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Wikipedia y el patrimonio cultural

Translation: Jon Alkorta Martiartu, PhD (UPV/EHU)

Wikipedia and Cultural Heritage

I have the pleasure to introduce you to Patricia Horrillo, who runs the company Wikiesfera and is one of our country’s experts in Wikipedia editing. Here is an interview with her. I hope you enjoy it.

Digital Heritage: If we type something in our browser, Wikipedia results often appear at the top of the list. How has a global, collaborative platform overcome bad reviews to become a worldwide reference?

Patricia Horrillo: After 20 years in operation, Wikipedia has become a tool used by millions of people around the world. And, although people continue to criticise the fact that it is a documentation platform developed collaboratively by volunteers, the truth is that it is much more difficult to criticise something that we use on a daily basis, although we continue to do so. We still respect an editorial board, even if we don’t know the names on it, with its biased views, more than an anonymous, broad and diverse collective.

In fact, academics are still very reluctant to use the free encyclopaedia on a regular basis as a reference work because they question how it is constructed, since “anyone can write it”. However, for the new generations that have been born with it, Wikipedia is the place to go to consult basic elements about anything: people, places, historical facts, works of art, etc. To deny its usefulness and its use is to deny a different way of understanding access to knowledge.

PD: For someone who doesn’t know how to upload content to Wikipedia and wants to get started in this collaborative task, how could they start training? Is it really a very difficult process?

PH: Editing on Wikipedia is not difficult in technical terms. However, as in any place of collective writing, it is necessary to know the rules that the community has established in order to guarantee a certain quality in the contents of the encyclopaedia. I always advise that, to start contributing to Wikipedia, we do it with elements that are easy for us, such as correcting spelling or punctuation mistakes (that’s how I started 14 years ago), or updating specific data in an article. In addition, for a few months now, people who create an account on Wikipedia will have a virtual guide to help them make their first edits, adding internal links to link other Wikipedia pages or including images in articles where they are missing. These exercises will help us get started and get to know how the visual editor works.

What is not advisable is that our first foray into Wikipedia is to create an article from scratch, as it is somewhat complex if we are not familiar with how an encyclopaedic article is constructed in this space: its structure, references, internal links, informative wording, etc. The most likely outcome if we try to do so is that what we have created will be deleted and this will lead to a rejection of attempting future contributions.

PD: Tell us what primary and secondary sources are and how they are used to create content on Wikipedia. Are secondary sources sufficient for good content? What if a user enters false information or information from a non-rigorous source?

PH: Wikipedia is a tertiary source, that is, it drinks from secondary sources. We do not use primary sources to construct knowledge (unless they are official documents such as a birth certificate or the BOE¾Boletín Oficial del Estado in Spanish) because a person can say they have won a particular award and, if there is no other external source to contrast that information, it may be a false claim.

In Wikipedia we always use secondary sources: those provided by researchers in academic papers or journalists in reports. On the other hand, if a user introduces false information in an article, there are several mechanisms within Wikipedia to detect and remove it: there are those who patrol newly created articles as well as bots developed by other users that detect suspicious edits and preventively undo them to avoid a greater evil.

Patricia Horrillo. Picture: Pablo Romero.

PD: I have had the experience of participating in your workshops to create content on Wikipedia dedicated to the Paisaje de la Luz, this space in Madrid that last year became part of the UNESCO World Heritage List, and the truth is that with your help everything was very easy. Tell our audience a little about the methodology to improve the position of anything in Wikipedia (you can tell us about the case of the Paisaje de la Luz) and what results were obtained in the last edition.

PH: An article in Wikipedia is directly indexed in Google within minutes of being created. That is why it is essential that heritage elements such as those contained in the Paisaje de la Luz have a good presence on Wikipedia with data and photographs that help to promote their knowledge and dissemination.

In the Paisaje de la Luz heritage project we developed last year, dozens of articles were created and improved, which had a great impact on the number of visits, as all searches on the Internet first come to the Wikipedia article, if it exists.

PD: Finally, I would like to ask you how a company, entity or institution of a cultural nature could start or expand its presence in Wikipedia. How could you help them from the Wikiesfera? If they live in Madrid, can they also join the Paisaje de la Luz work team? Let us know how to contact you.

PH: It is important for the staff of cultural institutions to know how to edit in Wikipedia, not so much to promote the institution itself, but to create or improve the heritage assets that are circumscribed in its field of action: buildings, biographies, works of art, flora and fauna… From Wikiesfera, we offer several training spaces for those interested in taking their first steps in Wikipedia and losing their fear of the most important collective documentation tool in history.

In addition, from now until December we will have the Paisaje de la Luz work team, which is focused on heritage. Anyone who wishes can come to the meetings scheduled for these months. It is not necessary to have any previous training and the only thing you need to bring is a computer. If you have any questions, please write to info@wikiesfera.org.

INFORMATION on the meetings of the Paisaje de la Luz

PD: To finish, I have just seen the news that Meta is creating an algorithm to audit Wikipedia. Please clarify the dimension of this news.

PH: The Meta project is in its initial stages and we still have to see how it evolves, although at Wikiesfera we believe that they are mistaken both in their diagnosis and in their approach. It is important to clarify that the verification of sources should be carried out at the source: that is, in the information published in the media and subsequently used by Wikipedians. Platforms such as Facebook have amply demonstrated that they are unreliable in this regard and have been spreading false information for years.

Claiming that an algorithm will verify that the information documented in Wikipedia is accurate is fanciful, to say the least, and denotes a profound ignorance of existing reviewing methods. Furthermore, when it is claimed that an algorithm will solve a problem of such complexity, it seems that it does not take into account the biases that this same algorithm, programmed by humans, can replicate: racism, sexism, homophobia…

In this regard, the Wikimedia Foundation itself, which does not collaborate with Meta on this, is developing a research project on Machine Learning Assisted Wikipedia Editing, which tries to find out how this technology could be used to support Wikipedians in the creation of content. In addition, they have developed a method to automatically detect claims that cannot be verified by existing Wikipedia sources and recommend better ones.

All these advances are always contingent on there being a strong community of editors who continue to document historical knowledge in the most visited online encyclopaedia. The more people there are, the better Wikipedia will be.

Dr. Pedro Ortega

Ingeniero Industrial, Historiador del Arte, Máster en Edición Digital y Doctor en Estética. Es Gestor Cultural de Patrimonio Mundial del Ayuntamiento de Madrid. Edita la revista académica Herejía y Belleza y dirige el sello académico Ediciones Aulós. Es autor en Penguin Random House y ha escrito artículos para El Imparcial, Jot Down e Historia National Geographic, entre otros medios. Pedro Ortega PhD Industrial Engineer, Art Historian, with a M.A. in Digital Publishing and a PhD in Aesthetics. He is the cultural manager at the World Heritage Service of the Madrid City Council. He is a published author at Penguin Random House and has written articles for El Imparcial, Jot Down and Historia National Geographic, among others. Pedro Ortega doktorea Industria Ingeniaria, Artearen Historialaria, Edizio Digitaleko Master-duna eta Estetikan Doktorea. Kultur kudeatzailea da Madrilgo Udaleko Munduko Ondare Zerbitzuan. Penguin Random House-ko idazlea da eta artikuluak idatzi ditu El Imparcial, Jot Down eta Historia National Geographic-entzat, besteak beste.

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OpenEdition le sugiere que cite este post de la siguiente manera:
Dr. Pedro Ortega (10 de febrero de 2023). Wikipedia y el patrimonio cultural. El blog de Tartalo. Recuperado 19 de marzo de 2025 de https://doi.org/10.58079/unvg


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