Representation of Non-Western Cultural Knowledge on Wikipedia: The Case of the Visual Arts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We explore gaps in Wikipedia's coverage of the visual arts by comparing the representation of 100 artists and 100 artworks from the Western canon against corresponding sets of notable artists and artworks from non-Western cultures. We measure the coverage of these two sets of topics across Wikipedia as a whole and for its individual language versions. We also compare the coverage for Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata, sister projects of Wikipedia that host digital media and structured data. We show that all these platforms strongly favour the Western canon, giving many times more coverage to Western art. We highlight specific examples of differing coverage of visual art inside and outside the Western canon. We find that European language versions of Wikipedia are generally more "Western" in their coverage and Asian languages more "global," with interesting exceptions, including that English is one of the most “global.” We suggest how both Wikipedia and the wider cultural sector can address this gap in content and thus give Wikipedia a truly global perspective on the visual arts.Nous explorons des lacunes dans la couverture de Wikipédia des arts visuels, en comparant la représentation de 100 artistes et de 100 œuvres d’art venant du canon occidental avec des artistes et des œuvres d’art notables venant de cultures non-occidentales. Nous mesurons la couverture de ces deux sujets à travers Wikipédia, dans son ensemble et pour chaque version individuelle dans une langue différente. Nous comparons également la couverture concernant Wikimedia Commons et Wikidata, des projets sœurs de Wikipédia qui hébergent des médias numériques et des données structurées. Nous montrons que toutes ces plateformes favorisent le canon occidental, offrant à l’art occidental beaucoup plus de couverture. Nous soulignons des exemples spécifiques de la couverture différente de l’art visuel dans et hors du canon occidental. Nous trouvons que les versions dans des langues européennes sur Wikipédia sont généralement plus « occidentales » dans leur couverture, tandis que celles dans des langues asiatiques sont plus « globales », sauf que des exceptions intéressantes, y compris celle d’anglais, qui est une des versions la plus « globale ». Nous suggérons la façon dont Wikipédia et le secteur culturel élargi peuvent aborder cette lacune de contenu pour donner à Wikipédia une perspective véritablement globale concernant les arts visuels.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".