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Assessing the Impact of a Welsh Government Wiki Partnership

Jason Evans

Open Data Manager and Wikimedian at the National Library of Wales

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‘to collect, preserve and give access to all kinds and forms of recorded knowledge, especially relating to Wales and other Celtic peoples, for the benefit of the public, including those engaged in research and learning.’

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And so - if people go to wiki for knowledge the we have a duty as a library to share our knowledge and help improve access to knowledge on wiki

And in January it will be 10 years since i took up the role of Wikipedian in residence at the library - and we’ve partnered with Wikimedia UK ever since

After a few speculative meetings with Welsh government a couple of years in, they also started to see the potential and the need to support the movement .

Early in the residency we focused on Library stuff - workshops, sharing images to commons, open access policy

The Governments interest was more focused on supporting access to knowledge in the Welsh language, whilst building editor communities at the same time and so 6 years ago Support for Wikipedia and Wikidata initiatives was written into their 5 year technology action plan for the Welsh language and they have funded a number of Wiki projects since then

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Shortly before covid we launched the Wici Addysg project wih the Welsh Education department to improve articles on Welsh Wikipedia relating to the Welsh History curriculum

We consulted teachers on the best format and language to use, the most needed articles, and then employed a former history teacher to help us curate and adapt Welsh language learning resources for Wikipedia. Amd we worked with WJEC and other orgs to release relevant learning resources on an open licence

And we created a series of short videos in Welsh, summarizing the content of the articles, aimed specifically at children.

And this was all in response to feedback from students who said overwhelmingly that they were forced to switch to english to find information for their studies to to poor or non exisitent resources in Welsh. So the content we created helped reduce that gap in knowledge equality

Last year the 101 articles which we either rewrote, or created were viewed 34k times

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Chat GPT AI output

Now I want to finish by briefly mentioning AI. As its inevitably going to shape the future of access to knowledge, and the future funding priorities of the library and the Welsh government

Here ive asked Chat GPT in welsh to give me some info on the history of the Celtic Knot conference and it does a decent job. Those of you that speak welsh will see that the welsh isn't perfect and it loses the plot a little in the last sentence but its ok.

How can this be improved - more welsh content on the web for it to learn from!

Will AI make wiki obsolete - NO. Wiki projects - especially wikipedia may need to adapt but AI can only learn from and understand knowledge which already exists online. So unless we want to reinforce existing bias in knowledge and language we will always need a way to feed in new knowledge, new ideas and perspectives and Wiki is really the only free and open mechanism for doing that at scale. So for me, the rise of Gen AI only increases the importance of wiki projects especially for those in small and minority language communities

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Diolch! - Thanks!

Get in touch with us:

Jason Evans

jje@llgc.org.uk

Q66689127