Education booklet – Imperial College London

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.  

Wikimedia UK has produced a report mapping engagement with the projects to existing digital skills frameworks in the UK, which can be read on Wikimedia UK’s website. and a report on The Potentials of Wikimedia Projects in Digital, Information and Data Literacy Development in the UK context. 

The skills which can be enhanced through engagement with the Wikimedia Projects include:

Wikipedia  the online encyclopedia

  • Computer and internet literacy, from opening an account to searching and critically evaluating information online.
  • Creating, preparing (digitizing, editing, converting), uploading, categorising, translating information and digital content
  • Collaboration, communication and consensus building in an online environment
  • Understanding reliable, verifiable sources, licences, consents, and copyright
  • Encyclopedic writing in the public domain, using citation softwares and referencing

WikiData an open database and central storage for structured data

  • Understanding data concepts, data types, data functions and data characteristics
  • Importing, exporting, linking, reusing, and combining datasets
  • Understanding of Creative Commons database rights 
  • Engaging with the development of data models, exploring and visualising your data 
  • Collaborative data management 

Wiki Commons a host of media files and their metadata

  • Understanding of free digital file types and formats
  • Understanding organisation of information and discoverability
  • Understanding of the educational value of different types of content
  • Content reuse skills, including editing and improving images

Wikibooks a collaborative, instructional non-fiction book authoring website

  • Wring in Wikitext or in a combination of Wikitext, HTML, and CSS 
  • Content creation, collaborative editing, translation
  • Editing skills (like spelling and grammar or formatting errors) 
  • Understanding of licensing (GFDL and Creative Commons)

Here’s one of the case studies included in the booklet…

Life Sciences BSc degrees, Science Communication, Imperial College London

File:Eimeria stidae infection rabbit liver. Taken by Sofia Amin on 15/03/2017 at Imperial College London.

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.

Introducing Mapping the Scottish Reformation: Clerics, Manuscripts, and Open Data

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.

Online training for online trainers – a response to COVID-19

By Sara Thomas, Scotland Programme Coordinator.

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!

Reflections on Roberta’s internship as it comes to an end

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.

Women in Red Edinburgh internship – celebrating notable women of Edinburgh

This post was written for the Women in Red blog by their intern, Laura Rose Wood. We launched the internship with Women in Red in January.

To the Future of Women in Red and Online Diversity

I find it hard to reconcile that my time as a Women in Red Wikimedia Trainer is coming to an end. The time has flown by and it seems like only yesterday I was setting up my desk with a castle-view in Argyle House. I definitely didn’t foresee myself conducting the majority of my internship work from my student bedroom! But nonetheless, working with Wikipedia and promoting diversity have given me an immense sense of pride, taught me a great deal, and given me experiences I’d never expected.

The changes pushed by COVID-19 were dramatic and unexpected. It was almost as if my internship was completed in three acts.

Act I – Imposter Syndrome

When asked in my first week how I would measure my success at my internship, the deliverables seemed daunting and intimidating for one part-time intern to accomplish. I’m just a Graphic Design student!

I knew the Women in Red project was massively important, and a fantastic initiative for creating gender parity in open content. I knew Wikipedia was a powerful platform for change, often visited and accessible to new users once the first hurdle of article creation was crossed. But I was still slightly unsure how I could make a significant dent in the systemic gender bias which many open knowledge platforms, not just Wikipedia, face.

I had a baseline understanding of systemic bias in these early weeks, but less so how that would affect event preparation. My concept of systemic bias was that, in a Wikipedia sense, it lay largely in the lack of diversity among editors and therefore the representation in the content being created was skewed. However, given that participants in our events are more often women, it became clear that there is not a lack of gender diversity among potential editors. So what would encourage diversity among senior Wikipedia editors?

It became clear to me that creating some form of sustained engagement would be key. This would not simply be about pulling in a new audience, but how we can keep experienced editors feeling supported, continue development, cover new topics and satiate their hunger to continue contributing whilst also making our events accessible to new editors.

In researching lists of suggested women and finding sources for them I found that systemic bias was far deeper than a reflection of those creating content on Wikipedia. Wikipedia relies on reliable sources to back up information. And oftentimes in fields where women and people of colour have faced barriers to entry, or their achievements devalued, this reliable secondary sourcing can be difficult to come by. We need researchers in academic sectors or publishing to continue to document these minorities, but the power we have as editors is to surface this knowledge.

Act II – Isolation(ish)

Enter Stage left Coronavirus. In a blink, my intention to create or utilise some kind of online hosting platform where attendees could support each other beyond our in-person training was cut short. Or so I’d worried…

But this radical shake up has forced people across all sectors to re-examine delivery and communication of information. The move to remote delivery was not without its challenges. There were concerns about the potential for the experience feeling more impersonal. We’d have to bring the sense of community to people’s homes.

Following suit with the new workplace normal, we needed a hosting platform on which to conduct a webinar and re-create the Women in Red edit-a-thon event conventions remotely. Not only this, but we needed supplementary resources in place of physical hand-outs, and collated lists of further readings to help participants. No more physical merch.

As a design student, my obvious route to consistency was to create a visual identity which I could use across our core resources, and in the webinar itself. I created banners for editable resources and tried to make a consistent presentation layout which I could change the colours of to suit the theme of each session. That’s not to say that no changes were made as sessions progressed – every edit-a-thon I have reflected on what went well and made changes to how we focus our training, and the whole experience has been a huge learning curve. But keeping the same overarching structure and design has, I think, helped editors feel that Women in Red is more than ‘just another WikiProject’.

Design takes away from the at times monolithic, white and greyscale interface of Wikimedia (which I am by no means critiquing). If you by any small chance are a branding nerd like me and get excited about visual communication and want to read up on why the Wikimedia Foundation follow the visual style they do, they have a style guide here. They believe that ‘Content precedes Chrome’, a kind of modern, user focused content version of modernist ‘form follows function’ philosophy.

Child falling over in three stages. Photo from Wikipedia page for Falling – “three phases in timed shutter release”, by Jamie Campbell, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

In a Wikipedia context, the idea that the content should come first makes articles easy to navigate from a browsing standpoint. It makes it all the more easy for us fall into a click hole of Wiki links and before we know it its 3am and we’re looking at the Wikipedia article for Falling (accident) or learning what a Squonk is.

However, for our new editors, it can seem daunting to be faced with such a design. Visual cues and links can seem hard to differentiate at first, and the pace of our sessions requires that we go through the basic user interface stuff reasonably quickly so users can get on with editing. The Visual Editor tool is a massive help for this, is extremely useable and works much like a word processor with which most of us have some degree of familiarity. But, especially when the site is so ubiquitous, I think there can still be a kind of editing anxiety.

This is where the kind of repetitive, kinaesthetic learning of creating your own article can give confidence. There’s a sense of cradle to grave achievement in creating a biography from scratch and hitting that final ‘Publish’ button that can instil confidence for future editing.

Act III – Time for positiviTea!

During our in-person sessions, there’s usually a tea and coffee where attendees can have a wee chat and get to know each other. The challenge as we move forward in this changing climate is how we continue to facilitate a community atmosphere. In the webinars, we usually encourage editors to introduce themselves at the beginning of the session both so I can gauge experience and Wiki literacy but also to bring a face to the names in the chat panel. I hope that this gives users more confidence in asking questions and being bold.

Promoting a Women in Red community in which our participants feel welcomed and supported is an in-road into the wider global Wikipedia community. One of the barriers to individual editors’ contribution to open source is that participation is both self-guided and self-sustaining. But this doesn’t have to be isolating, even when we’re self-isolating.

Epilogue

What does the future hold for the sharing of knowledge in the post-COVID world?

We seem increasingly likely to turn to the internet as our primary source of reliable information. It is therefore up to us to construct and contribute to repositories with verifiable information.

The democratisation of knowledge through open access platforms may seem like a utopian ideal, but if the recent pandemic has highlighted one thing it is that such alternatives to physical resources are becoming increasingly important to the functioning of our society as a whole. Archives that opened access to their collections during lockdown prove this is achievable.

Sharing and communication is key. Information is and always has been free, it is the medium by which it is shared that can create barriers to access. The huge community effort which we’ve witnessed on social media in creating resources to support the Black Live Matter movement has been a testament to this. If we all work to give a platform to minority voices in our own way, we can ensure that traditionally overlooked pockets of knowledge are given representation. We can make way for cross-community discussion and enable discouraged potential voices to come to the forefront.

Over the course of my internship, I saw more than 60 attendees learn to edit Wikipedia and hone their newfound editing skills. There are now 57 new biographical articles about women and 12 new articles about queer books, authors, artists, bookshops and publications. We’ve run some wonderfully diverse, intersectional events and had attendees from all over the UK thanks to our ability to host the sessions online. Whilst I may not have planned to run events in this way, this pandemic and the subsequent move to online delivery has made our materials more accessible to a broader audience. I hope that this outreach will continue to inspire editors to continue Women in Red work, or any editing in the name of diversity and open knowledge. To help keep this momentum going now that my post is coming to an end, I’ve created a resource which synthesises all the essential information about editing and creating biographical articles, and how to deliver your own Women in Red online editathon.

If you’re curious exactly what we’ve been up to, these are some of my personal stand-out articles created by our editors, although this list is by no means exhaustive:

  • Mountaineer and rock climber who co-founded the Ladies’ Scottish Climbing Club, Jane Inglis Clark.
  • Doctor and former captain of the Afghanistan national women’s football team, Hajar Abulfazl.
  • Advocate for Women’s football who created the first professional women’s football team in Mexico, Marbella Ibarra.
  • 22 year old Filipino climate activist Marinel Sumook Ubaldo.
  • Ugandan climate and environmental rights activist Hilda Flavia Nakabuye.
  • ECA alumni and botanical artist Olga Stewart.
  • Scottish botanist and teacher Mary Pirie.
  • Edinburgh midwife who kept a casebook of 1,296 labours which she assisted, Margaret Bethune.
  • Diabetes researcher who created the Metabolic Unit at the Western General Hospital, Edinburgh, Joyce Baird. A new ‘Baird
  • Family Hospital’ is due to open in Aberdeen in 2021, named for her and her family’s contributions to the field of medicine.
  • And of course Lavender Menace Lesbian & Gay Community Bookshop, a pioneering LGBT+ space in Edinburgh in the
  • 1980s, whose founders are still doing fab things today in the name of archiving queer literature.

My first week as the new Wikimedia Training Intern

Hannah Rothmann is an intern at Edinburgh University, training with our Wikimedian in Residence who is based there, Ewan McAndrew. Hannah wrote this post for the University’s blog.

Hannah Rothmann is an intern at Edinburgh University, training with our Wikimedian in Residence who is based there, Ewan McAndrew. Hannah wrote this post for the University’s blog.

Hi, my name is Hannah and I will be going into the final year of my Classics degree in September. I have just finished week 1 of my Wikimedia Training Internship; the start date was delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the uncertainty that came with it. Adjusting to working remotely from home, meeting new people but over video calls and Microsoft teams and also learning about entirely new things has meant that it has been a strange and somewhat nerve-racking first week and not what I would have expected from a summer internship a year ago. Thankfully, my line manager, Ewan McAndrew, has been very welcoming and made me feel at ease despite this novel situation!

The Wikimedia Training Internship caught my attention among a long and varied list of Employ.Ed internships. The aim of my internship of is to create materials to teach people how to edit and use Wikipedia and Wikidata with the goal of them becoming active editors and contributing to a growing database of free, credible and jointly gathered information. I was shocked when I discovered this week that only around 18% of biographical pages on the English Wikipedia are about women! Hopefully, by making more accessible teaching materials we will be able to address this imbalance and increase the diversity of Wikipedia and Wikidata. This means making resources that avoid complicated jargon, address all stumbling blocks a beginner wiki-user may encounter and will enable the uninitiated to become confident editors and contributors.

Wikimedia UK believes ‘that open access to knowledge is a fundamental right and a driver in the democratic creation, distribution and consumption of knowledge’. These aims demonstrate the importance of the work of Wikimedia UK. My line manager Ewan stressed this importance and that Wikimedia related activities have a growing significance in a learning environment shifting more towards the digital world when he had to argue that the internship should go ahead despite financial impact COVID-19 on the university; many internships were cancelled. My internship will hopefully enable remote learning and help people see how they can change their approach to teaching to incorporate Wikimedia related activities into how students learn.

This aim means that the work I am doing is firmly rooted in the present and even the future. Just this week I have learnt new ways to use technology and skills which will be indispensable in a world moving ever more into the realm of online, online learning and the online experience. Although at first glance this internship appears in direct contrast to my Classics degree, which is focussed among other things on reading and interpreting ancient texts, the aim of a Classics degree, in my opinion, is to understand that ideas and concepts of whatever period always have relevance and there is always the possibility of continual learning. The different skills I will develop in my internship and the skills I am learning from my degree will hopefully enrich my approach to work and any work that I do in this time and in the future.

So far, I have been getting used to remote working and all the quirks that come with it (hoovering is not something that goes too well with a work video call for example!) and I have also been figuring out where the gaps are in the current resources that Ewan has to teach people about Wikipedia and Wikidata while also filling in my rather large gaps of knowledge. For example, I had no idea what Wikidata really was before the start of my first week and I am still trying to understand it fully. I was lucky enough to attend the NHLI Women in Science Wikithon at the end of my first week which gave me a chance to implement what I had learnt about Wikipedia editing and it showed me how much more still needs to be done to improve diversity. Dr Jess Wade, who was Wikimedia UK’s Wikimedian of the year 2019, gave an introduction exploring why we should all edit Wikipedia. She has personally made hundreds and hundreds of Wikipedia pages for women and for notable women in science who previously had been ignored and in doing this has increased awareness regarding Wikipedia and how it can be used to tackle inequality and lack of diversity. After this introduction, it was a treat to have some training from Dr Alice White who showed us how to begin editing and creating our own pages. I edited some pages already created but lacking details, for example a page about Dr Susan Bewley, as I did not feel quite ready to begin making my own pages. The work Dr Jess Wade has been doing and continues to do along with this event really showed me how Wikipedia could be used as a force for good and also the importance of ensuring people have access to learning materials.

I am excited about getting to grips with my internship, developing skills, challenging my abilities all with the aim to make Wikipedia and Wikidata a platform that anyone anywhere will feel able to use, edit and appreciate!

Just one week left to sign up for our 2020 AGM!

We’re gearing up for this year’s Annual General Meeting with just over a week to go until the event! On Saturday 18th July we will be meeting virtually, and though we won’t see each other in person we’re hoping to make the day as interactive as possible.

We’ll be using Zoom, with a conference link sent to all Eventbrite sign ups, so claim your free ticket here. If you’re not sure how to use Zoom, you can watch instructions on this support page, or contact us with any queries. While the AGM is an opportunity for our members to vote on essential governance of the charity, we also encourage participation from volunteers, partners, supporters, and anyone else who’s interested in the Wikimedia community in the UK.

Agenda

11am Welcome and introduction, including technical onboarding

11.15am Keynote talk from Gavin Wilshaw, Mass Digitisation Manager at the National Library of Scotland, on the Wikisource project that the library has been delivering since the March shutdown

11.35am Q&A with Gavin, and contributions from other participants about their work on Wikimedia during and in response to the pandemic

12noon BREAK

12.15pm A global movement – short updates on Wikimedia 2030, the rebranding project, and the Universal Code of Conduct

12.30pm Lightning talks

1pm BREAK (+ social networking)

2pm Start of the formal AGM: reports, questions and announcement of voting results for the Resolutions and Elections

3pm Wikimedian of the Year and Honorary Member Awards

3.30pm Thanks and close

Proxy voting

All voting for this year’s AGM will happen by proxy. Our current Articles of Association require members to be present in person at the AGM to vote on the day, something we’re not able to facilitate this year. This means all votes must be submitted by the proxy deadline which is 2pm on Thursday 16th July. You can find the director candidate statements here, ask them questions here, and read through the resolutions we’ll be voting on here.

Voting packs have been sent to all members by email, but if you haven’t received one and you think you should have, please do get in touch with Katie at membership@wikimedia.org.uk.

Sign up

You must register for the AGM on Eventbrite rather than on wiki as we need your full name, not Wikimedia user name, and we’ll be sending out video conference links to all attendees registered through Eventbrite closer to the date.

If you have any questions or more general comments, please do get in touch with Katie at membership@wikimedia.org.uk.

We look forward to seeing you next Saturday!

If you’d like to join Wikimedia UK as a member or renew your current membership, you can do so here. To support free access to knowledge through our programmes, you can support us here.

Wikidata and Aberdeen – a virtual hackathon

Introduction by Sara Thomas, Wikimedia UK’s Scotland Programme Coordinator.

Over Easter weekend I attended a virtual hackathon, hosted by Code The City. It was originally supposed to be held in person in their space in Aberdeen, but what with lockdown and all, to Zoom we went.  

The hackathon was concerned with a number of areas of history, heritage and data in Aberdeen, such as a project looking at Aberdeen Harbour Board Arrivals supported by Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives; another looking at scraping data from the Aberdeen Built Ships site with a view to uploading to Wikidata; and the project that myself and Ian worked on, looking at Aberdeen Provosts and Lord Provosts, and getting those into Wikidata using Quickstatements.

Lockdown has meant an explosion in the frequency of online meetings, and I’m not alone in having found those increasingly tiring, due to a combination of the demands of the format, and the ongoing lockdown situation magnifying those demands. I expected to be exhausted by the end of the weekend, but came away energised, and keen to do more data work. (At the end of the first day I sat for a few more hours and finished the first tranche of data prep… I really wasn’t expecting to want to do that.)

I wanted to repost Ian’s blog here for a couple of reasons. It takes a very helpful step-by-step approach to Wikidata, which I think blog readers may find valuable, and I was struck by how well this kind of event worked when shifted to an online-only format. As the Wikimedia UK programmes team in particular is doing more of this kind of work, it’s given me a great deal of inspiration.

Aberdeen Provosts

A version of this blog was first published 6th May on Code The City, written by Ian Watt.

In the run up to Code The City 19 we had several suggestions of potential projects that we could work on over the weekend. One was that we add all of the Provosts of Aberdeen to Wikidata. This appealed to me so I volunteered to work on it in a team with Wikimedia UK’s Scotland Programme Coordinator, Dr Sara Thomas, with whom I have worked on other projects.

In preparation for CTC19 I’d been reading up on the history of the City’s provosts and discovered that up to 1863 the official title was Provost, and from that point it was Lord Provost. I’d made changes to the Wikipedia page to reflect that, and I’d added an extra item to Wikidata so that we could create statements that properly reflected which position the people held.

Sara and I began by agreeing an approach and sharing resources. We made full use of Google Docs and Google Sheets.

We had two main sources of information on Provosts:

Running the project

I started by setting up a Google Sheet to pull data from Wikipedia as a first attempt to import a list to work with. The importHTML function in Google Sheets is a useful way to retrieve data in list or table format.

I entered the formula in the top left cell (A1):

=importhtml(“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_provosts_of_Aberdeen”, “list”, 27)

and repeating the formula for all the lists – one per century. This populated our sheet with the numerous lists of provosts.

That state didn’t last very long. The query is dynamic. The structure of the Wikipedia page was being adapted, it appeared, with extra lists – so groups of former provosts kept disappearing from our sheet.

I decided to create a list manually – copying the HTML of the Wikipedia page and running some regex find and replace commands in a text editor to leave only the text we needed, which I then pasted into sheets.

Partial list of Lord Provosts.

Once we had that in the Google Sheet we got to work with some formulae to clean and arrange the data. Our entries were in the form “(1410–1411) Robert Davidson” so we had to

  • split names from dates,
  • split the start dates from end dates, and
  • split names into family names and given names.

Having got that working (albeit with a few odd results to manually fix) Sara identified a Chrome plugin called “Wikipedia and WikiData tools” which proved really useful. For example we could query the term in a cell e.g. “Hadden” and get back the QID of the first instance of that. And we could point another query at the QID and ask what it was an instance of. If it was Family Name, or Given Name we could use those codes and only manually look up the others. That saved quite a bit of time.

Identifying QIDs for Given and Family Names.

Our aim in all of this was to prepare a bulk upload to Wikidata with as little manual entry as possible. To do that Sara had identified Quickstatements, which is a bulk upload tool for Wikidata, which allows you to make large numbers of edits through a relatively simple interface.

Sara created a model for what each item in Quickstatements should contain:

A model of a Quickstatements entry.

There are a few quirks – for example, how you format a date – but once you’ve got the basics down it’s an incredibly powerful tool. The help page is really very useful.

Where dates were concerned, I created a formula to look up the date in another cell then surround it with the formatting needed:

=”+”&Sheet1!J99&”-00-00T00:00:00Z/9″

Which gave +1515-00-00T00:00:00Z/9 as the output.

You can also bulk-create items, which is what we did here. We found that it worked best in Firefox, after a few stumbles.

Data harvesting

As mentioned above, we used a printed source, from which we harvested the data about the individual Provosts.  It’s easy to get very detailed very quickly, but we decided on a basic upload for:

  • Name
  • First name
  • Last name
  • Position held (qualified by the dates)
  • Date of birth, and death (where available).

Some of our provosts held the position three or four times, often with breaks between. We attempted to work out a way to add the same role held twice with different date qualifiers, but ultimately this had to be done manually.

The first upload

We made a few test batches – five or six entries to see how the process worked.

A test batch to upload via Quickstatements.

When that worked we created larger batches. We concluded the weekend with all of the Provosts and Lord Provosts being added to Wikidata which was very satisfying. We also had a list of further tasks to carry out to enhance the data. These included:

  • Add multiple terms of office – now complete,
  • Add statements for Replaces (P1365) and Replaced By (P1366) – partly done,
  • Add honorific titles, partly done
  • Add images of signatures (partly done) and portraits (completed) from the reference book,
  • Add biographical details from the book – hardly started,
  • Source images for WIkiCommons from the collection portraits at AAGM – request sent,
  • Add places of burial, identifiers from Find A Grave, photographs of gravestones,
  • Add streets named after provosts and link them.

You can see the results in this WikiData query: https://w.wiki/PsF

A Wikidata Query showing Provosts’ Terms of Office, and their replacements.

This was a very interesting project to work on – and there is still more to do to improve the data, which you can help with.

Ian Watt is one of our newer Wikimedia UK trainers, with a particular interest in open data and Wikidata. Amongst other things he’s worked on Wikidata-ifying Open Plaques in Aberdeen, and producing some great blogs which have explained the process clearly. For anyone (myself included) whose introduction to the Wikimedia projects was through text and open culture rather than open data, these have been tremendously helpful.

A message to our supporters in lockdown

By Lucy Crompton-Reid, Wikimedia UK’s Chief Executive.

I hope that you and your loved ones are safe and well during the current crisis. I think if there is a silver lining to this horrible situation it’s that I see more care and concern from friends, colleagues and strangers alike. I have only met a small number of Wikimedia UK’s donors and members in person, but I consider you all a part of our extended community. I know that many people are struggling at the moment, for different reasons, but hope that everyone feels able to cope with whatever you are facing – whether that’s isolation from friends and family, financial worry, health concerns or juggling home-schooling with working from home (speaking personally!)

Like many other charities and businesses that hold a lot of in-person meetings and events, Wikimedia UK has spent the past month ‘pivoting to online’. However, as part of what is ultimately an online movement, we were well set up to do this and have been working with a wide range of existing partners in the education and cultural sectors and beyond to support their own transitions. That’s not to say there hasn’t been a learning curve, because there certainly has been. But I’m pleased to be able to share with you some examples of online activities that the team and wider Wikimedia UK community have run over the past few weeks:

  • One of our trainers in Scotland, working with our Scotland Programme Co-ordinator, ran an online hackathon for Code the City in Aberdeen over the Easter weekend. The hackathon – which was very quickly re-imagined as an online event – focused on the social and industrial history of the city and resulted in the creation of thousands of new records on Wikidata.
  • Last weekend we held an online event with Banner Repeater for the Digital Archive of Artists Publishing. This is an ongoing partnership, committed to challenging the politics of traditional archives, particularly regarding inclusion and accessibility from a post-colonial, gender critical and LGBTQI perspective.
  • Back in August we trained a number of archeology volunteers at the Museum of London, and last week we ran a follow up session online. Participants were very enthusiastic about the training, and see a gap in Wikipedia’s content about archeological digs that they can very usefully contribute to.  
  • The National Wikimedian for Wales and Wikimedian in Residence at Menter Môn have started delivering introductory sessions to editing the Welsh Wikipedia on Twitch (the next one will be on Monday 4th May). We hope these will prove to be a useful way to continue delivering training and outreach to existing and potential contributors during the lockdown. 

You may have seen media coverage about Wikipedia’s essential role during the pandemic, with readership up by around 30% across all the Wikimedia projects and the articles related to Covid-19 receiving millions of views a day. But with this rise in users comes the challenge of keeping myths, misinformation and poorly-sourced content out of the large number of articles about the virus. So Wikimedia UK is working with WikiProject Medicine to mobilise experienced editors in the UK to help address these issues. We are also working with health bodies to ensure that the most accurate and up to date information about the virus, the disease and the pandemic is made available under an open licence and freely accessible on Wikipedia.

It is thanks to donations from supporters that Wikimedia UK can continue this vital work during the current lockdown. Whilst we know that our fundraising for the year is likely to be significantly affected by the pandemic and the associated economic downturn, I’m so grateful for the solid foundation of supporters who give when they can or regularly. On that note, please consider making Wikimedia UK your Amazon Smile charity. It only takes one click and can raise additional income for us with no cost to you. Thanks again for your support, and stay safe.

Nick Poole becomes Chair of Wikimedia UK’s Board

By Lucy Crompton-Reid, Wikimedia UK’s Chief Executive.

Wikimedia UK is delighted to announce the appointment of a new Chair of the Board of Trustees, Nick Poole. 

Nick Poole is the Chief Executive of CILIP, the UK’s library and information association. His previous roles, before joining CILIP in 2015, include CEO of Collections Trust and National Policy Adviser at the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. Nick was previously Chair of the International Council of Museums UK and of the Europeana Network. He has lectured and presented worldwide on topics relating to cultural heritage, technology and the arts, and is a visiting lecturer at several Universities.

Nick was elected to the board of Wikimedia UK in July 2015, and so already has an in depth understanding of the work of the chapter and the aims and ambitions of the Wikimedia movement. During the time that Nick has already been on the board, Wikimedia UK has benefited from his extensive knowledge of the cultural sector, his strong connections and influence with senior leaders and policy makers, and his passionate commitment to openness as an essential element of social justice. I’m extremely pleased that Nick has been appointed Chair of the Board and am looking forward to working with him more closely in this new role. 

At the same time, it’s with sadness that I have to announce Josie Fraser’s departure from the Wikimedia UK board – after nearly five years of service – due to increasing time constraints given her new role as Head of Digital Policy at National Lottery Heritage Fund. Josie became Chair of Wikimedia UK in July 2017, and has been an inspiring and supportive leader to me and to the rest of the organisation over the past few years. Josie’s deep understanding of and connections with the open sector, learning technology and Open Educational Resources has been hugely beneficial to the development of our profile and programme over the last few years and she will be hugely missed. I know Josie will also be missed by international colleagues, as she has forged strong relationships with the Chairs of other chapters and user groups across the global Wikimedia movement. 

For more information about the role of the board and details of our other serving trustees, please see Wikimedia UK board.