Introduction

There is abundant literature about Wikipedia and open culture, but there has rarely been a work focused on describing and understanding the specific participation of a country’s population in Wikimedia platforms. The present collective work aims to examine Wikimedia initiatives in Canada, presenting a series of studies that shed light on how the ideals of sharing, open access, and collaboration—the pillars of open culture—manifest themselves in Canada.

This work raises a fundamental question: How do Canadians participate in Wikimedia platforms, and what are the issues and dynamics of their participation? In the introduction, we aim to set out a few benchmarks and milestones for this question and to point out some of the limits constraining it. From the outset, we would like to acknowledge that there is some peril in producing an all-encompassing portrait of Canada, whatever the theme, given the country’s complex regionalisms, linguistic and ethnocultural divisions, and historical presence of its First Peoples. Canada is a country whose identity and history benefit from being seen as plural (Wright, 2020). This country therefore serves as a somewhat troubling mirror of the Wikimedia movement itself, where each point in the network of people connected to the platform can add its own touch to the projects, based on its contribution interests. So much so that the Wikipedia encyclopedia has already been described as a large dynamic territory where different projects and communities are developing autonomously, but the accent should not be put on separation from one another (McDowell & Vetter, 2021, p. 77). The multiple authors’ perspectives in this collective work reflect this intersecting complexity of the Canadian and Wikimedian territories.

Furthermore, the policies for collecting data on the people contributing to various Wikimedia projects do not seem to allow for their country of residence to be identified. The culture of the community is largely based on respect for anonymity and does not require any link to civil identity (Konieczny, 2023). As a result, we can hardly characterize the Canadian contributor population by identifying where each editor resides. This lack of specific data on the profile of Canadian editors creates other challenges in fully understanding the participation dynamics that interest us. That said, some anonymized datasets made available by the Wikimedia Foundation’s technology team make it possible to geolocate contributions to Wikipedia, which is the movement’s most active project. Between September and October 2021, 3,101 active contributors located in Canada participated in the English-language Wikipedia, compared to 391 in the French-language version.1 In addition to these two main language versions, there is steady, although smaller-scale, participation in the Farsi, Hebrew, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian, and Mandarin versions. This suggests that Canadians of immigrant background maintain a connection to their culture and language of origin by contributing to the free encyclopedia.

This previously mentioned question can also be considered from the point of view of the birth and growth of the Canadian Wikimedia “chapter.” This approach helps reveal the motivations and challenges arising from the very first initiatives while offering a crucial entry point for proposing some answers; the approach also highlights the importance of local initiatives and national chapters such as Wikimedia Canada, which provide valuable insight into regional contributions and specific issues.

Since 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation, the movement’s parent organization, has officially recognized the nonprofit organization Wikimedia Canada. Wikipedia itself was founded in 2001, and 2 years later, the foundation was created to support the contribution of volunteers by administering, developing, and maintaining the technological infrastructure of all the projects revolving around Wikipedia. As such, the foundation is the custodian of the Wikimedia brand. What’s more, the foundation provides financial support to 37 chapters around the world—that is, organizations whose aim is to support and stimulate the development of Wikimedia projects on their territory.

Starting in 2005, a handful of volunteers in Canada from Ontario, Québec, British Columbia, and Alberta took steps to set up a structure that would publicize and encourage contributions to Wikipedia in this country. These volunteers also share the ideals of the free- and open-culture social movement behind Wikipedia, promoting the free circulation of knowledge and information so that it can be legally copied and redistributed. Under the terms of its free licence, all of Wikipedia’s content can be used, modified, and shared, as long as the source of this content is cited and its free nature is preserved.

From the very start of their collective efforts, the activists laying the organizational foundations of what would become Wikimedia Canada called for the abolition of section 12 of the Copyright Act, which deals with what is known as Crown copyright. This section of the law, which has been in force in Canada since 1921 and is common to several Commonwealth countries, stipulates that documents produced by the federal government only enter the public domain 50 years after being created, which has the effect of preventing publicly funded content from being reused in Wikipedia and the movement’s other projects. For example, official photographs of Members of Parliament cannot be used to illustrate articles in the encyclopedia, as such photographs belong to His Majesty. This law contrasts with practice in the United States, where all documents produced by the US federal government are placed in the public domain from the outset and can be freely reused. In addition to members of the Wikimedia community, the main associations of archivists, librarians, researchers, and teachers in Canada are also calling for the abolition or reform of this section of the law, which would make it possible to preserve and enhance the value of documents produced by federal public institutions (Wakaruk, 2020).

In the summer of 2011, the long-term efforts of the first volunteers to create a Canadian organization that would be recognized by the American foundation came to fruition. When Wikimedia Canada (WMCA) officially became an affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation, James Heilman, MD, became the organization’s first president. Since then, WMCA has become an official affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation and is run by people who aim to stimulate the development of Canadian content projects by increasing the number of opportunities for meetings and contribution events.

The chapter’s first official public activity took place on August 28, 2011, and illustrates this approach. The aim was to document more than 375 places of historical interest so that the encyclopedic articles devoted to them could be illustrated with freely licensed images. Known as Wikipedia Takes Montréal, the project was significant in more ways than one. It aimed, on the one hand, to mark Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary and, on the other, to stimulate unprecedented participation in the production of Canadian commons in the country’s information landscape. The event attracted more than 200 people thanks to media coverage across Canada in both French and English. This local initiative also had an international dimension: It was prepared in advance along with the municipal administration of the City of Montréal, and this collaboration with a public institution would become a hallmark of WMCA once it was officially affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation.

WMCA received logistical support from another chapter of the movement, Wikimedia France. This activity suffered a setback that was both unforeseen and highly memorable when the remnants of Hurricane Irene arrived in Montréal on the same day, compromising the quality of most of the thousands of photos taken. Relatively speaking, this was a disappointment, but it was far from demotivating the organizers; it actually had some impact within the movement.

The establishment in 2013 of a partnership agreement with Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) marked a decisive moment in the recognition of the Canadian chapter of the movement by institutions across the country, particularly those belonging to GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums). This agreement is a true “public-common partnership,” it remains in force a decade later, and it is proving beneficial to both parties and to more besides. As described by David Bollier and Silke Helfrich (2022), a public-commons partnership is a form of collaboration between public entities (governments and public institutions) and the commons (resources managed collectively by a community according to community-established rules). In this case, Wikimedia content created from institutional documentary resources is more precisely designed as a knowledge commons.

On the one hand, WMCA is officially affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation, and the movement of volunteers it is seeking to develop can count on a free physical place of convergence and offline socialization for the Montréal community through training evenings entitled “Mardi, c’est Wiki” (Wiki Tuesdays) following a tried and tested formula in the French-speaking world. On the other hand, BAnQ is encouraging archivists and librarians at this institution, which is present throughout Québec, to broaden their documentary expertise by promoting the collections they hold on Wikimedia platforms and by involving their audiences, who are offered training in how to contribute to Wikimedia projects (Boudreau et al., 2016). Canada’s chief librarian, Guy Berthiaume, who was head of BAnQ when the partnership was established and then replicated it to some extent when he moved to Library and Archives Canada (LAC) in 2017, had this to say in his opening speech at the Ontario Museum Association Conference that same year:

So, while museums and other GLAMs have the knowledge and the records, Wikipedia has a reach that none of our institutions could ever match on its own. . . .

We are working with Wikimedia Canada, the non-profit body that aims to increase Canadian content in Wikipedia. The idea was that our expanded presence on Wikipedia would attract new users to our website and our collections. LAC now has over 3,000 images embedded on Wikipedia article pages, and in turn, this results in roughly 30 million hits a month on LAC materials. (Berthiaume, 2017)

WMCA was now officially affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation, and the partnerships created with memory institutions were acting as a catalyst to “wikify” the country’s noncommercial institutional ecosystem. Museums, learned societies, universities, public and research libraries, and cultural and community organizations have all hosted contribution and training activities or incorporated a Wikimedia component into their organizational strategy. This sometimes involves the occasional hiring of a Wikipedian in residence, although often the Wikipedian expertise of the staff is deployed in the shadows, without there being any institutional recognition of the contributory work, which is often the case within the Wikimedia movement (Stintson & Evans, 2018).

Even before the partnership with BAnQ, however, the first interactions with libraries took place as part of an edit-a-thon. The first of these interactions took place on February 18, 2012, at the Université Laval Library in Québec City, with a workshop devoted to Jean Talon, the first intendant of New France. A year later, on April 6, 2013, Mile End Library (now called the Mordecai-Richler Library) hosted the first edit-a-thon in a public library in Québec and, as far as we know, in all of Canada. The event was part of the Mile End Project, launched in February by Mile End Memories, a local history organization, in collaboration with Wikimedia Canada. In Montréal, public libraries would be incorporating contribution workshops at Wikipedia into their regular programming. Between 2016 and 2018, more than 20 workshops were held, most of them in partnership with the Café des savoirs libres, a collective of librarians and open-culture advocates committed to creating knowledge commons (Martel, 2021). By setting up partnerships based at the local library site, it has proved possible to bring together players from public institutions as well as civil society (historical societies and community groups), creating locally based Wikimedia networks. A number of workshops have also been set up to promote the cinema commons at the Cinémathèque québécoise, in the presence of key figures in the Canadian animation film community.

Many of these institutions have focused their Wikimedia activities on combating systemic bias, narrowing the gender gap, and raising the profile of certain minority communities or marginalized groups in line with the public policies of reconciliation, equity, diversity, and inclusion (REDI) that have now been adopted by these institutions across Canada.

In terms of integrating the movement into higher education, the many roles played by the country’s librarians should be underlined in opening up and paving the way for building bridges with an academic community that was initially wary of Wikipedia’s potential to disrupt established uses of documentation in the digital environment.

The contribution of universities to the movement is considered so central to WMCA that the people active in the Canadian chapter have taken to building on the acronym GLAM by adding a U at the end. Benoit Rochon, president of WMCA from 2016 to 2019, explains the origin of the expression GLAMU in these terms: “For the record, I spoke at a conference in 2011 at the Mushroom Museum in Amsterdam, where a few university professors from the Netherlands were in the audience. I wrote on a slide ‘We will GLAM•U, universities’ recalling Queen’s song We Will Rock You” (Rochon & Phan, email exchange, May 26, 2023). Ha-Loan Phan, a volunteer since 2012 and president of WMCA from 2022 to 2024, explains why she set out to popularize the expression afterward:

I’d learnt to publish information on the opossum on my own after doing my Masters on the animal, and I felt that GLAM was missing the presence of universities, even though they are the places where knowledge is produced and circulated. University librarians have always been privileged allies for our training workshops: as specialists in sources, they gave us the assurance of their expertise, which reassured the professors! What’s more, university libraries are perfect places to host this kind of “extracurricular” activity, with the sources close at hand. (Rochon & Phan, email exchange, May 26, 2023)

Another highlight in the history of the Canadian movement was the annual international Wikimania Convention held in downtown Montréal in 2017, which helped attract new members and deepen the roots of the Canadian chapter in Québec’s leading city. This served as an opportunity for Wikimedians from all over the world to discover Canada’s contribution to the movement but also to appreciate the country’s linguistic duality and the importance of its Indigenous cultures. Wikimania 2017 was an opportunity to celebrate the public launch earlier that year of Wikipetcia, the version of the encyclopedia in Atikamekw Nehiromowin, the Atikamekw native language.

The presence of Canadian indigenousness in Wikipedia is also worth highlighting, since it indicates the role and underlying issues of participation in the encyclopedia in working toward the diversification and neutrality of the information available online. The Wikimedia movement makes it possible to include the plurality of Canadian realities within one of the most visited platforms on the web, helping people to participate in shaping knowledge and also disseminating knowledge in a variety of languages. That said, to date, there are only three Indigenous language versions: Inuktitut, Cree, and Atikamekw Nehiromowin, the last of which is very dynamic. The 8,000 members of the Atikamekw Nehirowisiwok nation are spread across three communities in the Mauricie region of central Québec and still speak their ancestral language. The Atikamekw Nehirowisiwok version of Wikipedia was created in 2013 and launched in 2017 and has enabled a culture with an oral tradition to appropriate and adapt to its needs a Western textual form: the encyclopedia. This digital presence offers a means of stimulating the revitalization of the Atiamekw language, in particular through a system of intergenerational transmission between the elders who hold the knowledge that the language carries and the younger people who gravitate to the contemporary technological universe.

This encyclopedic sharing project has also served as an opportunity to redefine what the principle of openness, so dear to the movement, means for the Atikamekw nation, which has led them to exclude knowledge regarded as sacred from their Wikipedia (Casemajor et al., 2019). Throughout history, dispossession has long structured relations between settlers of European origin and the Indigenous peoples of Canada, and this explains the legitimate skepticism that Indigenous people may have toward the ideal of openness. Science, the media, and Wikipedia are inherently Western spaces of knowledge, and Indigenous people do not recognize them as being conducive to a genuine consideration of their own perspectives on the world. Wikipedia is nonetheless distinctive in that it is increasingly seen as a space for the production of knowledge, which, because of its decentralized mode of operation, can be used by Indigenous people in Canada to rewrite history in a more neutral way (Lugosi et al., 2022). The Canadian chapter of the Wikimedia movement is promoting such an approach and hopes to stimulate the development of new Indigenous language versions over the next decade.

Holding Wikimania 2017 in the Québec metropolis marks a decisive turning point for WMCA, consolidating its presence in Montréal and within French-speaking culture, despite the predominance of English in Canada. This characteristic is reflected in the content of this book, which was originally written mainly in French, and can be explained not only by the vigorous commitment of Québec documentary institutions to Wikimedia projects but also by the steadfast dedication of one volunteer in particular. Working behind the scenes, Benoit Rochon has played a crucial role in the establishment and growth of the Canadian chapter of the movement. He has been contributing to Wikipedia since 2003 and is a founding member of WMCA and of WikiFranca—an organization founded in 2012 to facilitate collaboration between volunteers in the movement from all over the French-speaking world.

He is also the driving force behind the partnerships with BAnQ and LAC, as well as countless edit-a-thons across the country, many of them in the Montréal area, including the organization of the Wikimania Conference in Montréal. Collaborative culture likes to promote collective intelligence as a process that upholds anonymity, but it should be remembered that contributions are unequally distributed between individuals. In fact, contributions are subject to a dynamic where a majority of people participate little, while a tiny minority of people are responsible for the vast majority of contributions (Shirky, 2008). Benoit Rochon belongs to this minority of people who have played a critical role in initiating collaboration and in developing local, provincial, pan-Canadian, and international projects within the Wikimedia movement.

When Benoit Rochon took over as president of WMCA in 2016, he sought to surround himself with volunteers on the Board of Directors who, like him, had a workforce capable of taking WMCA further by developing new partnerships and tapping new sources of funding. Their efforts have been crowned with success, but the workload rests exclusively on the shoulders of a team of volunteers, which means that a strategy needs to be developed to professionalize the chapter’s organization by providing it with salaried staff capable of tackling the issues that require sustained attention, particularly when working with institutions. Compared with the movement’s chapters in France and Germany, which have more than 12 and 90 employees, respectively, Wikimedia Canada’s workforce is based entirely on the free time that its members and board members manage to find, along with occasional mandates given to contractors. This way of doing things, which has been the case since WMCA was founded, began to change in 2022.

The Canadian chapter underwent a major transformation, setting up its first operational team and hiring its first-ever executive director, Louis Germain, who until then had been executive director of the Association des archivistes du Québec. This may be a sign of growing maturity, or it may illustrate the wish to inject new dynamism in order to stimulate the movement’s activities in Canada, but it surely marks a new departure. In November 2023, the team took on the challenge of organizing the Wikiconvention North America at the Toronto Public Library, bringing together enthusiasts from across North America to exchange ideas, strengthen collaborations, and celebrate the movement. Among other things, the convention examined the vital question of the impact of artificial intelligence on Wikimedia projects, culture, and free knowledge but also on democracy, considering the risks of information manipulation, mass surveillance, algorithmic bias, political microtargeting, and the concentration of power.

The other challenges that will continue to guide Canadian open culture in the future, particularly within the Wikimedia movement, include the need to broaden and renew the communities contributing to the projects beyond the circles historically associated with the movement (free-software developers, librarians, archivists, educators, and researchers). The COVID pandemic increased people’s isolation and encouraged the emergence of remote socialization practices, making it more difficult to develop strong social interactions. In this context, the in-person contributions and networking activities that have been important in structuring and fostering local Wikimedia communities in various Canadian cities need to be revived. What’s more, the evolving role of the movement’s Canadian partner institutions needs to be given particular attention, as there is no guarantee of sustainability because of changes in personnel, particularly in the management teams that define organizational priorities.

Finally, three key issues are likely to have an impact on the vitality of the movement in Canada over the next few years. Firstly, the strong comeback of concerns for open education and open educational resources and practices, which are directly aligned with the principles of the Wikimedia movement, are the subject of marked interest within provincial government ministries of education, as well as renewed advocacy within library associations (CARL, 2023). Secondly, the fact that open science is now public policy at both the federal and the granting agency levels, which has the potential to transform the practices of researchers and, more generally, the scholarly publication ecosystem, bringing it closer to a self-organized governance model similar to that of the Wikimedia movement itself. And finally, the legal framework in place in Canada, which places significant limits on the reuse of works, whether produced within the federal government under Crown copyright or not but also because of the decline in the Canadian public domain since January 1, 2023, which has been extended from 50 years to 70 years after the death of the author.

As a result, given their concerns about the possible exhaustion of the open movement, other internal critics are calling for ways to revitalize it, such as promoting the contribution of other voices but also of other narratives, such as that of the “commons.” The Wikimedia movement and the concepts associated with the commons converge in terms of participatory and collaborative engagement, free access to knowledge, and the promotion of collective management of resources.

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This present work is organized around three key themes linking the texts together. We have grouped them into three main sections according to the importance attached to them by their authors: (1) identity issues; (2) collaboration with institutions; and (3) the literacies developed by taking part in or interacting with projects.

We can see that Wikipedia remains the main object of investigation in the analyses, closely followed by Wikidata, which now plays a central role within the Wikimedia ecosystem and beyond; finally, two studies in the present work also look at the use of the Wikimedia Commons image bank. It should also be noted that all the people authoring a study in this book have a contribution practice linked to the projects on which they are developing knowledge.

Starting with the first theme, which looks at identity issues within the platforms of the Wikimedia ecosystem, Nathalie Casemajor analyzes the intercultural cohabitation that takes place within three language versions of Wikipedia: English, French, and Atikamekw Nehiromowin. She conceptualizes the pluralization protocols that these three encyclopedias have developed over time to ensure the existence of Canadian linguistic and cultural particularities in these globalized digital spaces. Gabriel Arsenault and Mathieu Wade explore the portrayal of the Acadian nation in the French version of Wikipedia. Their work is guided by two questions. On the one hand, is Acadia a territory confined to Canada’s Maritime provinces, or is it instead a diaspora without borders? On the other hand, are the Acadian people a reality relying purely on the written word and belonging to the past, or, on the contrary, do they constitute a living collective subject that is still full of vitality? This scholarly exploration of Acadian time and space ends with a vibrant call for Acadia, past and present, to bring to life its diversity in the free encyclopedia.

Finally, Marie D. Martel and Simon Villeneuve use massive data from Wikidata to assess the representation of people identifying themselves as women and men and the gender gap in biographical articles in over 80 reference dictionaries and encyclopedias from a wide range of countries, from Canada to China, Germany, and New Zealand. These two scholars show there is a major underrepresentation of people who identify as women in all these works, including in the Canadian publications identified and—albeit to a lesser extent—in the biographical resources of the Wikimedia movement.

The second theme deals with the integration of Wikimedia projects within Canadian institutions, a subject we began to describe earlier in this introduction. These collaborations give rise to mutual enrichment, but they also require institutions to overcome certain misgivings, such as admitting the contribution and expertise of amateurs, understanding the value of making accessible the content they possess or of which they are the custodians, and, more generally, adopting practices of openness and transparency, forcing them to develop new ways of working and making decisions. First, Stacy Allison-Cassin reflects on the presence of Canadian music online by offering a critical review of an initiative she led, which aimed to make the Mariposa Folk Festival archives accessible to the public via Wikidata. In doing so, she paints a portrait of the appropriation of Wikidata within the Canadian library community and, more broadly, within GLAM in this country. This contribution is followed by two other case studies. Nathalie Thibault explains how and why the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ) has embarked on open GLAM–type collaborative initiatives, setting up Wikimedia workgroups to make its collections more accessible thanks to free licences and to allow the reuse, sharing, and modification of its cultural data and content. As far as government institutions are concerned, Miguel Tremblay’s article studies an innovative project for uploading meteorological metadata produced by the Government of Canada, a case that illustrates an application of the open government model using Wikidata.

The third theme in the present work concerns literacy. One of the leitmotifs working its way through the studies presented here is highlighting the various skills that are developed or called upon when taking part in Wikimedia projects and the movement’s community life. Literacy comes in a variety of forms, which often tend to converge. In many ways, information literacy is also digital literacy, which also calls on skills that can become more specifically legal and hermeneutic but also algorithmic, data related, organizational, relational, and technological. As individuals, communities, and institutions advance within the movement, they gradually incorporate most of these forms of literacy, which they need in order to successfully carry out the initiatives they are involved in. This multifaceted learning process attests to the undeniably educational value of the Wikimedia movement’s projects. That said, while the majority of the studies in the present work focus on amateur or expert production practices, Denise Smith’s chapter stands out for its anchoring in the field of knowledge dealing with health literacy, from the point of view of both the knowledge-producing community and that of the general public seeking to make informed decisions about their health. Smith places her comments in the context of the misinformation infodemic that raged during the COVID-19 pandemic, and she shows the extent to which Wikipedia has proved to be a major source of information for Canadian internet users.

For the afterword, we have asked the philosopher Pierre Lévy to extend and broaden the thinking about collective intelligence processes that are examined throughout this book. Lévy starts from a consideration of knowledge production and sharing practices that take place within the Wikimedia movement, then places them in a broader context rooted in both human and animal history but also in the most recent technological developments in generative artificial intelligence.

This introduction offers an outline of the content in the present work, but it also aims to capture the main thrust of the Wikimedia movement in Canada with the help of a brief chronology and a map of the institutional poles linked to it.