Georgia should embrace Wikipedia as part of its knowledge strategy and mainstream this into higher education. While Wikipedia is highly visited, its quality is uneven. Many essential items are missing. Many pages are outdated. This could easily be changed.
Hans Gutbrod is our regular contributor and writes on developments in the South Caucasus
He is on X (formerly Twitter) at https://x.com/HansGutbrod
Key information, such as on inflation? Little is available. The Georgian entry is an 80th of the length of what one finds in English, though inflation bites in households across the country. Georgia’s main monuments? Hardly anything is easily retrievable and correctly linked.
Ghia Nodia, Georgia’s most influential political thinker, was cited hundreds of times for his works in the study of nationalism. There was no reference to any of his landmark publications in his English language Wikipedia entry – though 8,500 people have visited his entry in the last eight years.
Ilia State University? The information is partially outdated, though again, it was visited by nearly 10,000 people each year. Few of Ilia State University’s academics are featured, though many have published internationally. (If you find the representation better than characterized, it’s likely because I added contributions in the last weeks.)
The National Bank? The information in English is rudimentary.
Key museums, such as the one in Bolnisi or Vani? They are barely mentioned and mostly don’t have an entry, even though they are places that Georgians should be proud of and visitors will find rewarding. Only a handful of the remarkable artworks in Georgia’s regional museums can be found. Adding such information costs no money, and no new website needs to be designed, hosted, or maintained. To become a competent contributor merely takes two hours of training – or some dedicated figuring out.
Among more than 120 criteria for self-evaluation that I, as a teaching staff at Ilia University, have to fill out every two years, there are items such as “being part of a jury in a poetry festival.” There are many other welcome criteria, but no criterion to reflect that, together with students, in a seminar class, we created the entry for the Writer’s House of Georgia and several other pages of academics or politicians. Over the last few years, they got a total of 180,000 views.
Bringing more of Georgia into Wikipedia and more Wikipedia into Georgia would be a great contribution to expanding knowledge. Such an effort could make information in English, French, German, or other languages about Georgia much more widely available – and conversely, bring international information into Georgia. Students studying, say, Italian or Japanese could test their skills by adding to entries about Georgia in these languages as a real-world application of their language skills (and yes, testing out and refining on machine translation also).
How do others do it?
Several Estonian universities already include such a “micro-contribution to knowledge” as a graduation requirement. At the University of Tartu, students, as part of their course in academic writing/information mediation, must make a significant contribution – under supervision. Students correct each other, and the lecturer ensures they get it right. Exams, otherwise, are read by the lecturer, assessed, and then discarded (depending on archiving requirements). Here, the work is collaborative and is a lasting contribution to knowledge. A coordinator helps to ensure the program stays on track.
Hundreds of students participate each year, and thousands of articles have been added. The Estonian University of Life Sciences has a similar program. Estonian Wikipedians have set up an ambitious program to create a million articles on Wikipedia. They see the effort as a “direct contribution to the society and clearly support the survival and further development of the Estonian science language.” This idea can serve as an inspiration for Georgia, too.
Challenges and Opportunities
Of course, there are uncertainties ahead. We do not know exactly how Wikipedia will interact with generative AI. That said, there currently is no big corpus of Georgian-language scientific information to train large language models on. Therefore, adding to Georgian-language Wikipedia may help improve artificial intelligence, too. While some information is easy to translate from other languages, this will still not render local information on GLAM – as Wikipedians refer to galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.
One great thing about embracing Wikipedia as a knowledge strategy is that it can be done from below. Institutions (and even individuals) can start without waiting for the government to set the course. There might even be a political angle – civic activists and even the opposition could use Wikipedia as a mobilization strategy to show young people something they can do out in Zestaponi, in Chiatura, and other places, to bring information from books into Wikipedia, to share old photographs, or to take pictures and document monuments.
David Goodhart has made the valuable distinction between the “Somewheres” and “Anywheres.” The Somewheres are defined by their location, and they have their identity largely ascribed to them. The Anywheres create more of their own identity through choice, they find their cafés and working spaces in Tallinn or Taipei. Wikipedia gives at least some of the Somewheres a chance for information about their places to be read anywhere – and to write themselves, not just be written about.
That is also an important kind of freedom, one edit at a time – and perhaps one that is even more important at a time when other freedoms are at risk.
How to get going?
For institutions, doing careful and considered experiments has low risks, and optional courses or edit-a-thons may be a good first step. Some such events have already occurred, but the effort could be scaled to a much higher level.
If one can illustrate that this increases knowledge and student engagement, institutions could expand their emphasis on Wikipedia. Yet more immediately, for those interested in this idea, there is no need to wait for others. You can register a username (ideally a pseudonym) on Wikipedia today and make your first tiny contribution to something you care about by going here.
