially give the same information, the core content of the narrative would be the same on every official tour. It is not the type of content I am concentrating on because this type of information is often also available in writing, but I think it is a suitable analogy to convince people that credible oral citations can in principle exist.

Background

Wikimedia Foundation previously founded the meta:Research:Oral citations project by aprabhala. This experiment is a follow-up.

• Grant discussion and approval on Meta
• Pre-release of a book chapter on the relationship between English Wikipedia and indigenous knowledge. The pre-release was reviewed in the November 2013 Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
• Wikimania 2013 talk on Indigenous knowledge for Wikipedia: Bending the rules? (video here).
• meta:Research:Indigenous Knowledge, the research project to which this workshop project belongs
• Web site of the research cluster where this project is located: Indigenous Knowledge Technologies
• Web site of the portal we develop to disseminate indigenous knowledge: Namibia Knowledge Portal