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4. Topicality

Topicality is a key factor when using open educational resources based on MediaWiki software (OER WMS).

The ability to easily update the content of these resources (which can often be done by practically anyone) is what gives them a competitive advantage over their more closed counterparts, i.e. primarily printed resources and, to a limited degree, static websites and other resources from the web 1.0 environment, which can often be updated only by the given website’s administrator. Wikipedia and other OER WMS, although often created in the beginnings of the internet’s development, belong to the group of websites under the web 2.0 label, i.e. resources that allow for users to take part in their development and potentially edit their content. 

The significance of topicality became very evident during the Covid-19 pandemic, which afflicted the world in 2020. Over the course of several weeks, over four thousand articles on Covid appeared on English-language Wikipedia and registered over 240 million views (Wikimediafoundation, 2020). Multiple edits were often made over the course of a single minute. In practice, articles were thus being updated almost constantly. In this period, Google also worked off of Wikipedia in its graphs to depict the number of afflicted persons in individual countries. 

A community of health experts appeared in a wholly spontaneous manner on Wikipedia surrounding coronavirus articles, monitoring them to make sure no baseless information was entered into them (Cohen, 2020). In a period when academic and scientific journals were often lax in their quality assurance mechanisms and printing studies that under normal circumstances would not necessarily pass a peer-review process, Wikipedia became a kind of “gatekeeper” to the world of knowledge about Covid. The article “Coronavirus disease 2019” on English-language Wikipedia was edited by a total of over one thousand editors and also a score of bots (artificial intelligence algorithms), which altogether made more than five thousand edits (see the Figure below). It is clear that a similar mechanism of updating content would be impossible for printed publications (or for traditional websites), as would be their distribution throughout the world in such a short period of time. 

Figure. Article statistics for the Coronavirus disease 2019 on English-language Wikipedia.

In the creation of OER MWS content, it is also possible to use editing algorithms (or “bots”), which point users to problematic passages they’ve written. In the example of vandalism, these can be vulgarisms; nonetheless, editing algorithms are also useful for ensuring topicality. Editing bots point the editor to words like “this year’s” or “present”, recommending they be avoided and thus preventing the text from seeming outdated in the future. 

With the exception of citing the time a text was accessed (or the last update to the resource that we are using), for OER WMS use and citation it is better to list this data along with the specific page number (or ID), which we can find in the edit history. Listing this data guarantees that the party interested in citing the resource will find the exact version we are using. As was already stated in the case of OER WMS, multiple edits can take place over the course of a single minute, and thus citing both the hour or minute the article was accessed is not necessarily sufficient. 

Generally speaking, if we want to verify whether the resource we intend to use is updated, we have three ways of recognizing this: 

  • Content – In terms of content, we often see time data in an article, which in some cases can be a useful indicator of topicality. This especially applies when we are reading a text on an issue with knowledge that we expect to develop over time (e.g. the Climate change article on English-language Wikipedia) and the last time data in the text is, for example, 2010 – in such a case, we can assume that the source is not being regularly updated. 

  • References – References are a useful indicator of topicality. It is enough to look at the date of their publication and find out whether one is from a recent date. 

  • Edit history – Edit history is the best indicator of whether “something is going on” with the article in the sense that someone is taking care of it. In OER WMS, history is often at the top right of the page (Figure 5). When we click on it, we can tell by the time data when the last update was made or whether the article is being regularly edited. 

At the same time, it should be noted that not all articles need to be updated. For some topics, the knowledge surrounding it is no longer developing as quickly, so the fact that they are not regularly updated does not necessarily mean a detriment to their quality. 

Figure. Graphic illustration of history options in the Global Warming article on English-language Wikipedia.

LITERATURE: 

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