Wikipedia and Perceptions of Shooting

Earlier in the year I gave Wikipedia a good poking to see if I could encourage search engines to show the correct National Rifle Association in the Knowledge Panel which accompanies search results.

I had some success, but more importantly I gained an appreciation of the structure of Wikipedia and the gaps in its coverage.

The Knowledge Panels used in Google and Bing searches were born from the realisation that most people reading Wikipedia found what they needed in the lead paragraph or the article infobox. Few people looking at the article for “Sheffield” want the detailed history of the city - they just want to know the population, or which political party control the Council. Search providers started to grab that key data and use it to populate the panels that enrich search results.

What’s apparent is just how heavily search providers now rely on Wikipedia as a source of truth. Sure, search engines return results indexed from the web, but they like to have a thumbs up from Wikipedia (or sister-project Wikidata) to go alongside. What that means, is that if you’re not in Wikipedia, you’re likely to be considered less relevant by Google and Bing. If someone searches for “National Rifle Association”, then the NRA of America is likely to be deemed a more relevant result than the NRA of Australia because it has a Wikipedia page, and lots of links and citations - this holds even if you’re using google.com.au from an Australian IP address.

Similarly, if you search “New Zealand Shooting”, results for the Christchurch Massacre are returned, instead of the closer text-match of “New Zealand Shooting Federation”. Why? Well of course the tragic Christchurch shootings are very significant and noteworthy. But from the algorithm’s standpoint, the NZSF doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. There is no object for it in the Wikidata social graph. There is less for search engines to latch onto.

Whilst people decry Wikipedia as unreliable (because anyone can edit it - and vandalism is certainly a challenge) Wikipedia is surprisingly accurate most of the time, and very solid on the “basic” stuff. Moreover, if an article has been created and passed review as “notable”, that’s a strong signal that the basic subject is notable, regardless of how good the article content is.

So how to ensure that sport shooters are fairly represented? Well the obvious answer is to put some content out there and stop pretending that we don’t exist. This isn’t about propagandising the sport - and I’m certainly not suggesting that perceptions of target sports will change simply by writing some stuff on Wikipedia. But by ensuring that our representative bodies are recorded within the relatively trusted framework of Wikipedia, we start to counter-balance the weight of media coverage that is given to the NRA of America and firearms crime. Over time, someone searching Google is more likely to receive more relevant and positive search results. Search engines suffer bias in that they can only see what exists online. We need to drag our sport out of print and give Search something positive to look at.

1. Create articles for notable agencies and events

This is not to spam Wikipedia with an article for every little rifle club. But if “Marksmanship medals in the US” are notable enough to enjoy their own (extensive) article, then surely a century-old entity like the National Rifle Association of Australia is too. Or an NGB like the New Zealand Shooting Federation.

It’s surprising that such articles didn’t already exist, but there is a phenomenon on Wikipedia where casual and occasional users are very happy to contribute to an article, but are intimidated by the idea of starting one themselves. Sometimes this is down to misunderstandings - many think the Wikimedia Foundation manages the content on Wikipedia and decides what is “in” or “out” - that they are being lobbied by faceless anti-gun activists to keep us out. This is not the case - they just provide the platform, it’s up to us to populate it.

Getting a decent start-level article written is a good way to encourage further contributions - and in any case, most people are only looking for the lead paragraph or contents of the infobox. I am not particularly well placed to write a history of the NZSF or NRA of Australia. But if I can help build out the framework of articles for other people to add depth to, then that’s achievable.

Articles that need creating include:

• Commonwealth Shooting Federation
• Imperial Meeting (new article split out from base NRA article)
• Sovereign’s Prize (split from base NRA article)
• Kolapore Match
• National Smallbore Rifle Championship (split from base NSRA article)
• Dewar/Pershing/Roberts Match (split from base NSRA article)
• ICFRA World Championships/Palma Match (split and expand from ICFRA article)

There are also new and stub articles which need filling out by people with more knowledge than myself, including:

• Ashburton Shield
• National Rifle Association of Australia
• National Rifle Association of New Zealand
• New Zealand Shooting Federation
• Target Shooting New Zealand
• Shooting Australia

We also need a deal of linking within Wikipedia - for instance, adding former NRA Presidents or other notaries into Category: People of the National Rifle Association. I’ve made a start, but I don’t know who all those people are to add, which is a testament to the lack of information published by these organisations over the years. Linking and adding relevant information to these fringe articles (that person x was a VP of the NRA, or sat on Shooting Council) raises the rank of the main articles.

2. Media & Photography

Wikimedia Commons has loads of photos…. of AR15s and the US Army. Also of Donald Trump, Wayne LaPierre and Carolyn Meadows. In the summer, I took a series of photos around Bisley, which - described as “National Shooting Centre - run by the National Rifle Association” - now displace a fair few US photos and rank highly in Wikimedia Commons when searching for “the” NRA. There’s now actually an NRA(UK) category. Adding better categories to photos from shooting competitions also places target shooters more prominently in categories like “Females with rifles”.

But there is much more to do. I’ve been able to take photos of property and target equipment. Governing bodies and people out in the community will have photos of historic events - Imperials and National Meetings past; events at Bisley prior to the 2002 redevelopment; the old 50metre range; Sovereign’s Prize winners; maybe even royalty visiting Bisley. I would encourage anyone with such photos to release them onto Commons for the rest of us to enjoy.

There would be a benefit to our NGBs digitising archival material and releasing that, along with newer, contemporary media. The internet is awash with military-based media, whether journalism, gaming- or militaria-related. Whilst the ISSF (for instance) do have a significant media output, the UK domestic shooting environment is very “quiet” which means (as far as algorithms are concerned) it doesn’t exist). The NRA have been better at this, hiring in a photographer to cover the Imperial, Phoenix Meetings and other events. But the copyright does not lie with me. I cannot scrape this material off Facebook into Commons.

3. Get more content published

Two for our NGBs. Publish more, and earn more reportage. Wikipedia lives and dies on references and citations. It’s very difficult to write an article about (say) the NRA of New Zealand if there isn’t much out there to reference or cite. Of course there’s a century’s worth of material - but mostly published in print journals, inaccessible to researchers or even most shooters. Those with a subscription to newspapers.com may have some luck, but this is hit-and-miss.

Publish more content

It would be a good idea for our governing bodies to follow the NRA of America’s lead (I don’t say this very often!) and publish some of their magazine content online. The NRAoA’s magazines have a print edition, but also a website with selected articles from the current or previous editions, along with archival material from old editions. For instance, there is more public content about the recent Pershing Match from “Shooting Sports USA” than from the NSRA over here.

Meanwhile, I was able to write about the rifle club that Arthur Conan-Doyle ran at his Undershaw home because the NRA of America republished a 1989 article about it from “American Rifleman” in their “Throwback Thursday” series. There is undoubtedly a treasure trove of historic material sitting in back copies of the (British) NRA Journal, the NSRA’s The Rifleman magazine (now “On Target”) and other print-only publications. For the one-off cost of getting a news site set up, it would not be a huge effort for NRA or NSRA staff to upload a couple of selected articles from each edition of their magazine. Combing for interesting throw-back articles would be more work, but there are likely to be individuals at the NRA Museum and in the NSRA whose depth of knowledge would allow them to compile a list fairly quickly of notable articles worth republishing for historic events, matches and competitions.

Malcolm Cooper for instance is one of the most successful competition shooters of all time. But his Wikipedia article is remarkably thin. Operating in the 1980s, much of his activity was recorded in print. Digitised or reproduced material tends to concern major events like the Olympics - someone with access to a stack of Rifleman back-copies could generate a bunch of citations, and record things like British 50Metre Championships which are not widely reported elsewhere.

Likewise, it is difficult to list domestic achievements of people like Irene Daw, Louise Minett or Jen & Seonaid McIntosh because the records of matches like the British Airgun Championships are not easily available online (compared with the NRA’s digitised competition records, or the historical team records compiled by Colin Cheshire & Karen Robertson). World-class achievements are widely reported in the press, but domestic matches less so. I know several people who have won British Championships, but not which years - yes, I can ask them, but that represents “original research”, which is not acceptable on Wikipedia - it needs to be published somewhere. And even if it was published by the NGBs, wikipedia seeks to avoid over-reliance on primary sources - notability is earned by third-party reporting.

In some cases, local media may have picked up on local shooters’ successes, but the nature of local media means sites change and articles become unavailable if they haven’t been scraped by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The loss of local news over the past decade is quite shocking - tens of thousands of articles are frequently cast aside and lost for posterity following a site redesign. This is often a more profound loss than old print reportage, which will live on in a reference library somewhere for a suitably motivated researcher to find. Future researchers will have an easier time with local news archives from the 1970s than they will from the 2000s.

Props to the British NRA here, who upload PDFs of NRA Journal back-editions. PDFs of course are difficult to search through en masse - no simple text search for people or names, and the contents won’t be neatly indexed by search engines. But the ability to access previous editions is significantly better than nothing.

Earned coverage

Find the money to hire a freelance reporter who knows their way around the newswire services and sports desks of the UK. Hire them in during the Imperial Meeting and NSRA’s August Smallbore Meeting. Get articles and press releases out into the media throughout those meetings and earn some column inches. As evidenced by pending cuts at BBC local radio, journalism is in crisis. Most news outlets will take any sports news that is thrown at them in a ready-to-go format. This would be good for our sport in itself, and would generate independent, third-party citations for use in wikipedia. A full-time, in-house journalist or PR guru would be nice but possibly unaffordable for the time being. But getting some consultancy for major domestic events would be sensible - the NRA has contracted in photographers to take photos for marketing and social media - now extend that beyond social. Offer it up to Wikimedia Commons. Place it on stock photo websites - become an Alamy news contributor.

Conclusions

This is all a very long-winded way of saying that we should be better at presenting ourselves to the world. But in short, there are some key “nodes” on the internet where fettling our presence could have an outsized impact, and Wikipedia/Wikimedia is one of them.

Key projects should include:

• Populate Wikipedia with articles about major events, competitions and organisations. The bulk of this is a one-time job, with only minor maintenance in future.
• Back this by releasing quality media, both archival and contemporary. The archival release is - again - a one-time job.
• Release back copies of print publications. Scanning back-issues is time-consuming, but it would be relatively easy to publish anything that is held electronically - which in most cases would go back to at least 2005. This makes it much easier to find references and citations to back wikipedia articles.
• Move some magazine content online. The print publications should remain as the journal-of-record. But having an online “magazine” site gives the search engines something else to latch onto. “Throwback Thursdays” can see old articles and retrospectives published, which again is immensely useful to researchers and writers. This is a bigger job, requiring (at least part-time) dedicated staff. It is perhaps not so big, since content is being borrowed from the print editions. It nonetheless requires upkeep.