The Wikimedia Ecosystem has been widely used in education indirectly—through popular platforms such as Wikipedia— and directly in classrooms, with or without its infrastructure (e.g., the MediaWiki software). However, its evolution as an ecosystem allows it to go beyond ‘traditional’ wikis, such as its wikibase extension and the possibility of semantically structured data. As part of the DARIAH project - Breaking the Code: Algorithmic Non-Normativity in Creative Digital Humanities, we raised the following questions:

To what extent have education and research taken advantage of the potential of the Wikimedia ecosystem?

How do educational structures, encyclopedias, and research tools normalize and universalize knowledge, reinforcing epistemic hierarchies?

How can we challenge this normalization, especially regarding class, gender, racialization, accessibility, and environmental concerns?

What does it mean to use Wikimedia-based tools as situated knowledge, engaging with intersectional and environmental perspectives in an arts education setting?

These questions necessitate an approach that embraces error, mistakes, and unpredictability as epistemological and pedagogical strategies.

Specifically, this communication presents a platform prototype developed within the Arts Education, Technology, and Society (AETS) course of the Master’s in Visual Arts Teaching. The platform is functional and ready for demonstration, supporting pedagogical resources across four key areas:

- Conceptual and critical resources for intersectional perspectives.

- Principles of instructional decentralization and openness to error.

- Resources for exploring alternative media production concerning sustainability and the environment.

- Examples of speculative and taxonomic ‘misuse’.

Beyond demonstrating the platform, this presentation critically reflects on its development, exploring tensions between instruction/emancipation, content/container, concrete/fuzzy, error/errance, and situated/universal knowledge.

In contemporary visual arts, error is often absorbed into creative processes, even when working with digital technologies. However, with their encyclopedic and taxonomic logic, wiki platforms act as devices that expose structural flaws in knowledge organization. This project leverages error as a condition and an active methodology within the platform’s development and pedagogical application. Technological Approach The platform employs a semantic data structure, where both the semantics and the data itself deliberately introduce fuzziness and ambiguity. While aligning with universal Wikidata structures, it simultaneously develops an alternative knowledge vocabulary. Examples include: Applying taxonomies designed for specific disciplines unexpectedly (e.g., kinship structures in coin classifications). Incorporating transgressive figures in taxonomies, such as the platypus, an anomaly in biological classification. Fictional taxonomies, such as Jorge Luis Borges’ Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, are used as speculative interventions in structured data. Additionally, the platform integrates critical data on imaging technologies’ environmental and social impact while promoting alternative, sustainable media production processes. This shift from data to capta (Drucker, 2011) foregrounds narrative construction and subjectivity over presumed objectivity. Pedagogical Approach The teaching/learning methodology mirrors the platform’s epistemic critique, incorporating: Errance, humor, and play are pedagogical strategies that challenge rigid knowledge structures. Engagement with students’ lived experiences, allowing them to situate their identities and social contexts within alternative knowledge frameworks. Interactive storytelling using Wikibase visualization tools (e.g., cartographic, chronological, and graphical interfaces), allowing students to construct and interrogate narratives through data representation. Through this iterative and participatory methodology, students become active agents in shaping knowledge rather than passive recipients of predefined structures. At the same time, we introduce serious data and taxonomies about the damaging relationship that image technologies have with society and the environment, as well as alternative and sustainable image production processes. In fact, we do not work with data but with capta, and we seek an intense involvement with the narratives to come that the capta give us. The visualization tools provided by Wikibase include cartographic, chronological, and graphical views, among other forms of visualization. These possibilities allow us to develop narratives from the capta engagingly and interactively. Above all, students’ lives can be involved in identity, social, and environmental issues, becoming part of new narratives in the search for new possibilities for life and worlds.

The platform’s playfulness, errance, and humor encourage students to engage with wiki-based technologies while critically exploring alternative instructional methodologies. Using speculative taxonomies and classification ‘misuse’ aligns this project with artistic research practices, including Arts-Based Educational Research (ABER). Expected Student Learning Outcomes By engaging with this platform and methodology, students will: Develop critical and reflexive thinking Understand how digital infrastructures shape knowledge validation and production. Problematicize epistemic normativity in taxonomic systems. Gain practical skills in digital methodologies and semantic data Learn to manipulate semantic structures within Wikimedia platforms. Apply capta-based storytelling to challenge universalist data narratives. Explore experimental artistic and pedagogical approaches Integrate error, humor, and play as creative and educational tools. Develop alternative media production methods with sustainability concerns. Engage with identity and social issues through knowledge creation Situate their personal and collective experiences in new taxonomies and archives. Challenge dominant classifications and propose alternative worldviews. Ultimately, this work reframes digital platforms as sites of artistic intervention and epistemic critique, moving beyond their traditional use in scientific or encyclopedic knowledge production. Reclaiming digital tools for the arts and humanities fosters a participatory, reflexive, and critical engagement with contemporary knowledge infrastructures.

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