Since then, I have gone on to receive training as a Wikimedia Ambassador from Ewan McAndrew, the University of Edinburgh’s Wikimedian in Residence, and led my own small training session for the Library’s Centre for Research Collections staff and volunteers. At the upcoming History of Medicine editathon, I’m exploring Wikimedia projects beyond Wikipedia, starting by testing out Wikisource with one of our recently digitised, out-of-copyright PhD theses.

Hunting citations

However, it’s not just the big, research-heavy element of Wikipedia that interests me; I also like using the Citation Hunt Tool to improve the quality of existing content. The tool provides the user with a paragraph of text from Wikipedia which contains a statement not backed up by reliable evidence (and therefore labelled with the ^{[citation needed]} tag). The challenge is to track down a trustworthy source, such as a peer-reviewed journal article or news article from a reputable publication, in order to back up the statement made in the text. It’s very satisfying when you discover an appropriate source and, as the statements can come from anywhere on Wikipedia, it’s easy to end up researching a range of bizarre and random topics.

In one of the examples I’ve worked on, I used a press release from the official San Francisco 49ers website to confirm the statement that American Footballer Justin Renfrow “signed a contract with San Francisco 49ers on May 18, 2015 along with Michigan State’s Mylan Hicks.”

#1Lib#Ref

I first dabbled with this tool last January as part of Wikipedia’s #1lib1ref campaign to mark its 15^th birthday. At one of our team meetings, Library staff set about making 32 edits to Wikipedia, some using the Citation Hunt Tool and others using their own knowledge and research. We therefore had a very clear target to beat this year! Wikimedia has added a new feature to the tool, so users can now select citations from a topic of interest, rather than just being provided with a completely random statement from the encyclopaedia. Added to this, many of my colleagues were using the visual editor for the first time and feedback was that this made the whole editing process far easier and more enjoyable.

Despite this, one of the big issues raised by colleagues was how to define exactly what can be considered a reliable source. There is lots of information on Wikipedia’s help pages about this issue but a short one-page guide to using reliable sources would be useful for occasions such as this. I personally got into a spot of bother when I used a source which, although published and available on Google Books, was not considered by the Wikimedia community to be reliable enough…

All in all, library staff and our colleagues from the Learning Teaching and Web division managed a grand total of 63 edits, meaning we almost doubled last year’s effort. There are rumours of a friendly rivalry with our colleagues at the National Library of Scotland… this will certainly encourage me to add a few more citations!

Gavin Willshaw

Digital Curator

Library and University Collections

University of Edinburgh

@gwillshaw

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This post is adapted from a text originally published in the CILIP November 2015 update.

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Bodleian Wikimedian Martin Poulter says that although the digital world finds it hard to capture the intimacy of being in the presence of historical objects and texts, it can play an important role in adding value to the collections of museums, libraries and galleries which do provide that experience.

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While working at the Bodleian, I’ve experienced what I call ‘the shiver’ many times. I had it when I realised I was reading Charles Darwin’s handwriting, or when shown a book that had been studied by Henry VIII. I saw it happening at the Marks of Genius exhibition when people encounter a Gutenberg Bible or a First Folio of Shakespeare.

The shiver is a realisation of a tangible connection to the past. It comes from authenticity, physicality and uniqueness. As such, it may seem irrelevant to digital information, which is endlessly reproducible and independent of physical location. However, when we think of how libraries can involve more people in that authentic experience, that digital world turns out to be crucial.

Sharing knowledge

Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the earliest feminist philosophers, holding views that were very radical for the 18th century. She came from a fascinating family whose manuscripts and correspondence are held by the Bodleian. To read Wollstonecraft’s final note to her husband, written days before she died, is one of those shiver-inducing contacts with the past. How can more people share that experience?

Wikimedia projects can connect the world of personal curiosity and informal discussion to the world of professionally published or curated resources. By creating or improving Wikipedia articles and sharing images, we can give readers a clearer image of historical figures and their achievements.

Data such as birth and death dates can be put into Wikipedia and Wikidata for harvesting by other sites and apps, such as the interactive timeline generator Histropedia. Releasing images and metadata under a free licence allows wiki contributors to make use of them. Improving an area of Wikipedia can be made into a fun event which draws in the public.

Sharing texts

Ideally, all public domain text would be freely available to everyone in the world, with no barriers. That is what Wikisource, the free library, works towards. My interest in Wollstonecraft and other 18th-century feminists has led me to put relevant texts in Wikisource, improving the previously meagre Feminism portal.

I have used existing free-text sources drawn from the University of Oxford Text Archive, Project Gutenberg, Library of Congress collections and the Internet Archive, as well as Jisc Historical Texts, which unlike the others is restricted to education institutions in the UK.

This is not just copying text from one place to another: Wikisource can use page scans to correct transcription errors, creating definitive electronic versions. Reciprocal links with Wikipedia mean that a text on Wikisource gets far more visits than on similar sites, making Wikisource a connected whole.

Building a web

John Duncombe’s 1751 poem, The Feminead, or Female Genius pays tribute to various creative and accomplished women, including poets and philosophers. Wikisource pages can have links – an advantage over similar archives such as Project Gutenberg – so I created profiles for several authors mentioned by Duncombe which contain authority file identifiers such as VIAF and ISNI.

By embedding sources in a web, we turn them into something more like an educational object; something that draws the reader into a journey and which they can benefit from without understanding all the references in advance.

Adding value

In reading 18th-century feminist texts, I found names and references that needed explaining. So I needed to consult modern scholarship, including books and papers that I would not have read if I weren’t improving Wikisource.

Reprinting out-of-copyright books unchanged is not viable in this world of ubiquitous, free, digital culture. Publishers have to find ways to add value, for example by getting scholars to supply context, via introductory essays or annotated editions. Wikipedia can be a dry and impersonal medium but this allows educational institutions to concentrate on what they do well, for example by using experts to bring the topic alive with enthusiasm and wit.

The more this text is freely available, the more it can influence the public sphere. The US feminist columnist and poet, Alice Duer Miller, recently had a satirical column that went viral on social media. This is more impressive when you realise that Miller died in 1942.

Wikimedia projects make it easy for people to enjoy and share out-of-copyright text, creating and satisfying a modern curiosity about past authors. What we can’t share digitally is that shiver-inducing connection to the past that comes from an encounter with the real physical object, but that’s okay: libraries are already great at doing that.

The post The Shiver: communion with the past in a digital age appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

In the early 19th century, Mary Somerville was a celebrity scientist. One of her works was the best-selling science book of the time, until overtaken by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. She published on astronomy, biology, atomic theory, and physical geography, at a time when scientific publications by women were rare. She tutored the computing pioneer Ada Lovelace, and introduced Lovelace to Charles Babbage.

Somerville’s name lives on, not least in the Oxford college named in her honour, yet not many people today know of her achievements. One reason is that it is hard to find her works. Her publications have been digitised, but the digitisation process only created images – rather than text, which is easy to find, search within and quote.

On 12 October, a group brought together by University of Oxford IT Services and the Bodleian Libraries started to change that. Working together on Wikisource, a sister-project of Wikipedia, we published a definitive transcription of a Mary Somerville paper from 1826. Being totally open access, the paper incidentally now meets modern funders’ requirements for scientific research outputs.

We also began that day a transcription of Somerville’s Preliminary Dissertation on the Mechanisms of the Heavens; a book described by the astronomer John Herschel as ‘by far the best condensed view of the Newtonian philosophy which has yet appeared’. The transcription was finished this month, and it and other texts are available through Somerville’s Wikisource profile.

This event was just one of a larger programme celebrating the bicentenary of Ada Lovelace. They involved Oxford staff, interested public and experienced Wikipedians, a couple of whom participated remotely. We were lucky to have two excellent guest speakers in Prof Ursula Martin and Prof Sylvia McLain. Each event improved a different aspect of open knowledge about women’s achievements in science and related fields.

In the edit-a-thon and improve-a-thon, we created 8 Wikipedia articles about notable women scientists — some living, some historic — and improved a further 16 existing articles. Creating an article from scratch can be a time-consuming process, but fixing clumsy wording or adding a cited fact is relatively quick.

Wikipedia’s new visual editor works like a word processor, so new users can write or improve articles without having to learn wiki code. We found that this makes Wikipedia editing much quicker to learn, quicker to do, and hence more enjoyable.

Our goal was not just to write biographies but to improve the web of knowledge to fairly represent women’s achievements. Amongst the non-biography articles we improved were those on Mary Somerville’s bestseller On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences and on the Finkbeiner test — important reading for anyone who writes about women scientists!

The 4th workshop was an image-a-thon, looking at Wikipedia’s sister project, Wikimedia Commons, and at some images of women scientists not yet used in Wikipedia. We also uploaded images from copyright-free sources, improving a total of 20 Wikipedia articles.

A call for material for the image-a-thon drew responses from private collections and cultural institutions. Among the contributions from The John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera is the accompanying illustration from a museum ticket, which now illustrates the Women in science article.

The records of what we did, including the articles edited, images uploaded and feedback are all openly available. More importantly, the process is ongoing. There are more articles that need expanding, re-wording, illustrating, or creating and anyone can join in: see the project pages for more details.

We will keep in touch with the participants and hope they continue as Wikipedians. The feedback from participants includes, ‘I found the session really useful and fun’ and ‘found it a very rewarding and useful experience and would like to continue contributing’ among similar comments, indicating that for some, we have started a habit.

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As in previous years, there will be an edit-a-thon to create articles related to women in science and to wish happy birthday to Ada Lovelace with celebratory cake. This will happen on Tuesday 13 October. It will include an introduction to wiki editing, so is suitable for new and experienced wiki editors.

This year we are also running three related events. All four events are open to members of Oxford University. We are also seeking experienced Wikipedians to help with the training. Even if you are not connected with Oxford, you can take part on-wiki; welcoming the new users and helping make their experience a pleasant one.

Monday 12 October will be the first ever transcribe-a-thon. We will look at Wikisource, the free library, where out-of-copyright books are transcribed using Optical Character Recognition and manual correction. During the event we will create an electronic edition of a book that can be used as a source for Wikipedia articles. This is an opportunity to learn basic wiki editing without having to worry about the many policies and guidelines affecting original text on Wikipedia.

Wednesday 14 October will be an improve-a-thon: we will look at Wikipedia’s quality scale and system of open review, and improve existing articles by adding facts or citations or by accessibly rewording. This will be suited to people who have edited Wikipedia before.

Thursday 15 October’s event is an image-a-thon: we will look at how Wikipedia articles are illustrated, using images from cultural institutions, from out-of-copyright books or personal collections. We will look at Wikimedia’s database of 27 million digital media files. With newly-uploaded images, we will illustrate articles on the week’s theme. No photography is required and this event is suitable for people who have never edited wikis.

The image-a-thon is an opportunity that Oxford’s libraries can support. College libraries may have photographs of alumnae, staff, or perhaps relevant art or manuscripts. We hope that some of these images can be made available under a Wikipedia-compatible licence for use in articles, with attribution. We will be uploading images of Lovelace herself which have not existed in digital form before.

We are interpreting the ‘women in science’ theme broadly, not just writing and improving biographies of women — living or dead — in professions related to science. There are also articles about books, or about scientific innovations and theories, where women’s contributions could be better represented. We will provide suggestions for target articles, as well as online and offline resources to help improve them.

Each of these four events looks at open knowledge from a different angle. If you can only make one, sign up for one, but if you want a broad hands-on experience of improving open knowledge, come to all four.

Dr Martin Poulter, the Wikimedian In Residence at the Bodleian Libraries, will lead the training but welcomes experienced wiki editors who can make things easy for newcomers. If you fit that description, please get in touch at martin.poulter@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

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This post was written by Charles Matthews, Wikimedian and Wikimedia UK volunteer.

The digitisation project for the Victorian-era Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) on Wikisource has reached the milestone of a complete posting for the biographies for the first edition, which was published in 63 volumes from 1885 to 1900. Wikisource is the text repository of Wikimedia, less well known than Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons (media files), but which adds value to texts with author pages, portals and categories, and light  annotation and hyperlinks.

The efforts of over 30 people since 2008 have put close to 30,000 DNB articles onto Wikisource. While in the UK the text of the old DNB is available freely through library cards on http://www.oxforddnb.com, the subscription site of the modern revised Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), the old DNB is still of interest, and this digitisation makes it much easier to use for the whole world… For example the DNB contains more genealogical and bibliographical research information. This major resource has in fact not previously been available straightforwardly on search engines.

The DNB was a remarkable legacy project of the publisher George Murray Smith. Typical of the unstoppable Victorian attitude, it was authored by over 700 writers, with the first editor being Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf. It is particularly strong in areas such as naval biography and Scottish history. With a deep coverage of figures relevant to the British Empire as it then was, it was called by historian Christopher Hill “that much maligned and indispensable work”. Texts on Wikisource cannot be guaranteed perfect, but the small numbers in the left margin of the DNB biographies give access to scans of original pages allowing for checking and correction by anyone.

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What do Howard Carter, discoverer of the famed tomb of King Tutankhamen, novelist Ford Madox Ford, and sexologist Havelock Ellis all share in common? They all died in 1939. On New Year’s Day 2010 all their works enter the public domain in the UK and become free for any use.

Each year the opening of Public Records in Britain is a well-publicised event; the press pore over interesting items replacing decades-old speculation with facts. There is a lesser-known addition to Britain’s cultural commons; all authors and artists who died seventy years ago have their work freed of copyright restrictions. In the digital age, their works can be re-used and adapted in many more ways: paintings can be reproduced and turned into new artwork; novels can be adapted and retold; text can be freely downloaded to e-book readers – a best selling item this Christmas – and anyone can create audio versions.

Creative works in the public domain are the backbone of our rich cultural heritage. Nursery rhymes are adapted for modern themes, fairy tales turned into Hollywood blockbusters and hymns reprinted for church congregations to sing. The addition of new creative works to this heritage renews and reinvigorates our culture.

Wikimedia UK anticipates January 1, “Public Domain Day”, 2010 being a great year for additions to the digital Wikimedia Commons. The poetry of W. B. Yeats, the works of Sigmund Freud, and Arthur Rackham‘s classic children’s book illustrations all enter the public domain. When the complexities of copyright no longer encumber reuse of old works, a work that has been a “sleeper” can become a new classic. Perhaps the definitive example of this is “It’s a Wonderful Life“, the 1946 Frank Capra film that became a Christmas classic in the 1980s.

Wikimedia UK promotes the uploading of copyright-free text to Wikisource, a sister site to Wikipedia, so that it can be widely enjoyed. Audio recordings of public domain works may be added to the Wikimedia Commons site, and Wikimedia UK invites you to join us and help digitise and preserve our common cultural heritage. You can make it available for everyone to share, build on, and simply enjoy.

EDITORS’ NOTES

Copyright law:

Please note that Wikimedia UK does not give legal advice. Information on copyright law and public domain can be found in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 as amended by the The Duration of Copyright and Rights in Performances Regulations 1995.

About Wikipedia:

Wikipedia is the fifth most popular website with 345 million visitors worldwide. Read by around 40% of UK web users, it is operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc, a US charity. Wikipedia is collaboratively written by over 100,000 active volunteers world wide and all material is published under a free license.

About Wikisource:

Wikisource is a repository of free texts (literary, reference and general), and is a sister project to Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia. It was started on 24 November 2003, and is operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

About Wikimedia Commons:

Wikimedia Commons is a free image and media file repository, and is another sister project to Wikipedia. It was started on 7 September 2004 and currently hosts more than 5 million images. UK works are accepted if they are released by the copyright owners under an eligible free license or if they are in the public domain under both US and UK law.

About the Wikimedia Foundation:

The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is the US-based non-profit organisation that operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world. These include Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

About Wikimedia UK:

Wikimedia UK is an independent organisation that supports free and open knowledge throughout the United Kingdom, including promoting and supporting Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Further information:

• Wikisource: http://www.wikisource.org/
• Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/

Contact details:

Michael Peel, Chair, Wikimedia UK

• Email: michael.peel@wikimedia.org.uk
• Phone: +44 (0)7988 013 646

Andrew Turvey, Secretary, Wikimedia UK

• Email: secretary@wikimedia.org.uk
• Phone: +44 (0)7754 881 562

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