Lane Rasberry is an activist, scientist, dreamer, and true-blue believer in the transformational power of information. As Wikipedian-in-Residence at UVA’s School of Data Science, he supports the school as they engage with the sprawling online information site Wikipedia. 

His ultimate ambition is to promote a more equitable society by championing the open movement exemplified by Wikipedia, which seeks to address the world’s most pressing problems in a spirit of transparency, collaboration, re-use, and free access.

Rasberry’s breadth and depth of expertise has drawn attention and funding from major philanthropic institutions, including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The World’s Largest Encyclopedia

By Rasberry’s estimate, 95% of all knowledge isn’t on the web; it is scattered about in billions of books, academic papers, and electronic devices. “Can you imagine accessing all the world’s knowledge quickly and easily through your device? That’s what I’m trying to do,” he said. 

Rasberry asserts that Wikipedia is the best platform for searching and distributing information thanks to its tremendous reach combined with its open ethos. According to an article on—where else—Wikipedia, “it is the largest, most comprehensive, and most accessible compilation of knowledge to exist in the history of the human race.” Its English version contains more than 6.7 million articles spanning more than 60 million pages. 

The open aspect of Wikipedia is especially important to Rasberry. “It’s an entire culture where people have tried to be thoughtful about maximizing access to data, protecting the readers who are accessing it, and making information available to as many people on earth as possible,” Rasberry said.
 

Sharing Scholarly Knowledge

Rasberry’s focus is disseminating academic research, which he says is often trapped at the university level. “We have high quality control of the knowledge in our libraries, but we have poor distribution and dissemination,” he explained.

While universities are expanding digital access to their holdings and research findings, most of the data is not web-indexed and FAIR—findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. “Suppose I went to any university and said I’d like a list of the research work of their faculty,” he said. “Would they be able to provide that? The answer is no.” 

Nor can likeminded scholars easily find each other. “If two researchers are researching the same thing and they don’t even know that the other one exists, and they’re spending hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars researching the same thing—that’s absolutely insane,” he added.

To address this problem, Rasberry secured two grants to UVA from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The first funded development of Scholia, a free and open scholarly profiling service on the Wikipedia platform. The crowdsourced tool aims to make academic research more readily accessible. Users can easily generate a list of papers authored by a particular researcher or names of researchers at a particular university. 

The second Sloan Foundation grant funded the capability to catalog software in Scholia. Often researchers develop software or compile data sets that could benefit academics in other disciplines. “We index these research resources with the intent of this open philosophy, again, to make them more accessible so that people can collaborate better,” Rasberry said. 

Spreading COVID Information

Another focus of Rasberry’s research is providing broad access to reliable health findings, something that he says isn’t always easy to find. While major health organizations are excellent repositories of accurate information, Rasberry describes them as “utter failures” when it comes to attracting audiences. “You’re competing for eyeball time. You can read their messages, or you can watch TikTok dances,” he said, referencing the rapidly growing social media app that reaches an estimated 1 billion users in more than 140 countries. 

The key is proper positioning in the media ecosystem. For example, “TikTok and Wikipedia are interconnected,” he said. “Information is more likely to travel from Wikipedia to TikTok than from the World Health Organization to TikTok.”

This communication challenge came to the fore early in the pandemic. “The question was, ‘How do you make sure everyone has access to reliable information and counter misinformation?’” Through a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to UVA, Rasberry led the charge to share accurate COVID information via Wikipedia.

Waiting for knowledge to organically spread as fast as the virus wasn’t an option. “Normally Wikipedia’s not on a timer, but for something like COVID, we couldn’t wait five years to get this good information out as quickly as possible, citing the best sources,” Rasberry said. Thanks to the Gates Foundation funding, he helped curate, localize, and disseminate life-saving medical information, translating it from English into 10 languages in India. 

Artist-in-Residence

Now, about his title. Rasberry estimates there are only 30 Wikipedians-in-Residence in the entire world; and he knows them all. But when he reveals his distinctive title to most people, “They think I’m crazy.” 

However, Wikipedian-in-Residence is a designation that’s known within the Wikipedia community and one he held previously at Consumer Reports. It captures the unique relationship between Rasberry and UVA. “The University doesn’t force its perspective on Wikipedia and neither can Wikipedia demand that the University do particular things,” he said. “So, I’m a Wikipedian-in-Residence, but I don’t take orders from anybody.” 

Rasberry likens his role to an artist-in-residence. “You ask for a particular artist to come, but you can’t mandate, ‘Be creative now.’ You put them in a certain space, and you have some idea of their history and what they produce.”

Changing the World

Despite his title and deep involvement with Wikipedia, Rasberry’s loyalty is to what the platform provides rather than the site itself. “I would abandon Wikipedia immediately if there was another repository for open knowledge,” he said. "If I didn’t feel this work was alleviating major problems in society, I wouldn’t be doing any of it.”

But don’t count on him stepping away from the keyboard anytime soon. Not with so much yet to be done, so much valuable information languishing on library shelves and obscured by copyright restrictions, and so many global questions still unanswered. 

“Are we on the path to eliminate poverty? Does everyone have access to healthcare? Does everyone have a career where they can advance and sustain a family? Will all politicians tell the truth? Do we have a plan to protect the environment?” Rasberry and his colleagues are convinced that the answers can be found on Wikipedia.

“We have put our minds to this, and we thought, ‘What is the most important thing we could be doing to achieve this kind of future?’, he said. “And this is where we’ve landed, this bit about opening up access to all knowledge at the university level.”