Page 13 – WMUK

My first steps in the Wikimedia world – interning with Wikimedia UK & Archeology Scotland

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.

The successful applicant was Roberta Leotta, and we planned that she would help to design and deliver a project which looked at the content gap around images of Scottish Archaeology, using Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata.

As a remote internship, with occasional visits to the Archaeology Scotland offices, our first step was to give Roberta some introductory training on the Wikimedia projects – and using some of the materials I put together for the new Scottish trainer cohort, let her explore the projects. Here are her reflections on the first part of her internship. – Dr Sara Thomas, Scotland Programme Coordinator, Wikimedia UK.

It is very common for a PhD student in Classics to be associated with the image of a bookworm: a person who spends all their time in the library surrounded by books and papyruses and who is usually very unfamiliar with technology and digital resources. For sure, some academic environments such as Classics tend to be less innovative and more traditional than others, however this image is increasingly becoming less realistic. In fact, even though we study the literature and culture of the past, we need and want to engage with the world where we live – a world which is highly digitised. Moreover, the special circumstances we are experiencing these days are showing how technology is crucial in all sectors, including Humanities. Unfortunately, despite some recent improvements, the opportunities to increase our digital skills whilst at university are not massive. For this reason, when I saw the possibility to partake in an internship with Wikimedia UK and Archaeology Scotland, I decided to apply. It seemed to me a good chance to learn something about a widespread digital resource that the academic world needs to deal in.

And indeed, my expectations were fulfilled from the beginning. In four training hours about Wikimedia, and in particular on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, I started to notice that something I took for granted was, instead, the result of a very well organised structure. The structure of Wikimedia is made by people who work according to the same principles, such as, in primis, to guarantee a free access to the sum of human knowledge.

At the beginning, my first challenges were to become familiar with the new language and acquire new processes, rules and attitudes. In this regard it was interesting for me to understand the rules to follow in order to create an article suitable for Wikipedia. Differing from what I was used to, an article needs to show the state of knowledge on a specific topic and it needs not to show the writer’s critical perspective. In fact Wikimedia’s aim is not to give the final interpretation on a particular topic, but to offer the starting points for research on that topic. In other words, Wikimedia offers material which can inform us about the world, but also that can improve our critical skills about what we know about the world.

Moreover, an article has to be notable and well-referenced, and writing about underrepresented subjects such as women is encouraged. In this regard, I found that there are some parallels between the accuracy and subjects’ preferences required both in Wikimedia and in the academic world. The concept of notability, instead, can be more challenging and relative, but still can encourage us to differentiate personal interests in knowledge from those that would benefit humanity’s interests as a whole.

I appreciate these principles, but what I appreciate mostly is how Wikimedia guarantees that those principles are followed. This leads me to talk about my last point, for now, which I found very provocative about Wikimedia, namely the community’s system. So far, the feelings I got by observing Wikimedia from this closer point of view is that providing knowledge to other people is not a matter of individual effort, but a matter of a communal effort and that the collaborative attitude rather than competitiveness is the key to make it possible.

I wish not only the academic environment, but also other environments dealing with culture, could take on board the same spirit and attitude to spreading knowledge and understanding of the world.

Roberta’s project has continued to develop over the months. The COVID-19 situation has – obviously – changed the project somewhat, and we’ll be reflecting on that in a later blog. If you’d like to help us support more interns like Roberta, please consider donating to Wikimedia UK.

Growing our volunteer community in Scotland

In 2019 we hired Dr Sara Thomas as our Scotland Programme Coordinator. As Sara’s expanded our reach across Scotland, the demand for volunteers and trainers has increased hugely. Though it’s odd to think about in-person meetings while working from home, the Train the Trainer course in Glasgow has set up a network that’s prepared us for both online and offline Wikimedia activities.

Sara decided to approach this new group of trainers as a specific volunteer cohort. New trainers were asked to agree to run a minimum number of training events per year, booking them either in response to a call from Wikimedia UK, or through their own contacts. This ensured they would have sufficient opportunities to volunteer throughout the year, and that we were tapping into our growing Scottish network. It was also hoped that volunteers would be able to support campaigns like #1lib1ref and Wiki Loves Monuments.

We recruited through the ScotWiki and Wikimedia UK mailing lists, our website, and by approaching existing volunteers whom we thought would appreciate the opportunity for development. We encountered a particular challenge around those we approached in academic circles as the course would take at least three days, potentially cutting into valuable teaching time. And as the content of the course focussed on pedagogy and approach to training rather than advanced Wikipedia editing, there was some scepticism as to whether this would be of the same value to teachers.

With this in mind, we felt that an individual approach would work best for the cohort. Sara carried out phone interviews with prospective trainees, assessing their suitability and the value of their attendance. It was agreed with one individual that this course would not be the right fit for them, but that we could develop their volunteering in other ways. As we’ve done for previous Train the Trainer courses, we also opened the training to international affiliates, inviting a delegate from both Sweden and the Netherlands.

Our cohort varied greatly in terms of their on-wiki experience. In order to level the playing field, Sara set up a mailing list and created weekly reading plans prior to the course, with suggested Wikipedia editing activities. Take up on the pre-course info was mixed, and in the future we’d likely look at presenting this as an online training module rather than a text-heavy set of emails – though these emails were appreciated by all as a resource for future reference. We have since used the materials for education partners with whom we’re working remotely during the COVID-19 period, and our new Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities funded intern who’s working on a project with Wikimedia UK and Archaeology Scotland.

The training quality itself was well received; in particular one participant rated it more highly than aspects of their professional teaching training. We’d also arranged a variety of social activities and it was noted that these were particularly valuable, helping bond the group and break up the intensive three days of training.

Following the training, the mailing list continues to be a key source of peer support and communication. For example, Sara has shared her new standard training slides (redesigned as a result of the training), and members have contributed interesting links and reflections on wiki-related activities. In addition to this, Sara has kept in regular contact with individual trainers. Each trainer will have the opportunity to shadow or have support in a course before we’d expect them to lead on their own. She’ll then offer feedback, building skills and confidence in order that trainers feel comfortable leading courses on their own. We’re also encouraging new trainers to attend any editing events in their area. Sara has conducted follow up phone interviews with each trainee to assess their interests and any further training needs. In particular, there are two trainers who have shown interest in developing Wikidata skills, and they have been supported and encouraged to work on particular projects.

At the time of writing, Sara reported that one trainer is working on the development of a light-touch Wiki in the classroom activity – a five week Student Selective Component in Science Communication for medical students at the University of Glasgow, which will include discussion of Wikipedia as a public outreach tool. Another trainer is working with a local history group and has provided leads for the set up of social editing groups in two Scottish cities. One trainer has already supported Sara in an upcoming event in Glasgow, and will build on that experience to develop an activity with an arts network local to her in the Borders; and three trainers have multiple events lined up, including one which is a multi-partner and multi-project event in the North of Scotland.

Our COVID-19 lockdown has obviously changed the state of play for many Wiki activities, with all in-person events cancelled. We’re in the process of looking at models of moving in-person training online, and some of our new trainers are involved in the first wave of this – Code The City 19: History + Data = Innovation will now take place online on 11th and 12th April, led by Ian Watt, which will feature Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata elements.

The demand for support for wiki-engagement activities continues to grow (and we’ve seen it grow further over the last few weeks). With support from all our volunteer trainers across the country, we’ll do what we can to meet it.

If you’d like to support Wikimedia UK’s work, you can donate to us here.

Remote working the Wikimedia UK way

Blog by Sara Thomas, Wikimedia UK’s Scotland Programme Coordinator

Due to the Coronavirus outbreak, it’s likely that more and more of us across the UK are going to be working from home. Here at Wikimedia UK, two of us (one in Scotland, one in Wales) are remote-workers by default, and so with our whole organisation now working remotely we thought that we might be able to share some hints and tips for those of you joining the shortest-commute-club.

I’m Dr Sara Thomas, Scotland Programme Coordinator for Wikimedia UK, and as the only Wikimedia UK employee in Scotland, I always work remotely. Hello, and welcome to the joys of having your cat interrupt your video call.

I work for a few organisations, one of which is Wikimedia UK, and none of which involve office space in Scotland. Most of the time, I’m sat at a desk (dining room table pushed against a wall) in the bay window area of my attic flat in Glasgow which you can see above. The shelf of stuff in front of me has sometimes useful stuff. My partner is an artist, and when he’s not running workshops or at his studio, he’s using the computer set up in our spare room to do digital work. We are a household of home workers. Here’s what I’ve learned over the past few years:

Video conferencing. I do a lot of meetings by Google Hangout / Meet / Skype. I definitely prefer the video option to phone calls; you just don’t get the same rapport with someone when you can’t see their face. My default is now video chat rather than call. Cuts down on travel time, and depending on where this situation goes in terms of social distancing, it might start to be your default too.

Check ins / Office rapport. I started off wiki-life as a Wikimedian in Residence, and whilst there was a good office culture at my host institution, I often felt distant from the rest of the UK Wikimedia community. For the last year or so, I’ve been running a WhatsApp group that brings Wikimedia UK programmes staff and Wikimedians in Residence across the country together, and it’s been great for swapping tips, support, and ideas about working with Wikimedia. Slack’s pretty good for this kind of stuff too.

Project & diary management. This is more of a time management thing, but it’s also good for when you’re working across a distributed team. Trello, Basecamp, etc – choose your weapon. Good for to-do lists, assigning tasks, etc. If you’re not used to working without direct supervision it’s really easy for your attention to wander – I find that blocking out my day in my diary really helps.

Don’t get distracted by TV, tempting though it is. Spotify playlists, on the other hand… if your office doesn’t usually allow tunes, now is your opportunity to play Nine Inch Nails very loudly to your heart’s content.

Organise your workspace. I have a good mouse, laptop stand and a proper chair. DO NOT WORK FROM BED. I know, I know, you can totally answer emails from your phone whilst under a duvet. But you will regret it, not least when your body has decided to associate your bed with work-thoughts, and doesn’t want you to get to sleep at night.

Get dressed. It’s really tempting to stay in your jammies all day but it makes it really hard to get into the headspace for work.

Cook good food. You’re at home, don’t limit yourself to the packed lunch you’d bring to work, or the disappointing sandwich from the shop round the corner. Slow cooker? Something that needs to marinate but that you’d never have time to do normally? Now’s your chance.

Remember to exercise. In my last office job I’d regularly walk a couple of miles a day; these days it takes less than 20 seconds to get from my bed to my desk. This is not good for my sleep pattern, waistline or general mental health, to be honest. So take regular breaks from your desk. Get up, move around. Go for a walk at lunchtime. I’ve seen a few friends decide that they’re not going to use the gym until this whole thing blows over (too much coughing and not wiping down of machines) but running shoes, walking shoes, and doing yoga in your front room are still options. Getting out into nature (if you’ve got any near you) is a good idea, not least because Cabin Fever Really Is A Thing.

If your work isn’t usually remote. One of our partners is considering Wiki-work as an option in the event of a building shutdown. They’d be updating metadata on images, contributing to their areas of interest and expertise, or maybe improving Wikidata. If you’ve any questions about how this might become a stream of work for your organisation, please feel free to drop me a line…

Another good blog I read on this recently is here.

Wikimedia UK and COVID-19: A local and global response

By Lucy Crompton-Reid, Wikimedia UK Chief Executive

This is not the blog that I thought I was going to be writing this March. Through a combination of Women’s History Month, International Women’s Day and Wikimedia’s own project Art+Feminism, Wikimedia UK would have been involved in a wide range of events with some amazing partners across the country, training new editors and increasing coverage of women and their achievements on Wikipedia and beyond. Instead, our events have been cancelled and as of today, the Wikimedia UK office is closed and staff are all working from home, as we are gripped by a global pandemic on a scale none of us has ever lived through.

These are strange, sad and unsettling times for all of us, which are illustrating both our fragility and our interconnectedness. It’s difficult to find anything positive to focus on at a time when people are dying, museums are closing, businesses are folding and all of us are worried about ourselves and our loved ones. However I did want to share with you some of the ways in which the Wikimedia community both here in the UK and around the world is helping people through this crisis:

Wikipedia editors are working around the clock to make sure that there is up-to-date, accurate and accessible information about COVID-19 and the social, economic and educational impact of the pandemic. This Wired article talks about the crucial role played by a London based doctor and Wikipedia contributor in the development of the COVID-19 article on Wikipedia, which is now receiving more than half a million views a day. The doctor in question was trained to edit Wikipedia by our Wikimedian in Residence at the Wellcome Library, demonstrating the importance of these programmes and the offline activities facilitated by Wikimedia UK.
As more than 849 million children and young people are having their education disrupted as a result of the pandemic – according to the latest information released to Wikipedia by UNESCO – the value of the Wikimedia projects as the world’s biggest open educational resource has never been more crucial. Here in the UK, we are exploring how we can support universities in their transition to online learning, whilst many Wikimedia organisations around the world are working to highlight teaching and learning resources for all age groups.
Individual editors and organisations across the global Wikimedia movement are joining advocacy efforts to encourage official bodies and international agencies to release content about the virus and associated issues under open licences. This work is ongoing and has already resulted in accurate, well researched and – crucially at this point – educational material about COVID-19 being released onto the Wikimedia projects, where millions more people are accessing this information.

Conversely, on a video call with colleagues from across the global Wikimedia movement yesterday, it became clear that some governments are using the pandemic to justify heavy censorship – including blocking Wikipedia – and roll back civil liberties. Whilst we are already seeing how a pandemic like this is creating an ideal environment for misinformation and disinformation, we must ensure that it is not used as an excuse to limit freedom of expression and curtail people’s rights to information and knowledge.

Wikimedia UK may be at home, but we’re still online. Yesterday the whole staff team met to discuss some of the implications of the office closure – and the wider COVID-19 situation – for us, our partners, our volunteer community and other contributors. We are already thinking about our programme and partnerships, and considering what events and projects will need to be cancelled but what can be rescheduled, moved online or re-imagined. We are also keen to explore ways in which we can support editors and readers during this period, as well as our members and supporters. If you would like to get in touch, please email us on info@wikimedia.org.uk and we will endeavour to respond as quickly as we can.

I wish you all the very best for the next few weeks and months. Please stay safe and, if you can, #StayAtHome.

If you’re able to donate to Wikimedia UK, we’d be grateful for your support.

Knowledge activism vs passive consumption – rethinking Wikipedia in education

This post was written by Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh.

Kindness on the Internet has been much in the news of late and this quote from novelist Henry James stood out to me:

Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.

I have been working at the University of Edinburgh for over four years now as the Wikimedian in Residence. Four years as of January 2020 in fact, just as Wikipedia itself turned nineteen years old on January 15th 2020. In thinking about this period of my working life, I am reminded of some of the (sometimes) sceptical conversations I have had with (some) academics over the years but more often than not I recall the enthusiasm, generosity and kindness I have encountered. And I’m reminded also of the words of Katherine Maher, Executive Director for the Wikimedia Foundation, when she said that Wikipedia, ultimately, is based on human generosity; that the act of editing Wikipedia is a generous act by volunteer editors all around the world because they are giving of their time, their expertise and their passion for a subject in order to improve the knowledge shared openly with the world through this free and open online encyclopedia. And why? Well because…

Knowledge creates understanding – understanding is sorely lacking in today’s world. – Katherine Maher.

While the residency has been something of an experiment, a proof of concept if you will for hosting a Wikimedian to support the whole university, I am more convinced than ever that there is a clear role, a structural need even, for Wikimedia in teaching and learning.

Yet while I am an employee of the University of Edinburgh, I attended the other place (University of Glasgow) for my undergraduate course and my postgraduate courses were at Glasgow Caledonian University, University of Strathclyde and Northumbria University. So four years at the University of Edinburgh and experience of five universities all told. As 74 UK universities go on strike now and a national conversation is being held about working conditions, casualised contracts and the workloads of staff at universities it does indeed give pause for thought. Time, for thought and reflection on the purpose of education… and its delivery.

Now imagine you are relaxing after work in a sauna at your local swimming pool one evening and a guy called Patrick starts chatting to you and asking what you do for a living. You tell Patrick why, I’m a Wikipedian at the University of Edinburgh. And Patrick replies… “Cool. What’s Wikipedia got to do with universities?”

Have a think for a moment… what is the link between Wikipedia and Universities? What would you say? How would you answer?

Well Patrick, it’s a fair question. Let’s see.

How about shared vision and mission statements. “The creation, curation and dissemination of knowledge” is built into the University of Edinburgh’s mission while Wikimedia’s vision is to “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.”

And as Sue Beckingham said in her Association for Learning Technology (ALT) keynote it’s about engaging with & understanding the relationship we have with the open web, how people create, curate and contest knowledge online and our relationship with the big digital intermediaries like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Wikipedia, the fifth most visited website in the world.

Then there’s the Digital Skills aspect – It is widely recognised that digital capabilities are a key component of graduate employability. So many reports make this clear. Supporting learning digital research skills, synthesising that information and communicating it in a rapidly changing digital world.

And it’s about how we support developing a more robust critical information literacy. In fact, this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the areas that working with the free and open Wikimedia projects affords. At its heart its about the fact that search is the way we live now and what’s right or wrong or missing on Wikipedia affects the whole internet. And this is how Wikipedia in teaching in learning is often framed – warning students about its use, pros and cons, often with the focus firmly on the cons, as something to be consumed at your peril. When Wikipedia in teaching and learning should really spin this on its head. It’s what you can also contribute as an institution, staff and students, and get out of the teaching & learning experience as a result.

Indeed, the ALT website defines Learning Technology as this:

We define Learning Technology as the broad range of communication, information and related technologies that can be used to support learning, teaching and assessment. Our community is made up of people who are actively involved in understanding, managing, researching, supporting or enabling learning with the use of Learning Technology. We believe that you don’t need to be called ‘Learning Technologist’ to be one.

Wikipedia is learning technology, the largest open knowledge resource in human history that is free, open and anyone can contribute to. Now aged nineteen, as of last month, Wikipedia has truly come of age and ranks among the world’s top ten sites for scholarly resource lookups and is extensively used by virtually every platform used on a daily basis, receiving over 20 billion views per month, from 1.5 billion unique devices. The only non-profit website in the top 100 websites, quite simply “Wikipedia is today the gateway through which millions of people now seek access to knowledge.”– (Cronon, 2012)

Ergo… Wikimedians are learning technologists. And a Wikimedian is just someone who has learnt how to train people how to edit, who facilitates editing events and assignments.

Ergo… Learning technologists are Wikimedians or they should be.

Because at the University of Edinburgh, we have quickly generated real examples of technology-enhanced learning activities appropriate to the curriculum and transformed our students, staff and members of the public from being passive readers and consumers to being active, engaged contributors. The result is that our community is more engaged with knowledge creation online and readers all over the world benefit from our teaching, research and collections.

Our Wikimedia in the Curriculum activities bring benefits to the students who learn new skills and have immediate impact in addressing both the diversity of editors and diversity of content shared online:

Global Health MSc students add 180-200 words to Global Health related articles e.g. their edits to the page on obesity are viewed 3,000 times per day on average.
Digital Sociology MSc students engage in workshops with how sociology is communicated and how knowledge is created and curated online each year.
Reproductive Biology Honours – students work in groups in 2 workshops at the beginning of the semester – learning about digital research kills from our Academic Support Librarians so they can work collaboratively to research and publish a new article on a reproductive biomedical term not yet on Wikipedia. One student’s article on high-grade serous carcinoma, one of the most common forms of ovarian cancer, includes 60 references and diagrams she created, has been viewed over 88,000 times since 2016. That’s impact.
Translation Studies MSc students gain meaningful published practice each semester by translating 1,500 words to share knowledge between two different language Wikipedias on a topic of their own choosing from the highest quality articles.
World Christianity MSc students spend the semester undertaking a literature review assignment to make the subject much less about White Northern hemisphere perspectives; creating new articles on Asian Feminist Theology, Sub-Saharan Political Theology and more.
Data Science for Design MSc – Wikipedia’s sister project, Wikidata, affords students the opportunity to work practically with research datasets, like the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database, and surface data to the Linked Open Data Cloud and explore different visualisations and the direct and indirect relationships at play in this semantic web of knowledge to help further discovery.
This academic year we have also added three more course programmes in Korean Studies MSc, Digital Education MSc (group editing pages related to information literacy), and Global Health Challenges Postgraduate Online (group editing on short stub articles on natural disasters). Indeed we are looking increasingly at how we support online course programmes and supporting discussion, engagement and up-skilling students on these course programmes in more structured self-directed way.

We also work with student societies (Law & Technology, History, Translation, Women in STEM, Wellcomm Kings) and have held events for Ada Lovelace Day, LGBT History Month, Black History Month, Mental Health Awareness Week and celebrated Edinburgh’s Global Alumni; working with the UncoverEd project and the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission.

Students are addressing serious knowledge gaps and are intrinsically motivated to communicate their scholarship because of this. They benefit from the practice academically and enjoy doing it personally because their scholarship is published, lasting long beyond the assignment and does something for the common good for an audience of not one but millions.

Why engage at all? I think we know that representation matters. And that Gender inequality in science and technology is all too real. Gaps in our shared knowledge excludes the vitally important contributions of many within our community and role models, trail blazers are important. You can’t be what you can’t see. To date, 69% of our participating editors at the University of Edinburgh have been women. The choices being made in creating new pages and increasing the visibility of topics and the visibility of inspirational role models online can not only shape public understanding around the world for the better but can also help inform and shape our physical environments to inspire the next generation.

Wikipedia in the curriculum involves identifying reliable secondary sources we can cite (or sometimes the lack thereof); discussing whose knowledge, open access, bias, neutral point of view, writing for a lay audience and copyright. These are all absolutely appropriate for the modern graduate. The skills needed by those contributing to Wikimedia are the same digital literacy skills which a degree at University of Edinburgh is designed to develop: Those of critical reading, summarising, paraphrasing, original writing, referencing, citing, publishing, data handling, and understanding your audience. In this era of fake news it has never been more important that our students understand how information is published, shared, and contested online. And beyond this, feel empowered that they can do something positive to share fact-checked knowledge and help build understanding.

Because It’s an emotional connection… Within, I’d say, less than 2 hours of me putting her page in place it was the top hit that came back in Google when I Googled it and I just thought that’s it, that’s impact right there!” (Hood & Littlejohn, 2018)

Things can look bleak when we think about all we see in the news and our relationship with the open web and the way in which information is shared online. It’s easy to lose faith at times. Indeed almost two years ago, Sir Tim Berners-Lee was on Channel 4 News being interviewed about the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal and he said this.

We need to rethink our attitude to the internet.

It is not enough just to keep the web open and free because we must also keep a track of what people are building on it.

Look at the systems that people are using, like the social networks and look at whether they are actually helping humanity.

Are they being constructive or are they being destructive?

And he’s later reiterated this point that he feels the open web is at something of a crossroads and could go either way.

Happily, Sir Tim had cheered up a little by May 2018 when he gave his Turing Award lecture in Amsterdam when he said,

It is amazing that humanity has managed to produce Wikipedia. Somebody recently said, “You know what? For all of the defending of the open net and the open web, it would have been worth it if we just got Wikipedia.”

It IS amazing that humanity has produced Wikipedia. And he’s right. That’s my experience of working with Wikipedia. The research, the feedback from staff and students all bear this out. People do feel they are doing something inherently good, and worthwhile in sharing verifiable open knowledge and they learn so much from engaging in this process. Becoming knowledge activists. I commend it to you as a hugely impactful form of learning technology where our staff, students, research and collections can help shape the open web for the better, building understanding to make for a kinder, better world.

Bibliography

Wadewitz, A. (2014). 04. Teaching with Wikipedia: the Why, What, and How. Retrieved from https://www.hastac.org/blogs/wadewitz/2014/02/21/04-teaching-wikipedia-why-what-and-how
Cronon, W. (2012). Scholarly Authority in a Wikified World | Perspectives on History | AHA. Retrieved from https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/february-2012/scholarly-authority-in-a-wikified-world
Levine, N. (2019). A Ridiculous Gender Bias On Wikipedia Is Finally Being Corrected. Retrieved from https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2019/06/234873/womens-world-cup-football-Wikipedia
Mathewson, J., & McGrady, R. (2018). Experts Improve Public Understanding of Sociology Through Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://www.asanet.org/news-events/footnotes/apr-may-2018/features/experts-improve-public-understanding-sociology-through-Wikipedia
Hood, N., & Littlejohn, A. (2018). Becoming an online editor: perceived roles and responsibilities of Wikipedia editors. Retrieved from http://www.informationr.net/ir/23-1/paper784.html
McAndrew, E., O’Connor, S., Thomas, S., & White, A. (2019). Women scientists being whitewashed from Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/women-scientists-being-whitewashed-from-wikipedia-ewan-mcandrew-siobhan-o-connor-dr-sara-thomas-and-dr-alice-white-1-4887048
McMahon, C.; Johnson, I.; and Hecht, B. (2017). The Substantial Interdependence of Wikipedia and Google: A Case Study on the Relationship Between Peer Production Communities and Information Technologies.

Fashion and digital citizenship at Bath Spa University

Bath Spa University. Photo by User:Rwendland, licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Bath Spa University in the UK had its first ever Wikipedia assignment, as part of a Digital Citizenship module for undergraduates studying Business Management Fashion. The results are mostly in user sandboxes, but some new articles have been created.

Bath Spa University, located in South West England, recently had its first, tentative, Wikipedia student assignment. The Business fashion degree has a focus on sustainable fashion, hence students had been studying the Rana Plaza collapse and its aftermath. This disaster highlighted the role of sweatshop labour in fashion supply chains and led to activism – including the #WhoMadeMyClothes hashtag. This gave a range of Wikipedia articles to which their work is relevant. The Women In Red project was also immensely useful for identifying prominent women in the fashion industry who did not have a Wikipedia article.

User:MartinPoulter gave two workshops on editing and interacting with Wikipedia. Because the Wikipedia element was introduced relatively late in the course, we decided to have the students post in user sandboxes rather than directly edit articles. Some groups collaborated on a single sandbox, and the article history was very useful in showing what each student had contributed.

As well as being marked for their individual essay submitted in the normal way, students were marked on whether they had done enough on-wiki work to make a substantial improvement to Wikipedia. It was still important that they experience feedback through the wiki platform, so in one activity they used Talk pages to write short reviews of each others’ drafts. The resulting work varies widely in quality but it has already enabled some significant improvement to English Wikipedia and at the same time it enabled students to do real collaborative writing. Martin is going through the students’ content, moving it into mainspace, in some cases combining work from multiple drafts. Some articles that have been created or improved:

On 26 February Wikimedia UK and the Disruptive Media Learning Lab are holding a one-day summit about the role of Wikimedia in education. This post was written by Martin Poulter and Caroline Kuhn; Martin will be taking part in the summit and teaching people about Wikidata. To learn more about Wikimedia UK’s activities, subscribe to our quarterly newsletter.

Yorkshire Editathon championing women in STEM

Presentation at the University of York Editathon on Women in STEM.

By Katie Crampton, Wikimedia UK Communications & Governance Assistant

We kicked off February in collaboration with University of York with another editathon to help close the gender gap on Wikipedia. Focused on Yorkshire women in STEM, the editathon aimed to highlight the diverse set of role models women have in the field. And with women’s uptake in careers in STEM at a dismal 22% in the UK, the importance of championing these voices is more important than ever.

With businesses in STEM building much of the world we interact with on a daily basis, the lack of women represented in these industries has long been a concern for those aiming to change its landscape. Without a solid foundation of biographies for women to take inspiration from, Wikipedia is one of the many areas that has fallen short in this regard, with only 18% of its biographies on women. Wikimedia UK and the global movement have been tackling the issue for a number of years, and we were delighted to partner with the University of York for this latest event.

The editathon aimed to expand digital editing skills through creating and editing Wikipedia pages. The first step was drawing together a list of entries to be added to or created, so a University wide call went out for names of notable Yorkshire Women in STEM. These included the likes of amateur field botanist Catherine Muriel ‘Kit’ Rob, whose story was included by the Borthwick Institute for Archives in a long list of other lost voices vital in a time when women had only just started entering STEM.

Dr Helen Niblock, Research Development Manager in Physical Science at the University of York, thanked Namrata Ganneri “for organising the editathon, it really brought people together for positive change. Thanks to Nigel [Wikimedia Trainer] for talking us through Wikipedia editing, it’s not as scary or complicated as I thought! I’ve now got the knowledge and confidence to go away and add more women scientists to Wikipedia.”

Some of the articles that were improved included Hilary Lappin Scott’s page, which now comprehensively outlines Scott’s career in microbiology with her “field of research in microbial biofilms. In 2009 Hilary was elected as the second female President of the Society for General Microbiology (SGM) in 70 years and served in this role until 2012. In September 2019 she was elected as President of the Federation of European Microbiological Societies (FEMS), being the first President from the UK.”

Other articles improved included Edith Pechey’s page, and the York physicist Professor Sarah Thomposon, with some work started on Professor Jane Hill’s page. With participants expressing interest in creating pages that there wasn’t time for in the event, like one for Catherine Muriel Kit Rob, a famous Yorkshire amateur botanists, we hope the skills built in the editathon will go on to have a lasting impact.

If you’d like to know more about our events, you can visit our events page, or for more activities around the gender gap on Wikipedia and its sister projects, have a look through this blog tag.

Announcing the Wikimedia in Education UK Summit

With around 20 billion page-views every month, Wikipedia is an integral part in how people discover information. It is used by students and lecturers alike, and it is one of the most important open educational resources currently available. Recognising the importance of engaging with Wikipedia and understanding its role in knowledge creation and dissemination, some university courses have used Wikipedia as a teaching tool for over a decade.

In the United Kingdom alone, there are around 25 modules across 18 higher education institutions that encourage students to actively engage with Wikipedia. These modules span the sciences, arts, and humanities and range from first-year undergraduate modules to Masters courses. With a variety of approaches, what unites them is that they help students improve their digital fluency and information skills.

Wikimedia UK and the Disruptive Media Learning Lab are jointly organising a summit to bring together people using Wikipedia in the classroom and those who would like to learn more about how it works. The event takes place on 26 February at Coventry University. This a pre-OER20 Conference event.

The Frederick Lanchester Library at Coventry University, home to the Disruptive Media Learning Lab. By Keith Williams, CC-BY-SA 2.0.

The day will feature keynotes from Prof. Allison Littlejohn (Director of the UCL Knowledge Lab) and Lorna Campbell (Senior Service Manager – Learning Technology, University of Edinburgh) as well as talks, practical sessions, and an unconference. Beyond Wikipedia itself, there will be an opportunity to learn about Wikidata, the open source knowledge base that links to Wikipedia.

The day will work from general principles, exploring what students get out of working with Wikipedia, and move into specifics with some case studies from Wikipedia in the classroom and hands-on sessions, and then an unconference session in the afternoon building on the ideas generated throughout the summit. The day will be concluded with a second keynote and a discussion panel.

The summit is open to all: lecturers, students, and Wikimedia volunteers. Tickets are £30 for waged attendees and £10 for unwaged. The full programme will be available on Meta-Wiki with details of how to reach the venue and accessibility.

Registration is now open and we look forward to seeing you there.

The Hill in the Disruptive Media Learning Lab. Photo by Daniel Villar-Onrubia, CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Wikimedia UK publishes ‘Closing the Gender Gap’ video

By John Lubbock, Wikimedia UK Communications Coordinator

I’ve worked at Wikimedia UK since 2016, managing their social media, press, content and general communications. During that time, the gender gap issue has become increasingly salient, especially with the media attention generated by Dr Jess Wade, a British research scientist who has written hundreds of biographical Wikipedia pages.

Jess started editing Wikipedia after attending a training workshop given by Dr Alice White, who was employed as the Wellcome Library’s Wikimedian in Residence, and is now Digital Editor at the Wellcome Collection. Wikimedia UK pioneered the use of Wikimedians in Residence, with the first ever WiR being hosted at the British Museum in 2010. Through promoting the use of Wikimedians in Residence and demonstrating their results, Wikimedia UK has punched above its weight as a chapter within the Wikimedia community, helping to release hundreds of thousands of images and show Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs), and also Universities, how they can use Wikipedia as a platform to gain a huge audience for their content.

Dr Wade, as well as a number of Wikimedians in Residence who have worked on the gender gap issue, feature prominently in our video, and add greatly to the impact that Wikimedia UK’s work has had in the past few years. Alone, we are just a small charity with 10 staff, but our allies and our community multiply the impact of our work greatly.

The knowledge that Wikipedia suffers from inadequacies and gaps in its coverage has pushed our community hard to try to redress the imbalances in content and contributors to Wikimedia projects. We have started to run Wikipedia training workshops for speakers of other languages, and especially to organise events aimed at encouraging contributions from women and LGBT+ groups.

Since the end of 2018 I have been slowly filming interviews and events which help to explain the breadth of work going on in the UK to help close the gender gap on Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia UK works across the country, so that we are not too London-centric an organisation. We have strong communities in Wales and Scotland, and support the Celtic languages to allow them to thrive in the digital era.

In Wales, this has been so successful that Welsh Wikipedia, Wicipedia Cymraeg, is the most viewed website in Welsh on the internet, and passed 100,000 articles in 2018. Wikipedia training was even included in the Welsh curriculum, and WiciMon, a group based in Northern Wales, has been training high school students in numerous schools. These younger groups are much more gender balanced than most Wikipedia communities, and there is also parity in biographical articles in Welsh between men and women.

There is so much work going on across different groups in the UK to address the gender gap, with groups like the Women’s Classical Committee and Women in Engineering running regular sessions, that sometimes it’s hard to see that at the root of this work, our chapter is often there helping with training and organising. It has not been easy to get the media’s attention on the work that we do to fix issues like the gender gap, because this work is not particularly glamourous and doesn’t make for clickbait headlines.

The intention of this film is therefore to show the media, and the wider Wikimedia community, how much effort Wikimedia UK staff, Wikimedians in Residence, and volunteers have put into improving Wikipedia’s coverage of underrepresented groups, and particularly women, over the last 4 years.

Wikipedia and Wikimedia charities often get criticised for not doing enough to fix sexism on our sites and within our communities. Clearly we have a long way to go, and there is much more to be done, but I hope that this film will show people what we are in fact doing, and how much we care about this issue.

The great promise of Wikimedia projects is that anybody can get involved in them and change them. The reality we experience is that over 40% of the world still has no internet access, and among those who do, there is a huge difference in levels of access. In less economically developed countries, millions of new internet citizens are coming online each day, and people in countries like the UK have a historical obligation to use our privilege to help people in countries with less resources redress this balance.

The gender gap problem is part of an intersectional network of inequalities in access to power and resources. As a community, Wikimedians must ensure that we do not repeat the unequal structures of power on which our technology is based. Fundamentally, we cannot fix gender inequality overnight, or the structure of power on which its is based. We can, however, help democratise access to those resources, especially those necessary for people to become educated.

‘You cannot be what you cannot see’, is a phrase often repeated by our community. I just searched Google images for the word ‘scientist’, and out of 40 people in the images that immediately appeared, 19 were women, 21 men. The first image in the list is the image that illustrates the Wikipedia page ‘Scientist’, and features two non-white people, one male and one female.

The proportion of biographical articles on English Wikipedia about women has increased from 14% to 18% since about 2015. If this proportion were to continue to increase by 1% a year, we could reach parity by 2051. It may be that complete parity is never achievable, due to the paucity of historical sources about women, but I think that these successes go to show that we are winning this fight, even if it feels like slow progress sometimes.

Communicating the work of a local Wikimedia chapter is hard work, but all of us at Wikimedia UK are extremely proud of what we have been able to achieve since the chapter began 10 years ago. Even if few journalists at big media companies pay attention to what we are doing, we know that what we are doing is changing things, and making the internet a better place for every digital citizen who has to share it in future.

Leveraging open data at the National Library of Wales

By Jason Evans, National Wikimedian at the National Library of Wales

Over 7 years ago the National Library of Wales made the decision not to claim any rights to digital reproductions of public domain works. I was then employed as a Wikimedian, in partnership with Wikimedia UK, to actively begin sharing this content openly on Wikimedia Commons.

To date we have shared over 17,000 images to Commons. Over 70% of these images are now in use on a Wikimedia project, including Wikipedia where views of pages containing our images have reached nearly 730 million. This demonstrates the massive reach which can be achieved through sharing with Wikipedia.

About a year in to the residency, following an introduction to Wikidata from Histropedia’s Navino Evans, we began exploring the possibility of sharing our rich metadata for our open content to Wikidata. We took the time, with the help of volunteers, to create items for relevant artists and photographers, to map descriptive tags to Wikidata depicts statements and to insure that data had Welsh language labels wherever possible.

The best way of exploring and visualising this data was Crotos. The Crotos project is a search and display engine for visual artworks. This website is powered by WikiCommons for images and Wikidata for metadata. At its launch in 2014 the site contained just 8000 images, but by the end of 2019 there are nearly 200,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs and more.

Crotos allows users to explore visual content shared on Wikimedia platforms

For years Crotos has been the go to platform for searching, discovering and simply enjoying the one of the worlds largest collections of free art. For Wikimedian’s it is also incredibly useful for demonstrating how structured data can be used to enrich search and discovery of artwork and other visual material, using various Wikidata properties such as depicts, artist, publisher and collection in order to filter content. Images can be displayed on a map based on places depicted and content can be filtered by date of creation. It’s a simple, yet highly effective tool for exploring digital content.

And this got me thinking. Many GLAMs dont have the resources to produce nice portals for exploring their digital content. The National LIbrary of Wales is in a stronger position than many, but even so we have to focus on our core functions – providing access to all our content, including books and archives through a central catalogue system. Our online catalogue is very good for searching for books or specific items from the collection, but it is less useful for those who wish to browse or explore our substantial archive of digital content in a visual and engaging way.

So I reached out to Benoît, the founder of Crotos, and he kindly added Welsh as a language to the Crotos interface. This was great, as it allowed us to benefit from the Welsh language labels, already in Wikidata to give access to our collections and others through the medium of Welsh. Following this, Benoît and I had several discussions at various events about the value of Crotos and the potential for it to form the bases of bespoke interfaces for individual institutions. This would certainly be of benefit to the National Library, but more generally for many smaller GLAMs, such a clear and tangible benefit could help tip the scales towards an open strategic approach.

The new National Library of Wales ‘Dwynwen’ interface

We are incredibly grateful to Benoît for taking this idea forward. He started modifying a version of Crotos especially for National Library of Wales content! Over a few weeks we tweaked the new site to suit our needs and our collection. The website, named Dwynwen (the Welsh Saint of lovers), retains all the functionality of the Crotos site and adds a few additions, such as links from each image to our own IIIF image viewer, and the addition of a ‘Published in’ facet. ‘Cosmos’ and ‘Calisto’ have been renamed ‘Browse’ and ‘Map’ to fit better with our own standards. Our version simply limits results to items that are part of the National Library of Wales collection.

Content can also be explored on a map using location data for places depicted in artworks

Speaking about the project, Benoît said;

Since its origins, the web has provided fantastic opportunities to freely explore digital reproductions of artworks, to get information about them, to link them, to browse collections, for knowledge or simply for the pleasure of art experience. Little by little cultural institutions shared their collections online. At the same time, volunteers through the world build or participate in websites about artworks. Wikimedia projects, led by Wikipedia and the goal to share and to give access to all the knowledge, are major players in this movement with many contributors and wide diffusion. Wikimedia Commons, the free-use media repository, and Wikidata, the Wikimedia knowledge database, are great places to gather and structure digital heritage assets and a place where institutions and volunteers can work together. With all that has already been gathered and the technologies that come with them, it is possible to create interfaces, including in the field of art.

Jason Evans, had the idea to create a subset dedicated to the collections of the National Library of Wales, and so Dwynwen was born. And what a great idea! The quantity and quality of the metadata makes it possible to encourage new explorations in those collections. So, for example, we can see more than a hundred views of Snowdon, discover Wales at the end of the 19th century through John Thomas’ photographs, explore prints and illustrations by publications or see extracts of Peniarth Manuscripts.

Thanks a lot to the team investment of the National Welsh Library and Wikidata volunteers that make the Dwynwen possible. Enjoy!

For the National Library, this will give our users a new, and better way of exploring our digital content. Whether you are looking for something specific, like images of Donkeys, bearded men, just the images of women or you just want to explore our photographs, prints or artworks, then ‘Dwynwen’ makes this easy, fun and intuitive.

Paintings of Women – Selecting only paintings of Women

But this will also be a fantastic tool to demonstrate the value of our open access activity to management, partners and funders, and we hope to use this and other Wiki powered software such as the Dictionary of Welsh Biography timeline, currently in development to change the way we think about giving access to our digital content, and to step up efforts to harness the power of linked open data for content delivery.

‘Dwynwen’ is the result of the National Library of Wales’ enthusiasm and belief in open access principals, together with the hard work of numerous volunteers. We are incredibly grateful to Benoît, for having the vision to develop Crotos, and for his generosity in adapting the platform for us. We are also greatly indebted to Simon Cobb, our Wikidata Visiting Scholar who has done so much work to help share our data to Wikidata, and all the volunteers on Commons and Wikidata who have helped us to share and described our digital content.