Just like everything else Wiki, the “Wiki Loves” competitions every year couldn’t happen without the hard work and contributions of a flurry of volunteers who help us promote and judge the competitions and maximise the use of the subsequent images throughout the different Wiki projects.

2026 is no different and we’d love your help! We have three competitions this year… 

Wiki Loves Folklore – February and March 2026

Wiki Loves Earth – May and June 2026

Wiki Loves Monuments – September 2026

To help us with managing these competitions we’re looking for the following volunteers for any or all of the above competitions.

Comms & Community support – We need volunteers who can help us make sure we’re shouting about the “Wiki Loves” competitions in the right places, making it easy for people to take part and celebrating the efforts of those who do. 

Competition judge – Our judges help determine which are the best entries that have been submitted to a particular competition and which we should submit to any international panel. The role might suit people with photography experience themselves or who understand the importance of high quality images to Wiki projects

Data volunteer – And of course, we want these images to be useful and helpful in the wider Wikiverse which is where data volunteers come in. If you’re knowledgeable about Wikidata, we’d love your help!

Follow the links above for more information or for a no obligation chat email volunteering@wikimedia.org.uk

The post Wiki Loves Photography – volunteers wanted appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

Today, Wikimedia UK is announcing a £56,198 grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund to safeguard access to the UK’s 3D heritage data and create a sustainable future. 

3D digitisation has rapidly become more affordable and accessible to heritage organisations seeking new ways to investigate the historic collections and spaces in their charge, and engage audiences with the stories connected with them. At the same time, national UK infrastructure has not kept pace with vast amounts of 3D data being produced leading many organisations to rely on commercial and proprietary platforms for storage, hosting, and dissemination tools. As the priorities of commercial platforms and the needs of the heritage community substantially differ, sustainable access to the UK’s digital 3D heritage data is in a precarious position.

The UK’s digital 3D heritage data is a unique asset that is of immense value for both professional researchers and general audiences alike and without this funding from the Heritage Fund access to this valuable resource is at risk of being lost. The UK Heritage 3D Data at Risk project will provide both short term guidance for UK heritage organisations to safeguard their 3D data, as well as indicate a long term strategy for sustainable access informed by the needs of professionals and audiences. In short, the project aims to:

• Save heritage by creating a strategic plan to preserve and provide long-term access to over 5,000 at-risk digital 3D models currently on the Sketchfab platform. 
• Protect the environment by researching and recommending sustainable 3D publication workflows that reduce duplicated effort and server usage. 
• Champion inclusion, access, and participation by engaging a diverse range of stakeholders through various methods, including providing financial support to remove barriers to involvement. 
• Boost organisational sustainability by giving UK heritage institutions a practical roadmap to future-proof their 3D collections. 

If you are working with 3D data within the UK heritage sector, UK Heritage 3D Data at Risk would love to hear from you. You can contribute your organisation’s story via a short online interview, online survey, participating in an online workshop, or joining us for an in-person event towards the end of the project. Please visit this WikiCommons page or send a message to 3Ddata@wikimedia.org.uk for more information.

Quotes

Lucy Crompton-Reid, Wikimedia UK Chief Executive said: “We are extremely pleased to have received this support from The National Lottery Heritage Fund. Thanks to National Lottery players we will be working on a roadmap to preserve 3D heritage. 3D files are a fantastic way for the public to explore the past, getting up close to objects that may be hundreds of miles away or behind glass to preserve them. The scans and models of everything from finger rings to entire buildings are an invaluable resource that must remain accessible now, and for future generations.”

Independent digital heritage consultant Thomas Flynn said “With gratitude to The National Lottery Heritage Fund and National Lottery players, I am delighted that we can move forward with this project. This funding provides a critical lifeline for thousands of unique 3D digital heritage assets from heritage organisations across the UK that are currently at risk. Working in partnership with Wikimedia UK and engaging with heritage professionals from across the country, we can now build a collaborative roadmap to help ensure this invaluable data is preserved and remains accessible for researchers, educators, and the public for generations to come.”

Stuart McLeod, Director of London and South at The National Lottery Heritage Fund, said: “Thanks to National Lottery players, we’re proud to support this vital project that will look to create best practice to safeguard the UK’s digital heritage. It will offer guidance for both small and larger organisations for preserving 3D heritage, including thinking about the environmental impacts. It will help to ensure that heritage organisations across the UK can continue to innovate, engage and inspire through digital technologies and protect our heritage for future generations.”

NOTES TO EDITORS 

About Wikimedia UK

Wikimedia UK is the national charity for the global Wikimedia movement. Our mission is to enable people to engage with open knowledge and access reliable information in order to develop their understanding of the world, and make informed decisions about issues that affect them. We work with educators, communities and cultural institutions to make knowledge more equitable, representative and accessible across Wikipedia and its sister projects.

About Thomas Flynn

Thomas Flynn is a UK based digital heritage specialist offering services and advice related to 3D digitisation, online publishing, open access, storytelling, and interoperability. He has worked with UNESCO, Europeana, Oxford University, Creative Commons, and many more organisations. Thomas is a Visiting Fellow to Bournemouth University’s Faculty of Archaeology & Anthropology, a co-chair of the IIIF 3D Community Group, and sits on the advisory board of the Rijksmuseum’s 2and3D Photography Conference. Thomas runs the Spatial Heritage Review newsletter and LinkedIn Group, is co-author of glam3d.org, and co-founder of museuminabox.org. Previously, Thomas was Cultural Heritage Lead at sketchfab.com and launched the British Museum’s first public online collection of open access 3D scans.

About The National Lottery Heritage Fund 

Our vision is for heritage to be valued, cared for and sustained for everyone, now and in the future. That’s why as the largest funder for the UK’s heritage we are dedicated to supporting projects that connect people and communities to heritage, as set out in our strategic plan, Heritage 2033. Heritage can be anything from the past that people value and want to pass on to future generations. We believe in the power of heritage to ignite the imagination, offer joy and inspiration, and to build pride in place and connection to the past.

Over the next 10 years, we aim to invest £3.6billion raised for good causes by National Lottery players to make a decisive difference for people, places and communities.

Further information

For further information, images and interviews please contact Thomas Flynn and Richard Nevell on 3Ddata@wikimedia.org.uk.

The post Heritage 3D Data at Risk project awarded National Lottery Heritage Fund Grant. appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

Over this past year the UK editing community has been as determined as ever to advance open knowledge online. An encyclopaedia is most valuable when it represents us all, and our community consists of individuals from diverse backgrounds and a variety of skills. Their contributions are vital in ensuring the availability of accurate, comprehensive information for people around the world. With each edit they make they strengthen Wikipedia and its sister projects, ensuring they remain a valuable resource for knowledge-seekers everywhere.

Giving Tuesday is the perfect opportunity to highlight some of the activities of our community. The last year has presented the UK editing community with new challenges, which have been met with determination and enthusiasm. We’ve seen new partnerships form, welcomed new groups into editing, and made great strides in our mission to represent all knowledge on Wikimedia.

Earlier this year, Wikimedia UK partnered with the Swadhinata Trust, a London-based Bengali heritage organisation, to enhance the representation of Bengali heritage and culture on Wikimedia platforms. This collaboration began with an introductory online workshop and continued with an in-person workshop, focusing on creating Wikimedia accounts, editing Wikipedia articles, sourcing information, and uploading images to Wikimedia Commons. 

The online workshop was followed by an in-person workshop at the Wikimedia UK office in April 2023, where participants learned how to create an account and to edit Wikipedia articles, as well as how to find reliable sources and avoid conflicts of interest. They also learned how to upload images to Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository that anyone can use. They explored some of the existing articles on Bengali topics and brainstormed for potential contributions.

The collaboration between Wikimedia UK and the Swadhinata Trust illustrates how Wikimedia projects can effectively celebrate and safeguard a wide range of cultural heritages while promoting community involvement. But it also highlights how important working alongside local community organisations is for us as an organisation in order for us to achieve our goals in driving community engagement.

We’ve also seen real progress being made through our Train the Trainer programme. Trainers support volunteers who are keen to deliver Wikipedia editing events. They play a key role in the delivery of Wikimedia UK programmes and extend our work to underrepresented communities, supporting them to become engaged in the Wikimedia projects. They train new and existing editors across the country, in-person, online or in hybrid sessions.

One of our trainers, Johanna Janhonen, began supporting Wikimedia UK last year, helping newcomers gain fundamental skills in the art of editing and learning from other Wikipedia trainers both in-person and remotely.

In April 2023, we began collaborating with an eager group of digital volunteers from the Royal Albert Memorial Museum. We initiated a practical three-week introductory program centred around Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. These volunteers came from various backgrounds, spanning from recent school graduates to retirees, each contributing their unique experiences and interests to the project. Over the three weeks, we covered essential editing techniques, addressed common questions about Wiki and cultural heritage, and discussed strategies for creating impactful edits. The program concluded with an online editing event in May 2023.

Throughout this process, we discovered a wealth of valuable content. We were particularly impressed by the significant contributions of local historians, highlighting their outstanding work on ‘Devon Women in Public and Professional Life, 1900–1950: Votes, Voices and Vocations,’ which significantly enriched our collaborative journey.

Nick Moyes, a former museum naturalist, has spent a career introducing people from diverse backgrounds to the wonders of museum artefacts, furthering their understanding of the world around them, and facilitating access to knowledge and information. Upon retiring a decade ago, he saw a new avenue for continuing this mission in Wikipedia. The platform offered an exceptional opportunity to carry on his work. It wasn’t long before he found himself assisting fellow editors in their contributions to Wikipedia. Last year, Wikimedia UK conducted a ‘Train the Trainers’ program, equipping individuals like Nick with the skills needed to conduct introductory group training sessions, whether in person or online.

Initially Nick provided support to other trainers, gradually building the confidence needed to lead his own training sessions on Wikipedia contributions. His sessions were tailored for professional astronomers and science educators in South Africa, and he received invaluable online support from a network of fellow trainers, part of the robust community of trained volunteers cultivated by Wikimedia UK.

Pledge your support this Giving Tuesday and help us celebrate the wonderful Wikimedia UK community as we bring 2023 to a close and look ahead to 2024. Follow our Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon and Instagram channels to stay up to date, and hey, give us a follow while you’re there!

P.S. We’re also holding our community at Wikimedia UK 2023 Community Meeting, taking place Sunday 26th November, 12-2pm, online. To join, sign up here. 

The post Unwrap the joy of giving: Open knowledge for all appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

Welcome to the Spring/Summer 2022 newsletter! I hope you have had a good start to the year, and a lovely bank holiday weekend over Easter.

This newsletter is full of information, stories and snippets about Wikimedia UK’s work in partnership with volunteers and institutions to open up knowledge, with a particular focus on knowledge equity, information literacy, and climate information. I hope you will find something to inspire, interest or excite you.

On a slightly different note, I have been moved by our community’s response to the terrible situation in Ukraine, and pleased to have played a small role in securing safe refuge, in the homes of Wikimedia UK donors, for two families seeking refuge from the war. Thank you to all those who responded to my emails about this in March.

With very best wishes

Lucy Crompton-Reid

Chief Executive

UK chapter update

Going further with student engagement

Over the last few years, Wikimedia UK and partners have been increasingly involved with or have helped with the hosting of internships or student work placements focused on delivering Wikimedia-related projects. We wanted to bring together some examples of this kind of work, explore how these kinds of
placements sit within the ethos of the Wikimedia community, and share what we have learned from these experiences, offering what we have in terms of best practice. The intern case study booklet is aimed at organisations in education or cultural sectors who already work with interns or student placements and want to explore whether Wikimedia-focused internships is a model of collaboration which could be beneficial to them.

Events and projects you can join

Annual General Meeting

The 2022 Annual General Meeting will be held online on the morning of Saturday 9th July. This is an important date for your diaries, particularly if you are a member of the charity (which costs just £5 a year). The meeting will include reports from the board and executive, voting on resolutions and of course trustee elections. There will be an opportunity to ask questions about our work in 2021/22 and to find out more about people standing for election to the board.

Celtic Knot conference

The Celtic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference will return in July 2022 over the 1st and 2nd. The conference aims to bring people together to share their experiences of working on information distribution in minority and minoritized languages on the Wikimedia projects. Our aim is to help people learn how to direct the flow of information across language barriers and support their communities. As in previous years we will have a strong focus on Wikidata and its potential to support languages.

The Celtic Knot is a place where people working on growing and maintaining their communities (on Wikipedia, but also Wikisource or Wikidata) can meet, learn from each other, and support each other on topics like community growth, technical tools, or collaboration with partners. Driven by Wikimedia UK’s vision, together with local partners and fellow Wikimedia chapters, the conference carries the experience of five annual editions, including two online events. In each of the first five years, the conference has spotlighted a language or language family, and the participants can learn more about the cultural context as well as the state of the Wikimedia projects in these languages. For the 2022 edition, Wikimedia UK, with the support of Wikimedia Deutschland, will be adopting a broader approach, with an emphasis on skills development for a diverse group of participants.

Our new climate actitvities

We are excited to announce that WikiForHumanRights: Right to a Healthy Environment is back for 2022. This year, our aim is to ensure that everyone has access to neutral, unbiased and fact-based information on the “triple planetary crisis” of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss. Taking part in the competition fits with the growing number of climate and environment based projects Wikimedia UK is taking on. Open access to climate information and data will play an increasingly important role in our shared ability to understand this crisis and act collectively. Running from April 15th through to June 14th 2022, this campaign aims to encourage our supporters, members and volunteers interested in the campaign to organise activities around the theme of environmental sustainability and climate knowledge.

The WikiForHumanRights campaign falls in line with Wikimedia UK’s new strategic focus on climate. We will be launching projects and programmes that support our editors, communities and partner organisations that relate to climate change and environmental sustainability. A few of our current projects include:

• We have been working with Climate Policy Radar, an open data climate startup to improve Wikidata’s ability to support environmental policy work.
• In 2021, we ran a 24-hour COP26 editathon with the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. 52 editors took part, creating 363 edits and resulting in over 150 thousand views worldwide.
• We are working with our partners, Natural Resources Wales and Llen Natur to feed localised data directly onto Wikipedia based on the threat of climate change to local communities.

Wiki Loves Earth 2022

Wales will participate in the Wiki Loves Earth 2022 international competition again this year, and the new website was rolled out last week. Wikimedia UK has again partnered with the National Library of Wales and WiciMon, in organising the work: other partners will be announced this week. 

Our work in partnership

Women’s History Month

We again did a series of interviews for Women’s History Month, showcasing the people and initiatives that are closing the gender gap on wiki projects. There were four interviews, with Helen Close from WES, Hope Miyoba from the Science Museum Group, Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh, along with three students who are involved in the gender gap projects, and finally Monisha Shah, Wikimedia UK’s Chair. We were so proud of the work these initiatives have achieved, and encourage you to watch the full series on our YouTube.

We also ran a number of events throughout March for Women’s History Month with the help of collaborating organisations:

We ran a Wiki Workshop with the British Library’s Eccles Centre and the University of Leeds to make Black women in 20th century theatre more visible on wiki projects. We wanted to expand and amplify knowledge produced by and about Black women, and about gender, feminism and the arts on Wikipedia. At this Wiki editing workshop, participants received training on creating and editing wiki pages in order to communicate the central role played by Black women in British theatre making between 1900 and 1950, women like Una Marson and Pauline Henriques. They were also invited to explore resources that can enable better citation justice for women of colour knowledge producers and greater access to archive collections documenting Black British histories. It’s really crucial for us to continue having an intersectional approach to our gender gap work, with women of colour well represented in the activities.

This is also shown in our collaborations with the David Livingston Museum. The David Livingstone Birthplace is the only independent museum in Scotland that is dedicated to preserving the legacy of David Livingstone and examining his work within the complex and painful realities of slavery, colonialism and Nineteenth Century European attitudes towards African people and community groups. Our Scotland Programme Coordinator was glad to join staff and volunteers at the museum for a hybrid editathon focussing on the women connected to David Livingstone, and continuing work on articles that we’d worked on at our last event. The in-person event was based in the new museum, and our worklist was drawn up by museum staff, using their subject knowledge, as well as resources from the museum and elsewhere. The editathon saw 1.44k words added to Wikipedia, and 14 references added.

As part of the National Lottery funded Digital Skills for Heritage initiative, we run webinars to showcase what Wiki-based platforms and the digital skills gained through contributing to them for the GLAM heritage sector. To round up the second series of these webinars, the Connected Heritage team hosted a potluck for International Women’s Day.  Participants learnt Wikipedia basics and made their first edits. In addition, the event allowed them to see how a Wikithon is run, and how it could work for their organisation and how you can best support the growth of open knowledge. Ideally, participants brought an idea of a topic or theme they wanted to work on. As the date is close to International Women’s Day, we encouraged them to bring projects relating to women.

We did a workshop with Protests and Suffragettes and Women’s History Scotland to celebrate International Women’s Day and the theme of #BreakTheBias, adding and improving entries for Scottish Suffragettes on Wikipedia. ​​We’ve collaborated with Protests and Suffragettes for quite some time. They’re a creative project led by a team of artists, activists, and local historians working to recover and re-voice the histories of women activists in Glasgow, and across Scotland. They create ‘artWalks, and public art and creative interventions in the public realm, while conducting archival research and recording oral histories. They work with Wikipedia as knowledge activists. Women’s History Scotland is a new partner for us, they’ve been working with P&S and this is the first in a series of events we’ll be doing with them. The event saw 4.36K Words Added to 16 Wikipedia articles, and 92 References Added.

Connected Heritage

The aim of the Connected Heritage project is to help cultural and heritage organisations share their knowledge through the Wikimedia projects, with a particular focus on underrepresented knowledge. The team have been busy delivering a series of webinars, workshops, and training events. Since the start of the year the project team have been setting up partnerships with really exciting external partners. From our workshops, 52 people have worked together to improve 54 articles which have already been read more than a quarter of a million times.

More than 100 organisations have been represented at our events and our potluck wikithon or International Women’s Day was fully booked well in advance. There is a lot of enthusiasm for Wikipedia and the potential for reaching new audiences. There isn’t space here to mention all the organisations we’ve worked with so far, but one highlight has been the work of interns from the Mixed Museum. They edited articles on South Asian people in Ireland and Black people in Ireland, adding important background information. Incredibly, they extended Wikipedia’s coverage of South Asian people in Ireland back by three centuries. That was quite a gap to fill and shows how important cultural and heritage organisations are for improving Wikipedia.

International Museum Day 2022

The International Museum Day 2022 Wikidata Competition is part of the Wikimedia events around the International Museum Day on 18th May. Its goal is to improve Wikidata content about museums, including related objects, people and events, in all participating countries and regions.

International Museum Day is an event organised by the International Council of Museums since 1977 to raise awareness that “museums are an important means of cultural exchange, enrichment of cultures and development of mutual understanding, cooperation and peace among peoples.” About 20 Wikimedia Chapters worldwide joined their forces to transfer this awareness into free accessible content of Wikipedia and its sister projects. In a joint campaign from 4th-18th May, the national Wikimedia associations and groups invite the community of Wikipedia contributors to edit, update, translate Wikipedia articles in the context or upload pictures. A Wikidata competition completes the offer around the IMD 2022 (see the project page in English).

A landmark for the Khalili Collections

Since February 2020, the Khalili Collections have hosted a Wikimedian in Residence to share their context with the Wikimedia projects. Martin Poulter has been sharing images, writing articles, and helping Wikimedia and the Khalili Collections learn about Wikipedia’s gaps in the arts. The residency recently passed a remarkable milestone: images from the Collection have been viewed more than 50 million times through Wikipedia and its sister projects. The residency has also connected with the University of Edinburgh, with students adding images from the Collections to Wikipedia.

Film

Robin Owain, our Manager in Wales has been working with the Welsh community on collating data on films from Wikidata, Rotten Tomatoes etc, preparing a semi automated batch of articles on international films from around 50 languages. The articles will again contain automated templates, bringing live ‘feed’ of information into the articles, with text being generated on-the-fly, especially that which changes over time (list of awards etc), thus keeping the information up to date and correct. 

Extending the NIHR residency

In our winter newsletter we were very excited to announce that we have been working with the National Institute for Health and Care Research to set up a Wikimedian in Residence project. Adam Harangozó started his residency in early December, and has been working with the organisation to identify where their research can have the most impact on Wikipedia. Initially a six-month project, it has been extended for another three months.

You can follow the work of the project on Wikipedia, and Adam recently had an interview with The Scotsman.

Wikipedia goes to university

New terms and semesters began at universities across the country earlier this year, with students picking up new modules. Wikimedia UK supports lecturers who want to use Wikipedia in the classroom. There are often conversations with lecturers to help them explore the possibilities, and excitingly this has led to the University of Sussex involving Wikipedia editing in two modules this year. Both run by Nimi Hoffmann, the first for forty first-year undergraduates module ran late last year, and the second module for about a hundred second year undergraduates started this spring. As part of their assessment, the students are writing about education and development. At the University of Derby, we were delighted that Suzanne Nelson decided to again get students editing as part of her MA Journalism course. The module simulates a work placement, and the students are busy writing and due to share their work in May.

The Wikimedian in Residence project at the University of Edinburgh is continuing strongly, and Ewan McAndrew has been supporting students from a variety of backgrounds including Translation Studies MSc, Digital Education MSc, and History of Art.

Join us

We’re very grateful to and proud of the network we’ve built around our chapter. You can support the governance of the charity by becoming a member, donate to us online, or volunteer on some of the projects above.

We’re also on social media if you prefer to chat there, we always appreciate new followers and sharers of our news; Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. You can also follow our blog, which has more details on some of the activities mentioned in the newsletter.

The post Friends newsletter/2022/Issue 1 appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

Welcome

Season’s greetings! Welcome to Wikimedia UK’s Winter Newsletter 2021. As we come to the end of another strange and rather difficult year for many, we are very grateful for the continued support of our donors, members and volunteers. You and our partners have made it possible for us to continue delivering creative and inclusive projects and programmes that open up knowledge, and enable more people to benefit from the Wikimedia projects. During a year of mostly remote working, we have welcomed three new members of staff as well as new Wikimedians in Residence at the British Library, National Institute for Health Research and the University of the Arts London. We took part in the Big Give Christmas challenge for the first time, and were delighted to achieve our fundraising target. We developed a new Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Framework and Action Plan, and have also drafted our new organisational strategy for 2022 – 2025, with input from our community. Thank you for all your support, and I hope you enjoy reading our final newsletter of 2021. The staff team and I are sending you our warmest wishes for a safe festive season. 

Lucy Crompton-Reid

Chief Executive

UK chapter focus

Due to take place in early 2022, we’re running another course of Train the Trainer. Volunteer trainers play a key role in the delivery of Wikimedia UK programmes, helping us to achieve our strategic objectives by delivering Wikimedia project training to new and existing editors across the country.  Demand for training often outstrips staff capacity to fulfil, and we’re conscious that our existing networks do not always allow us to reach all the communities with whom we’d like to work. In the past, we’ve offered our main Train the Trainer programme as a 3-4 day in-person training course, and it has often focussed on training design and pedagogy. This time however, we’re taking a slightly different approach, which we hope will offer more flexibility to our volunteer trainers, and which we have developed in response to feedback from the community, and from partner organisations. The aim of this round of training will be to equip Volunteer Trainers with the skills, experience and resources to deliver a standard ‘Introduction to Wikipedia’, such that would take place at an online editathon or wiki workshop.

Wikimedia UK works on a three year strategic planning cycle, and we are now developing our new strategy for 2022 to 2025. We’ve held meetings with the staff, board, and wider community to develop the new strategy. Our schedule is aligned with our application deadline for funding from the Wikimedia Foundation, for which we’ll be applying for multi-year funding for the first time. While our strategy is still being finalised, we’re expecting to continue our work in themes such as knowledge equity and information literacy, while also increasing our focus on data and information on both the climate crisis and environmental conservation.

Events and projects you can join

The Connected Heritage project had an excellent turn out in 2021 and will be continuing into 2022. Over 100 participants took part in the free hour long webinars, tailored specifically to those working in the heritage sector. There was also a follow up session for 12 participants who wanted further training. The webinars covered open knowledge, the digital skills gap, digital preservation and how Wikimedia UK is addressing those issues. Participants were provided with access to resources and materials to take back to their organisations, and the opportunity to follow up with the project and engage in partnership. In 2022 there will be more webinars on the 18th January, 2nd February, 17th February and 4th March, and an International Women’s Day Potluck Wikithon on Friday 11th March.

#WikiForHumanRights will return from 15th April through to 14th June 2022. This year’s focus is on the Right to a Healthy Environment. The environmental crisis is getting more complex and humanity needs to make thousands of big and small decisions to address it. As the UN Environmental Program described it, we need to make “Peace with Nature” and protect the human rights of the most vulnerable. Wikipedia and other platforms need to fill the knowledge gaps at the intersection of sustainability and human rights in every context and language. The world needs access to reliable information about the link between environmental sustainability and human rights. We encourage individuals or organisations interested in the campaign to organise activities around the intersecting themes of human rights and the environment.

#1Lib1Ref is back for 2022! Abbreviated from 1 Librarian for 1 Reference, 1Lib1Ref calls on librarians around the world, and anyone who has a passion for free knowledge, to add missing references to articles on Wikipedia. #1Lib1Ref runs every January 15th to February 5th and every May 15th to June 5th.

Our work in partnership

We’ve helped the National Institute of Health Research recruit a new Wikimedian in Residence. The initial proposal was for a six month placement with the potential to extend. The residents will help the Institute share health information to a larger audience, train staff in editing the Wikimedia projects, and scope out what information the Institute has.

We ran an editathon in partnership with the University of Leeds for Black History Month, citing African scholars on Wikipedia. The aim was to increase the representation of African scholars and sources across the Wikimedia projects, with a suite of resources available to the students and staff who attended. 269 citations from African scholars were added to Wikipedia, with 26 articles created, and 116 articles edited.

The Wikimedian in Residence at the British Library, Dr Lucy Hinnie, who is also a project lead for Connected Heritage, has been running Wikimedia workshops for library volunteers. Lucy’s been working on a number of fascinating projects such as the Agents of Enslavement data project which was covered by The Guardian; the Canadian Copyright collection – a significant collection of Canadian photographs that were received between the years 1895 and 1923; the India Office Records project; a Bengali Wikisource collaboration, and the relabelling of historic materials in line with modern thought and vocabulary.

Dr Martin Poulter, Wikimedian in Residence at the Khalili Collections, and Dr Sara Thomas, Scotland Programme Coordinator here at Wikimedia UK, hosted a series of online Wikidata workshops. There was a workshop for beginners, a more advanced workshop, a workshop for the Education sector, and one for the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) sector. Wikidata is much easier to understand and has more interesting and varied content than most databases, so it is a good place to start when considering how knowledge can be represented by computers. It can create interactive educational visualisations on all sorts of topics and adding to Wikidata is already used as a platform for educational assignments. It can give a new lease of life to research outputs by joining them up with other information sources in a connected web.

We led a session for the School Library Association (SLA) to give school librarians a deeper understanding of Wikipedia’s mechanisms and how it strives to improve, so that they can give informed advice to students on how to approach Wikipedia.

To quote Wikipedia on the subject, The Red Book of Hergest is a large vellum manuscript written shortly after 1382, which ranks as one of the most important mediaeval manuscripts written in the Welsh language. It preserves a collection of Welsh prose and poetry, notably the tales of the Mabinogion and Gogynfeirdd poetry. We’ve been working with Jesus College Oxford to upload a substantial number of photographs of the manuscript to Wikimedia Commons. You can see the Commons category here.

Our Wikimedian in Residence at the Science Museum Group, has also had their residency extended. They continue to collaborate with the Wellcome Collection to get the Science Museum’s vast collection of high quality images on Wikimedia Commons. The resident is utilising and training the museum’s volunteer network.

The Devil’s Porridge Museum ran the Miracle Worker Research Project, working with remote volunteers to uncover the untold histories of munitions workers at HM Factory Gretna during WW1. They’ve since been making efforts to get the research on Wikipedia, with edithathons in September, October, and November, and the project is set to develop in the New Year.

Further and Higher Education

Our Scotland Programme Coordinator, Dr Sara Thomas, has been working with Edinburgh College on their first ever Wikipedia in the Classroom project. A cohort of around 40 students from the Art & Ethics course worked to create Wikipedia articles on underrepresented artists, learning about open licensing, underrepresentation in the canon, and how this applies to their own practice and reflection.

The Decolonising Wikipedia Network is relaunching, supporting students and staff at University of the Arts London (UAL) to edit Wikipedia through the lenses of anti-racism and decolonisation. This includes (but is not limited to) increasing the visibility and credibility of under-represented and marginalised figures and topics connected to our subject disciplines on Wikipedia. We’ve helped expand the network from the comms department to the arts department. We hope to see the network continue to grow, and add to their incredible successes such as the over 7000 words they have added to Wikipedia articles.

The University of Sussex has a module for students to take part in, called the ‘Education for Development: Aid, Policy and the Global Agenda’ module. The students have been working with articles such as education in Indonesia, and will hopefully be taking their text live in the new year.

Occasionally our staff give guest lectures at universities. Dr Sara Thomas returned to The University of Glasgow to lecture on Wikipedia and Information Management, to undergrad students in Digital media and information studies, and another lecture for the postgrad students in Information management and preservation.

The University of Edinburgh’s Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan McAndrew, continues to do fantastic work. Over the residency Ewan has recruited a number of interns from the student body, most recently the intent at the Library and University Collections, Joshua Jackson. Together they wrote a report of the library and university’s engagement with Wikimedia, which can be found on Commons and offers excellent insight into the value of Wikimedia in higher education. Ewan also liaises with the professors at the university to introduce Wikimedia components into their courses, such as the Reproductive Biomedicine BSc sixth year students workshop, and on the Digital Education MSc course.

Blog highlights

Our projects and collaborations are many, so while there’s not a post for every activity, the ‘Our news’ page is the perfect home for a more in-depth look at the great Wiki initiatives happening in the UK.

Connected Heritage

The launch of our Connected Heritage project and the three month achievements of the project are live on our blog, with information on how heritage professionals can take part in the 2022 webinars.

Wikimedia UK returns to the office, but trials a new way of working

Our Chief Executive, Lucy Crompton-Reid, lays out our new way of hybrid working. For the time being we are restricting the number of people in the office at any one time to a maximum of six. Alongside this, we are consulting with all staff individually to determine what their working pattern might look like within this hybrid model. For anyone trying to reach us, email is probably still the best route. Since writing this blog post, the risk of the Omicron variant has further restricted our staff from travelling into the office.

Ada Lovelace day 24 hour global editathon

On the 12th October, an international 24 hour editing marathon started in New Zealand to improve the coverage of women in Wikipedia. The relay of volunteering editing reached the UK at 2pm, with an event hosted at the Pankhurst Centre in Manchester as both an in-person and an online event. This blog detailed the editathon for anyone interested in getting involved.

2021 Palestine-Wales editathon

Wikiproject Palestine-Wales was a month-long editathon, which took place in August 2021, between Wikimedia UK and Wikimedia Levant. The event generated a total of 242 new articles. Robin Owain, Wales Programme Manager, details the event.

UK based Punjabi artist opens up his archive

UK based Punjabi writer and photographer, Amarjit Chandan opened up images from his archive. As of 19th June 2021, a total of 471 images have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and at least 54 distinct images (11 % of the total images) are being used across languages and projects with the maximum images being used on Punjabi Wikipedia followed by English Wikipedia and Wikidata. More photos followed. 

Talking strategy with Wikimedia UK’s community

We had the pleasure of facilitating a meeting for our community to help shape the future direction of Wikimedia UK. We work on a 3 year strategic planning cycle, and we’re now developing our new strategy for 2022-25. Our Chief Executive gives an overview.

Train the Trainer

As referenced above, we invited expressions of interest in our next round of Train the Trainer, due to take place in early 2022. We are delighted to say that we’ll once again be partnering with Trainer Bhav Patel.

National Institute for Health Research launches Wikimedian in Residence in collaboration with Wikimedia UK

As referenced above, The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) has recruited a new Wikimedian in Residence for a six month post is part of a pilot to help the evaluate the opportunities for using Wikimedia to support dissemination of NIHR funded research. We spoke to Adam Harangozo about his role.

Join us

We’re very grateful to and proud of the network we’ve built around our chapter. You can support the governance of the charity by becoming a member, donate to us online, or volunteer on some of the projects above.

We’re also on social media if you prefer to chat there, we always appreciate new followers and sharers of our news; Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

The post Friends’ Newsletter/2021/Issue 03 appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

Say you want to find out where all the paintings by Van Gogh are housed? A bit of googling and digging would be needed, and unless someone’s made a specific web page listing such information, it’d take you a while. What about something a little more complex, like a list of all the self-portraits by female artists? It’s questions like these that Wikidata’s working towards answering with one simple search query, and projects like Crotos, a Wikidata-driven tool for exploring the world’s artworks from hundreds of different collections, that have spawned from Wikidata.

A number of our programmes use Wikidata to create something truly brilliant. Take the award winning Scottish Witches Map. A pretty design with a sobering bit of history, the visuals of seeing where Scottish witches were accused, their story, and what happened to them is an excellent example of what can be achieved with Wikidata. Scottish Equate Scotland student intern, Emma Carroll, worked with Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh, Ewan McAndrew, during the summer 2019 to geolocate the place names recorded in the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database (1563 to 1736), and find the place of residence of 3,141 accused Scottish witches.

Through Emma’s detective work c.500 place-names have been located using Ordnance Survey maps, place-name books, historical maps, and gazetteers. This data was uploaded into Wikidata, as linked open data and further enriched with the location of detentions, trials, place of death, and more. Richard Lawson, ISG web developer, provided the technical expertise for the new website and graphic design was contributed by Interactive Content Manager Stewart Lamb Cromar.

It builds on the university’s breakthrough work on the Scottish Witchcraft Survey which brought to life the persecution of women during the period, with many burned at the stake or drowned. Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh, said: “The map is a really effective way to connect where we are now to these stories of the past.”

“The tragedy is that Scotland had five times the number of executions of women. The idea of being able to plot these on a map really brings it home. These places are near everyone.

“There does seem to be a growing movement that we need to be remembering these women, remembering what happened and understanding what happened”

Emma Carroll, Equate Scotland Careerwise Intern (or ‘Witchfinder General’) said, “not only does the project help highlight the power of data science but also shows the capability of Wikidata to aid in the making of all of the different visualisations.”

The surfacing of the witchcraft data as linked open data to Wikidata has motivated Design Informatics Masters students each year since 2017 and showed what is possible both for the teaching of data science and for furthering discovery and engagement with real world research datasets.

The Mapping the Scottish Reformation project has since been inspired by the Map of Accused Witches project and are collaborating with Ewan McAndrew and the university’s Interactive Content team to build a new map website, powered by Wikidata.

It’s a truly beautiful interactive map, with an important and harrowing bit of information that’s critical to our understanding of women and marginalised people’s history.

Dr Martin Poulter is a long time Wikimedian and resident of ours, first at the University of Oxford where he worked on a project using Wikidata to describe its library and museum collections. And he is currently using the platform to describe the private collections of Sir David Khalili.

“Wikidata links the world’s cultural and scientific archives together into a web of knowledge,” Martin says. “I’ve learned things through Wikidata that otherwise would have required hundreds of different websites and databases. Anyone writing software can tap into this vast free resource with billions of facts; it has transformed how we visualise our cultural heritage. Text isn’t always the best way to share knowledge: people want something interactive they can explore and see where their curiosity takes them. Wikidata’s many graphical interfaces let them do that, and in hundreds of different languages.” – Martin Poulter.

The capabilities and visuals of Wikidata are truly a magnificent achievement, and that it’s run by volunteers when so many people’s mantra is ‘time is money’ only makes it more remarkable. We’re continually impressed by this fantastically clever little bit of software and the community that has built and keeps on building it. So Happy Birthday Wikidata, here’s to many more years.

The post Happy Birthday Wikidata! appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

This article based on the text of Wikimedia UK’s submission to the government’s inquiry into fake news, which was launched in January.

A changing media landscape

The media landscape has changed beyond all recognition over the past 25 years. Before the internet, there were just a handful of media providers with large, guaranteed audiences and plenty of funding to compete with each other on the quality of their journalistic output.

In this bygone era, people generally had more trust in mainstream sources of information and knowledge. You knew where this media was coming from, and the media landscape was predictable. But now none of this certainty exists. The media landscape is diverse, with hundreds of subsidiary websites controlled by opaque political groups or corporate bodies. Faith in the old canonical media sources has eroded and social groups insulate themselves in bubbles that keep out conflicting ideas.

As economic inequality has risen, fragmented social groups have retreated into ideological positions. The erosion of trust in traditional media institutions further contributes to the ability of people to ignore facts that don’t fit their confirmation biases. This trend has become so bad that some commentators have declared that facts don’t matter.

Where does Wikipedia fit in?

Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, not a news service (though its sister site WikiNews is a news service), and our mission is not political in the way many media organisations are – our goal is accurate, neutral information, not to make money or support any political ideology. Our volunteers are diverse in their politics, but they subscribe to the same process and mission to make the best, most neutral source of information which can be trusted by people no matter what their political views are. A recent study by Harvard Business School showed that Wikipedia articles usually become more politically neutral as more contributors get involved in editing them. This allows us to win the trust of our readers and hopefully provides an example to the media of how to regain the confidence of the general public.

As the charity which supports and promotes Wikipedia and its sister projects in the UK, we believe that facts do matter, but the way in which they are produced matters too. Wikipedia generates trust in itself through transparency and verifiability. You can check the sources of the facts written on every page in the list of citations. You can see the history of how each article was written and the accounts or IP addresses of the editors who wrote it. If you disagree with the content, you can discuss it on the talk page of the article to reach consensus with other editors about whether the information should be included.

Part of the problem is that our education system is still too often set up to inculcate facts, rather than analytical ways of thinking. Our pedagogic processes haven’t evolved from a media landscape in which you could be reasonably sure that what the BBC said was true, to one in which children are bombarded with messages from different political points of view, advertisers and ideologies. Our minds have always been a battleground for various social forces, but the sheer number of agents and institutions vying for control of our thoughts and feelings today is so large that it is confusing and destabilising for many.

In such a confusing landscape, people will often choose simple, clear messages which cut through this white noise. Facile slogans with little substance like ‘Take our country back’ and ‘Make America Great Again’ can gain momentum and huge support, while more complex facts and realities are drowned out.

Teach critical ways of thinking, not just facts

We believe that instead of trying to control the conversation and narrative, the best thing that governments can do is to arm their citizens with the educational tools to analyse this confusing landscape and protect themselves from indoctrination by simplistic political messaging. We believe that learning how to use Wikipedia, engaging in the creation of knowledge through debate and consensus, is one way that people can be armed with the analytic tools to form their own opinions and to distinguish good information from bad information.

On Facebook, people often share stories that conform to their previously held beliefs without checking the source of the information first. One very common internet meme from the middle of 2016 involved a made up quote by Donald Trump about how he would run as a Republican candidate for President because they are the ‘dumbest group of voters’. Just a minute of effort searching for the source of this information would reveal that it had been made up, but people wanted to believe it. This kind of fabrication is impossible to get away with for long on Wikipedia.

When you create a new article or add information to an existing article on Wikipedia, other editors who are watching the page will review your work, deciding if the information is correct and the source is reliable. Some of the highest traffic articles on Wikipedia are peer-reviewed by thousands of different people. Here are the page view statistics for the International Women’s Day article, which has been viewed over 1 million times already in 2017 on the English Wikipedia.

Wikipedia also creates trust and reliability by being the only non-commercial website in the top 100 most popular sites (by traffic) on the internet. It is run by a non-profit charity, the Wikimedia Foundation, and has no advertising. We believe that the absence of commercial advertising is integral to maintaining trust in the site, and this shows in the public’s response. Wikipedia gets around half a billion unique visits a month, and a recent poll by YouGov shows that people trust Wikipedia more than journalists from any media group.

Ensuring the best information is more visible

One aspect of Wikipedia’s importance is its search engine ranking. Unreliable sources can game the way search algorithms work to place high on Google rankings. However, Wikipedia articles will also appear near the top of searches, providing a reliable, neutral place to find a summary of other good sources. Here is an example:

Unfortunately, many educators have had a propensity to warn students away from Wikipedia, in the belief that if it can be edited by anybody, its reliability cannot be as good as the BBC or other traditional media. We believe this is clearly not true for most articles, but the point of Wikipedia is not to encourage people to take the information at face value. The sources will be transparently listed at the bottom of each article so you can see where the information comes from.

Social trust is an important bedrock to creating political consensus. Countries that exhibit low levels of interpersonal trust are generally ones beset by social and political issues. Economic inequality creates the conditions for a loss of trust, and makes it more likely that people will be willing to believe biased information. Wikipedia cannot fix the underlying problems of economic inequality, but it can teach people how to understand and analyse information in context.

Our community creates trust by developing rules by which we can judge the veracity and value of the content that people add to Wikimedia projects. Editors have for a long time deprecated the use of unreliable media sources, with one policy (WP:PUS) stating that:

• The more extreme tabloids such as the National Enquirer should never be used, as most stories in them are intentional hoaxes.
• In general, tabloid-journalist newspapers, such as The Sun, Daily Mirror, equivalent television shows, or sites like The Register, should be used with caution, especially if they are making sensational claims. The Daily Express and Sunday Express should be treated with even greater caution. Following a request for comment in February 2017, the Daily Mail is no longer considered to be a reliable source and cannot be used to demonstrate notability.

These policies guide and inform discussions and disputes about the content of articles, and editors engage with each other on the Talk pages of articles to discuss and decide by consensus whether a source is reliable and whether particular information is relevant. This whole process is transparent, and you can look back at the history of any article to see its previous versions and what has been changed.

Active knowledge construction as part of good citizenship

What we try to do as a charity is to encourage people not simply to be passive consumers of information, but active agents and participants in the collective construction of knowledge about our world. We don’t believe that the narrative of history is best controlled by any one powerful interest, and we would like everybody to understand the process by which knowledge is produced on Wikipedia, so that we can all be sure the final output is transparent and verifiable.

It is this process which is lacking in traditional media. You never get to see the process by which the sausage is made, and that allows people with low levels of trust in traditional institutions to believe that the information is inherently biased. It is harder to believe this about Wikipedia because you can see for yourself how it was produced.

The world has changed, and yet we are still right at the dawn of the internet age, experiencing the changes that this new technology has wrought on culture, politics and society. We need to get to grips with these changes and develop systems which allow a more equitable balance of power between individuals, corporations and states so that people cannot be exploited for others’ gain. Wikipedia is one way to do that.

The post Wikipedia Vs Fake News appeared first on Wikimedia UK.