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.

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.