Slides from lightning talk at the Open Educational Resources Conference 2017 held at Resource for London on 5-6 April 2017. ‘Post-truth’ is the international word of the year, announced by Oxford Dictionaries (Flood, 2016). In this climate, open education has never seemed more important. Yet while “search is the way we now live.” (Darnton in Hillis, Petit & Jarrett, 2012) with Google processing 90% of searches in Europe (Fioretti, 2014), seldom does the no.1 search engine display the provenance of where the ‘suggested answers’ it provides come from, undermining “people’s ability to verify information and, ultimately, to develop well-informed opinions.”(Dewey, 2016) This session covers why the most important frontier of Wikipedia is not its content but its 30 million plus citations (Orlowitz, 2016) and the latest developments behind the WikiCite project after its first year. The WikiCite initiative is to build a repository of all Wikimedia citations and bibliographic metadata in Wikidata to serve all Wikimedia projects. The ultimate goal to make Wikipedia’s citations as “reliable, open, accessible, structured, linked and free as our Knowledge is.”(Orlowitz, 2016) Why is this useful? Resolving the hitherto poor structuring of citations on Wikipedia & turning them into interlinking machine-readable structured data means we will have more reliable & verifiable data for altmetrics. This open citation data, behind every Wikipedia article, the “largest hand-curated bibliography in human history”(Orlowitz, 2016), is therefore incredibly powerful as it can be queried, analysed & visualised in any number of ways including filtering by author, co-author, publisher, sponsor etc. It also allows us to identify which references are open access & which are not so publishers can be encouraged to release the rights in order to further progress scientific discovery & open education.

1. [Citation Needed]
Digital Provenance in the era of Post-Truth politics.
Ewan McAndrew (University of Edinburgh) and Dr. Martin Poulter (University of Oxford).
“We live in the information age
and the aphorism ‘one who possess
information possesses the world’ of course
reflects the present-day reality.”
Vladimir Putin in Interfax, 2016.

2. “Now no one even tries proving ‘the truth’.
You can just say anything. Create realities.”
Pomerantzev in the Economist, 2016.

3. Okay Google….. what’s the UK’s GDP?
“Digital intermediaries such as Google and Facebook are seen as the new powerbrokers in online news, controlling
access to consumers and with the potential even to suppress and target messages to individuals.” (Tambini, 2016)

4. Okay Google….. what’s the average lifespan of a goat?
Seldom does the no.1 search engine display the provenance of where the ‘suggested
answers’ it provides come from, undermining “people’s ability to verify information and,
ultimately, to develop well-informed opinions.”(Dewey, 2016)

5. “Search is the way we now live.” (Darnton in Hillis, Petit & Jarrett, 2012)

7. Fact checking sites are springing up in greater numbers but convenience and
cognitive ease have proven to be the drivers for the virtual generation.
The truth is out there.
But it’s up to us to verify it.

8. Wikidata logo © the Wikimedia Foundation
Wikidata phase 1 interwiki links by Pyfisch on Wikimedia Commons, CC-By-SA
8

9. Wikidata facts are triples
United Kingdom  capital  London
9
CIA World Factbook 2017  publisher 
CIA

10. Link facts to their sources
10
United Kingdom 
capital  London
 stated in 
CIA World
Factbook 2017

11. Wikicite
11
This and the next slide from “Building the sum of all human citations”
by Dario Taraborelli, CC-BY-SA

12. A journal article in Wikidata
12

13. Queries
• Statements from papers that
have been retracted.
• Most common author about
Zika.
• Statements about terrorist
attacks that have no references.
• Number of references to Le
Figaro.
• “Get all proteins with GO annotations
that are a subclass of "signaling
receptor activity", where the
determination method is a type of
manual assertion, and the evidence is
a scientific article that was published
in the last three years”
13
Citation network of some papers
about the Zika virus

15. View on Scholia

18. Links and further reading.
• Alcantara, C. (2016). Wikipedia editors are essentially writing the election guide millions of voters will
read. [online] Washington Post.
• Caitlin, D. (2016). You probably haven’t even noticed Google’s sketchy quest to control the world’s
knowledge. [online] Washington Post.
• Fioretti, J. (2014). Wikipedia fights back against Europe’s “right to be forgotten”. [online] Reuters.
• Post-truth’ named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries. [online] the Guardian
• Hillis, K., Petit, M. and Jarrett, K. (2012). Google and the culture of search. 1st ed. Routledge, p.5.
• Orlowitz, J. (2016). DLF: WikiCite. [online] Google Docs.
• Why Wiki Ed’s work combats fake news — and how you can help – Wiki Education.
• Students reject Fake News to write footnoted, neutral Wikipedia entries – NPR Ed.
• Yes I'd lie to you - The Economist
• How technology disrupted truth – Katherine Viner in the Guardian.
• No we’re not in a post fact world – Wikimedia blog.
• Wikipedia vs. Fake News – Wikimedian in Residence blog.
• Wikipedia is fixing one of the internet’s biggest flaws – Washington Post.

19. Ewan McAndrew
Wikimedian in Residence
Twitter: @emcandre
Email:ewan.mcandrew@ed.ac.uk
Martin Poulter
Wikimedian in Residence
Twitter: @mlpoulter
Email: martin.poulter@bodleian.ox.ac.uk