Page 11 – WMUK

What does decolonisation mean for Wikipedia?

By Richard Nevell, Project Coordinator at Wikimedia UK

Wikipedia is a magnificent tool for sharing knowledge with an enormous reach. Its pages are read 20 billion times every month. But like the world around us, it reflects some long-standing inequalities. At Wikimedia UK one of our strategic priorities is to increase the engagement and representation of marginalised people and subjects. We want to challenge these inequalities and help redress them by sharing information.

Universities and museums – keystones of education and heritage communication – are currently working out how to decolonise their curriculum and their collections. Doing so widens the variety of voices in interpreting and understanding our heritage. Within the context of higher education, courses often focus on the work of white, western people. Decolonisation aims to bring more diverse research into the curriculum.

Finding the best path to decolonisation can be tricky. Removing a subject from a curriculum, or a group of authors from a reading list, does not address the underlying structural inequalities which mean that reading lists tend to be predominantly white. Widening the range of sources used and exploring how the colonial past influences how particular subjects are approached and researched today is important.

Wikipedia itself needs to be decolonised. It began as an English language project, and while it is available in more than 300 languages English is still by far the largest. The dominance of English and a small group of languages risks eroding smaller languages. For people who speak more than one language, they tend to gravitate to where there is more content – even if it is in a language they are less fluent in. While language is an issue, it is one factor that Wikipedia needs to address and it extends to the content of our pages. The Wikipedia article about historians has images of eight people – all of whom are male and European.

Wikimedia UK is taking active steps to combat this. We run events improving Wikipedia’s coverage of under-represented subjects; we support residencies such as those at Coventry University and the Khalili Collections; and we run an annual conference supporting small language communities, the Celtic Knot. The conference has showcased the work of Welsh, Cornish, Irish, and Suomi communities amongst others and helped foster their work.

Coventry University has a programme of activity which aims to decolonise the curriculum, and our Wikimedian in Residence there, Andy Mabbett, is helping lecturers use Wikipedia as a way students can make information about a wide range of topics more accessible. The Khalili Collections comprise 35,000 items, including collections about Islamic art and Japanese culture. The Resident, Martin Poulter, has been sharing information about the collections through Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons, bringing them to a new audience. The images are already seen by a million people a month through Wikimedia.

We are working with organisations such the London College of Communications who have established a Decolonising Wikipedia Network. In the process of learning about Wikipedia and how it works, the students have an opportunity to redress some of the imbalances within Wikipedia. Many of our events try to highlight marginalised communities and figures who have otherwise been overlooked by Wikipedia; it is an ongoing process, often culturally sensitive and one which will take years.

Welcome to the British Library’s new Wikimedian in Residence

By Lucy Hinnie, Wikimedian in Residence at the British Library, on Twitter at BL_Wikimedian

Hello, I’m Dr Lucy Hinnie and I’ve just joined the Digital Scholarship team at the British Library as the new Wikimedian-in-Residence, in conjunction with Wikimedia UK and the Eccles Centre. My role is to work with the Library to develop and support colleagues with projects using Wikidata, Wikibase and Wikisource.

I am delighted to be working alongside Wikimedia UK in this new role. Advocacy for both the development of open knowledge and the need for structural change has never been more pressing, and the opportunity to work with Wikimedia and the British Library to deliver meaningful change is immeasurably exciting.

Bringing underrepresented people and marginalised communities to the fore is a huge part of this remit, and I am looking to be as innovative in our partnerships as we can be, with a view to furthering the movement towards decolonisation. I’m going to be working with curators and members of staff throughout the Library to identify and progress opportunities to accelerate this work.

I have recently returned from a two-year stay in Canada, where I lived and worked on Treaty Six territory and the homeland of the Métis. Working and living in Saskatchewan was a hugely formative experience for me, and highlighted the absolute necessity of forward-thinking, reconciliatory work in decolonisation.

2020 was my year of immersion in Wikimedia – I participated in a number of events, including outreach work by Dr Erin O’Neil at the University of Alberta, Women in Red edit-a-thons with Ewan McAndrew at the University of Edinburgh and the Unfinished Business edit-a-thon run by Leeds Libraries and the British Library. In December 2020 I coordinated and ran my own Wikithon in conjunction with the National Library of Scotland, as part of my postdoctoral project ‘Digitising the Bannatyne MS’.

Front page of the Bannatyne MS, National Library of Scotland, Adv MS 1.1.6. (CC BY 4.0)

Since coming into post at the start of this March I have worked hard to make connections with organisations such as IFLA, Code the City and Art+Feminism. I’ve also been creating introductory materials to engage audiences with Wikidata, and thinking about how best to utilise the coming months.

Andrew Gray took up post as the first British Library Wikipedian in Residence nearly ten years ago, you can read more about this earlier residency here and here. So much has changed since then, but reflection on the legacy of Wikimedia activity is a crucial part of ensuring that the work we do is useful, engaging, vibrant and important. I want to use creative thinking to produce output that opens up BL digital collections in relevant, culturally sensitive and engaging ways.

I am excited to get started! I’ll be posting on the British Library’s Digital Scholarship blog regularly about my residency, so please do subscribe to the blog to follow my progress.

Wikimedia UK receives funding to boost digital development in heritage organisations

Wikimedia UK, the national charity for the global Wikimedia movement is among the successful organisations awarded funding by The National Lottery Heritage Fund Digital Skills for Heritage initiative, to raise digital skills and confidence across the UK heritage sector. National Lottery funded Digital Skills for Heritage has expanded thanks to an additional £1 million from the Government’s £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund.

Wikimedia UK’s project ‘Developing open knowledge skills, tools and communities of practice for sustainable digital preservation’ is one of 12 grants announced today, awarded to address three distinct areas; driving digital innovation and enterprise, providing answers to organisations’ most pressing concerns, and empowering collaborative work to achieve common aims.

Digital skills are more relevant and necessary than ever as heritage organisations affected by the coronavirus pandemic look toward a more resilient future. In October 2020, The National Lottery Heritage Fund published the findings of its survey of over 4,000 staff, trustees and volunteers at 281 heritage organisations, identifying the current digital skills and attitudes of the sector. The results highlighted what tools and training organisations needed to weather the coronavirus pandemic and move forward into a more resilient and creative future.

Wikimedia UK has a strong track record of collaborating across heritage and cultural organisations, developing strategies to embed open knowledge and engaging with wider virtual audiences. Over two years £119,000 funding will develop skills, tools and communities of practice for the sustainable digital preservation of heritage. Engagement will be through a range of opportunities, from short webinars explaining the role of open knowledge and the scope it holds for sharing and engaging in collections, through to close collaboration on the development and delivery of strategic plans for open knowledge; enabling participating organisations to ensure that heritage is better explained as well as preserved for the long term.

Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK, Lucy Crompton-Reid, said “Wikimedia UK is excited to have been awarded funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to deliver this vital and timely project. Our ambition is to equip heritage staff and volunteers with the skills and tools to share their content and collections online, with a particular focus on increasing access to underrepresented cultural heritage. We look forward to working in partnership with the heritage sector to make this happen, and to ensure that the extraordinary reach and longevity of Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects benefits everyone.”

Josie Fraser, Head of Digital Policy at The National Lottery Heritage Fund, said, “Throughout the coronavirus pandemic we have all seen the essential role that digital skills have played in helping heritage organisations continue to work, communicate and connect. We are proud that our National Lottery funded Digital Skills for Heritage projects have provided the sector with practical support when it has been most needed.

“The £1 million Culture Recovery Fund boost from DCMS recognises the value of digital skills and allows us to expand the initiative. These new grants focus on what organisations have told us they need most – digital innovation, enterprise and business skills to improve and rethink how the sector operates.”

Caroline Dinenage, Minister for Digital and Culture, said,
“I have been really impressed by the innovative ways that sites and projects have already pivoted during the pandemic, but now more than ever it is essential that our heritage sector has the latest digital skills to bring our history to life online. This £1 million boost from the Culture Recovery Fund will ensure that staff and volunteers have the skills they need to keep caring for the past and conserving for the future through the sector’s reopening and recovery.”

Read more about the awards here.

Further information & images: press@wikimedia.org.uk

About The National Lottery Heritage Fund
Using money raised by the National Lottery, we Inspire, lead and resource the UK’s heritage to create positive and lasting change for people and communities, now and in the future. Website: www.heritagefund.org.uk.

Follow @HeritageFundUK on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and use #NationalLotteryHeritageFund and #HereForDigital

Women EmpowerED: Wikipedia Editathon

By Sarah Lappin, final year computer science and artificial intelligence student at the University of Edinburgh, and President for Edinburgh University Women in STEM (EUWiSTEM).

In Summer 2020, I organised my first Wikipedia Editathon as part of the Women in STEM Connect series. With an eye-opening talk, physicist and Wikipedia diversity advocate, Dr Jess Wade introduced me to the issue of underrepresentation on Wikipedia and left me, and seemingly all our attendees, feeling inspired to start editing Wikipedia. With training from University of Edinburgh Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan McAndrew, and a total of 15 editors, we were able to contribute fourteen thousand words, edit forty-two articles and add five new articles to Wikipedia by the end of the event. I created my first Wikipedia article on Dr Jessica Borger, an Australian T-Cell immunologist, and caught the editing bug!

To celebrate International Womens’ Day 2021, Edinburgh University Women in STEM (EUWiSTEM) has joined forces with 5 other female and gender minority lead societies: Edinburgh University Women in Business, Women in Law, Women in Politics and International Relations, EconWomen, and Hoppers, the society of women and gender minorities in Informatics. Together we are hosting Women EmpowerED, a week-long celebration aiming to showcase the achievements of women in different fields and discuss the issues women currently face, with a focus on cross-disciplinary inclusion.

The theme of International Womens’ Day 2021 is #ChooseToChallenge. Fitting with that theme, it is important we acknowledge the achievements of diversity and inclusion initiatives but it is equally crucial that we continue to challenge the norms and push for further improvements. Women EmpowerED has chosen to kick-off our celebrations on March 6th with an event that fits these aims perfectly – a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. At this event, we aim to improve the representation of women and gender minorities on Wikipedia, focusing on those who have chosen to challenge societal norms, and inspirational women in the host societies’ fields. Ewan McAndrew will be providing editing training during the event, helping us to make Wikipedia editing accessible to all.

We are pleased to be welcoming Bruce and John Usher Professor of Public Health in the Usher Institute, Dr Linda Bauld, to give a talk on the importance of representation online at the Edit-a-thon. Online platforms now have a massive influence on society, and most of these platforms are rife with internet ‘trolls’, and political agendas. As the fifth most visited website worldwide, and what is designed to be a source of reliable information for users, it is crucial that Wikipedia is free from bias and abuse. As Jess Wade explains in a 2018 TEDXLondon talk, “the majority of history has been written by men, about men, for other men.”

But we can start to change that through Wikipedia.

In our event, not only will we add and improve articles for women and gender minorities, but we also hope to increase the diversity of its editors, making a lasting impact on Wikipedia.

If you would like to learn how to edit articles or assist in our mission to improve diversity on Wikipedia, you can get tickets to our editathon on eventbrite.

For more information on Women EmpowerED visit our website.

The wiki gender gap and Women’s History Month

By Lucy Crompton-Reid, Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK.

Wikipedia’s vision is a world in which everyone has access to the sum of the world’s knowledge, but to do this, we must have representation from all the world’s voices. For the past five years Wikimedia UK has been working to address inequality and bias across the projects, with a key strategic aim being to increase the engagement and representation of marginalised people and subjects on Wikipedia. Whilst there are all sorts of ways in which structures of power and privilege can exclude people, during Women’s History Month we will be shining a light on the gender gap, and thinking critically about how women are represented on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects.

In a world where women are still systematically oppressed in many countries – and where, even in countries with gender equality written into the legislative framework, systemic bias still pervades – the ‘gender gap’ can feel like an intractable issue. We have seen how the Covid-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected women, and deepened pre-existing inequalities, despite men being more likely to die from the disease. Globally, according to the UN, even the limited gains made in the past decade on issues such as education, early marriage and political representation are at risk of being rolled back. Here in the UK, a report by the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee acknowledges the particular and disproportionate economic impact on people who are already vulnerable, and highlights how existing gendered inequalities have been ignored and sometimes exacerbated by the pandemic policy response.

Within this context, working to increase and improve the representation of women, non-binary people and related subjects on Wikimedia is more important than ever. If ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’ then we need to make sure that the world’s free knowledge resource – which is read more than 15 billion times a month – is telling everyone’s story. This includes women, people of colour, disabled people, LGBTQ+ folks and those living outside the United States and Western Europe. Those people, and those stories, exist – they don’t need to be written into Wikipedia to come alive. But for many of us, Wikipedia is the ‘first stop’ when we want to learn about the world. By writing women’s stories into Wikipedia and the wider information ecosystem – by making them more discoverable – we will be helping women around the world discover who they are and can be.

People of any gender can, and do, commit time and energy to addressing gender inequality on Wikimedia. This might be by creating new articles about women, training new female editors, raising awareness of the gender gap or myriad other things. Increasingly, editing Wikipedia is being recognised as a form of knowledge activism which helps to address gaps in information, and generate discussions about how knowledge and information is created, curated and contested online.

Fixing the gender gap on Wikimedia is a huge challenge. Much has been written about the reasons for this, as well as the many initiatives and tools that have been developed to try to address the lack of parity on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects. I’m not going to repeat that here, but instead I’m going to introduce some of the extraordinary people involved in this work. I’m pleased and proud that Wikimedia UK will be talking to the following four amazing women as part of a special Women’s History Month series of interviews, with one video to be released every Monday in March:

Kira Wisniewski, Executive Director of Art+Feminism – an intersectional feminist non-profit organisation that directly addresses the information gap about gender, feminism, and the arts on the internet.
Dr Rebecca O’Neill, Project Co-ordinator at Wikimedia Ireland, Vice-Chair of Women in Technology and Science Ireland and Secretary of the National Committee for Commemorative Plaques in Science and Technology.
Dr Victoria Leonard – Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Postdoctoral Researcher in Late Ancient History and Founder and Co-Chair of the Women’s Classical Committee – who will be talking about her work to increase the visibility of women in classics on Wikipedia, through #WCCWiki.
Dr Alice White, Digital Editor at Wellcome Collection and former Wikimedian in Residence at Wellcome Library.

I will be giving the final interview in March to round up the series and reflect on the future priorities, challenges and opportunities for Wikimedia and the gender gap.

Recognising our own privilege when it comes to knowledge and information is important. I feel very privileged to be writing this blogpost for Women’s History Month for Wikimedia UK; to have this platform when so many women’s voices aren’t heard. On that note, if there’s anything you would like me to include in my interview later this month, please let me know. I’m keen to hear about and to showcase all the different ways in which people and communities are addressing underrepresentation on Wikimedia, so please contact me on info@wikimedia.org.uk or by twitter (@lcromptonreid) if you would like me to share your story.

Introducing George Colbourn – our new Fundraising Development Coordinator

In January we started the year as we mean to go on, by ensuring that Wikimedia UK is sustainable for the future. We grew our fundraising capacity by recruiting George Colbourn for the newly created role of Fundraising Development Coordinator. George joins our Development and Communications Team, headed by Natasha Iles, and accompanied by Katie Crampton as Communications and Governance Coordinator.

George began working in the third sector when he interned at the American non-profit ‘Liberty in North Korea’. It was here that George learnt the basics of fundraising, campaigning and event planning. In six months, George travelled across 15 US states, raising awareness of the growing North Korean refugee crisis and how people in the West could lend their support.

Upon returning to the UK George started working for the Stroke Association, focusing on securing grants from Trusts and Foundations. In his two years at Stroke, he secured numerous grants for stroke support services, national campaigns and pioneering stroke research studies.

In 2018, George took a break from the charity world to embark on a part time Masters in Global Development. It was during his studies that George began to learn about the importance of open knowledge, and how access to free, reliable information is integral to social development. He found the Wikimedia projects integral to his studies.

When asked why he wanted to work for Wikimedia UK, George emphasised his ambition to be involved with an organisation that promotes the advancement of open knowledge in the UK and to focus his fundraising efforts on this cause.

We’re delighted to have George working with us, and in the month he’s been with us he’s already become a valuable asset to the team.

Editing Wikipedia: Stars, robots and talismans honours course

By Glaire Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Islamic Art at the University of Edinburgh.

I have steered my students away from Wikipedia for years, envisioning my role as a teacher to show students how to carry out ‘real’ research. But this year convinced me it was time to change my attitude, and so for 2020’s Fall term I put editing Wikipedia at the heart of Stars, Robots and Talismans: Science, Magic and Medieval Islamic Visual Culture, my fourth-year Honours module. I normally approach my undergraduate classes as workshops, encouraging collaborative experiments with digital tools, so experimenting with Wikipedia was a natural step. But unlike previous class experiments, I didn’t know the first thing about editing Wikipedia and neither did the students. And while a few of the students had studied Islamic art with me before, none came with any background in history of Islamic science and technology. Moreover, all of us were facing the uncertainties of our first online semester necessitated by Covid-19 restrictions. It was completely unfamiliar terrain that we would have to navigate together, in some cases while in different countries and time zones.

Glaire Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Islamic Art.

What better time for a new experiment?

Luckily for me, Edinburgh has its own Wikimedian-in-Residence, Ewan McAndrew, whose Wikimedia in Education guide (created by Wikimedia UK and the University of Edinburgh) provided a helpful overview of case studies that illustrate how other academics were using Wikipedia in the classroom. Ewan and I met and discussed my initial inspiration, which came from my colleague Stephennie Mulder’s experience with scrapping a traditional research paper in favour of Wikipedia editing in her Islamic art course at the University of Texas.

To work out the project logistics Ewan connected me with two other academics, Alex Chow, in Edinburgh’s School of Divinity and Sasha Litvintseva, in Film Studies, Queen Mary University of London, who generously shared their advice and experience. Thanks to them I was able to get the idea off and running quickly without having to reinvent the wheel. Following Mulder’s example, I asked my students to imagine they had been hired as consultants for a major museum. Their mission for my course was to use their art history research and writing skills to improve the public’s knowledge of Islamic science and the occult in advance of an exhibition. They were to research and improve an article by editing and adding new text to existing articles, adding bibliography. In addition to revising text and adding citations to existing articles I asked the students to illustrate them with images of scientific instruments and illustrated manuscripts. Thanks to Ewan, the students and I learned about a new landmark partnership between Wikimedia UK and the UK-based Khalili Collections, to release research content and high resolution images of world art masterpieces on Creative Commons licenses. The Khalili Collections encompass one of the world’s great assemblages of Islamic visual culture, including scientific instruments and manuscripts. This image component of the editing project gave the students experience with Wikimedia and introduced them to issues around image copyright, which is key for art historians.

I provided the students with a pre-selected list of Wikipedia articles keyed to our weekly course topics. Based on the topics they chose I divided them into small groups of 2 or 3 students and asked them to work collaboratively on the Wikipedia article (the groups also functioned as their autonomous learning groups, or ALGs for the term). At mid-term the groups would present briefly on what they had accomplished. Ewan set up a Wikipedia project page on Islamic Visual Culture with the list of target pages the students would be editing, and which provided helpful links to training and other resources. He also created a Dashboard page so that we could monitor and quantify the edits being made as part of the assignment. In the first week of the course he led the class through an optional live two-hour online Wikipedia training session to get the students started with Wikipedia accounts and basic skills. We recorded the session for those who couldn’t attend the live session.

With Ewan’s help, the students rose to the challenges. They organised digital meet-ups in small groups, brainstormed, discussed, and coordinated drafts. They researched and wrote new content on medieval Islamic contributions to history of science, technology and the occult, diversifying articles that had previously represented these topics mainly from an Anglo-European perspective. And since most of the students in my course were female, simply by participating in the assignment they contributed to a more diverse Wikipedia (editors have tended to be a homogenous group: white, male, 30s, from tech disciplines). Regardless of gender, all the students contributed strong research and writing skills to a more interdisciplinary Wikipedia. They brought perspectives from art and architectural history and Fine Arts to the work of editing History of Science articles, creating their own intersections between science and art. They contributed images to articles that previously had privileged text and intellectual content exclusively. Collectively the students contributed some eight thousand words and eighty-five references to nine articles, which have received some 772,000 views to date.

I was worried going into the term that the students would dislike the experiment, that they would be put off by the necessity of having to learn yet another new digital tool at an already difficult time. A few weeks into the course they had spoken frankly about the stress of knowing that what they created would be out there in the world as free and public knowledge, their sense of worry and responsibility to do this work ‘right’. I was therefore surprised at mid-course feedback that specifically mentioned the Wikipedia project as something that was going well in the course. They appreciated how the editing process had gotten them thinking about knowledge dissemination. Thanks to their efforts Wikipedia’s freely-available knowledge is now a bit more diverse and globally representative. In a year that brought pervasive systemic injustices into stark relief, our experiment in applying our knowledge outside the classroom gave us a sense that we were creating something positive, something that mattered. As one student commented, “Really love the Wikipedia project. It feels like my knowledge is actually making a difference in the wider world, if in a small way.”

Find out more about Wikimedia UK’s education initiatives in the blog tag, and visit Glaire Anderson’s website here.

London College of Communications – decolonisation through Wikipedia

Written by the London College Communications Teaching Hub for their blog.

Back in April and May we collaborated with London College of Communications students and staff around decolonising Wikipedia, building on work they’ve been doing to decolonise the curriculum. As part of that we are looking at a partnership with a focus on decolonisation, the visibility and credibility of under-represented figures connected to teaching and research across their subject disciplines. On the 25th November the college will launch a new Decolonising Wikipedia Network that aims to support students and staff to become Wikipedia editors and creators.

Decolonisation is not a metaphor or synonym for diversity and inclusion work (read Tuck and Yang, 2012); it is about equity, justice and reparation for people whose lives and life chances have been and continue to be negatively affected by colonisation. Under British colonial rule, entire communities and nations suffered the loss or oppression of traditional knowledge and ways of knowing (aka epistemicide).

To this day, the white western elite dominates global understanding of what and how to know, whilst the ways of knowing of those colonised, their ancestors and diaspora, continues to be oppressed, marginalised, othered and exoticized. And even knowledge production systems that are intended to be democratic and inclusive still maintain practices which can exclude and marginalise, for example through the credibility criteria of academic writing and notability criteria of Wikipedia.

Work to decolonise university curricula and collections has highlighted that it’s not just a matter of including more diverse authors on reading lists, but a matter of diversifying knowledge production itself, to allow for different knowledge and different ways of knowing to be visible and valued. LCC Changemakers are working with Wikimedia Education on this basis, to develop skills and confidence in LCC students and staff to play an active role in decolonising knowledge production and increasing the visibility and credibility of under-represented figures connected to our subject disciplines.

Building on the LCC Wikipedia Editathon in May-June 2020, this new network supports students and staff to edit and create Wikipedia entries through a decolonial lens at a scale and pace that suits them, supporting them to make anything from a small intervention to an existing Wikipedia page in a day, to a writing one new Wikipedia page over a month. The network will be launched here on 25 November with a video introduction and instructions for joining. Watch this space!

Introducing Natasha Iles, our new Head of Development and Communications

In October we recruited for a role that we have long known will be critical to the sustainability of Wikimedia UK’s vital work. Having a Head of Development and Communications gives us a strategic approach to our public image, fundraising, and external outreach. We wanted the role to be in senior management, leading a new team consisting of Katie Crampton, our Communications and Governance Assistant, and another new role that we’re currently recruiting for, a Fundraising Development Coordinator. Though we had to postpone recruitment for the Head of Development and Communications due to lockdown, we’re pleased to announce that one month ago we found a candidate who we think is the perfect fit; Natasha Iles.

With a background in the corporate world, Natasha took a career change into the Third Sector over ten years ago knowing she wanted to make a broader, more positive impact with her skills. Since Natasha’s first charity role as a sole fundraiser and marketeer, she has developed to lead both fundraising and communications functions as an active member of senior management. Natasha holds a Diploma in Fundraising and is a member of the Chartered Institute of Fundraising.

When asked about her goals while working with us, Natasha outlined her aims for our new Development and Communications team to continue to increase visibility of our amazing programmes and activities across the UK. Natasha will also work to diversify our income streams. Like us, Natasha feels that increasing our profile and the positive impact of our work is vital to ensuring we continue breaking down the barriers to accessing and contributing to free knowledge.

Though she’s only been with us a few weeks, we’ve already seen incredible work from Natasha. To say she hit the ground running is a bit of an understatement! We’re very excited for everything she’s bringing to the team.

Happy Birthday Wikidata!

It’s Wikidata’s 8th birthday today, and we’re incredibly proud of Wikipedia’s lesser known little sister. Twenty years ago an incredible idea was made reality in the form of a democratic encyclopedia built from the bottom up, all by volunteers with no corporate influence or advertisement. Now, there are many projects related to Wikipedia that make the Internet a truly very different place than if we’d gone without them. Wikidata is like Wikipedia for computers. Collectively we’ve become aware of just how much data there is out in the world, but most of it is held by private companies for their own gains. So Wikidata stepped up. A free, democratically created software that has no agenda beyond the spread of information for the betterment of human knowledge. It’s a noble goal, and seemingly a fool’s errand. But Wikipedia worked, and now, so is Wikidata.

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.