WikiCrediblity Initiative: A Year In Review
By: Ahmed Medien
Tags: Misinfocon, Wikicred, Wikipedia, Trust, Credibility

WikiConference North America is the annual conference of Wikimedia enthusiasts and volunteers from throughout North America, including Canada, the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean.

WikiCred is wrapping up its first year in operation. Since November 2019, when we announced at WikiConference North America in Boston, we have funded 14 projects. Each focuses on a different aspect of research, methodology, and language, improving credibility on Wikipedia.

WikiConference North America 2019 was also called “WikiCredCon” because it explored information reliability and credibility themes. Funding is generously provided by Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Facebook, and Microsoft.

The mission behind WikiCred is to nurture a community of Wikimedians, open knowledge enthusiasts, and professionals in the credibility space to come together, have conversations and work on projects to strengthen credibility in the online information ecosystem through platforms like Wikipedia and Wikidata, on the platforms themselves or use these platforms as a source or conductor for reliable information and knowledge.

“Wikipedia and the Wikiverse are uniquely positioned to play a role in providing global scaffolding for credibility because they combine the nuances with human judgment but scalable infrastructure,” said Jennifer 8. Lee

We received 38 proposals this year from Wikimedians and other individuals invested in the credibility space and scholarship. Many came from the Credibility Coalition, a group dedicated to creating common standards for information credibility online. WikiCred funded 14 projects, including new tools, research methodologies, uncovering knowledge gaps (The Vaccine Safety Project), citation gaps (RefB), media literacy (Reading Together), and online connections (Wiki UX). You can find the entire list of projects and their descriptions on wikicred.org. In total, we committed $93,000 to support these projects.

Glassbox — A WordPress Plugin for Opening the News (Spanish version)

Scribe — Scribe Structures New Cited Sources on Wikipedia

Wiki UX — UX of Wikipedia Credibility (To be published in January)

Source Scour — A Collaborative News Site

Sourceror — The Wikipedia Community’s Platform Against Disinformation

WikiWhatsThis — Adding Context to Online Stories by Suggesting Wikipedia Articles

WPWP — Promote Credibility on Wikipedia Pages with Multimedia Files

RefB — A Bot to Add References to WikiData Statements

Iffy. news — A new way to assist in evaluating the credibility of media sources

The Vaccine Safety Project — Strengthening information on vaccine safety on Wikipedia

News on Wiki — NOW — Helping the Public Navigate a Challenging Media Landscape

Cite Learn — An academic tool for learning to cite sources

Reading Together — Reliability and Multilingual Global Communities​

WikiCred Demo Hour, WikCred’s monthly meetup

Beyond projects, we built a community for Wikimedians, Credibility Coalition members, and other professionals interested in leveraging open-knowledge platforms to strengthen credibility and trust in online information sources. Our community interactions reside in Slack and are nestled under the Credibility Coalition umbrella. We also launched monthly meetups for members to come together and attend demos and presentations from WikiCred projects. We dubbed it “WikiCred Demo Hour,’’ and everyone is welcome to submit a proposal to demo their new project or idea, ask questions and get feedback from participants and attendees. Presentations are uploaded on our YouTube.

To submit a proposal for WikiCred Demo Hour, please send an email to hello@wikicred.org. To join our audience, please subscribe for upcoming newsletter updates.

Acknowledgment

WikiCred is a partnership between Hacks/Hackers, MisinfoCon, the Credibility Coalition, and the Wikimedian community, who helped this project reach new audiences and engage the public conversation about reliability and credibility on the world’s most visited open encyclopedia.