Postgraduate Course: Crowdsourcing the Past: Wikipedia and Cultural Heritage (EFIE11439)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh Futures Institute |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | Crowdsourcing is a way of gathering and organising knowledge that is specially relevant to the field of cultural heritage, because of its potential to enhance inclusion as well as topic coverage. This course explores the issues that crowdsourcing raises through the example of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, arguably the world's most important online platform for heritage-making, and one of the earliest digital crowdsourcing projects. |
| Course description |
On this course you will consider how Wikipedia's nature as a crowdsourced project shapes the generation and consumption of cultural heritage, both recent and remote, at a global scale. You'll hear the expert perspectives of guest speakers, and discuss recent analysis and interpretations of the site with your peers, including debates on whether we can trust the crowd-sourced knowledge on Wikipedia, how the site can be decolonised, whether it constitutes a transnational public space, and how AI is changing its function and audience.
To anchor these theoretical perspectives and see how they really work in practice, you'll be trained in the basics of Wikipedia editing, and will collaborate in editing a current Wikipedia page on a cultural heritage topic. The final assessment will allow you to critically reflect on what you have learned about crowdsourcing and global cultural heritage production.
Students will learn through a combination of mini lectures; followed by group discussion; individual reading; supervised group activities; individual research and knowledge exchange as well as creative communication of research findings. Guest lecturers will be invited, to enhance interdisciplinary teaching and offer students the opportunity to connect with heritage professionals in academia and beyond.
Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) - Hybrid Course Delivery Information:
The Edinburgh Futures Institute delivers many of its courses in hybrid mode. This means that you may have some online students joining sessions for this course. To enable this, the course will use technologies to record and live-stream student and staff participation during their teaching and learning activities.
Students should be aware that:
- Classrooms used in this course will have additional technology in place: in some cases, students might not be able to sit in areas away from microphones or outside the field of view of all cameras.
- All presentations, and whole class discussions will be recorded (see the Lecture Recording and Virtual Classroom policies for more details).
- You will need access to a personal computing device for this course. Most activities will take place in a web browser, unless otherwise stated. We recommend using a device with a screen, physical keyboard, and internet access.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2026/27, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 30 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 5,
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 5,
Supervised Practical/Workshop/Studio Hours 9,
Summative Assessment Hours 1,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
176 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
This course embraces an assessment for learning philosophy, which will be explained to students from the outset.
Assessments are seen as means of scaffolding and facilitating learning throughout the course. In line with this ethos, the assessments are designed as follows:
1) Group Presentation (20%)
15-minute presentation. In the final session, groups will present to the rest of the class about their collaborative work, summarising their achievements and commenting on their experience.
Learning Outcomes Assessed by Component: 1, 2, 3, 4
2) 3500 Word Reflective Essay (80%)
Students will critically reflect on the theoretical approaches to Wikipedia they have encountered through core reading, lectures and additional reading and individual research, in the light of their collaborative editing experience. They will communicate the processes and outcomes of this reflection through a reflective essay (ca 3,500 words with at least 10 key references). This assessment component will be graded and make up 80% of the overall assessment.
Learning Outcomes Assessed by Component: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 |
| Feedback |
Feedback on any formative assessment may be provided in various formats, for example, to include written, oral, video, face-to-face, whole class, or individual. The Course Organiser will decide which format is most appropriate in relation to the nature of the assessment.
Feedback on both formative and summative in-course assessed work will be provided in time to be of use in subsequent assessments within the course.
Feedback on the summative assessment will be provided in written form via Learn, the University of Edinburgh's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).
Formative Feedback Opportunity:
Formative feedback is ongoing feedback which monitors learning and is intended to improve performance in the same course, in future courses, and also beyond study.
Student groups will present their experience and goals to the rest of the group. This component will be formative. It will not be graded.
Feedback will be provided throughout the teaching activities: by answering questions, through discussions and by interacting with students during the time allocated to group activities.
In addition, in the final session, students will present and receive feedback on the group activity they conducted and which constitutes the starting point for their summative assessment. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate understanding of the role played by crowdsourcing projects in creating and disseminating cultural heritage knowledge, with Wikipedia as the case study.
- Conduct both autonomous and collaborative engaged research into how the crowdsourced format and nature of Wikipedia shapes the intangible cultural heritage collected and presented on its pages.
- Critically evaluate Wikipedia's claims to present globally-neutral crowdsourced knowledge about cultural heritage.
- Communicate the outcome of critical evaluations of Wikipedia as a crowdsourced heritage platform to an audience of peers.
- Reflect on individual learning, considering choices, decisions and their outcomes.
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Reading List
Narges Azizifard et al., 'Wiki Loves Monuments: Crowdsourcing the Collective Image of the Worldwide Built Heritage', Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 16 (2022) https://doi.org/10.1145/3569092
Chiara Bonacchi, 'Co-Producing Knowledge Online'. Bristol: Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2018. https://connected-communities.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Knowledge_Online_SP.pdf
Amy Bruckman, Should You Believe Wikipedia? Online Communities and the Construction of Knowledge (Cambridge, 2022).
Heather Ford, Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age (Cambridge, Mass., 2022)
Kyle Keeler, 'Wikipedia's Indian problem: settler colonial erasure of native American knowledge and history on the world's largest encyclopedia', Settler Colonial Studies (2024) https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2024.2358697
Zachary J. McDowell, 'Wikipedia and AI: Access, representation, and advocacy in the age of large language models', Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 30 (2024) https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565241238924
Sabine Niederer and José van Dijck, 'Wisdom of the crowd or technicity of content? Wikipedia as a sociotechnical system', New Media & Society 12 (2010) https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365297
Prema Smith and Ben Marwick, 'World Heritage Sites on Wikipedia. Cultural heritage activism in a context of constrained agency', Big Data and Society 8 (1) (2021) https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211017304
Matthew Vetter, Wikipedia and the representation of reality (New York, 2021) |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Crowdsourcing,Intangible Cultural Heritage,Wikipedia,Cultural Heritage Futures |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Prof Charles West
Tel:
Email: cwest3@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Zoe Hogg
Tel:
Email: Zoe.Hogg@ed.ac.uk |
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