Call for book chapter proposal “Open Knowledge and Wikimedia Projects in Canada”

The year 2021 marks the 20th anniversary of Wikipedia and the 10th anniversary of Wikimedia Canada, the non-profit, educational association that aims to stimulate contributions to Wikimedia projects in Canada. This double anniversary testifies to the long-term nature of Wikimedia projects and invites us to reflect on the vitality and specificity of the free knowledge movement in Canada.

This call for papers aims to collect chapter proposals for a peer-reviewed book to be published in French and English. The manuscript will be submitted for publication in the serie Parcours numériques at Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal.

This book aims to provide critical perspectives of the free knowledge movement in Canada since the turn of the millennium. Who contributes, or does not contribute, to Wikipedia and other projects in the Canadian Wikimedia ecosystem? What uses or misuses are made of Wikimedia platforms by the Canadian public, and more specifically by activists, political parties, teachers, librarians, archivists, the research community, students, artists, journalists, businesses and casual users of all kinds ?

Currently, Wikimedia projects in Canada are mainly fed by three linguistic communities (English, French and Atikamekw nehiromowin), which break down into countless individual and collective profiles. We wish to paint a portrait of this vast community, as diverse as it is unknown.

We are calling on people who believe in the free culture movement, Wikimedians, the research community, librarians, archivists and people from all walks of life to put together an overview of the specificities, challenges and issues of the Wikimedia movement in Canada.

The book will bring together around a dozen texts, each between 3000 and 3500 words. We are particularly interested in texts that offer a synthesized understanding of a project’s general scope (Wikipedia, Wikisource, Commons, Wikidata, etc.), centered on the Canadian context as a whole, or on a particular community — province, nation, region, city, etc.

These texts could address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Scholarly research on the Wikimedia Movement in Canada;
• Wikidata, the Semantic Web and the Canadian context;
• Wikimedia projects within GLAMU (galleries, libraries, archives, museums, universities);
• The Wikimedia movement and open education in Canada;
• History and actors of Wikimedia Canada;
• Wikipedia, online health and Covid-19 in Canada;
• Editorial controversies within portals related to Canada in the various language versions of Wikipedia;
• The arts community, Canadian Cities and the Wikimedia projects;
• The feminist and LGBTQ+ movements in Canada in Wikimedia projects;
• Contributing feedback related to Wikimedia projects;
• The use of Wikimedia projects within Indigenous nations;
• The reading and consultation habits of Canadian users.

The target audience for the book is the Canadian general public, the international Wikimedia community and the research community.

Terms and conditions of participation

Proposals should be sent by Friday May 14, 2021 at the latest at WMCA10@wikimedia.ca. They can be written in French or English.

Please include in your proposal 1) a working title, 2) an abstract of approximately 350 words, 3) five to ten bibliographic references and 4) a short biography of each author.

The results will be communicated to all authors who have submitted a proposal by the end of May. Selected papers should be submitted no later than the 1st of November 2021 for peer review and translation.

For any question, please contact Jean-Michel Lapointe : jmlapointe@wikimedia.ca

Scientific direction of the book

• Jean-Michel Lapointe (Université du Québec à Montréal and Wikimedia Canada)
• Sophie Montreuil (Université de Montréal et Association francophone pour le savoir — Acfas)

_{Photo credit : Abhi Sharma, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0}