A Decade of Lingwiki: An informal history
Lingwiki is the name used for an informal network of people and events with the aim of improving the representation of linguistics on Wikipedia. Whether it’s people sharing their edits via a hashtag, informal online editing events, or dedicated workshops and catered edit-a-thons, lingwiki aims to improve linguistic contributions to the open access encyclopedia, which is the largest reference work in history.
2025 marks ten years of lingwik. I like round numbers, documenting informal histories and lingwiki, and so I wanted to celebrate this anniversary by sharing the parts of the lingwiki story I am familiar with. I link to Gretchen’s All Things Linguistic blog posts about lingwiki throughout this post, but you can read them all here too.
The first lingwiki event was held at the Linguistic Society of America’s (LSA) 2015 Annual Meeting in January 2015. This event was run by Gretchen McCulloch. Gretchen was heading towards the end of her MA and thought this event would be a good opportunity to both get involved in the LSA and improve the quality of public information about linguistics. Gretchen had some experience with editing Wikipedia, but realised that improving the quality of linguistics content was a task too daunting for one individual, and that a better investment of her time would be increasing the number of linguistically knowledgeable volunteers with editing skills who could contribute.
Prior to the first lingwiki event, in August 2014 Gretchen ran an online call for people to edit key linguistics pages of Wikipedia, a project she called Crowdsourced Linguistics. I participated, with a longer blog post on ergativity and edits to the Ergativity page on Wikipedia. During this online exercise, it became apparent that people were interested in editing, but wanted more training and support (technical and moral). Wikipedia edit-a-thons were an existing model Gretchen could emulate in a space for linguists, and she’d had experience attending a couple of Art+Feminism edit-a-thons in Montreal. Having many people in the same space (physical or digital) to collaboratively edit Wikipedia has many advantages: there’s help to get new editors set up, people around to help you troubleshoot any advanced editing problems, models for new ways of helping to improve linguistic content, and a sense of camaraderie. Events also help people who are willing editors, but struggle to set aside the time in busy schedules to do the work. At the time, Brice Russ worked at the LSA in PR, and reached out to Gretchen to talk about how the LSA could support this project. That's how the first in-person edit-a-thon came to be at LSA. The fact that LSA were able to comp Gretchen’s registration also made a difference to helping a junior person who was new to lingcomm attend LSA.
Changing the name from Crowdsourced Linguistics to lingwiki for the first in-person event made the aims clearer, and #lingwiki was a useful tag for social media spaces. It is also an early example of Gretchen’s knack for branding linguistics projects. In keeping with the networks she had, alongside the LSA in-person event, Gretchen also reached out to other online lingcomm creators to run parallel events. I was in Singapore at the time, and ran an event for staff and students at Nanyang Technological University the same week, and also monitored Twitter traffic during the LSA event. I had some experience with editing Wikipedia, but these lingwiki events were the first time I committed to systematically improving and creating articles with an understanding of the processes and policies of editing on the platform. The benefit of these events is that they attract many new to editing Wikipedia, but also some people with experience, so that there’s support beyond the main facilitator.
The first lingwiki not only served as a model of this kind of event for linguists, but also for the kinds of editing work that Wikipedia needed, and very much still needs. There were four main types of editing work laid out in the slides. The first type of editing is improving stubs. Stubs are short articles where the page has been created but there’s very little information. WikiProject Linguistics estimates there are over 2,600 linguistics stubs. This is twice as many as there were in 2015, since it’s a lot easier to start a page than to edit it up to a level of quality, but they’re also a great place to start since any additions will be an improvement. The second type of editing is improving the description of the majority of the world’s languages. All languages with an ISO 639-3 code have an automatically generated Wikipedia page, but many of the world’s languages, even those with descriptive grammars to reference are still stubs. The third type of editing is translating posts from one language to another. There are many stubs on English Wikipedia, but there are 341 other currently active languages, many with even less linguistics than the English Wikipedia. If you have the skills, translation from one Wikipedia to another is an excellent way to get linguistics topics to new audiences. The fourth type of editing is creating or improving biographies of linguists, especially those in demographics that are under-represented on Wikipedia.
Thanks to Rose-Marie Dechaine at the first lingwiki, Gretchen learnt about the process of applying for grants from WikiMedia to run events. This allowed Gretchen to run events in 2015 and 2016 including at the LSA Summer Institute in Chicago. From 2017-2021 Gretchen collected feedback from participants for events that she ran. Across a range of online and in person events at conferences, summer schools and universities the survey was filled in 242 times. Participants improved pages across a wide range of topics in linguistics, and mainly worked on stubs (40%), biographies (29%) and underdocumented languages (25%). Over half of participants had never edited Wikipedia before, but over three quarters (77%) of participants were keen to continue to participate in ongoing edit-a-thon events and almost two thirds (62%) were open to continuing to edit even without events. For people at these events, it was the first lingwiki for 81% of survey respondents. When it comes to lingwiki participants, the majority were grad students (46%), followed by undergrads (18%), profs (14%) and non-academic linguists (9%), a reflection of the kinds of venues where these events were run.
The original slide deck from the first event has been enriched and translated over the years, but still lives at bit.ly/lingwiki. Lingwiki became a staple of the LSA annual conference schedule (Gretchen’s reports from 2016, 2017). When I moved to the UK we ran monthly lingwiki events at SOAS from 2015-2017 (with a pizza budget thanks to WikiMedia). Off the back of the positive reception for lingwiki, LSA has become a partner of WikiMedia, with quite a few linguists using Wikipedia editing as a practical classroom project across a range of linguistics courses. Gretchen and I ran workship on Wikis and Wikipedia for Endangered Languages, and several editing events, at the language documentation summer school CoLang 2016 in Fairbanks Alaska. More recently, the LSA Committee on Gender Equity in Linguistics (COGEL) has been running edit-a-thons for the last five years with the targeted aim of improving the diversity of Wikipedia biographies, and the LSA Committee on LGBTQ+ [Z] Issues in Linguistics (COZIL) have run Pride Month edit-a-thons too. Sunny Ananthanarayan, one of the organisers of the COZIL events was joining lingwiki events before even starting linguistics undergrad studies, one of the many lovely examples over the years of lingwiki being a self-propagating collection of events thanks to an enthusiastic and engaged linguistics community.
I have spent a lot of my editing time on a couple of key topics. I started with a focus on improving the biographies of Australian linguists, especially women. Around the time we were at CoLang I also made sure that language pages linked to relevant archives, cross-linking all of the languages in PARADISEC and Kaipuleohone at the time. The page I have worked on most extensively is the Yolmo language page, a Tibetan language in Nepal that was the topic of my PhD research. I also published a version of the work on that page as a WikiJournal of Humanities paper, which has been a useful way to translate the time spent editing Wikipedia into something legible to my institution, in much the same way handbook chapters are.
Lingwiki has been an important thread across the years I was a precariously employed and often uprooted early career researcher. It’s the first project Gretchen and I schemed on, and the reason we got to meet in person for the first time at CoLang in Alaska. This is very much the history of lingwiki as I see it, but as someone who is used to editing Wikipedia, I’m also used to valuing the contribution of many others as well, and I’m sure there are people who have taken lingwiki and made it their own in their institutions, organisations and classrooms. Neither Gretchen nor I get the chance to run edit-a-thons very often anymore. I use Wikipedia as an informal learning activity across a number of subjects. I also made edits occasionally. I still believe it’s one of the most powerful ways all linguists can improve public understanding of linguistics.
You can edit Wikipedia using the lingwiki slides as a quick-start guide, or you can use the slides to run your own editing events. With the internet becoming more of a series of closed off social media gardens, and the ever-present problems with the reliability of information online, Wikipedia feels like a more important resource than ever. Improving Wikipedia is one of the best, enduring ways for you to positively improve public knowledge about your topics of linguistic interest.
Lingwiki slides: https://bit.ly/lingwiki
