Since 2022, the NIHR has been piloting the use of Wikipedia as an innovative platform to share research results. In just over a year, working with researchers, patient and public contributors and NIHR staff, we have updated and expanded 400 Wikipedia articles with findings from NIHR-funded research.

The updated Wikipedia content now includes up to 300 citations to NIHR Evidence, and 200 citations to NIHR journals, plus other references to NIHR-funded studies. Following our edits, these articles have garnered an impressive 75 million views.

The Wikipedia project is now gaining momentum across the NIHR. What started as a pilot will turn into a permanent strand of our dissemination strategy. We expect this to lead to increased evidence uptake in policy and practice, and help to make knowledge more open.

Table: Some of the articles we have edited on Wikipedia and the number of times they have been viewed since our additions

Why should researchers use Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia that is free to use and simple to edit. Contrary to popular belief, its editing policies and army of editors ensure that it is a reliable source of health information. It is also one of the most visited health resources on the internet. In 2019, Wikipedia’s medical content had more than 2 billion page views.

Referencing NIHR research on Wikipedia makes our research more accessible. It reaches a wide audience that includes laypeople and healthcare professionals alike. Studies have suggested that 50 – 70% of doctors consult Wikipedia for healthcare information. It was also found to be one of the most used resources by medical students.

Concerns and preconceptions about the reliability of Wikipedia need to be acknowledged. Yet, in my time at the NIHR, I’ve seen these worries fade away when I explain how Wikipedia works, and its checks and balances for accuracy. Most people are pleasantly surprised at how important Wikipedia is for health information, and how user-friendly it is.

Collaborative Wikipedia editing workshops

There is an appetite for harnessing Wikipedia’s potential. Several NIHR research teams and centres are now interested in integrating Wikipedia editing into their dissemination strategy. Some include it as part of their funding application.

Our thematic editing workshops for researchers, patients and members of the public have been impactful.

Other than access to the internet, there are no technical requirements. Prior knowledge of Wikipedia editing is unnecessary. Technical aspects are taken care of by the Wikipedian so participants can focus on enriching content.

During these workshops, 10-20 participants collaborate and aim to improve the quality of a single Wikipedia page corresponding to their research area.

For example, multiple long-term conditions are an area of strategic focus for the NIHR. But the Wikipedia page on multiple long-term conditions was short and outdated. It lacked evidence from the past 10 years. Following a workshop, the article now includes detailed evidence from NIHR-funded studies. It describes how terminology has changed, the impact of multiple long-term conditions on quality of life, and other updates.

In another workshop, we collaborated with the NIHR’s Mental Health Policy Research Unit. Together, we updated the article on the remote delivery of psychiatric care, known also as telepsychiatry. This expanded article now reflects their research on the practice and impact of telepsychiatry during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Graph: Improved content draws in more readers: Increased monthly traffic of the Multiple Long Term Conditions article following our workshop

Exploring new horizons

We have built a strong foundation for Wikipedia editing at the NIHR, with new opportunities for researchers to share and refine information on vital research. Many more topics could be covered in editing workshops, and previously edited articles can be updated as new evidence is published.

Social care, patient and public involvement, health equity, and global health are areas with untapped potential for Wikipedia editing.

We have started to deliver global health Wikipedia workshops, which will help share global health research with a lay audience, reaching additional people, potentially local audiences too as articles could be translated into other languages as well.

We are exploring how to nurture the next generation of health and care professionals and researchers. We are talking to health librarians and university departments, and suggesting that Wikipedia editing could be an assignment for medical students.

Discover more about the Wikipedia project

Wikipedia offers plenty of opportunities to share research widely. We can bring together a diverse community of researchers and patients to work on sharing health and care knowledge effectively. This will help ensure that more people can access the NIHR’s research, and perhaps also transcend language barriers.

As Wikipedian-in-residence, I’m looking forward to new developments in knowledge sharing, and continued growth in access to information.

To learn more about the NIHR Wikipedia project, contact Adam Harangozo.

The post How Wikipedia can help to disseminate research: an innovative NIHR project appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

By Tatjana Baleta, Wikimedia Visiting Fellow at Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter

I am a South African conservationist and science communicator with an interest in the power of knowledge to drive change. As the Wikimedia Visiting Fellow at the GSI, I will be working with researchers and the Wikimedia community to make climate change knowledge more accessible, expand and strengthen the quality of climate change information available on open knowledge platforms and to combat dis- and misinformation.

My fascination with the natural world led me pursue a BSc in Ecology & Evolution and Genetics and a BMedSc(Hons) in Cell Biology. With a growing understanding of the global environmental crisis, I then completed an MPhil in Conservation Leadership.

I have worked internationally in research and communications on marine species monitoring, marine litter monitoring, marine protected area design research, conservation technology, species prioritisation and conservation-decision making.

As an avid science communicator, I am passionate about sharing my love for the natural world, and particularly about using that communication to instigate positive change.

I’m really excited to dive into this opportunity to explore open knowledge systems and contribute to climate change resource accessibility.

Keen to brainstorm? Let’s connect! Contact me at t.baleta@exeter.ac.uk.

The post Welcome Tatjana Baleta, Wikimedia Visiting Fellow for climate appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

At Wikimedia UK, we believe that addressing Wikipedia’s gaps will better inform people about climate action. Wikipedia is the ideal platform for unbiased, cited climate information, as it already has a global audience of billions. It exists in over 300 languages and has an established, dedicated volunteer editing community of nearly 300,000 editors and contributors. The 59 million articles these editors create and maintain are accessed by over 1.5 billion unique devices every single month. We bought Climate and Environment into our 2022-25 Strategic themes to ensure a core focus on addressing the gaps. Consequently, we’re delighted to announce we have launched our first-ever climate residency in partnership with the University of Exeter.

Tatjana Baleta has been recruited as Wikimedia Visiting Fellow at the University of Exeter, within the Global Systems Institute (GSI) academic community. Embedded within this centre of excellence for climate research, Tatjana will work alongside several world-leading climate scientists, including those at the UK Met Office with whom the GSI has a strategic partnership. She will also be amongst researchers from other disciplines who are looking into climate impacts, climate justice, biodiversity and energy.

Tatjana is a conservationist and science communicator with an interest in the power of knowledge to drive change. She has a BSc in Ecology & Evolution and Genetics and a BMedSc(Hons) in Cell Biology. With a growing understanding of the global environmental crisis, she also completed an MPhil in Conservation Leadership, which she then applied to her conservation career. Tatjana is passionate about sharing her love for the natural world, and particularly about using that communication to instigate positive change.

Dr Andy Richards, Manager at GSI said of the partnership “We are very excited to be working with Wikimedia UK and the Wikimedia community, and hosting Tatjana as the first ever Wikimedia Visiting Fellow focused on climate change. We are passionate about providing unbiased and open information and making it as widely accessible as possible. Wikipedia is a powerful resource to do this.”

Well-known Wikipedian and climate change researcher Dr Femke Nijsse outlined how important Tatjana’s work is: “Wikipedia plays a key role in overcoming polarisation, but this is only possible when its content is of high quality. Involving academics means that errors and biases can be spotted and resolved more rapidly.”

If you’d like to get in touch with Tatjana, you can reach her at t.baleta@exeter.ac.uk.

The post New partnership delivers Wikimedia UK’s first-ever residency for climate appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

Adam Harangozo, who started in post on Monday 6th December, has been editing Wikimedia projects for more than 10 years and includes in his experience a residency at the Blinken Open Society Archives and various projects across cultural and community settings.

Of the role and opportunity with the National Institute for Health Research, Adam said “I’m very excited about my new role as Wikimedian in residence not only because of my firm belief in the values represented by Wikimedia but because it is really important that large institutions like NIHR recognise Wikipedia and contribute with their research and knowledge. I think scientific institutions need to reflect on what they have to do differently, how to make research more visible and accessible. Opening up to Wikipedia, working together on shared platforms with non-professionals definitely has to be part of this process. I’m more than inspired that I can help guide NIHR in this and I hope that we can make contributions that really matter and bring systematic benefits to both the Wikimedia community and the institution itself. Please do feel free to contact me with any ideas, suggestions, and questions during my residency.”

A study between 2021 and 2017 into the impact of Wikimedians in Residence showed how new audiences were reached and partner organisations were “better able to share their knowledge” through having a Wikimedian in Residence. This initial 6 month pilot will focus on the work through NIHR’s Centre for Engagement and Dissemination launched in early 2020 to “make health and care research representative, relevant and ready for use.” 

Wikimedia UK’s Director of Programmes and Evaluation Daria Cybulska highlighted why this pilot and the partnership are critical to how we access health information “A lot of people visit Wikipedia as their first port of call for health information, so it’s important that this content is available, up to date, and written in an accessible way. This residency, through access to the extensive expertise of NIHR’s staff and researchers, will improve the content of Wikimedia pages in the area of health and wellbeing. As a pilot project, we will also explore further opportunities for collaboration.”

Over the next few weeks we will share updates and opportunities to get involved with Adam’s work. 

The post National Institute for Health Research launches Wikimedian in Residence in collaboration with Wikimedia UK appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

Earlier this year we produced a booklet with the University of Edinburgh, bringing together a collection of case studies from across the UK in order to provide insight into the use of the Wikimedia projects in education. It is our belief that the Wikimedia projects are a valuable tool for education, and that engagement with those projects is an activity which enriches the student experience as much as it does the open web itself. As such we have a number of education projects, and have managed to introduce Wikimedia teaching as a part of the Welsh baccalaureate. You can find what we’ve blogged about these projects in the education tag.

Educators worldwide are using Wikimedia in the curriculum – teaching students key skills in information literacy, collaboration, writing as public outreach, information synthesis, source evaluation and data science. Engaging with projects like Wikipedia – particularly through becoming a contributor – enables learners to understand, navigate and critically evaluate information as well as develop an appreciation for the role and importance of open education. Once published, material produced by students becomes immediately accessible by a global audience, giving students the satisfaction of knowing that their work can be seen by many more people than just their tutor.

As individuals working in the open web in the twenty-first century it is incumbent upon us to embrace innovative learning, embedding into our practice those tools which equip our students to work collaboratively, be skilled digitally, and think critically.

Of our 13 examples, 12 pertain to Higher Education, and one to Secondary; but although this work has thus far been more common in Universities than schools or colleges of Further Education, it is far from being restricted solely to them. This resource has been designed for anyone involved in education, and will be of particular interest to those teachers, lecturers and learning technologists involved in open pedagogy and course design, or who have an interest in innovative learning, working on the open web, co-creation, collaborative working, or digital skills.

Feedback from both students and course leaders, at the University of Edinburgh and beyond, has consistently highlighted:

• Student-led creation of academic quality content, available to be shared and used by wide audiences
• Students and course leaders having the opportunity to examine their subject area reflectively through a global, publicly engaged perspective
• Students having the opportunity to learn and practice beginner-level coding skills and increase their digital competencies

Wikimedia and Skills development

The Wikimedia projects are more than just Wikipedia.  There are 13 projects in all, four which are of particular interest here: Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wiki Commons, and Wikibooks.  

Wikimedia UK has produced a report mapping engagement with the projects to existing digital skills frameworks in the UK, which can be read on Wikimedia UK’s website. and a report on The Potentials of Wikimedia Projects in Digital, Information and Data Literacy Development in the UK context. 

The skills which can be enhanced through engagement with the Wikimedia Projects include:

Wikipedia  the online encyclopedia

• Computer and internet literacy, from opening an account to searching and critically evaluating information online.
• Creating, preparing (digitizing, editing, converting), uploading, categorising, translating information and digital content
• Collaboration, communication and consensus building in an online environment
• Understanding reliable, verifiable sources, licences, consents, and copyright
• Encyclopedic writing in the public domain, using citation softwares and referencing

WikiData an open database and central storage for structured data

• Understanding data concepts, data types, data functions and data characteristics
• Importing, exporting, linking, reusing, and combining datasets
• Understanding of Creative Commons database rights 
• Engaging with the development of data models, exploring and visualising your data 
• Collaborative data management 

Wiki Commons a host of media files and their metadata

• Understanding of free digital file types and formats
• Understanding organisation of information and discoverability
• Understanding of the educational value of different types of content
• Content reuse skills, including editing and improving images

Wikibooks a collaborative, instructional non-fiction book authoring website

• Wring in Wikitext or in a combination of Wikitext, HTML, and CSS 
• Content creation, collaborative editing, translation
• Editing skills (like spelling and grammar or formatting errors) 
• Understanding of licensing (GFDL and Creative Commons)

Here’s one of the case studies included in the booklet…

Life Sciences BSc degrees, Science Communication, Imperial College London

Final year Biochemistry and Biological Sciences BSc students at Imperial College London selected and improved Wikipedia articles within their Science Communication module by adding content to existing pages, including adding their own illustrations.

Course leaders: Prof. Stephen Curry, professor of Structural Biology, and Dr. Steven Cook, Principal Teaching Fellow in the Department of Life Sciences.

Class size: 30 students.

Course duration: 1 academic term, featuring a 3-hour workshop introducing Wikimedia, Creative Commons, and practising Wiki mark-up language.

Learning outcomes

• Developing writing skills suited for a public audience.
• Increasing critical thinking, information and digital literacy.
• Introducing basic illustration and graphic design skills.
• Introducing collaborative writing, useful for future academic and work-based projects.

Further support and resources used

• Wikimedia UK’s Programmes team.
• The Wikipedia Manual of Style guidelines.
• Science communication and illustration workshops run by staff on the Science Communication module.
• Wikimedia Commons and the RCSB Protein Data Bank.
• User:Polypompholyx’s Wikipedia page includes guidance for students.

Impact beyond the classroom

• 100 articles improved since 2012.
• Several illustrations and photographs were created and uploaded to Wikipedia pages to support the relevant compound’s Wikipedia page.
• Contributed to the growing Wiki culture and community within the University.

“There are plenty of incomplete and missing articles on Wikipedia, and it would be great to get students involved in editing articles much earlier in their Careers.”

“The articles have to be on a scientific topic, and they typically choose life science topics, as that is their expertise (biology and biochemistry students). Some articles are created from scratch, others take existing articles and improve them. This is typically by rewriting the text to make it clearer, more complete and more up to date. Most articles end up with new sections, updated references, and additional media: either from Commons, or media they create and CC license themselves.” Dr. Steven Cook, Course Leader

For more of the education booklet case studies, take a look at the free digital copy here. For more information on our education projects, follow the blog tag, sign up for our newsletter, or get in touch with us. To support Wikimedia UK projects like this one, please consider donating or becoming a member today.

The post Education booklet – Imperial College London appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

By Katie Crampton, Wikimedia UK Communications & Governance Assistant

We kicked off February in collaboration with University of York with another editathon to help close the gender gap on Wikipedia. Focused on Yorkshire women in STEM, the editathon aimed to highlight the diverse set of role models women have in the field. And with women’s uptake in careers in STEM at a dismal 22% in the UK, the importance of championing these voices is more important than ever.

With businesses in STEM building much of the world we interact with on a daily basis, the lack of women represented in these industries has long been a concern for those aiming to change its landscape. Without a solid foundation of biographies for women to take inspiration from, Wikipedia is one of the many areas that has fallen short in this regard, with only 18% of its biographies on women. Wikimedia UK and the global movement have been tackling the issue for a number of years, and we were delighted to partner with the University of York for this latest event.

The editathon aimed to expand digital editing skills through creating and editing Wikipedia pages. The first step was drawing together a list of entries to be added to or created, so a University wide call went out for names of notable Yorkshire Women in STEM. These included the likes of amateur field botanist Catherine Muriel ‘Kit’ Rob, whose story was included by the Borthwick Institute for Archives in a long list of other lost voices vital in a time when women had only just started entering STEM.

Dr Helen Niblock, Research Development Manager in Physical Science at the University of York, thanked Namrata Ganneri “for organising the editathon, it really brought people together for positive change. Thanks to Nigel [Wikimedia Trainer] for talking us through Wikipedia editing, it’s not as scary or complicated as I thought! I’ve now got the knowledge and confidence to go away and add more women scientists to Wikipedia.”

Some of the articles that were improved included Hilary Lappin Scott’s page, which now comprehensively outlines Scott’s career in microbiology with her “field of research in microbial biofilms. In 2009 Hilary was elected as the second female President of the Society for General Microbiology (SGM) in 70 years and served in this role until 2012. In September 2019 she was elected as President of the Federation of European Microbiological Societies (FEMS), being the first President from the UK.”

Other articles improved included Edith Pechey’s page, and the York physicist Professor Sarah Thomposon, with some work started on Professor Jane Hill’s page. With participants expressing interest in creating pages that there wasn’t time for in the event, like one for Catherine Muriel Kit Rob, a famous Yorkshire amateur botanists, we hope the skills built in the editathon will go on to have a lasting impact.

If you’d like to know more about our events, you can visit our events page, or for more activities around the gender gap on Wikipedia and its sister projects, have a look through this blog tag.

The post Yorkshire Editathon championing women in STEM appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

This article was jointly authored by Thomas Shafee and Jack Nunn from the WikiJournals board, and edited by John Lubbock of Wikimedia UK.

The WikiJournals are a new group of peer-reviewed, open-access academic journals which are free to publish in. The twist is that articles published in them are integrated into Wikipedia. At the moment, there are three:

• www.WikiJMed.org (the original medical journal)
• www.WikiJSci.org (science, technology, engineering and mathematics)
• www.WikiJHum.org (humanities, arts, and social sciences)

WikiJournals are also highly unusual for academic journals, as they’re free for both readers and authors!

What WikiJournals hope to achieve:

The  aim of these journals is to generate new, high-quality peer-reviewed articles, which can form part of Wikipedia. As well as new articles, submissions can include existing Wikipedia pages, which are then subjected to the exact same rigour as any other submission.

The hope is that this new way of publishing peer-reviewed content will encourage academics, researchers, students and other experts to get involved in the process of creating and reviewing high-quality content for the Wikimedia project. It also allows participants a way of putting their contributions on their CV with an easily definable output (including DOI links and listing in indexes like Google Scholar).

When an article gets through the peer review process, there are two copies. The Journal copy can now be reliably cited and stays the same as a ‘version of record’ alongside the public reviewer comments. The Wikipedia version is free to evolve in the normal Wikipedia way as people update it over time, and is linked to the Journal article.

Since 2014, articles have been published on massive topics like Radiocarbon Dating and niche topics like Æthelflæd. They’ve also published meta analyses, original research, case studies, teaching material, diagrams and galleries!

How to get involved!

If this sounds like the sort of thing that you’d like to get involved in, support, or just spread the word on, there’s plenty of ways to contribute!

School projects

So here’s an example for a teacher. You have a class of 30 keen students who would normally all write an essay on a subject, have it read once, then never seen again. An alternative could be to have students in groups of 5 each chose a section of a neglected Wikipedia article to update and overhaul (there are millions of stub and start class articles to choose from). Each group writes a section of the article, then proofreads each others sections (WikiEdu has a great dashboard for this). Once the article is up to scratch, it’s submitted to the relevant WikiJournal who reaches out to experts in the topic to give in-depth feedback on what can be improved. If you and your students are able to fully address those comments then the article can be published and you and your students have just generated a new Wikipedia article read by thousands, and an academic article to put on their CVs!

Teachers who would consider using this method as an assessed class exercise can ask for advice from Wikimedia UK. We think that this workflow offers a useful alternative to simply having students write parts of Wikipedia articles in class, which may be harder to assess, and doesn’t provide a final product as tangible as a published journal article.

Academic outreach

The current priorities for the WikiJournals are to expand and improve representation on their editorial boards, and to invite article submissions. If you would like to volunteer in these roles, we encourage you to talk to the WikiJournal organisers.

If you are based in a UK academic institution at a course that has a strong strategic overlap with Wikimedia UK’s strategic priorities, you can also email education@wikimedia.org.uk to talk to us about providing advice on using WikiJournals as part of your course.

Individuals

The journals always welcome new submissions. Whether they’re written by a professor or a student, all go through the same process. You could get a team together to submit a brand new article. Or maybe you could overhaul and submit an existing Wikipedia page. You could even help translate an existing article.

They have a public discussion forum (typical for a wiki, unusual for a journal!) where you can share ideas for improvements, other projects they could reach out to or point out gaps in Wikipedia’s content where they could invite researchers to write an article.

Each journal has a twitter and facebook account (@WikiJMed, @WikiJSci and @WikiJHum) so feel free to chat with them there. You can even suggest social media posts or accounts to follow. Not into social media? Maybe put a poster in your university tearoom.

The post What are WikiJournals? appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

• The ScienceSource platform will be a collaborative MediaWiki site. It will collect and convert up to 30,000 of the most useful Open Access medical and bioscience articles and convert them.
• We will work with two Wikimedia communities (Wiki Med and WikiJournal) to develop machine-assisted human-reviewing. The wiki platform will facilitate the decision-making process, driven by the human reviewers.
• Articles will be annotated with terms in WikiFactMine (WFM) dictionaries. In this project, those dictionaries will include, for example, diseases, drugs, genes. This not only means that the useful terms are highlighted, but they are also linked to entries in Wikidata and therefore to any relationship that is described in Wikidata. Thus “aspirin” links to d:Q18216 with synonyms, disease targets, chemistry, etc.

Once papers are transferred to standard HTML to get them to the same format for text mining they can be tagged, e.g. tagging all the cancers in red, the diseases in blue. With a decent visualisation you can see when the red and blue are close together – this is called a co-occurrence. Now you can ask a human to decide what the sentence is saying – is the cancer known to be treated by this drug, or resistant? This is the relationship you’re looking to find in wikidata terms.

Charles Matthews, Wikimedian in Residence at ContentMine, described the project as “an industrial scale version of the Find tool. Ctrl F gone mad.”

The first part of the project is to identify around 30,000 Open Access articles as a sample to work on. To do this, they need the help of the Wikimedia community, and especially medical professionals who know which articles in the literature would be most useful. Right now the list only has around 3-4,000 articles and is dominated by studies on infectious diseases.

In particular, the project is interested in looking at neglected diseases. These are diseases that have little research aimed at eradicating them because they often affect people in the world’s poorest countries. One example of this would be leprosy, which is nowhere near being wiped out (unlike Guinea Worm). A one country study of leprosy which would be specific about treatment and which drugs are used to treat it in that country would be useful as a reference. You can watch a video on Commons explaining neglected diseases here.

This means that there’s a systematic bias in the medical literature – rich people get more research on their diseases, and it’s important that we don’t simply  reproduce this bias on Wikipedia.

So Science Source is developing a Focus List of medical literature with a concentration on neglected diseases, and needs the help of medical professionals to suggest good research papers in this area.

In order to add articles to this list, you need to add a particular property to the Wikidata item for the research article. The workflow is as follows:

1. Find the DOIs of papers you think should be part of this list. Pick, for example, the top 3 papers in a particular field, get the DOIs.
2. Go to the Resolver tool on the Wikidata page for the project. Find the Wikidata item for the paper.
3. Add a property for the ‘on focus list of Wikimedia project (P5008)’ statement to the item, with ScienceSource (Q55439927) as the object.

Science Source is done on wiki and people can participate, whereas WikiFactMine was an API which required people to be developers. So we need the Wikimedia community to help out, and especially medical professionals who are also Wikimedians.

If you know of any medical professionals who would be interested in helping out this important project to improve the quality and reliability of Wikipedia’s medical articles, please tell them about this project, or get in touch with Wikimedia UK or ContentMine for more information about how you can help. There’s also the ‘Facto Post’ mailing list which you can sign up for on Wiki to get updates about the project.

The post Science Source seeks to improve reliable referencing on Wikipedia’s medical articles appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

“GB1900 is a crowd-sourcing project to transcribe all text strings from the second edition six inch to the mile County Series maps published 1888-1914. The project is a collaboration between the National Library of Scotland, the Great Britain Historical GIS team at the University of Portsmouth, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, the National Library of Wales and the People’s Collection Wales.

The final goal [was]  to create the largest historical place-name gazetteer for Great Britain specifically including co-ordinates.”(1)

A screenshot of Cymru 1900’s user interface

So why create a gazetteer of Great Britain, when you are trying to understand the lay of the land at a frozen point in history? Why not simply rely on old maps? And perhaps it’s worth detailing what entails a gazetteer to the non-geographers among us… A gazetteer is a ‘geographical dictionary’, to be used alongside a map or even an atlas, which gives more detailed description of the physical or geographic features of an area, at ‘land-level’.  The presentation of the project began detailing the versatility of a gazetteer as a medium, stating that gazetteers “… are better than maps!” Historically, we have many more gazetteers to rely upon than maps, which are comparatively, a more recent phenomena – with maps only being commonplace from the 18th Century. Secondly, gazetteers are functional for walkers and navigating new areas – with descriptions of landmarks, as and when you come by them, (on a weekend stroll perhaps).

What were the team looking to achieve by transcribing a gazetteer or Great Britain, frozen in 1900? “We have three main aims. Firstly, to contribute to the overall development of “citizen science” by showing how working on particular local areas that matter to them affects the motivation of volunteers.” Following on from this, the team hoped that the project would encourage similar online crowdsourcing projects. Lastly, the project team wished to demonstrate how their work benefits the general public, “…we need to show not just that many people use our websites, but to report on what our sites help people to do.” (2)

The project’s process & outcomes

A need was identified for ‘a new historical gazetteer’ of Britain, as pre-existing historical gazetteers had partial data on either postcodes, features or parishes – but no completely descriptive gazetteer available as a whole.  Discussions for such a project initially began in March of 2011, at first as ‘Cymru 1900- Historic Place names of Wales’, . After forming partnerships supporting the idea, the People’s Collection of Wales, the Centre for Advanced Welsh & Celtic Studies, National Library of Wales and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, decided to create a uniquely crowdsourced Welsh historical place name gazetteer. The collaboration then further partnered with the citizen science platform, Zooniverse, to host the development of the project’s bespokely required interface system. The website ‘Cymru1900wales’ was launched by October 2013, with transcription of the historic Ordnance Survey maps active until their completion in September 2016. The place names transcribed and verified by the volunteers in that time for the Cymru1900 gazetteer, were then also able to contribute to The List of Historic Place Names of Wales index, quickly being able to demonstrate the versatility of open- citizen-sourced data.

Soon after the successful completion of Cymru 1900, the project was then decidedly extended to attempt to transcribe the rest of Great Britain towards the end of 2015. In order for this to be achievable, it was recognised that several more volunteers were needed to be recruited, who would be fundamental in the execution of the project. The volunteers ideally would need to have an idea about transcription, and be interested in the History of Great Britain; the team turned to advertising part way through the project, through the ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ magazine’s ‘Transcription Tuesday’ initiative. This proved successful in adding some new faces to the team of dedicated volunteers who were enamoured by the project’s aims.

The team and volunteers proceeded to run with the GB1900 aims without funding, having officially launched their volunteer engagement in September 2016 and using high quality, historic map scans from the National Library of Scotland. A separate supporter site was then created for the volunteer’s to interface, building upon the successful format used for the Cmyru1900. The site designed so that volunteers could track the ‘contribution leaderboard’, and take a look at the maps as their data points grew in progress. At the project launch, by happenstance, I sat next to one of the many dedicated volunteers, who shared their delight not only at participating in the place-name subscription, but also the opportunity to share personal ‘place-memories’ of the areas they were working on, through the volunteer interface. By January 7th 2018, the whole of Great Britain at ‘1900’ had been completely transcribed. This of course was with great thanks to the 1000+ volunteers, several of which were presented to have given up to 20 hours a week to the project. Awards were given to the volunteers who had given the most hours, in the appropriate form of the printed ordnance survey maps, from the National Library of Scotland, featuring the regions that the volunteers has contributed the most to.

“In total, the volunteers located 2,666,341 strings on the maps, and contributed 5,500,339 transcriptions. It is hard to see how this could have been matched by an academic research team.” (3)

Following the presentation of the project, Dr. Southall and Paula Aucott, research associate of the project, used the opportunity to encourage the use of the open data – following the example of the proven versatility of the Cymru1900 project before hand. On the project’s website – it is made clear to whoever might interested, what forms of data are available e.g. the project’s ‘raw data’ or as ‘cleaned versions’ of the data – matched with the coordinates and modern district names of the transcribed place names – and what license they’re available under – e.g. CC by 0 & CC by SA, respectively. There were following presentations, giving insight to initial uses of the data set; by representatives from  the University of Wales Centre for Advanced and Celtic Studies, demonstrating the historic linguistic research now attainable through the transcribed place names, and from The Ramblers, demonstrating how the data can be used for their Finding Historic Footpaths project.

Attending the project’s presentation was a clear demonstration of the possibilities of citizen science, with even just a small and dedicated team coordinating it’s growth and volunteer engagement behind the scenes. What was most poignant to me as an attendee of GB1900 launch, was the personal experience that was resonant with many of the volunteers who transcribed the coordinates of the gazetteer, with many focusing on areas where they had once lived or spent holidays. The project and it’s now open outputs reside within a wonderful overlap, whereby this new formation of data is not only useful, but has brought to life personal histories of places across britain, that were always there, simply waiting to be noted, and brought together.

To see the data sets, you can visit the Vision of Britain website.

1. https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/sheetlines-articles/Issue111page46.pdf
2. https://support.gb1900.org/portal/kb/articles/gb1900-volunteer-study-participant-information
3. https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/sheetlines-articles/Issue111page46.pdf

The post GB1900 Project Launch: The Historically Open Gazetteer of Great Britain appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

Volunteers at the National Library of Wales have been translating important health articles from English into Welsh – image by Jason Evans CC BY-SA 4.0

By Jason Evans, National Wikipedian for Wales

Improving health related content on the Welsh Wicipedia

The Welsh language Wicipedia is the most viewed website in the Welsh language, and articles about health related issues are among the most frequently viewed. And yet only around 2% of Welsh articles cover this subject, compared to more than 6% in English.

Welsh speakers deserve access to quality health information in their native tongue, but currently hugely important topics such as cancer, mental health and medical treatments have very little coverage. So, in July 2017 the National LIbrary of Wales, with Welsh Government funding and Wikimedia UK support, embarked on a 9 month project to improve this content. The project was called Wici-Iechyd (Wiki-Health).

A series of edit-a-thons and translation projects has already lead to the creation of over 250 hand written articles. Many have been translated from English articles prepared for use in other languages by the WikiMed project. Other are derived from text released on an open licence by project partners including the British Lung Foundation, WJEC and the Mental health information service Meddwl.org.

The big news this month is the creation of 2700 articles about human genes. The articles were created using information from Wikidata and PubMed and images from Wikimedia Commons. Since all articles about genes follow a similar format it was possible to generate and upload the 2700 articles en mass. The articles include information about the location and structure of the genes as well as synonyms. All include a bibliography with the 5 most recent publications about each gene. Wikimedia UK were involved in producing a Wikidata Infobox which pulls in an array of data, images and citations. Naturely time was also spent ensuring Wikidata had Welsh labels for items which were likely to be called on by the infobox.

Members of the Royal College and Nursing improving content at an edit-a-thon in Cardiff – image by Jason Evans CC BY-SA 4.0

It is hoped that many future improvements to health related content will link to these articles about genes giving a greater depth of information on the subject.

This upload alone represents a 2.8% increase in the total article count for Welsh Wikipedia, however with more articles being prepared, on diseases, drugs and medical pioneers we could see close to a 5% increase by the end of the project. It is likely that health related content as a percentage of the total article count will be comparable to, or better than the ratio in the much larger English Wikipedia.

The project is funded until the end of March, but it is hoped the Wici-Iechyd will continue to thrive as a Wiki project on the Welsh Wicipedia.

The post 3000 new articles added to the Welsh Wicipedia appeared first on Wikimedia UK.