Page 10 – WMUK

UK based Punjabi artist opens up his archive

Written by the Punjabi Wikimedians User Group

UK based Punjabi writer and photographer, Amarjit Chandan opened up images from his archive. Aside from images photographed by him, the archive includes images from his father, Gopal Singh Chandan, a full-time photographer and other public domain images.

Amarjit Chandan has a Wikipedia account of his own and has tried himself adding images to Commons in the past years. Punjabi Wikimedians User Group approached him to see what help he needed, also asking if he’d be interested in releasing further content.

Punjabi Wikimedians User Group collaborated with Wikimedia UK to execute this project. As the collection had a connection to both affiliates, it felt like a great opportunity to collaborate. Amarjit Chandan was more than glad to give his photographs but he needed support to create multilingual Metadata regarding the photographs, handling the captions and helping with the upload. Multilingual metadata was important to include as it helps the Punjabi community to search and access the data easily. User:Gurdeepdali who is an independent photographer worked as an online Wikimedian-in-Residence for the project.

File:Amarjit Chandan-Chandigarh-1979-Pic Dev Inder. CC BY-S.A 4.0.

As of 19 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.

Aside from helping illustrate articles on Punjabi personalities on Punjabi and English Wikipedias, the images help capture lives of Punjabis across three continents. Chandan was born in Kenya where his father was a political activist as well. He moved to India at the age of eleven in 1957 and eventually migrated to the UK in 1980.

In 2020, both collaborators were excited to start work on it then in 2020, but the pandemic, COVID-19, meant we couldn’t run in-person events that were planned for this. We still went ahead with the wiki content work, and Punjabi Wikimedians are currently planning to organise an online editathon to add more photographs to relevant Wikipedia articles. You can get in touch with gillteshu@gmail.com or sonichotian@gmail.com for any future plans, and we welcome any multilingual editors who can help add the images to articles in various languages.

If you’re interested in how you can get started with your own cultural heritage project as part of a GLAM organisation, we’ve got a series of free webinars for any cultural heritage professionals. There’s just two more webinars in 2021, on the 9th November and the 2nd of December, sign up here.

2021 Palestine-Wales editathon

By Robin Owain, Wales Programme Manager for Wikimedia UK

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.

Wikipedians from both communities listed the most important articles from their respective languages and translated them as a token of friendship. The wikiproject contributed to reducing the cultural as well as content gap on Wikipedia, and strengthened the bond between the State of Palestine and Wales, both Levantine and Welsh communities.

Half way through the programme, the organisers reached out to the Cornish editors who flocked over to the project in droves. They created a list of subjects based on Cornwall (for example, King Doniert’s Stone (Cornish, Welsh, Arabic, English, Stargazy pie and an article on the Cornish language revival) which were subsequently translated into Arabic and Welsh. This was their first Wikiproject and 7 editors participated; all in all, 32 editors contributed. There’s a Welsh saying that it’s easier for two mountains to get together, than two people; in this case we got three mountains!

The themes were mostly cultural: food, places of interest, women of note, education and COVID-19. Among the articles written in Arabic and Cornish on Wales were, Gwenno Saunders (English, Arabic, Welsh, Cornish), bara brith loaf and Aberystwyth University. The Cornish editors created 44 new articles, just shy of the Palestine editors who wrote 57 articles, and the Welsh community created 142 new articles.

In the context of languages, perhaps the winners are the Cornish speakers. There are 300 million Arabic speakers, 750,000 Welsh speakers and around 2,000 Cornish speakers. However, the number of articles per language was:

Cornish – 44

Arabic – 57

Welsh – 142

So the winner is… all 3 communities!

Ada Lovelace day 24 hour global editathon

On the 12th October, an international 24 hour editing marathon will start in Aotearoa New Zealand to improve the coverage of women in Wikipedia. The relay of volunteer editing starts midday in Aotearoa and continues with Australians joining in, passing the baton from timezone to timezone. The event in the UK starts at 2pm UK time finishing back in Aotearoa New Zealand 10 hours later.

The event runs for a whole day to ensure that anyone with access to a computer, anywhere in the world, can join at a time when they are free to. In the UK with the easing of covid restrictions, it is possible to join either in person or online.

Participants will learn how to edit Wikipedia, working from redlists of notable women in science and mathematics who do not yet have Wikipedia articles. Everyone’s efforts will be contributing to reducing the online gender gap.

The event is organised by the international group Women in Red, a volunteer organisation within Wikipedia whose aim is to reduce the gender gap in the disportionate number of Wikipedia biographies devoted to men. It takes its name from red links in the online encyclopedia; ones which are yet to have a corresponding article. Women in Red was started six years ago in Mexico by two volunteers, a British and an American, and now has thousands of followers and hundreds of active editors but no budget, office, or hierarchy. When the group was formed, 85% of Wikipedia biographies were about men. Since then the community has created over 167,000 new articles about women, at a rate of about 70 a day. Together participants work in parallel on Wikipedias in over 30 other languages to reduce the online gender gap and give visibility to notable women from the past and present.

The date chosen, 12th October, is Ada Lovelace Day, named after the 19th century British mathematician, daughter of the mathematician Lady Byron and Lord Byron. Ada is regarded as the world’s first computer programmer. Ada Lovelace Day celebrates women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics).

The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia began in 2001 and now has 6 million articles in English and over twenty million more in hundreds of other languages. It is now the eighth most visited website and one of the few that is run by a non-profit. The Wikimedia Foundation, based in San Francisco, keeps Wikipedia running but major decisions about its content and future direction are made by the global community. All the content is written and kept up to date by about 250,000 active volunteers around the world.

For more information on how to join the UK editathon see the Wikipedia event page. For more detail on the global event go to WikiAda24.org.

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

By Lucy Crompton-Reid, Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK

On 16th March 2020, the UK Prime Minister asked the nation to stop non-essential contact and travel; a week before the start of what we now know to be a series of ‘lockdowns’ designed to contain Covid-19. I was working from home that day and immediately called my colleague Davina Johnson, Director of Finance and Operations for Wikimedia UK, to discuss bringing forward the closure of the office. As she works part-time and was therefore not in the office either, we decided that we would both go in the next day – along with any other staff who wanted to do so – to gather files, equipment and other things that we thought we might need if we were working remotely for a few weeks or months.

Of course, it has turned out to be a lot longer than a few weeks. Writing this blog post at the end of September 2021, I have been in the London office a total of four times since March last year. Whilst some staff have been in the office more regularly (notably Davina, along with a new Operations Coordinator who joined the team in July this year), most have been working at home throughout the pandemic. This has brought some unique challenges, as many of you reading this will be familiar with, but it has also brought some unexpected benefits. Programme Coordinators based in Scotland and Wales noted how, with everyone working from home, they felt more connected to the rest of the team. More effort has been made to share information online, and to find new ways of engaging with each other away from the office; and remote staff were not, as in former times, half forgotten as we all trudged into the meeting room and handed around biscuits and cups of tea while someone tried to make the AV work for a hybrid staff meeting.

Maintaining this feeling of parity and a shared organisational culture regardless of where staff are based is only going to become more important to Wikimedia UK. For one thing, our team has grown over the past year, and we now have five staff who are fully remote, while ten are notionally based in our London office. As we emerge from the pandemic, we are also moving to a hybrid model of working, in which staff will only be expected to work in the office on agreed days and for specific purposes.

Earlier this year, the Board of Trustees considered the options for future working, looking at what it might mean for the organisation to become wholly virtual, to return to office-based working, or to embrace more flexible working. They all agreed that as a small charity working within the socio-technological space, we have the opportunity to create a work culture and environment that combines the best of home working with intentional moments of in person gatherings across our staff, board and wider community for strategising, creative exploration and social connection.

In practice, we are moving to hybrid working whilst the country still grapples with Covid-19. Although all staff are now fully vaccinated, case numbers continue to be high and include ‘breakthrough’ infections in people who have had the vaccine. We have therefore put in place a series of measures to try to reduce the risk to staff and guests, and to make a gradual return to using the office as safe as we can for everyone. These include a requirement for a negative lateral flow test for any staff, board member or visitor to the office. For the time being we are also 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.

As a small organisation, we have the luxury of creating something that works for everyone, and takes individual preferences into account. But we will almost certainly make mistakes along the way. Over the next six months – or perhaps even longer – we will need to codify our expectations for how often staff will be in the office, and within what parameters they will be required to attend external meetings and events. We also want to consult with members and volunteers about their needs, and the shape of future community-focused activities. For anyone trying to reach us, email is probably still the best route. Whilst staff are now starting to return to the office, we can’t guarantee that there will always be someone there to answer the phones. It will probably be some months before we can be really clear with our stakeholders and the wider general public about how ‘open’ our London office really is; and I hope you will bear with us as we navigate this new reality. For now though, I’m just pleased to be able to meet up with staff and board members in person for the first time in 18 months. It’s been a long haul.

Connected Heritage webinars

As part of the National Lottery funded Digital Skills for Heritage initiative, Wikimedia UK is running webinars to showcase what Wiki-based platforms and digital skills can offer organisations in a GLAM heritage context.

Our webinars will cover open knowledge, the digital skills gap, digital preservation and how WMUK is addressing those issues through this project. Participants will be 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.

You need only attend one webinar: sessions are free, open and no prior Wiki experience is required. We hope to see you there!

Webinar dates

Friday 8 October at 10am; [Eventbrite]
Thursday 14 October at 2pm; [Eventbrite]
Friday 15 October at 10am; [Eventbrite]
Thursday 21 October at 2pm; [Eventbrite]

Webinar leaders

Lucy Hinnie

Hello, I’m Dr Lucy Hinnie and I’m really excited to take on this new role as part-time Digital Skills Wikimedian on the Digital Skills for Heritage project. I was drawn to the public-facing relationship-building of this role, and the intersection of Wikimedia and the heritage, cultural and education sectors.

I’ve been working with Wikimedia UK in some capacity since March 2021, when I took on the role of Wikimedian-in-Residence at the British Library. I am passionate about engaging people, working with new ideas, concepts and ways of knowing. I believe in the power of open knowledge as a tool for social change, and in empowering people to tell their own stories.

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Leah Emary

My name is Leah Emary and I have recently started working alongside Lucy Hinnie at Wikimedia UK as a Digital Skills Wikimedian on the Connected Heritage project. The project is headed up by Richard Nevell and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Together we will be working with people at heritage organisations to contribute knowledge and open resources on topics which are currently underrepresented across Wikimedia projects.

I am new to Wikimedia UK but have worked as an academic librarian in the UK and the USA and hope to continue to pursue the values which attracted me to librarianship: sharing resources and knowledge and engaging with digital and information literacies. I began teaching students and colleagues to edit Wikipedia a few years ago and find it good fun. Crucially, it’s a great method for teaching digital skills along with information literacies and critical approaches to knowledge authority.

Celebrating #WCCWiki at 50!

By Dr Victoria Leonard, FRHistS

In July 2021, #WCCWiki marked an important milestone. The initiative, designed to improve the online representation of those who identify as women and non-binary, held its fiftieth Wikipedia editathon. Since 2016 when the initiative began, our community has come together each month to edit Wikipedia pages for women and non-binary people, share resources and practical tips for editing, and to offer training for those new to the task. Organised through the Women’s Classical Committee UK, #WCCWiki has done fantastic work in transforming the online representation of classicists who identify as women and non-binary, and helping to challenge Wikipedia’s intractable gender gap. Classics is very broadly conceived, including historians, archaeologists, theorists, translators, poets, and others who work on the ancient world.

But the implications of our success reach far beyond one platform. #WCCWiki has spread awareness and understanding of Wikipedia and why it’s so important, especially to those invested in knowledge transfer, as much of our community is. We have upskilled classicists to use and improve Wikipedia, tools which have then been transferred into classrooms around the world. We have built an activist network based on solidarity and dynamic action, and we have demonstrated how hard-won research skills really are transferable and can make a huge difference to environments beyond grant applications and writing articles.

Julia Caldwell Frazier was one of the classicists to have a new entry written about them on the English Wikipedia in 2021.

Before #WCCWiki got started, the heritage of women and non-binary people in classics, both historical and contemporary, was a largely unrepresented online demographic. An estimate in 2016 found that only 7% of biographies of classicists on Wikipedia featured women. #WCCWiki has worked hard to make this demographic a highly visible and accessible part of classics.

We’ve created or edited more than 450 Wikipedia pages for those classicists who identify as women and non-binary, including path-breaking foremothers who were only referred to on their husband’s pages, such as Dr Miriam T. Griffin, Dr Annie Ure, and Professor Leslie Brubaker. One of our long-standing members, Richard Nevell, calculated that, as of 28 July 2021, 17.7% of the total of biographies of classicists on Wikipedia feature women. This is a significant rise from December 2019 when the number of biographies of women classicists was 16.3%. With every month, the proportion of Wikipedia biographies featuring classicists who identify as women or non-binary continues to increase.

Our pace of change means that on average every other day, a page for a woman or non-binary person is created or edited. #WCCWiki articles have featured regularly on Wikipedia’s front page and an increasing number have achieved Good Article status. #WCCWiki franchises have been inspired internationally, from Durham in the UK, to Winnipeg in Canada, to Ohio in the US. Our Wikipedia pages have been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, and we have boosted their impact on social media, mainly on Twitter, where posts have reached 50,000+ people.

Richard’s calculations demonstrate the huge leaps #WCCWiki is taking, especially in comparison with Wikipedia in other languages. 34% of new articles about classicists on the English Wikipedia created between December 2019 and July 2021 feature women, which is twice that of the German Wikipedia, and triple that of French. Whilst #WCCWiki edits and creates pages in a variety of languages, English does predominate. Richard’s stats reveal the gender bias on Wikipedia without initiatives like #WCCWiki working against them.

A graph showing the percentage of biographies on different Wikipedia about classicists that are women. Created by Richard Nevell using data in denelezh and queries on 28 July 2021

Initiatives like #WCCWiki and the Wikiproject Women In Red are still essential in tackling Wikipedia’s gender gap. Between 84% and 91% of Wikipedia editors are male, and only around 19% of biographical pages feature women overall. At 17.7%, the representation of those classicists who identify as women and non-binary still lags behind the more general gendered trend. So, there is much more to do. Everyone is welcome to join us online as we edit together on or around 22^nd of each month, 13.00-15.00 GMT+1. For more information, check out our Project Page, and #WCCWiki on Twitter. Now we’re looking forward to our 100^th editathon, come and join the party!

Towards a National Collection

TOWARDS A NATIONAL COLLECTION: WIKIMEDIA UK AND PARTNERS WORKING TOWARDS INCREASED AND DIVERSIFIED ENGAGEMENT

£14.5m awarded to transform online exploration of UK’s culture and heritage collections through harnessing innovative AI.

In order to connect the UK’s cultural artefacts and historical archives in new and transformative ways, The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has awarded £14.5m to the research and development of emerging technologies, including machine learning and citizen-led archiving.

Five major projects form the largest investment of Towards a National Collection, a five-year research programme. The announcement reveals the first insights into how thousands of disparate collections could be explored by public audiences and academic researchers in the future.

The five ‘Discovery Projects’ will harness the potential of new technology to dissolve barriers between collections. They will open up public access and facilitate research across a range of sources and stories held in different physical locations. One of the central aims is to empower and diversify audiences by involving them in the research and creating new ways for them to access and interact with collections. In addition to innovative online access, the projects will generate artist commissions, community fellowships, computer simulations, and travelling exhibitions.

Daria Cybulska, Director of Programmes and Evaluation at Wikimedia UK said “We were delighted that two Discovery Projects we are involved in were selected for this round of funding by the AHRC. Increasing and diversifying access to UK’s collections and supporting open research is of strategic importance for Wikimedia UK. Through our involvement we will aim to demonstrate the benefits of open knowledge, especially for public engagement, and its abilities to help dissolve barriers between separate collections. We see an exciting amount of overlap between the projects we are directly supporting and our priorities, for example amplifying underrepresented community heritage in the Our Heritage, Our Stories project, and linked open data, including Wikidata in the Congruence Engine project.”

The investigation is the largest of its kind to date. It extends across the UK, involving 15 universities and 63 heritage collections and institutions of different scales, with over 120 individual researchers and collaborators.

Together, the Discovery Projects represent a vital step in the UK’s ambition to maintain leadership in cross-disciplinary research, both between different humanities disciplines and in their work with other sectors. Towards a National Collection will set a global standard for other countries building their own collections, enhancing collaboration between the UK’s renowned heritage and national collections worldwide.

Read more about the two Discovery Projects Wikimedia UK are engaged in:

The Congruence Engine: Digital Tools for New Collections-Based Industrial Histories

Principal Investigator: Dr Timothy Boon, Science Museum Group

Project partners: British Film Institute, National Museums Scotland, Historic Buildings & Monuments Commission for England (Historic England/English Heritage), National Museum Wales, National Museums Northern Ireland, The National Archives, National Trust, The V&A, universities of Leeds, London, and Liverpool, BBC History, Birmingham Museums Trust, BT Heritage & Archives, Grace’s Guide to Industrial History, Isis Bibliography of the History of Science, Saltaire World Heritage Education Association, Society for the History of Technology, Whipple Museum of the History of Science (Tools of Knowledge Project), Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums (Discovery Museum), Bradford Museums and Galleries, Wikimedia UK and Manchester Digital Laboratory (MadLab).

The Congruence Engine will create the prototype of a digital toolbox for everyone fascinated by our industrial past to connect an unprecedented range of items from the nation’s collection to tell the stories they want to tell. What was it like then? How does our past bear on our present and future? Until now, historians and curators have become acclimated to a world where it has only been possible to work with a small selection of the sources – museum objects, archive documents, pictures, films, maps, publications etc – potentially relevant to the history they want to explore.

The Congruence Engine will use the latest digital techniques to connect collections held in different locations to overcome this major constraint on the histories that can be created and shared with the wider public in museums, publications and online. Digital researchers will work alongside professional and community historians and curators.

Through iterative exploration of the textiles, energy and communications sectors, the project will tune collections-linking software to make it responsive to user needs. It will use computational and AI techniques – including machine learning and natural language processing – to create and refine datasets, provide routes between records and digital objects such as scans and photographs, and create the tools by which participants will be able to enjoy and use the sources that are opened to them.

Our Heritage, Our Stories: Linking and searching community-generated digital content to develop the people’s national collection

Principal Investigator: Professor Lorna Hughes, University of Glasgow

Project partners: The National Archives, Tate, British Museum, University of Manchester, Association for Learning Technology, Digital Preservation Coalition, Software Sustainability Institute, Archives+, Dictionaries of the Scots Language, National Lottery Heritage Fund, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland & Wikimedia UK

In the past two decades communities have gathered, recorded, and digitised their collections in a form of ‘citizen history’ that has created a truly democratic and vast reservoir of new knowledge about the past, known as community-generated digital content (CGDC). However, CGDC has proved extraordinarily resistant to traditional methods of linking and integration, for lack of infrastructure and the multilingual, multidialectal, and multicultural complexity of the content.

Our Heritage, Our Stories will dissolve existing barriers and develop scalable linking and discoverability for CGDC, through co-designing and building sophisticated automated AI-based tools to discover and assess CGDC ‘in the wild’, in order to link it and make it searchable. This new accessibility will be showcased through a major public-facing CGDC Observatory at The National Archives, where people can access, reuse, and remix these newly-integrated collections.

The project will make CGDC more discoverable and accessible whilst respecting and embracing its complexity and diversity. Through this, it will help tell the stories of communities through their rich collections of CGDC, which are at present hidden from wider view. By dissolving barriers between these and showcasing their content, the project will help centre diverse community-focused voices within our shared national collection.

Further information & images press@wikimedia.org.uk

Competition Winners, Wiki Loves Earth, Wales

By Robin Owain, Wales Programme Manager at Wikimedia UK

This year Wales took part in the international photography competition ‘Wiki Loves Earth’ organised by the Wikimedia movement. Founded 9 years ago as a focus for nature heritage, the competition raises awareness of protected species and sites globally.

Cymraeg: Mae Mynydd Marian yn gartref i amrywiaeth eang o blanhigion ac anifeiliaid ond yn enwog am y glesyn serennog. English: Silver studded blue (Plebejus argus) at Mynydd Marian SSSI, Conwy, Wales. More on Mynydd Marian SSSI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mynydd_Marian — Second Placed entry Silver Studded Blue Mynydd Marian, North Wales, SSSI

Wikimedia UK and the National Library of Wales coordinated the WikiLovesEarth, Wales, a project, which saw 1,888 new images uploaded to Commons from National Parks, Sites of Special Scientific Interest, Sites of Outstanding Natural Beauty and other protected areas in Wales. This was done in partnership with a number of large organizations including Natural Resources Wales, Pembrokeshire and Snowdonia National Park, the Welsh Mountaineering Club, Edward Llwyd nature society, WiciMon and others.

Just after the easing of lockdown we ventured to ogwen Valley to catch the milky way arch. — Third placed entry Llyn Ogwen Milky Way, photographed by John Badham

Iestyn Hughes, one of the judges from Wales said, “It was a pleasure to see such an enthusiastic response to this competition from so many photographers. The top ten images edged ahead in a field of some two thousand entries, and display both excellent technical quality and empathy with their subject matter.”

Our second Judge, Wildlife Photographer and Author Jean Nappier, said “The standard of the images was very high especially the wildlife images of the seabirds”

English: Puffin (Fratercula arctica) above The Wick (Y Wig) on Skomer Island, Pembrokeshire, Wales. Running for its burrow with lesser sand eels (Ammodytes tobianus). — Runner up: Puffin (”Fratercula arctica”) on Skomer Island, Pembrokeshire, Wales, Charles J. Sharp

With 1,888 images taken, Wales is in the 7th position (out of 33 competing countries, just in front of Sweden, Italy and Spain); the percentage of images used on Wikipedia, to date, is also one of the highest in the competition, at 17%, with 38 uploaders (photographers) competing. The number of uploaders registered after the competition start was slightly lower than the norm, at 68%. In the last couple of months, the 323 images used on Wikipedia articles have been viewed 1.3 million times!

Jason Evans, National Wikimedian said that “The National Library of Wales was thrilled to co-host this years Wiki Loves Earth Wales contest, along with our partners Wikimedia UK as part of our wide and varied digital outreach programme. The level of engagement and the standard of photography was fantastic to see and the winning images are a testament to our rich and diverse natural environment.”

The winning photo from Wales is of a protected species, a brown hare, by Alun Williams, himself a very keen ornithologist and naturalist, and a member of Llen Natur. Wikimedia UK has worked closely with Llen Natur over the last 6 years. Williams, who also took the photo which came 2nd, is a retired headteacher from Llanrwst.

English: Brown hare (Lepus europaeus). An animal which has become extremely rare in Wales. More here on Lepus europaeus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_hare Cymraeg: Yr ysgyfarnog, sy'n anffodus wedi prinhau'n arw yng Nghymru. — The Winning entry, photographed by Alun Williams

Robin Owain, Wikimedia UK Manager (Wales) was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the images saying “the quality is surprisingly good and helps us record of the state of play for some of the protected species in Wales. Working on a global level in this way we can highlight our concerns about the effect of global warming, and celebrate the work done to preserve these species and habitats with our partners.”

You can view the 10 wonderful Welsh winning images here.

WLE Wales Website on Commons here.

View the stats from the competition here.

Virtual Volunteering with the National Galleries of Scotland

Over the course of lockdown in Scotland, we’ve seen a variety of responses to the conditions of the pandemic reflected in our partnership work. At the National Library of Scotland, staff worked to upload and transcribe the Scottish Chapbook collection to Wikisource. Student internships adapted and moved online/remote, and Wikimedia UK rolled out online training for online trainers, so that we could better respond to requests for online training. And over the winter/spring period, we worked with the National Galleries of Scotland to roll out a Virtual Volunteering Programme.

Volunteer A: The chance to ‘Wiki edit’ has been a revelation to me! Although, (like everyone I know), I have used Wikipedia extensively I never thought it possible to actually contribute. The tuition sessions were really informative and I would recommend it to anyone to give it a try.

Following a conversation with a colleague in curatorial, Rebecca Pierce from the National Galleries of Scotland got in contact with me towards the end of 2020 to ask about running a mini editathon with some of their volunteers, to focus on female artists and sitters of works held in the Scottish Collection. We ran that event in December 2020, followed by another on 17th February 2021, and then 29th March 2021. The first two focussed on an introduction to editing Wikipedia, with the third looking in more depth at how to build a good biography, and integrate biographical information into the encyclopedia.

Volunteer B: Thank you also to Dr Sara for being so cheery and helpful and patient! I came away with a big smile, feeling very proud of myself and genuinely upskilled in something that I didn’t know a lot about before.

Rebecca was looking for ways to keep volunteers engaged over lockdown, when access to the Galleries, and thus the usual volunteering tasks, wasn’t possible. And indeed, it’s proven to be very popular amongst the volunteer pool, who so far, have contributed over 50 hours to the project.

Rebecca Pierce, NGS: Virtual volunteering is quite far removed from the usual way that the National Galleries of Scotland’s Volunteer Programme operates; so, adapting to create meaningful volunteer opportunities presented quite the challenge. Running new Wiki-editing initiatives has allowed us to create collaborative, supported, and flexible opportunities that can meet the interests of numerous volunteers. It has quickly become one of the most popular aspects of our online programme. Better yet, Wikipedia editing has allowed volunteers to further engage with the Collection and to raise the profiles of lesser known and underrepresented artists. During March, we hosted a month-long edit in celebration of International Women’s Day and volunteers contributed a phenomenal 50 hours towards creating and editing the pages of female Scottish artists. A truly fantastic result that could not have been achieved without the support of Dr Thomas and Wikimedia.

This is the kind of work that doesn’t have to stop when lockdown eases, and we’re already planning on how to continue with the Galleries. This type of volunteering can be done remotely, in-person, or in a hybrid fashion. Volunteers can carry out research at home and at their leisure, at hours that suit them, or could (once restrictions allow), go on-site to carry out research at one of the Gallery sites. Editing can be done in group settings or at the volunteer’s leisure, again in-person or remotely. This opens up digital volunteering opportunities to those for whom in-person events would present a challenge due to access requirements.

Volunteer C: I’m afraid that I got rather hooked and have spent a bit of time on some of my chosen subjects. Part of the fun is to find proper sources to back up the article or edit. This can take you on wonderful tangents and nooks and crannies of the internet and books and articles!

Even after the sessions had finished [Sara] was available and was able to help by email. I am now weeks into my research and keep finding more information…but I have to stop soon and publish!

A most enjoyable experience and a pleasure to be a Wikipedia editor and part of a worldwide family.

The availability of this activity during lockdown provided an interesting and worthwhile activity in which volunteers could engage, teaching them new skills and allowing a global audience for their work. For Wikimedia UK, it allows us to expand our pool of volunteer editors, the Scottish Wiki community, and to help contribute quality information on underrepresented content on the encyclopedia.

Volunteer D: The Wikipedia editing programme at the National Galleries of Scotland with Dr Sara Thomas has been a brilliant initiative to start being part of a collaborative worldwide team of editors! Thanks to these encouraging sessions of collective learning I began to learn the instruments and policies for sharing knowledge on Wikipedia and so to contribute to make it free, reliable, accurate and accessible to everyone.

Articles created or improved so far with the Virtual Volunteering group include Harriet Carr, Elizabeth Price, and Flora Macdonald Reid.

Our 2021 AGM and Community Day

By Katie Crampton, Communications and Governance Coordinator

We had a wonderful Annual General Meeting and Community Day on Saturday, and we’d like to thank all of our members, volunteers, trustees, staff and supporters who attended and made the day so special. Thanks to a large number of our members using their votes for our board elections we’re pleased to say we were quorate.

We had an excellent keynote from George Oates in discussion with Nick Poole, which you can catch in the full video of the event on our YouTube. We also heard from five superb lightning speakers; Lorna Campbell on the representation of HIV/AIDS activism on Wikipedia, Jason Evans on the Places of Wales, Dr Martin Poulter and Waqas Ahmed on their visual arts bias research, Dr. Kirsty Ross on the IDEA Network at the University of St Andrews, and Cas Libre on the Core Contest.

Elections

We voted in three trustees, welcoming two new candidates Julian Akodoye Manieson, and Caroline Ball, and re-electing Rod Ward, with huge thanks to all six candidates who put themselves forward for the board this year. We’re excited to welcome new skills onto the board, and retain such a valuable board member in Rod. We also passed all proposed resolutions, allowing the charity to keep running smoothly for the next year.

At the meeting, Nick Poole also announced that following his departure from the board at the end of the meeting, which marked six years since he was elected as a trustee, Lorna Campbell would be stepping in as Interim Chair until October. Nick welcomed our new co-opted trustee and Chair Elect, Monisha Shah. We’d like to thank Nick Poole and Doug Taylor for their outstanding contributions to the board, both as advocates for the chapter and in their unique skills they freely offer to the staff team.

Awards

UK Wikimedian of the Year

Marco Cafolla won the award for their efforts supporting the Scots Wikipedia. They have been a key part of the wiki, organising editathons which not only improved content but fostered a community of editors working together. Having people within a community who can step up and organise is invaluable, and those efforts mean that Scots Wikipedia is improving ever

Honourable Mention goes to Ian Watt who is a tremendously active volunteer and advocate for open knowledge, working with Commons, Wikidata, and Wikipedia. Over the last year he has run public-facing workshops and editathons, and he is hosting and supervising an Edinburgh University post-grad student running a mass transcription of the Register of Returned Criminals (1869-1939).

Up-and-Coming Wikimedian of the Year

Awarded jointly to Abd Alsattar Ardati and Lucy Moore. Abd is one of Wikimedia UK’s accredited trainers and has been proactive in helping his university engage with Wikimedia; his efforts have helped WMUK adapted to the methodology of online training. Lucy is another excellent advocate for Wikimedia – she has organised events at her place of work and encourages people in the museum and archaeology sectors to work with Wikimedia; she is also an active editor and writes articles addressing Wikipedia’s content imbalances.

Partnership of the Year

London College of Communication won the award for the Decolonising Wikipedia Network was set up in 2020 involving students and staff to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of under-represented topics. The Student Changemakers (who had a prominent role in leading the decolonisation efforts) were powerful advocates for the project and presented to staff and fellow students. The successful project will expand over the next academic year to include the whole of University of Arts, London, of which LCC is a part.

Honourable Mention goes to the Scotland, Slavery and Black History project at the University of Edinburgh. History students were invited to improve public knowledge of Scotland’s Black history, and to help make Scotland’s deep connections to Atlantic slavery better understood. They have provided videos on their reflections on this work to local Edinburgh secondary schools who are also interested in Dundas and improving black history on Wikipedia.

Honorary members

We’re pleased to award honorary membership, which waives the requirement to pay an annual membership fee, to Rosie Chapman, Mike Peel and Martin Poulter. Honorary Members have the same rights and responsibilities as regards to the charity as any other member, and do not constitute a separate class of membership. The board reviews its recognition of all Honorary Members at least annually. The memberships were awarded by the Board of Trustees in recognition of the outstanding contributions to the chapter; Rosie for her support in governance for the last six years, Mike for his valuable contributions during the early days of the chapter, and Martin for being an outstanding advocate and contributor in his work as Resident and beyond.

Thank you again to everyone who made Saturday so enjoyable, and welcome to our new trustees. If you’d like to become a member so you can vote in future AGMs and help shape the charity’s governance and strategy, please sign up here.