In order to counter systemic bias in peer production projects like Wikipedia, a variety of strategies have been used to fill gaps and improve the completeness of the archive. We test a number of these strategies in a project aimed at improving articles relating to South Africa’s primary school curriculum and find that many of the predominant strategies are insufficient for filling Wikipedia’s gaps. Notifications that alert users to the existence of gaps including incomplete or missing articles, in particular, are found to be ineffective at improving articles. Only through the process of trust-building and the development of negotiated boundary objects, potential allies (institutional academics in this case) can be enrolled in the task of editing the encyclopaedia. Rather than a simple process of enrolment via notification, this project demonstrated the principles of negotiation required for engaging with new editor groups in the long-term project of filling Wikipedia’s gaps.

In order to counter systemic bias in peer production projects like Wikipedia, a variety of strategies have been used to fill gaps and improve the completeness of the archive. We test a number of these strategies in a project aimed at improving articles relating to South Africa’s primary school curriculum and find that many of the predominant strategies are insufficient for filling Wikipedia’s gaps. Notifications that alert users to the existence of gaps including incomplete or missing articles, in particular, are found to be ineffective at improving articles. Only through the process of trust-building and the development of negotiated boundary objects, potential allies (institutional academics in this case) can be enrolled in the task of editing the encyclopaedia. Rather than a simple process of enrolment via notification, this project demonstrated the principles of negotiation required for engaging with new editor groups in the long-term project of filling Wikipedia’s gaps

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The research "Mobile A2K: Culture and Safety in Africa. Documenting and assessing the impact of cultural events and public art on urban safety" is an applied research with an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, conceived to document and assess the impact of cultural events and public art on urban safety in relationship with the Millennium Development Goal 7d ("By 2020, to have achieved a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers").More specifically the research aimed at:1. Documenting and mapping cultural events and public art produced between 1991 and 2013 in the cities of Douala, Luanda and Johannesburg and making this documentation accessible through ICT. 2. Assessing the impact of cultural events and public art on urban safety by exploring a series of case studies and compare them.Research question. How cultural events and public art affect urban safety in African cities? Can we assess these changes as positive according to a group of factors?Hypothesis. The arts are a space for experimentation and research, not directly connected to urban safety, but capable of triggering unforeseen ways of producing higher livability, civil cohabitation and social cohesion.According to its objectives, the research has documented and mapped cultural events and public art in Douala, Luanda and Johannesburg between 1991 and 2013, and -through case studies (with maps and qualitative and quantitative interviews) -it has analyzed the impact of those cultural events and public art on urban safety.mobileA2K.org -April 2014The research team was composed of scholars in the fields of arts, communication, design, architecture, anthropology and sociology, and with representatives of institutions working in the three cities at the centre of our analysis.