 Hello everyone. I'm Daria Zbulska. I'm the Director of Programs and Evaluation at Wikimedia UK. I'm dialing in from London today. I'm here to give you a brief framing to this talk about Western bias and cultural content gaps on Wikipedia. If you've been participating in this year's Wikimedia for the last few days, I can imagine you're very tired. Normally, by the last day of Wikimedia, for me, my brain is just full of information and can't absorb anymore. However, here we are to talk to you about more gaps. We want to present to you the results of a research that Wikimedia UK funded to attempt to quantify visual arts gaps across various language Wikipedia's. Part of Wikimedia UK's strategy for the last few years has been to share knowledge created by and about underrepresented people and subjects. Many of us have a broad sense of what that means, what counts as underrepresented knowledge, but as our work develops at Wikimedia UK and as we focus more on decolonisation, we wanted to support a research that will give us more deeper understanding of underrepresentation. Across Wikimedia this year, there was a number of talks about gaps. For example, from the research team at the Foundation talking about the Knowledge Gaps Taxonomy Project. There is an overlap with this work, although our approach is more immediate. We are here to present some results to you today. Also, it's special in that it's combining cultural expertise to have qualitative understanding of the underrepresentation and also Wikimedia technical skills to quantify our findings. So it's now over to our researchers to share with us what they found. All right. Thank you very much indeed, Darian. That was a lovely introduction to our project. So my name is Waqas Ahmed. I am actually artistic director of an organisation called the Khalidi Collections. The Khalidi Collections is one of the most culturally diverse private art collections in the world. And the reason why I give you my background is because it's through the work that I've been doing with Dr. Martin Polter on digitising and sharing more content from the collections onto Wikimedia and Wikimedia platforms. It's through that work that we fully appreciated the extent of this cultural gap relating specifically to the visual arts. And in identifying what we intuited to be quite a major gap, we felt the need to design some research to further investigate this and to also identify some areas in which we can have some immediate impact. So that's a little bit of background on that. Moving on to actually our research, which as Darian mentioned is both qualitative and quantitative, starting off with some of the qualitative dimensions. Just a surface level kind of survey of Wikipedia and Wikimedia platforms will give you an indication of how this bias is quite obvious. Especially with regards to the visual arts. So if you were to look at various art related articles on Wikipedia, you'll find certain lists and many of those lists pertaining to the arts include like list of sculptures, list of painters by nationality etc. And as you can see from some of these points on your slide, it is predominantly and rather ludicrously Western or European oriented, huge disproportionate which you can see pretty much immediately just by looking at some of these lists. So I'm just going to highlight a few more of these just to give you an idea of the kind of scale of this. So if you look at for example, list of contemporary visual arts, if we can go back to that one, if we can look at the list of contemporary visual artists, of course there are contemporary visual artists all over the world, many of them are great renown and have produced great quantities of fantastic work. But this list is currently 80% European which is hugely disproportionate. And then if you look at things like list of national museums, non-Western national museums, even those amongst the most visited in the world, for example the Brazilian National Museum, have relatively short insufficient articles often without collection galleries. So even when there are articles or there is reference to non-Western art institutions or cultural institutions or artists, it's often highly insufficient vis-à-vis of their Western counterparts. Same goes for list of single museums and there are quite a few other similar lists. But this is just to give you an example. But then giving you some more specific examples if you move on to the next slide is right here. So yeah, if we look at specific artworks, right, masterpieces many of them like to call, many of us like to call them. If we look at the city and chapel ceiling which of course is considered a cultural wonder of the world and a masterpiece by the artist Michelangelo. It's obviously been highly covered across Wikimedia platforms as you can see here on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, a lot of resource there. But if you look on the right hand side, the Blue Mosque, the Blue Mosque can be considered a kind of well not Eastern counterpart but at least Turkish or Middle Eastern counterpart where not just the Blue Mosque itself which of course is well renowned but the ceiling of the Blue Mosque was also painted or designed by Alhubari who is an equally celebrated artist from the Ottoman period as Michelangelo was in 1560th century Italy and yet not very well known at all. And if you can look at how it's reflected, the reason why these two examples are comparable is because they are almost equally visited as tourist sites and they have a comparable amount of touristic visitors and they are considered national treasures in their respective countries. So if you look at the, there's no Wikipedia article at all currently about the Blue Mosque ceiling and there's no Wikidata entry and of course there are images of it primarily taken by tourists but if you look at this, this is an example of such disproportionality and bias and move on to the next, we'll go on from masterpieces which we looked at but on to actual masters i.e. the artists themselves. So if you look at here obviously one of the most well known masters in the art and culture sector is Leonardo da Vinci and with Leonardo da Vinci you can see quite understandably he has a phenomenal amount of information and coverage on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata. Sushi who a few of you will know actually was an artist and also a polymath much like Leonardo da Vinci i.e. he operated in various fields to a very high level Sushi operated for almost 500 years before Leonardo da Vinci and he is considered a national treasure and cultural icon much like Leonardo da Vinci is in Europe and Sushi of course is from China and as you can see here there are major disproportionalities in terms of Wikipedia Commons and Wikidata coverage so this again just to give you an illustrative example of the masterpieces and the masters in the western world vis-a-vis the non-western world and their coverage on Wikimedia platforms is hugely disproportionate these are just some qualitative anecdotal examples just to illustrate and bring it to life but of course we went into greater detail in terms of the quantitative analysis and the data analysis around this and it was highly revelatory and Martin will give you more information on that. Okay thanks very much Rokas I'm Martin I'm a Wikimedia in residence at the Kaledi Collections as well and a general consultant so Rokas's examples are great for particular topics or particular articles which seem this seems really unbalanced really to be prioritizing European western often Christian culture and we were interested in is this a feature of the whole thing is it just a feature of those topics or is it a feature of English Wikipedia are the different platforms showing a different amount of imbalance the way we measured this was to draw up lists of a hundred western artists and 100 non-western artists so for these these from all other cultures and similar lists for masterpieces and what we're reporting here is the comparison of the the artists so we could ask the different platforms how much do you have about this particular topic this artist so I didn't ask personally I wrote software which asked the different platforms the 300 different language versions of Wikipedia and also looked at Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons and getting a ratio so we compared the total coverage of these 100 highly notable western artists against the total coverage of 100 highly notable artists from other cultures and the number I want you to take away from this one number if you remember one thing from this presentation is seven so for Wikipedia as a whole seven times as much coverage for the western artists as for the most notable artists and these are the most acclaimed these are definitely notable artists they're significant within their cultures they're just as important to those people as Leonardo da Vinci or Ruskin are to European or English culture but there are interesting variations and the preprint of this research is linked in the etherpad there's lots of tables you'll see the lists there of the different masterpieces and artists so we take a ratio the resulting number is a measure of how pro-western the coverage is by our criteria so a smaller number means more global in coverage and a bigger number means more focused on the western visual art we've done this as I said for all 300 versions of Wikipedia just some major ones are listed here and I said it's seven for Wikipedia as a whole but there is variation so you can probably see that the towards the top of the table the bigger numbers tend to be European languages and towards the foot of the table the more global tend to be Asian languages so the question is is English Wikipedia particularly biased towards western art actually no English is a surprise it has a ratio of four so it's more it's more global than most of the other languages and maybe that's a ceiling effect maybe English Wikipedia being the biggest Wikipedia is so big that they've kind of exhausted what there is to write about western art that's one interpretation so English we've discussed seems very much to prioritize western European art but it's actually more global than most other Wikipedia's surprisingly Thai is the most European Thai Wikipedia has much much more about European art than art from other cultures of the world surprisingly we did this for wiki data as well accounting the database statements about our artists and it's four times as much for the western artists and we looked at files on commons so there's 21 times as many files images relating to art of these western artists as there is for the non-western artists and so there's lots and lots of these tables in the paper so if there was some sort of equality you could say that's not knowledge equity in itself but it's on the way to knowledge equity we've taken sets of a hundred we haven't looked at the whole entire coverage of visual arts and all wikipedia and there are limitations in this research but all limitations tend to underestimate how much these platforms privilege western art so if anything we're underestimating the gap between the coverage of western and non-western visual art briefly maybe we'll all discuss that what can we do emphasizing cultural partnerships so there's things that the wider cultural heritage sector can do releasing images releasing cataloged data there's things we can do on wiki there are red lists lists of articles to create we hope our paper will be a basis for that putting more non-western art into the vital article lists that guide the creation and just translating translating existing things and in Wacass and our work with the Khalili collections we've bulk uploaded a lot of non-western art from these fantastic private collections and there's an example there on the screen so this is a great opportunity but there could be more there could be more involvement from museums and institutions worldwide so that's the end of the presentation but we very much welcome questions and feedback and like I said the paper itself is linked from the etherpad so in the three minutes we have left let's try and tackle some questions people just started sharing them on etherpad and Martin I copied the first one onto our chat you can see if that's something to respond to and there's so lots of these artists have at least one image in both sets we didn't have much for there was a problem with the masterpieces in that there's so little coverage or so few images of what we've defined as the non-western masterpieces that we kind of get a divide by zero when we try to calculate a ratio so that's why we've focused here on the artists the method of the qualitative research that was used so yeah just a comparison of the scale of the bite size of the article sizes for those things so it's intermediate between looking at one artist in their coverage or one topic which could be just a fluke or looking at the totality of artists which is really hard to define what's the totality of artists in China versus Europe what's the comparison set just a quick word about sorry just a quick word about qualitative research how do we arrive at some of these lists of the western and non-western well the western canon is very easily documented very widely documented across the literature and there are many top 100 lists which we compared in cross-reference etc it wasn't difficult to get to arrive at that the non-western was much more difficult to arrive at because there's no such real list authoritative list exists so we made an attempt at one not in ranking order but just to provide some kind of indication of the substance and the regard and how well celebrated these artists and these masterpieces were in their respective cultures vis-a-vis how as Martin said how well the western are as well so some discretion and personal expertise or professional expertise was used together with a variety of sources online and through the literature and we might have time for the last question which links to what we want to have as a call to action to everybody listening so should institutions focus on adding more content to wiki data or comments which one would have more impact and also Martin maybe you can say what people our listeners can do if they're interested in helping out institutions just opening up their catalog and images putting them under free license so giving Wikimedians permission to reuse them in Wikipedia articles on wiki data that would be a great start even employing Wikimedians and residents would be a great start for that kind of work and on wiki well yeah we can we can take what exists and remix it and maybe there's an opportunity to refer to a potential task force Martin or Daria do you want to talk about that? yeah please do sign up we want to build a task force we've got to the end there's a task force on the ether there's a link on the ether there's a link on the ether