In 2018, Heather J. Sharkey, professor and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences, 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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
This story is by Katelyn Silva. Read more at OMNIA.
