Submissions:2025/Shaping Cultural Inclusion: A Conversation on Wikipedia Policies
This submission has been noted and is pending review for WikiConference North America 2025.
Title:
- Shaping Cultural Inclusion: A Conversation on Wikipedia Policies
Type of session:
- Edit-a-thons or Workshops (30-120 min)
Session theme(s):
- Missing pieces
Abstract:
This workshop aims to foster dialogue on the inclusion of culturally diverse forms of knowledge within the Wikimedia environment. It will focus on the editorial protocols that enable cultural pluralization of knowledge on Wikipedia. In practice, contributors who wish to add content about underrepresented communities, territories, or cultures often face barriers: a lack of recognition of an article's relevance, or difficulties in assessing the quality of sub-national or specialized sources (e.g., niche media outlets in Ivory Coast). How can the relevance of articles be supported when their cultural or media context is less familiar to the majority?
The workshop will unfold in three parts:
1. Presentation and discussion of preliminary findings from the research project “Cultural Pluralization of Knowledge on Wikipedia”. The research team has mapped out editorial protocols—policies and guidelines—on French and English Wikipedia that address intercultural issues in content production (e.g., article internationalization practices).
2. Presentation of proposed pathways for action:
- Rethinking reliability: integrating source diversity
- Beyond notability: redefining content quality
- Building bridges between editing communities and administrators
- Protecting emerging knowledge by reducing automatic deletions
- Creating a source database with usage metrics
3. Collective discussion and comparative insights from the Spanish-language Wikipedia. This session particularly welcomes contributors from Latin America active on the Spanish-language Wikipedia, whose insights will enrich the collective discussion. The session will invite participants to share their experiences, identify challenges, and explore context-sensitive strategies to advance epistemic inclusion. This conversation aims to enrich the comparative reflection and help surface both shared and locally grounded approaches to supporting epistemic diversity across language communities.
Author name(s):
Wikimedia username(s):
Affiliated organization(s):
- Institut national de la recherche scientifique (Montréal, Canada)
Estimated length of session
- 60 minutes
Will you be presenting remotely?
- I will present remotely
Okay to livestream?
- Livestreaming is okay
Previously presented?
- Part 1 was previously presented at WikiConvention Francophone 2024
Special requests:
- We need to be able to discuss with the participants (participants need access to a mic).