Ethnology and Wikipedia? Analysis of the current state and possibilities of Wikipedia usage for the communication of ethnological knowledge
Abstract
Wikipedia is one of the most used Open Educational Resources (OER) and also one of the most visited websites in the world. It is used for the primary introduction as well as for the review of secondary resources.
Wikipedia has a significant impact on the creation of knowledge and general introduction to various topics. Educational institutions can benefit from its importance, both by using Wikipedia to communicate knowledge and to make the results of their research more visible.
In the research, we focused on the possibilities of Wikipedia usage for ethnology. We analyzed keyword ,,ethnology" in all Czech Wikipedia articles, categorized them and then mapped the number of the page views.
The results showed that ethnology is relatively underrepresented on the Czech Wikipedia. There are mentions about ethnology only in 240 articles, which is significantly less than in foreign versions of Wikipedia.
Although, the demand for ethnological knowledge exists on the Czech Wikipedia, because there are more than 4,300,000 page views of those articles in three years. In conclusions, therefore, we propose ways to improve communication of ethnology on the Czech Wikipedia.