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.

Supporting the Turkish Wikimedia community from the UK

A tram on Istanbul’s Istiklal Street in the snow – image by Jwslubbock CC BY-SA 4.0

By John Lubbock, Communications Coordinator

As many of you know, Wikipedia has been blocked in Turkey since 2017. While it’s still possible to access the site from Turkey via proxy sites and VPNs, it’s much harder to edit Wikipedia from Turkey, which means that the content is not being updated and the Turkish language version of Wikipedia is not growing.

I’ve been visiting Turkey regularly since 2012 to visit my partner who used to live there, and have written about the country quite often in my spare time as a freelance journalist. So I care quite a lot about access to information in Turkey, and about supporting the Turkish Wikimedia User Group there.

A couple of months ago, I asked a BBC journalist who had been a correspondent in Turkey if he would be willing to share some of the photos he had taken in Turkey on Wikimedia Commons, because some of them were quite useful images of political events, like government press conferences, political campaign rallies and the aftermath of serious terrorist incidents. Unfortunately, the BBC claimed copyright on these images and asked for them to be removed from Commons. This was because an employee’s content (produced in the course of doing their job) is the copyright of their employer, and because the BBC have an agreement with Getty Images to let them use all their staff’s photos, even those which are low resolution, taken on smartphones and posted on Twitter.

To make up for this setback, I have decided to publish my own photos from my many visits to Turkey over the years. So far I’ve uploaded over 1500 images, which is far higher than the roughly 250 images which were donated by the BBC journalist. You can see them all in the Category:Photos of Turkey by John Lubbock on Commons. Here’s just a few of them.

[slideshow_deploy id=’4756′]

Most of these photos are of Istanbul, but I’ve also visited Fethiye, Adana, Diyarbekir, Antalya, Tatvan and a few smaller towns in the East. There are some good images of the recently opened Adana Archaeological Museum, the Istanbul Archaeological Museum and the Fethiye Archaeological Museum, because, well, I like museums and one of the best things about visiting Turkey is the wide range of cultures and civilisations which have existed in Anatolia over the past few thousand years whose remains are everywhere for you to see.

In the context of the Turkish government’s blocking of Wikipedia and the ongoing European Court of Human Rights case brought by the Wikimedia Foundation to pressure Turkey to unblock the site, I think it’s important to show that the Wikimedia community can still support the Turkish Wikimedia community in various ways. That’s why I’m running a Wikipedia workshop for Turkish speakers in January to improve content on the Turkish Wikipedia about cultural subjects.

I am also working with Wikidata trainer and Histropedia creator Nav Evans to try to improve data about heritage sites in Turkey, which can hopefully be used by the Turkish User Group to run their first Wiki Loves Monuments next year. In the past, they have been unable to do this because the Turkish government’s own data about heritage sites is quite messy and hard to incorporate into Wikidata. Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons are not blocked in Turkey, so we hope that working on these project will show people in Turkey that Wikimedia projects can be important for promoting and preserving cultural heritage in Turkey which is such a large factor in their tourism industry.

Wikimedia UK would like to run more events in future for speakers of other lanaguages which can help to improve content in those languages and to meet our commitment to improving the diversity of content and contributors to Wikipedia. If you are a speaker of a language which doesn’t currently have a lot of content on Wikipedia, please consider getting in touch with Wikimedia UK and talking to us about running an event.

Copyright for Wikimedia photographers in the UK

A functional item: a 1971 Smalley 5 Mk II mini digger in waterway recovery group markings – image by Geni CC BY-SA 4.0

By UK Wikimedian and copyright enthusiast Geni

Spoiler:Its a terrible broken system which is part of the reason Wikipedia went copyleft in the first place. Please note that this is not legal advice. If you want that, ask a lawyer or, given the mess some bits of the law are in, 5 supreme court judges.

To be honest, this would be better titled “what you can upload photographs of without Commons rightfully complaining”.

The first thing you have to consider is: is the subject of the photo 3D or 2D? 2D and 3D subjects are dealt with very differently so see the relevant section for the subject you are interested in (objects with more than 3 dimensions are probably the same as 3D objects but there is no caselaw).

3D subjects

The good news is that the UK is one of the most liberal countries when it comes to photographing 3D objects (formal term freedom of panorama). If its on 3D and on permanent display in a public place then you are free to photograph it. This covers buildings, statues, dolls and basically anything else that’s 3D (although the exact reasons why may vary).

On permanent display: the Three rings sculpture by Jane Ackroyd in ocean village – image by Geni CC BY-SA 4.0

To break it down a bit, permanent display means no specific plans to remove the subject at some point. Public place means places the general public regularly has access to. So things like market squares, museums and the more open type of church would be fine but a private house or factory would not be (and yes this can result in the weird situation where you can’t upload a photo of a figurine taken in your home but could upload a picture of an identical one on display a museum).

One exception to all of this is that it assumes the item is under copyright in the first place. If the author has been dead for 70 years or the subject is in the public domain for some other reason then the location of the object and its permeance doesn’t matter. A second exception is that it only applies to items that qualify for copyright at all. Under UK law functional items (tools machinery, clothing etc) that don’t rise to the level of artistic craftsmanship don’t qualify for copyright. Unfortunately the term “artistic craftsmanship” is only defined through caselaw and even then pretty poorly. Of the nominal standards, the easiest to work to involves judging author intent. If it appears that the author was trying to create an artwork then the subject is more likely to qualify for copyright than if it did not. For example a highly decorative lampshade might well qualify for copyright but a standard fluorescent strip light mounting would not.

2D subjects

While the UK may be liberal with 3D objects its very much the reverse with 2D. Photos of paintings, murals and graffiti (and any other 2D work) are copyright infringements if the original work is under copyright (which unless the author has been dead for 70 years it usually would be).

Incidental inclusion

The UK has an explicit allowance for incidental inclusion. Wikimedia Commons users tend to interpret this as meaning

that if something is not the subject of the photo you don’t need to worry about it. Graffiti on a building (where the photo is of the building) or a temporary sculpture in the corner of a village square are not an issue. Photos where those were the focus of the image would be a problem. Full details can be found at Commons:De minimis (the rough US equivalent).

The unreasonably difficult photo contest

If all this copyright stuff is boring or depressing then I can offer you the unreasonably difficult photo contest where none of the subjects present a copyright issue.

Wiki Loves Monuments UK 2019 winners announced

*Perch Rock Lighthouse continues its run of winning entries in WLM UK competitions with this commended image by Mark Warren*

Wiki Loves Monuments UK, part of the world’s biggest photographic contest, has announced the winners of this year’s competition. The UK competition is organised and voted on by members of the Wikimedia community in the UK, and seeks to encourage photographers to upload their images to Wikimedia Commons, the media-sharing sister site of Wikipedia, where content is shared on Creative Commons Open Licenses and is freely available to use by anybody.

Competition organiser Michael Maggs announced the winners on the Wiki Loves Monuments UK site over the weekend and explained the judges decisions to award the main prizes.

First prize

Kilchurn Castle at sunrise by MHoser – image CC BY-SA 4.0

Michael Maggs: “The judges appreciated the wonderful colour-palette that the photographer has captured with the early-morning light, and the real skill and care that is evident in the composition.”

Second prize

File:Bass Rock with lighthouse and gannets.jpg

Bass Rock with Lighthouse by Ellievking – image CC BY-SA 4.0

Michael Maggs: “Although Bass Rock is a well-photographed subject, the judges picked this image out for its unusual and varied lighting which brings out the details of the upper rock surface, the clouds of birds in flight, and the photographic angle which allows the lighthouse to stand out clearly.”

Third prize

Sun Setting on Commando Memorial by Jock in Northumberland – image CC BY-SA 4.0

Michael Maggs: “The judges liked the use of a low camera angle and late afternoon sunshine to enhance the presence of this powerful monument. They also appreciated the photographer choosing a lesser-known site.”

Commended

Arnol Blackhouse

Clifton Suspension Bridge and the Observatory in Bristol, England

High tide at Newport transporter Bridge

Leasowe Lighthouse Frozen Fields

Leasowe Lighthouse with Frozen Fields by Mark Warren 1973 – image CC BY-SA 4.0

Perch Rock Lighthouse Gold

Perch Rock Lighthouse by Mark Warren 1973 – image CC BY-SA 4.0

This year the judges have awarded only five commendations, as they did not feel there were sufficient images of prize-winning quality to award the usual seven. We are accordingly submitting a total of eight images this time.

If you want to see all 10,438 images submitted to Wiki Loves Monuments this year, you can find them in this category on Wikimedia Commons.

Congratulations to the winners of the top prizes, and especially to MHoser, whose winning entry receives a prize of £250. Wiki Loves Monuments will return in September 2020, and we strongly encourage photographers to consider taking photos of monuments throughout the year which they can submit next September.

Samhuinn at the University of Edinburgh

So, the University of Edinburgh have been awfully busy when it comes to all things Witchcraft recently.

Samhuinn Wikipedia editathon at University of Edinburgh - Mihaela Bodlovic — Samhuinn Wikipedia editathon at University of Edinburgh – Mihaela Bodlovic – CC-BY-SA

Wikimedian in Residence Ewan McAndrew has been working with Wikidata and the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft for a while now, with the University’s Wikidata / Data Visualisation internship and “Witchfinder General” Emma Carroll taking it to another level; geolocating places from the database of accused witches in Scotland, and entering them into Wikidata.

This allowed for some incredible visualisations and detailed storytelling, as you can see on the dedicated website here. Both the project and the website have been incredibly popular, and gained a huge amount of press – you can see just one of the pieces here. This success is testament not only to the hard work of all involved, but to how data storytelling can help us connect to our culture, and our history.

For the last few years the University have been celebrating Hallowe’en – or Samhuinn/Samhain, in the original Gaelic – with something a little Wikimedia, and this year is no exception.

Faerie Porters at the University of Edinburgh Samhuinn Editathon in 2016. Mihaela Bodlovic. CC-BY-SA

Ewan will be hosting A Witchy Wikipedia Editathon for Samhuinn on Thursday 31st October in Argyle House, just off the Grassmarket, between 1pm-5pm. The event’s open to members of the public as well as those from the University, and you can book your tickets by following the link here. They’ll also be hosting their regular Women in Red editathon at the University library on Wednesday 30th.

They’ll be concentrating on improving the coverage of accused witches of Scotland, gothic novels, and more. We’d love to see you there!