Grants:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Espana/2019/PESCAR

PESCAR (Program story)

Introduction

One of the problems found in Wikipedia is the existence of different content biases that have been occurring over the years. These include, to give some examples, less content about women, less content about rural areas, or less content about geographical areas outside Europe, such as Africa, Asia or Oceania. Wikimedia's chapters, user groups and thematic groups are constantly working to reduce these biases through different types of initiatives.

Development

In 2017, Amical Wikimedia launched the PESCAR initiative, an annual online competition with the intention of improving knowledge about the history of humanity on Wikipedia. Each month they suggested a set of articles from a different historical period, from the beginnings of history to the present day, in order to fill in the gaps in Wikipedia in a progressive way.

The success of participation and the idea itself of the contest encouraged us to replicate it in Spanish Wikipedia in 2018. In that first edition we decided to follow the same scheme: each month was dedicated to a historical period and several articles were proposed from each topic (politics, economy, society, culture, arts and religion), distributed in a double scoring category, with several normal articles and several premium ones. In the selection of the articles to be proposed (made by direct search or through the tool not-in-other-language) several volunteers participated and on the first days of each month the articles were published.

The monitoring of the score was carried out through a bot, whose code was shared with us from Amical, and a volunteer was in charge of preparing and executing it throughout the year. At the end of the year, several gifts were given to the three people with the highest scores, both globally and in thematic areas and historical periods, consisting of Christmas baskets and books.

The experience was very positive, 532 items were created and 21 people participated. This motivated us to repeat the experience in 2019. The methodology was practically the same, with several volunteers proposing various articles to be edited at the beginning of each month, except that the scoring was simplified into a single category. On the other hand, we focused on content related to geographical areas of Africa, Asia and Oceania, to reduce the lack of articles about these areas, regardless of the historical period. The monitoring was again carried out through the bot, and at the end there were some gifts, like Christmas baskets and books, for the three people with the highest scores.

In 2019, although only 9 people participated, 394 articles were published. These not only included those proposed each month, but out of competition, the editors also edited other related articles. the success in these two years, with almost 1000 new articles, encourages us to continue organizing this initiative to continue filling in thematic gaps in Wikipedia.