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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
As Wikimedia UK, we work to support language communities living in, or connected to the UK. This translates to a range of projects, including Scots Wikipedia.
Up until recently, there were only a relatively small number of regular, active editors of sco.wiki. However, as of the end of August, that has most definitely changed. And that’s the best thing that we could have hoped for. I really hope that these new editors will feel motivated to stick around, because their long-term support will would be transformational for the Scots Wiki, and hopefully will have benefits for the wider Scots language community too.
With all the press coverage, a certain amount of immediate interest was inevitable. And the community has worked hard to increase their capacity to help deal with this; nominating and onboarding new Scots-speaking admins, improving on-wiki tools, organising review of articles, discussing spelling and dialect, deflecting vandalism, writing a new notability policy, deleting spam.
We’ve been heartened by the energy and proactive attitude of the existing Scots wiki community in dealing with the increased attention and participation in their project. At the same time, it was disappointing to see some of that attention fail to assume good faith on the part of the editor upon whom attention fell, and to engage in personal criticism. That’s not a behaviour we would support, and what we want to focus on here is the positive impact of the story on Scots wiki.
With any minority language Wikipedia, community building is incredibly important; one of the ways this happens is through events like the Celtic Knot conference which Wikimedia UK have organised since 2017. Calls for content to be parachuted into the Wiki are ultimately not the most helpful, not least because a Wiki relies on its community; it needs the ongoing support and oversight of that community to survive. It needs those volunteers who look out for vandalism, who fix spelling mistakes, who create new articles, who review articles, who work on tech infrastructure – all of those kinds of things which it’s easy to take for granted if you spend most of your time on en:wiki. If you want paid editing, and an encyclopedia which remains fixed in one point in time, there are options for that. But that is not Wikipedia.
The relationship between a chapter and a language Wikipedia is one of support, not of dictatorship. So as Scotland Programme Coordinator for Wikimedia UK what I’ve been working on for the last few months is seeing how I can support, and help to grow that community.
In practice, what that’s meant is a whole load of activity if not behind the scenes, then in the wings. User:Cobra3000 set up a two-day editathon at the end of August, for which I ran online training sessions (we’ve been doing a lot of that recently) using the Wikimedia UK Zoom and Eventbrite accounts; set up a Dashboard to track activity; helped to set up an on-wiki event page, and I created and uploaded some sco.wiki specific how-to videos to Commons, which went on the event page, was used for training, and in the off-wiki locations where activity was being organised – Cobra3000’s Scots Language Discord server, and the new Scots Wikipedia Editors Facebook group, which is now at over 100 members. I’ve been active in both of the latter, answering questions, promoting the training, and answering wiki-specific questions where possible. For the editathon, we also were sure to include a range of activities for non- or lower-proficiency Scots speakers, of whom there were many who were interested in helping out. Dr Michael Dempster of the Scots Language Centre has been very involved, including making an 8 hour introduction to Scots course available for free on YouTube. The editathon produced some quite incredible stats; they include high-volume AWB tasks, but even so, I was excited to see the enthusiasm and care that the community has for the Wiki.
We’ve also been talking to the Scots Language Centre about how we might engage the wider Scots community with Wikimedia in the future, and this will hopefully build on some existing projects which had to be shelved due to COVID.
The second editathon was held at the end of September, focussing on places, and we hope that these editathons can become a regular event. Now that we’ve done with the initial firefighting period, it’s time to dig in for the long term.
If you’d like to find out more about community building through events, you can get involved here, or to see more about our Scottish activities, you can browse the blog tag.
Extract from the Education booklet case study, written by Wikimedia UK and University of Edinburgh.
Earlier this year we produced a booklet with the University of Edinburgh, bringing together a collection of case studies from across the UK in order to provide insight into the use of the Wikimedia projects in education. It is our belief that the Wikimedia projects are a valuable tool for education, and that engagement with those projects is an activity which enriches the student experience as much as it does the open web itself. As such we have a number of education projects, and have managed to introduce Wikimedia teaching as a part of the Welsh baccalaureate. You can find what we’ve blogged about these projects in the education tag.
Educators worldwide are using Wikimedia in the curriculum – teaching students key skills in information literacy, collaboration, writing as public outreach, information synthesis, source evaluation and data science. Engaging with projects like Wikipedia – particularly through becoming a contributor – enables learners to understand, navigate and critically evaluate information as well as develop an appreciation for the role and importance of open education. Once published, material produced by students becomes immediately accessible by a global audience, giving students the satisfaction of knowing that their work can be seen by many more people than just their tutor.
As individuals working in the open web in the twenty-first century it is incumbent upon us to embrace innovative learning, embedding into our practice those tools which equip our students to work collaboratively, be skilled digitally, and think critically.
Of our 13 examples, 12 pertain to Higher Education, and one to Secondary; but although this work has thus far been more common in Universities than schools or colleges of Further Education, it is far from being restricted solely to them. This resource has been designed for anyone involved in education, and will be of particular interest to those teachers, lecturers and learning technologists involved in open pedagogy and course design, or who have an interest in innovative learning, working on the open web, co-creation, collaborative working, or digital skills.
Feedback from both students and course leaders, at the University of Edinburgh and beyond, has consistently highlighted:
Student-led creation of academic quality content, available to be shared and used by wide audiences
Students and course leaders having the opportunity to examine their subject area reflectively through a global, publicly engaged perspective
Students having the opportunity to learn and practice beginner-level coding skills and increase their digital competencies
Wikimedia and Skills development
The Wikimedia projects are more than just Wikipedia. There are 13 projects in all, four which are of particular interest here: Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wiki Commons, and Wikibooks.
Final year Biochemistry and Biological Sciences BSc students at Imperial College London selected and improved Wikipedia articles within their Science Communication module by adding content to existing pages, including adding their own illustrations.
Course leaders: Prof. Stephen Curry, professor of Structural Biology, and Dr. Steven Cook, Principal Teaching Fellow in the Department of Life Sciences.
Class size: 30 students.
Course duration: 1 academic term, featuring a 3-hour workshop introducing Wikimedia, Creative Commons, and practising Wiki mark-up language.
Learning outcomes
Developing writing skills suited for a public audience.
Increasing critical thinking, information and digital literacy.
Introducing basic illustration and graphic design skills.
Introducing collaborative writing, useful for future academic and work-based projects.
Further support and resources used
Wikimedia UK’s Programmes team.
The Wikipedia Manual of Style guidelines.
Science communication and illustration workshops run by staff on the Science Communication module.
Wikimedia Commons and the RCSB Protein Data Bank.
User:Polypompholyx’s Wikipedia page includes guidance for students.
Impact beyond the classroom
100 articles improved since 2012.
Several illustrations and photographs were created and uploaded to Wikipedia pages to support the relevant compound’s Wikipedia page.
Contributed to the growing Wiki culture and community within the University.
“There are plenty of incomplete and missing articles on Wikipedia, and it would be great to get students involved in editing articles much earlier in their Careers.”
“The articles have to be on a scientific topic, and they typically choose life science topics, as that is their expertise (biology and biochemistry students). Some articles are created from scratch, others take existing articles and improve them. This is typically by rewriting the text to make it clearer, more complete and more up to date. Most articles end up with new sections, updated references, and additional media: either from Commons, or media they create and CC license themselves.” Dr. Steven Cook, Course Leader
For more of the education booklet case studies, take a look at the free digital copy here. For more information on our education projects, follow the blog tag, sign up for our newsletter, or get in touch with us. To support Wikimedia UK projects like this one, please consider donating or becoming a member today.
Between 1560 and 1689, there were some 1,100 parishes in Scotland, each one served by a minister who, ideally, preached sermons once or twice a week, offered communion at least once a year, visited the sick and dying, oversaw the behaviour and morality of his neighbours, alongside a host of other responsibilities. As the Protestant Reformation in Scotland progressed, these men (and their families) became increasingly central to how religious change was experienced at a local level. Despite this prominence, we know remarkably little about them.
The project Mapping the Scottish Reformation is an attempt to track all of Scotland’s ministers between the Reformation Parliament in 1560 and the Glorious Revolution in 1689. And by ‘track’, I mean that the project seeks to trace their movements: the big milestones in clerical careers, where and when they lived, and where they moved, where they were educated, who they married, and what happened to their children. The end result will be a weather map of sorts, that will allow us to observe ministers’ movements and the process of religious change.
How do we find out about these people? We rely on surviving documents that were made at the time, usually by Church courts known as presbyteries. These documents are all housed in the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh, must be searched by most users on site, and must be transcribed by each visitor. There are no real indexes to help. Here’s an example of a two-page spread, typical of the manuscripts we use:
To date, as part of our first case study, we have parsed around 3,500 pages of manuscript material like this, extracting twenty-two different data points: including ministers’ names, the parishes they served, the dates when they were appointed, the dates they transferred to other parishes, where they were educated, the locations to which they moved, when they were disciplined, when they died, etc.
Most of the individuals we have found are obviously relatively obscure and have no item entry in Wikidata. Some were captured as part of the recent project the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, but most remained unknown to Wikidata. As such, we have created around one thousand new items over the last two months, all of which serve as a framework to record the key parameters of a cleric’s career.
To ensure our data entry was as quick and reliable as possible, it was essential that we structured each new cleric on Wikidata by using existing properties. We followed the structure for most ‘human’ (Q5) entries to Wikidata, but then added ‘occupation’ and ‘residence’ properties. We added ‘start time’ and ‘end time’ qualifiers to ‘residence’ so we could track precisely when a minister arrived and left his parish.
To capture the complexity of clerical careers in early modern Scotland, we made use of the ‘Significant Event’ property (P793). We had to get a little creative here, because some of the specialist terminology relating to the Church did not exist in Wikidata’s reams of items. As such, we created the following items that can be classified as ‘significant events’:
In some rather more fruity cases, we made use of existing items such as ‘illness’, ‘repentance’, and even ‘execution’, as other ways to capture significant events. Coupled with the ‘point in time’ qualifier, we were able to record this information in quite a detailed way.
One of the essential parts of this project is that we need to meticulously record where we obtained our information. As such, we had to devise a method to record manuscript information in Wikidata’s referencing system. Again, after lengthy consideration, we made use of existing properties already on Wikidata to capture the information we required. Incredibly, when used together, the properties ‘collection’, ‘inventory number’, and ‘folio(s)’ allowed us to recreate an academically robust system to reference manuscripts in their complexity. Here is an example:
An example of referencing manuscripts with existing Wikidata properties. Taken from the entry for Henry Aickinhead, Q91915309
In summary, Wikidata’s existing menu of properties and items provides significant amounts of flexibility in designing schema that can capture the messy and complex world of the early modern cleric. Indeed, the scope of Wikidata’s flexibility could accommodate a range of projects that gather data from manuscript sources. During the several months we have been working with Wikidata, we have successfully ported over thousands of data points from manuscripts kept under lock and key at the National Records of Scotland, traced the careers of over 900 clerics and started, tentatively to manipulate this data through the Wikidata Query Service. Keep watching our website mappingthescottishreformation.org and our Twitter account, @MappingScotsRef to see how our project, and our integration with Wikidata, develops.
Chris R. Langley is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Newman University, Birmingham. Mapping the Scottish Reformation is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Strathmartine Trust.
At the beginning of the lockdown period in the UK, the Programmes Team, along with our network of Wikimedians in Residence, got to work on exploring how we could continue to support our community and partner organisations. We discussed ways in which we could offer engagement with the Wikimedia projects as lockdown activities (the National Library of Scotland’s work on WikiSource is an excellent example of how this worked out) for both staff and in terms of public engagement, as well as in the fight against mis- and disinformation surrounding COVID-19.
Back in November we had engaged a new trainer, Bhav Patel, to deliver our Train the Trainer course in Glasgow, Scotland. In light of the success of that programme, we decided to approach him again.
We held two brainstorming sessions, inviting all of our existing trainers to attend. Turnout for these was encouraging, and we were happy to see some familiar faces as well as some individuals whom we had not seen for a while. These sessions were intended to capture both appetite for training, and training needs. We anticipated that as we were approaching existing trainers that there may be less demand for content which pertained to design, however this was not wholly the case. We were also conscious that the high standard of Bhav’s training in the past concerning training design might be beneficial for our existing volunteers. There was significant interest in how to convert existing training methods to the online format, the “tips & tricks” of using specific tools, and liaison with partners in advance to properly assess training needs. There was also some trepidation around how to give individual support over video conferencing, and adapting to feedback in-session in the context of having no physical feedback from the room.
Following these sessions, and further discussions with Bhav, we held two sets of three sessions, delivered at varying times of day to accommodate the existing commitments of volunteers. The first of these sessions, led by Bhav, was titled “Going Online”, and focussed on the move from onsite to online design and delivery of events, taking a platform-agnostic approach. The second was “Tools, Tech & Event Management”, focussing on tips, tricks & a variety of online conferencing and supporting tools, as well as overall event management, and was led by myself. The third session was an opportunity for practise and feedback, offered to all participants as a way to test out new tools and ideas they had for leading online training. In total, 14 trainers attended across the six sessions, with positive feedback. The two training sessions were recorded for future use, and a pool of accompanying resources created. These were sent to all participants, to the wider volunteer trainer pool, and are being kept as a resource for partner organisations, Wikimedians in Residence, and future volunteers.
Reflecting on this process, we noted a few things. Firstly, that just because we deal with an online resource does not mean that we are automatically prepared to deliver online. Secondly, that the online space opens up opportunities as well as presenting barriers – trainers’ geographic location matters less, for example. Thirdly, that we were able to engage volunteers with a variety of time commitments, from a wider demographic, and that the pressures on their time likely reflect those of our various audiences. Lastly, that ongoing investment in existing volunteers helps to reignite engagement.
Once again, a huge thanks to our volunteer trainers for the time and energy that you give to the movement; it is massively appreciated!
In 2019 Wikimedia UK, Archaeology Scotland and The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland recruited a graduate intern through the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities Internship programme. These funded placements give PhD researchers the opportunity to spend up to three months with a partner organisation; improving their research skills and giving them an opportunity to work on a project which makes a real difference to an organisation. Robertta Leotta is coming to the end of her internship, and reflects on her project in this blog she wrote for us.
At the beginning of March – which now looks like many ages ago – I went to North Berwick in order to take pictures I wanted to upload in Wikicommons. During my walking tour and while I was taking pictures of monuments and buildings, I bumped into a monument dedicated to Catherine Watson, a woman who died in her attempt to rescue children from an angry sea, in 1889. Seeking Catherine Watson on the Internet I found this interesting project called Mapping Memorials to Women in Scotland. This project aims to uncover and map several memorials in Scotland which commemorate women, either famous or unknown, ‘who have contributed in some way to the life of the country we know today’. I really liked the purpose of this project and I started to think about some collaborations in terms of my internship. I would have liked to do some historical research about women in Scotland and go around taking pictures of other possible memorials, so that I would have contributed to the increase in open access images in Wikimedia about the history of women in this country. However, when I was about to begin this project the pandemic happened and I needed, for personal reasons, to come back home to Italy.
All this has been very disruptive for everyone and, in my own way, I needed to adjust all my plans under these new circumstances. It was highly remarkable how quickly and effectively it was possible to find a solution to adapt my internship project to the new reality we all have been experiencing.
Indeed while I was in Sicily locked inside an empty house, I could have not travelled anymore around Scotland in my hunt for memorials. However, the host institution of my internship was very supportive and they helped me to find a different solution for my project. Instead of mapping memorials physically, I started to learn how to navigate the digital space of Wikidata, a relational database. Wikidata was totally unknown for me, but became a place where I could remotely create, map and increase new data about women in Scotland.
At the beginning, I had a hard time understanding this language, the coding system, how things make sense in this field, but my host institution was always there for all my doubts, questions, worries. This online and remote training was indeed very efficient because of the empathy, positiveness and expertise provided by the host institution.
Then, thanks to the fact that we obtained properties approved for the Women of Scotland project, we had access to the identifier numbers through which I was able to create more than fifty items in Wikidata – among memorials and women – linked to the Mapping Memorials website. As an ultimate outcome, my project contributed to an increase in open access knowledge about the history of women who. in some cases, are little known in Scotland.
In this process, I had the chance to acquire several skills and have a very significant experience, both from a personal and professional perspective. Firstly, I learnt some new digital skills, extremely necessary for almost all careers nowadays. Secondly, this project gave me the chance to reflect upon principles and processes of categorisation and classification in Wikidata; a topic which also dialogues with my PhD interests in cognitive studies. Lastly, what I consider the major lesson I took from this experience was understanding how to create a collaborative, supportive working team which is able to face, with creativity and flexibility, any type of situations; also, as it happens to experience, very unpredictable ones such as pandemics.
Find out more about how you can support interns like Roberta here.
