by Trudi E. Jacobson
There is an article about metaliteracy on Wikipedia. Actually, there are four. But let’s start at the beginning, with the one that was never officially published. While there are millions of articles on Wikipedia, there are also guidelines about what might appropriately be added to the site.
First, the subject must be notable. In other words, it must have gained sufficiently significant attention by the world at large and over time, and secondly, it must fall within Wikipedia’s scope. Notability involves these elements:
- Significant coverage in reliable sources suggests it would merit its own Wikipedia article
- This significant coverage directly addresses the topic, in some detail, so no original research is needed
- Reliable sources “means that sources need editorial integrity to allow verifiable evaluation of notability”
- Sources must be secondary sources, which might be either online or in print, in English or not
- Being “independent of the subject” means that “works produced by the article’s subject or someone affiliated with it” cannot be the reliable secondary sources that justify the Wikipedia article.
While there is the perception that anyone can add anything to Wikipedia, this clearly is not the case. It can be an uphill struggle to get new articles approved. Two earlier blog posts document the struggle to get a metaliteracy article added to Wikipedia, one from December 2019 and the second from April 2021. There was also a celebratory post from May 2022 when the Metaliteracy Wikipedia article was accepted. Taking a look at the page that documents the history of edits to the article, there have been a modest number of changes since its publication. It took a while, but the resulting metaliteracy article is excellent.
Let’s return to the title of this blog post. The exciting news is that there are now translations of the metaliteracy article appearing on three additional language versions of Wikipedia: Spanish, Igbo (native to Nigeria), and Čeština (native to the Czech Republic). The revision history page for each of these indicates that the English version was translated as is, rather than new metaliteracy articles being created from scratch. However, a small number of edits have since been made in each article--they have taken on lives of their own.
Wikipedia has a resource page for translating English-language articles into other languages. There are automated tools to help create these translations. But machine translations can’t be relied on without some additional work. As mentioned on the resource page, “Mere machine translations, without substantial modification are highly undesirable. For that reason, you must have a reasonable level of fluency so that you can make appropriate changes to the tool’s automated output.” We would love to see translations appear in additional Wikipedia language versions to make information about metaliteracy available to all who are interested. Would you be able to help, if you are a speaker of languages beyond English? The metaliteracy learning goals and objectives are currently available in 15 different languages. It would be great if the number of metaliteracy Wikipedia articles reached that level!
The Wikipedia logo is from Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia-logo-v2-en.svg.
Thanks to Trudi E. Jacobson for researching and writing this blog post!
Metaliteracy.org 
