Arabic Wikipedia is growing fast – here’s why

Faisal Saeed al-Mutar (right) with Wikimedia UK’s John Lubbock – image by author

By John Lubbock, Wikimedia UK Communications Coordinator

I met recently with Faisal Saeed al-Mutar, an Iraqi refugee in the US, who set up the organisation Ideas Beyond Borders, whose goal is to make more content accessible online for people living in parts of the world where access to reliable information is problematic. His work with Arabic translators to translate good English Wikipedia articles into Arabic has so far created around 3200 new articles and his work was profiled in The Guardian.

According to the Guardian, just 0.6% of the content online is available in Arabic. There are over 400 million speakers of Arabic, but the Arabic Wikipedia only had around 600,000 articles by the end of 2018. For comparison, English Wikipedia is about to pass 6 million articles. You can see more stats about the Arabic Wikipedia here.

However, in the past 10 months, Arabic Wikipedia has expanded massively to 966,000 articles and it looks likely to be the next Wikipedia version to break 1,000,000 articles. As well as talking to Faisal al-Mutar, I talked to Helmi Hamdi, who is working with the Arabic Wikimedia community to help create articles using a bot called JarBot, which is specific to Arabic Wikipedia.

Helmi Hamdi: “Reaching 1 million milestones was important for the community. With large and diverse native language speakers (around 270 million) we had to offer sufficient content on different subjects. Meanwhile, the community wasn’t able to retain enough new editors. As a result, the number of articles created by editors didn’t increase significantly since 2014. Articles created by anonymous editors have even drastically decreased. The tendency of the Arabic Wikipedia community to edit the existing articles and the high level of maintenance in comparison to other Wikis were the main obstacles to increase the number of articles.”

Faisal Saeed al-Mutar (right) – image by author

Helmi said that it wasn’t straightforward to gain support from the community for the project, but “we started but preparing the field by doing multiple pre-approved tasks: creating Wikidata-based infoboxes (ARWikipedia is classified 3rd in terms of Wikidata use in articles among all Wikipedias), adding Arabic female form of labels of professions and nationalities on Wikidata, automate creating and adding categories stub temples, portal banners, importing external links from Wikidata. Then, we tested the bot for humans and at first we only created bot articles on football/soccer players. We got a lot of feedback in the beginning. By incorporating those comments, we enhanced the quality of bot articles and avoided large oppositions.”

“After creating male soccer players we asked to do the same for females. Then we started adding other sports such as handball, volleyball, basketball and cricket by only translating field positions labels on Wikidata! Funny fact: Arabic Wikipedia has now more than 8 000 articles about cricket (less than 800 on French Wikipedia). Around April 2019, the community was ready to accept bot articles for different professions and not only sports people. You see on the graph a large increase in bot articles during that period.”

Articles created by bots on Arabic Wikipedia

“Around 50% of articles on Arabic Wikipedia are biographies due to massive bot creation. To limit that, we started several specific tasks using Wikidata such as years, decades, years by country, movies, websites, planets, proteins, bilateral relations, embassies, etc. The Arabic language community asked to stop using creating bot articles until we reach manually 1 million articles and then start again. Meanwhile, we are trying to implement the project on African languages Wikis specially those based on Latin script.”

The creation of articles by bots can provide a big boost to the size of the Wikipedia in a particular language, but they also need real contributors to come and improve those basic articles created by bots. Ideas Beyond Borders has an interesting approach to incentivising contributions to their translation project. Lisa Pirovano from IBB told me that they give participants in their projects training certificates sponsored by themselves and partner organisations to show that they are adept at translating from English to Arabic. Furthermore,

“Through their interactions with program coordinators and giving them access to in-person workshops with their peers, we’ve built a community where aspiring translators can hone their skills, translate impactful content that they can choose, and ultimately, improve their professional background.”

IBB has also been able to fund some translators with a ‘small, symbolic stipend’, which is something that I am personally in favour of, as the Wikimedia movement cannot always rely on voluntary work, which is often the preserve of educated, time-rich people in the West. They have worked with around 120 translators and currently have a group of about 60 people working with them. I asked Lisa Pirovano what more the Wikimedia movement could do to support their initiative. Pirovano said that partnership and funding opportunities would be welcome, and that supporters can follow them on their Facebook page, or directly contribute via their website.

Pages created by IBB have been viewed over 8.5 million times so far, and we hope their initiative will result in thousands more articles in future.

If you are an Arabic speaker in the UK, you can ask us how to get involved in Wikimedia projects, and we also encourage people to talk to us about organising Wikipedia editing workshops for speakers of Arabic and other languages.

 

Wikimedia UK’s John Lubbock and Faisal Saeed al-Mutar

“Masterpieces of the World” – A Landmark Partnership between Wikimedia UK and the Khalili Collections

Wikimedia UK is launching a landmark partnership with the UK-based Khalili Collections – one of the greatest and most comprehensive private collections in the world. Over the course of five decades, UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador Professor Nasser D. Khalili has assembled eight of the world’s finest art collections – each being the largest and most comprehensive of its kind. They comprise:

  • Islamic Art (700-2000)
  • Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage (700-2000)
  • Aramaic Documents (535BC-324 BC)
  • Japanese Art of the Meiji Period (1868-1912)
  • Japanese Kimono (1700-2000)
  • Swedish Textiles (1700-1900)
  • Spanish Damascened Metalwork (1850-1900)
  • Enamels of the World (1700-2000)

Together, the Eight Collections comprise some 35,000 works, many of which have been exhibited at prestigious museums and institutions worldwide.

Panoramic View of Mecca, 1845 – image from Khalili Collections CC BY-SA 4.0

As part of the “Masterpieces of the World” project, the Khalili Collections will initially release a thousand high resolution images on Creative Commons licenses, as well as summaries of its extensive research content relating to artwork and objects from around the world. The Collections plans to continue working with Wikimedia UK to further share knowledge about art on Wikimedia platforms and increase the visibility of cultures and art forms that are currently under-represented on Wikipedia.

“At Wikimedia, we are actively seeking to diversify our cultural content, and the Khalili Collections is one of the most geographically and culturally diverse collections in the world, spanning some two and a half millennia, with masterpieces from Europe, the Middle East, Scandinavia, East Asia, Russia, South Asia, North Africa and beyond”, said Lucy Crompton-Reid, CEO of Wikimedia UK. “We are proud to be partnering with one of the world’s great preservers of global cultural heritage”.

“We are delighted to be working with Wikimedia UK, undeniably a pioneer in delivering free access to cultural knowledge worldwide”, said Professor Nasser D. Khalili, Founder of the Khalili Collections. “The partnership is an important part of our wider, long-standing strategy to make the Collections – and the five decades of expert research dedicated to them – more accessible to art and culture lovers worldwide”.

Initial outputs from the partnership will include new Wikipedia articles on The Khalili Collections (an overview article has just been published and articles for the eight individual collections will be forthcoming), 1000 images which will be freely available for reuse, including on Wikipedia, metadata records about the images on Wikimedia Commons, and content from the collections being showcased on Wikipedia, Commons, and Wikidata.

A Complete Cover for a Damascus Mahmal, Istanbul, 16th century – image from Khalili Collections CC BY-SA 4.0

To achieve this, the Khalili Collections will change the licence on 1,000 of its images from “all rights reserved” to CC-BY-SA. These are very high-quality images depicting treasures from non-Western cultures. Some use state-of-the-art high-resolution digitisation. KC will also freely licence some short summaries of the academic books it has published, allowing them to be used as the basis for Wikipedia articles.

In the longer term, we hope that the success of the initial pilot release of content will lead to further joint work sharing perspectives on the history of the world, as revealed through cultural treasures. Wikimedia UK recently published a report on the long-term impact of our Wikimedians in Residence who work at cultural and educational institutions, and we are looking at the potential of hiring a Wikimedian to work with the Khalili Collections to help make the most of the information and content that the KC is making available.

Wikimedia UK are very excited about this project, as it helps us to meet one of our main goals, to increase the diversity of the content and contributors to the Wikimedia projects. Digital inequality across the world means that Wikipedia is much better at representing the culture and history of European civilisations than those of other continents, and we hope that the release of content by the Khalili Collections will help Wikimedia to fill some of the gaps in its representation of the world.

We have a very long way to go in our quest to make an encyclopaedia which represents the breadth and diversity of the world’s history and culture, but partnerships like this are hugely important in making the art heritage of the world freely available to anybody with an internet connection.

Does Wikipedia have enough administrators?

Wikimedia admins – image by Jwslubbock CC BY-SA 4.0

By John Lubbock, Wikimedia UK Communications Coordinator

There are currently 1144 admins on the English language Wikipedia, of whom 501 are active as editors, though not all of those do a lot of admin-specific tasks. When you talk to people who have worked as admins on Wikipedia, they usually tell you that back in the early days of Wikipedia, a lot of people became admins quite easily, but that after spring 2008, it became a lot harder to become one.

What exactly do admins do? Well, according to the Wikipedia page about them, “Administrators, commonly known as admins or sysops (system operators), are Wikipedia editors who have been granted the technical ability to perform certain special actions on the English Wikipedia. These include the ability to block and unblock user accounts, IP addresses, and IP ranges from editing, edit fully protected pages, protect and unprotect pages from editing, delete and undelete pages, rename pages without restriction, and use certain other tools.”

User:WereSpielChequers has done some excellent analysis of the number of new admins being created on English Wikipedia, and the number of new admins has been in almost uninterrupted decline from early 2008 for over a decade. In an essay about the process of Requests for Adminship (RfA), WereSpielChequers says that it “is widely but not universally considered to be broken for various reasons.” but he also says “And yet, the great majority of those few who do pass do so almost unanimously.”

Graph of successful requests for adminship on Wikipedia by WereSpielChequers CC BY-SA 4.0

One issue of concern seems to be whether at some point there will simply not be enough admins to do all of the work necessary on the site, leading to a potential crisis. Another issue according to WereSpielChequers is that it creates a generational divide “between an active editing community – many of whom have been with us for less than two years and a large majority for less than four – and an admin community, none of whom have been here less than a year, fewer than 1% have been editing for one to two years and the vast majority have been editing for more than five years.”

I interviewed administrator User:WormThatTurned about how you become an admin and whether the process is currently too hard:

“Administrators on the English Wikipedia are promoted after a process called “Request for Adminship”. That generally either starts with a nomination from a long standing editor or a self-nomination, and answering three simple questions, which are roughly “Why do you want to be an admin, what’s your best work and what’s gone wrong for you on wikipedia?”. After that, the page is transcluded onto the requests page, and a week long process of scrutiny begins.

“Unfortunately, the community has very high standards for administrators.They require thousands (generally tens of thousands) of edits, and years of tenure. In addition, they look for evidence of article creation and evidence that the nominee has some idea what they’re getting themselves in for (that might be looking at why they need the tools, or how they’ve handled conflict in the past). I’ve written up a “Magic Formula” on how to become an admin, but it’s really not a simple task.

“The scrutiny period does involve many users taking a deep dive into your history, as well as any individuals who have previously had disagreements with you emerging to have a say. In addition, how you handle yourself during the process is taken into account. The entire process is so stressful that it is often referred to as “the gauntlet”, and while many users pass through with little or no comment, many others have a very hard time there.

“As to whether I feel the process is insufficient, well, yes. Editors who are eligible will regularly refuse to run, because they are fearful of the unpleasant experience that they will have to go through, and the benefits are small. Personally, I believe that the difficulty in removing administrators leads people to have higher standards than they should and the encyclopedia needs to go through the pain of not having enough admins for a bit to lower its standards. I also feel that fixed term adminship (rather than “for life”) would be a massive improvement in the long run.”

 

Confucius was an administrator in about 500 BC, but probably didn’t have the same issues Wikipedia admins experience. image Public Domain

User:WormThatTurned suggests that people who are interested in becoming admins check out a page he created about the process: Request an RfA Nomination.

One aspect of the RfA process which should be considered in light of discussion around the gender gap in the content of, and contributors to, Wikipedia, is that the reputation of the RfA process could put women off applying to be admins. WereSpielChequers has noted that the reputation of the process is worse than the reality, and points out that women made up a sizeable minority (8/28) of RFA candidates with over 200 supporters. It may also be true that women are more likely to be successful in applying for adminship because they tend to be overqualified at the point that they apply. Male editors may also be more likely to have red flags raised in their RfA discussions due to past behaviour which could lead to an unsuccessful application.

It’s certainly true that women make up a minority of admins on English Wikipedia, but then they also make up a minority of Wikipedia editors, so the problem with the lack of diversity in Wikipedia admins can’t really be separated from the problem of lack of diversity on the Wikimedia projects as a whole. Redesigning the whole process to encourage more editors to get involved is something that may need looking at in the future. It is certainly important to consider how the process could be improved to encourage more people from underrepresented groups to apply for adminship.

Despite the problems we have listed above, I would encourage more people to apply to be admins, and Wikimedia UK is here to support and advise you on who to talk to about doing this if you need help. Like the gender gap issue, we can only change the way that admins are created if more people get involved and help change the processes that lead to undesirable outcomes.

 

 

Wikimedia UK’s 2019 Annual General Meeting – election results and more

Wikimedia UK AGM 2019 – image by Jwslubbock CC BY-SA 4.0

2019 board elections and resolutions

Thank you to all members who attended our AGM on Saturday or voted by proxy. We had an excellent response from eligible voting members, receiving 91 votes in total – ensuring that the meeting was quorate and helping us to elect five board members and agree all the proposed resolutions. The full minutes of the AGM will be on wiki soon, but in the meantime we’re happy to announce the election of:

  • Sangeet Bhullar
  • Lorna Campbell
  • Andrea Chandler
  • Josie Fraser
  • Rod Ward

Sangeet, Lorna and Josie were all existing trustees who were standing for another term, so we’re very pleased that Wikimedia UK will continue to benefit from their considerable expertise. We’re also delighted to welcome Andrea and Rod as new trustees, and look forward to seeing how their skills and insights can enrich the Wikimedia UK Board. 

We’d also like to take this opportunity to formally thank the other members who stood for the board and encourage you to consider standing in future years, and continue to work with the charity in other ways in the meantime. 

Presentations and workshops

We were delighted to hear from a range of speakers on Saturday, and our Communications Co-ordinator is currently editing a film of the talks so that they can reach more of our members. Brandi Geurkink, European Campaigner from Mozilla Foundation, gave a fascinating and informative keynote talk on the information supply chain and combating misinformation online; calling for those of us working in and passionate about open knowledge to support this work. Our programme co-ordinator in Scotland, Sara Thomas, wove a magical story of ogres and witches to shine a light on recent on-wiki activities to remember Scotland’s hidden historical women; and four other members gave Lightning Talks on subjects including Wikimedia and Museums, the Central and Eastern European Wikipedia article writing contest, Wiki Loves Monuments, and the WiciMon project in Wales – which you can learn more about by watching this video.

We had a stimulating discussion about how the policies, structure and culture of Wikipedia impact on the behaviour of its contributors. The conversations as a plenary and in smaller facilitated groups proved to be highly insightful and informative, and we are pulling together the notes from this session to inform our work on community health going forward. As an alternative to this workshop, several members went on a photography walk around the Old City in Bristol to capture some of the landmarks missing from Wikimedia Commons.

Awards

Lorna Campbell announced Wikimedia UK’s Partnership of the Year and Wikimedian of the Year, along with honourable mentions for both categories.

The Partnership of the Year Award went to Amnesty International for their collaboration with Wikimedia UK on the BRAVE campaign. This project – focused on women human rights defenders – saw 550 articles created or expanded across seven languages, as well as new relationships and partnerships between local Wikimedia groups and Amnesty sections. An ‘honourable mention’ in this Award category was given to The Dumphries Stonecarving Project, which celebrates the sandstone heritage of Dumfries. 

Wikimedian of the Year went to Dr. Jess Wade, whose work is making women in science more visible through the creation of a high number of biographies on Wikipedia about prominent women in STEM; and who has inspired others to do the same in science and other disciplines. Andrew Gray received an honourable mention for his extensive and valuable work on his Wikidata project focused on British politicians.

More details about the winners and honourable mentions can be found here.

Honorary members

Former Chair and outgoing trustee Michael Maggs introduced the charity’s first Honorary Memberships, awarded by the Board to those members who have contributed significantly to the progress of the chapter. These were presented to Carol Campbell and Greyham Dawes in recognition of their outstanding work as Chair of ARC and Treasurer of Wikimedia UK respectively, and we were especially pleased that Carol was able to make the journey to Bristol to accept her Honorary Membership. 

Thank you to everyone who made the AGM such an enjoyable day. You can find an online version of the Strategic Report that was in the delegate packs here, and a video about the day will be on wiki soon.

Wikimedia UK announces Wikimedian and Partnership of the Year

Michael Maggs at the Wikimedia UK AGM 2019 – image by Jwslubbock CC BY-SA 4.0

At Wikimedia UK’s 2019 Annual General Meeting on Saturday we awarded our prizes for Wikimedian and Partnership of the Year. These awards recognise people and projects which have made a significant impact on the Wikimedia projects and community over the last year.

Wikimedian of the Year

Winner: Dr Jess Wade

Dr Jess Wade (right) in 2018 with Dr Alice White – image by Jwslubbock CC BY-SA 4.0

With her persistent work Dr. Jess Wade is helping to close the gender gap in biographies on Wikipedia. She launched a project that has made women in science visible by creating over 200 articles in one year on prominent women in STEM. These efforts have inspired others to do the same in science and other disciplines, creating gender parity and representation on Wikipedia.

Beyond her editorial work she has also made important contributions to the public conversation about Wikipedia and how it reflects society’s biases and blindspots.

Honorable mention: Andrew Gray

Andrew Gray in 2014, following his Wikimedia residency at the British Library – image by RockDrum CC BY-SA 4.0

Andrew’s work on the project he established, Wikidata:WikiProject British Politicians has been extensive and valuable.

It’s a great example of the value of quietly working on improving the quality and quantity of data in a particular area. It showed what can be produced in terms of research value and the process of developing workable, scalable schema for a set of people going back to 1386.

Further, the presentation of, and the showcase queries for the project have been extremely useful: from fairly functional queries like “all parliamentary terms of a single person” to more obscure ones like “MPs with identified mythical ancestors”. This has been very useful in Wikimedia UK’s advocacy work on releasing data and showing its value.

Partnership of the Year

Winner: Amnesty International

As a result of the relationship built over the years with Amnesty International (who keynoted at our London Wikimania in 2014) and a growing volunteer network, last year we worked together on an international initiative focusing on editathons about human rights activists and other human rights issues.

In June 2018 we took park in Amnesty International’s BRAVE campaign focusing on Women Human Rights Defenders. The international volunteer bases of both movements were combined to create content on human rights in multiple languages. We engaged with Wikimedia affiliates across the world, while Amnesty drew on their county sections. Each section determined its own content locally, working on content relevant and most pressing for them.

This project was an opportunity for the global Wikimedia community to work with the leading human rights charity in their own location, and an opportunity to raise awareness and produce some great content across the Wikimedia projects. As a result, 450 articles were expanded and 100 created, 23 affiliates were connected to their local Amnesty groups and some have continued to collaborate, articles were created in at least seven languages, and we have built capacity at a local level for Amnesty staff and volunteers to continue contributing to Wikipedia.

Honourable Mention: Dumfries Stonecarving project

Greyfriars Dumfries town centre – image by Frank Hayes CC BY-SA 4.0

The Dumfries Stonecarving Project is a year-long, National Heritage Lottery Funded project led by the Dumfries Historic Buildings Trust which began August 2018. The project celebrates the sandstone heritage of Dumfries, from local quarries to carved gargoyles. Project outputs have included week-long stonecarving courses for young people, stonecarving ‘taster sessions’ for all ages, archival research and oral histories, and guided ‘stonecarving quests’ in the town centre.

Building on previous Wikimedia partnerships between Dr Sara Thomas and Dr tara S Beall dating from 2015 onwards, the Wikimedia element of the project was built in from the very beginning, involving the delivery of Wikimedia Commons training sessions to local volunteers.  Specifically, this involved engaging local photography groups, who uploaded high quality pictures of local stonecarving – many involving listed buildings – which can and have then been used in Wikipedia articles. A number of pictures were entered into Wiki Loves Monuments 2018.  Two rounds of training sessions have already taken place, with an additional round planned for the end of July. This final round will also include a Wikipedia editathon, where the findings from archival research will be used to improve relevant Wikipedia articles.

The success of these projects was the basis of a paper, written by Drs Thomas & Beall, which was delivered at the recent HeritageDot conference, and which focused on the ability of Wikimedia projects to ensure considerable impact and longevity for the outputs of community heritage projects.

Wikimedia UK would like to thank the winners of Wikimedian and Partnership of the year, along with the honourable mentions, for making outstanding contributions to the Wikimedia movement and helping us at the chapter have such a great year.

Wikipedia for Peace at Europride Vienna

 

Wikipedia for Peace – image by Mardetanha CC BY-SA 4.0

Earlier this month I took some time out from my Edinburgh work to travel to Vienna to take part in the Wikipedia for Peace editathon organized by Wikimedia Austria to coincide with Europride 2019. The event brought together twelve editors from all over the world to create and edit LBGT+ articles in a range of European languages over the course of four days. Unfortunately I missed the first day and half of the event as my travel plans were thwarted when a tree brought down overhead power lines on the West Coast mainline, my train to London was cancelled and I missed my flight. Not the most auspicious start! I eventually managed to get to Vienna on Thursday afternoon in time for a walk around the city visiting significant queer sites, including the home of Josef Kohout, whose experiences of incarceration in a Nazi concentration camp are recorded in Heinz Heger’s The Men With the Pink Triangle. Later in the day we made our way to Wikimedia Austria’s offices for an online meeting of the LGBT+ User Group, which is in the process of scoping a role for an LGBT+ Wikimedia at Large.

On Friday our group spent the morning discussing LGBT+ strategy within the global Wikimedia movement. Issues that were raised included addressing homophobia and discrimination in some Wikipedia chapters and communities, educating Wikipedians around issues relating to gender identity, the need for multilingual LGBT+ style guides, particularly addressing how to write about trans individuals on the encyclopedia without misgendering them. We also felt strongly that as a condition of funding, the Wikimedia Foundation should require chapters to demonstrate how they are actively supporting and promoting equality and diversity, while acknowledging that how chapters are able to do this will look very different across the world.

Friday afternoon was devoted to editing. When I applied to Wikimedia UK for a project grant to attend Wikimedia for Peace, I said that I hoped to create some articles around bisexual topics and individuals, which are sometimes marginalised in the LGBT+ community. The first article I created was Bi Academic Intervention, group of bisexual academics, researchers, scholars and writers, which was formed at the 11th National Bisexual Conference in Notttingham in 1993, an event that I coincidentally attended.  I also translated articles on Sápmi Pride and Serbian gay rights and peace activist Dejan Nebrigić, who was murdered in Pancevo in 1999. That article prompted one of our participants to write a new Serbian article on Arkadija, the first LGBT+ organisation in Serbia, founded by Nebrigić and colleagues in 1990. I translated that article into English too, though it still needs a bit of work to bring it up to scratch.

The total outputs of the Wikipedia for Peace editathon are:

  • 113 new articles created and translated
  • 5 articles improved
  • 5 meta pages improved
  • 21 new Wikidata items created
  • 9 Wikidata items improved

Plus hundreds of images of the Europride village and parade. This is a huge achievement for the event, and a significant contribution to improving equality, diversity and queer representation on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia for Peace editathon – image by Mardetanha CC BY SA 4.0

The parade itself took place on Saturday in 38 degree heat. How the drag queens in their finery and the kinksters in their leather and latex survived is beyond me. I haven’t seen a final estimate of how many took part in the parade, but one press report the following day said 500,000 people attended the event, which I can quite believe. The whole atmosphere was very friendly and laid back and I particularly appreciated the fact that the parade was un-ticketed and open to all. Like Pride parades the world over, there was a visible corporate presence but it was much less obvious than at some other events. Like everyone there, I took a ridiculous number of pictures of the parade, 60 of which I uploaded to Wikimedia Commons as part of the Wiki Loves Pride competition. Huge thanks to all the amazing participants who were so happy to be photographed.  It’s been a joy to see more and more pictures of both Wikipedia for Peace and the Europride Parade being uploaded to Commons over the last fortnight.

I’ve carried on working on my Wikipedia articles since getting back from Vienna, and am hoping to create a new article on Scottish Aids Monitor as part of Wiki Loves Pride. So much of the queer history of Scotland and the UK is poorly represented on the encyclopaedia, if it appears at all, so I hope I can make a small contribution to improving representation, and work with the Wiki community to address equality and diversity across the movement.

I’m immensely grateful to Wikimedia UK for funding my travel to Wikipedia Loves Peace, to Wikimedia Austria for organising and supporting the event, to all those who participated (it was amazing to meet you all), and last but not least, to Thomas for making it all happen and for looking after us so well during our time in Vienna ♡

How Wikimedia UK is working with the music industry to improve Wikipedia

Wednesday Campanella performing at Primavera Sound 2019 – image by Jwslubbock CC BY-SA 4.0

By John Lubbock, Communications Coordinator at Wikimedia UK

Why should the music industry engage with Wikipedia? Firstly, they already do, but often they don’t do it very well, and get content deleted which they add to artists’ pages because they don’t follow the site’s guidelines. Second, a Wikipedia page is important in that it gives legitimacy to especially smaller artists, helps them get booked, and gives their fans a quick way to find out about them. Wikipedia biographies are also used by sites like BBC Music and Spotify, where artists can choose to link their artist page to their Wikipedia page.

Wikipedia pageviews also contribute to some music charts, like the Billboard Social Top 50. I know this because when I search Twitter for people talking about Wikipedia, there’s lots of K-Pop fans encouraging their peers to visit the Wikipedia page of a particular group for 3 minutes in order to add to their Social Top 50 ranking score. All the data about Wikipedia pageviews is open for anybody to see, and I personally like knowing that the Wikipedia page I started on the singer Jorja Smith has now been viewed over 1.8 million times. Wikipedia also constitutes a place where music fans can curate information about the band they like, and encouraging fans to help improve an artist’s Wikipedia page, if done correctly, can get around the conflict of interest of a music label writing about an artist they are promoting.

How not to engage with Wikipedia

‘WP:NOT’ is the abbreviation for the Wikipedia policy that outlines what Wikipedia is not. It’s not an advertising platform, a soapbox or a business directory. For a lot of non-notable businesses, vanity articles on Wikipedia which they ask staff to write will simply be rejected or deleted. However, some industries like the music industry promote artists who often do deserve Wikipedia pages, or may be in a notability grey area where they could potentially deserve a Wikipedia page, if written well and according to the site’s rules. But music companies generally don’t understand how to write Wikipedia pages, and if they do so they often break the site’s rules like WP:NPOV (Neutral Point of View), or simply do not succeed in demonstrating the WP:N (Notability) of an artist when they create a page on them.

It was because I noticed music companies engaging with Wikipedia in the wrong way that I reached out to the Association of Independent Music in 2018. AIM represents independent record labels in the UK, and asked me to come and talk to industry representatives at one of their regular events. I also gave a talk at AIM’s invitation at the Great Escape music festival in Brighton in May, and we have now organised an event for people from independent music labels in London on July 2 to teach label employees how they can engage with Wikimedia projects in a way that avoids conflicts of interest.

One of the best ways that music companies can engage with Wikimedia without violating guidelines on Conflict of Interest is to release content about their artists. Releasing a good Open Licensed photo of an artist is a way that music companies can have some control over the images media use when reporting on their artist. If there is only one CC licensed image of an artist, and it’s used on their Wikipedia page, it will probably appear at the top of the Google image search for that artist and be used by people writing about them.

Give the Wikimedia community access to events

Another way that the music industry can engage with Wikimedia without directly releasing content is by giving Wikimedia charities press passes for events where artists are performing. I went to Primavera Sound festival a few weeks ago, and was given a photography pass by the festival organisers to take a good camera inside. You can see all the photos I took on this Commons category, so feel free to improve the Primavera Sound Wikipedia page by including one or two.

Wikimedia UK members are welcome to ask us to apply for press or photography passes for music or other events where there are opportunities to take photos to illustrate Wikipedia with. Glastonbury gave us access this year, and we welcome community members to ask us to apply for access passes for them at other music festivals. If you’re a Wikimedian who is going to Glastonbury, there’s even a meetup organised there by Wikimedia UK members, so why not go along and say hi to them?

Little Simz performing at Primavera Sound 2019 – image by Jwslubbock CC BY-SA 4.0

One of Wikimedia UK’s priorities is to improve underrepresented content on Wikipedia. There are many artists who could have Wikipedia pages who currently do not, because the people who like their music are not the same demographic as the people who usually edit Wikipedia. So we particularly encourage Wikipedia editors to write about music from underrepresented cultures, about non-European/American artists or about female artists who are less likely to have Wikipedia pages.

Last year, I tried to organise an event with the Black Cultural Archives and Warp Records to improve Wikipedia pages on Soundsystem Culture, as the Warp Records artist GAIKA had just released an album inspired by Soundsystem culture and was interested in doing an event to improve content related to it on Wikipedia. Unfortunately the event didn’t go ahead, but subject areas like the history of Afro-Caribbean music in the UK are particularly rich areas which are underrepresented but could be improved on Wikipedia.

Music history is important, as is representing the richness and cultural diversity of contemporary music in the UK, and artists who have made important contributions to the UK’s world-famous music culture deserve to have Wikipedia pages so people can read about them. Music companies can contribute to surfacing these stories by releasing content which we can use, by giving press passes to our community members, and learning how they should and should not use and engage with Wikipedia.

Signups for our event with AIM in July indicate there is a big appetite from music companies to understand how to engage with Wikipedia, and as the event became fully booked very quickly we will probably organise future events. If you still have any questions, or would like to talk to Wikimedia UK about releasing content on an artist, feel free to contact us directly.

University of Edinburgh win higher education award for innovative use of Wikimedia in the curriculum

Ewan McAndrew (centre) at the University of Edinburgh Spy Week Wikipedia edit-a-thon – image by Mihaela Bodlovic CC BY-SA 4.0

Wikimedia UK is very pleased to announce that our partners at the University of Edinburgh have been awarded the Innovative Use of Technology award for their use of Wikipedia in the Curriculum at the Herald Higher Education Awards 2019.

University of Edinburgh Wikimedian in Residence Ewan McAndrew has been leading on this work in Edinburgh, running dozens of Wikimedia events since he began his residency in January 2016, and developing innovative projects and partnerships across the university

The award is well-deserved recognition for Ewan’s hard work in changing the perception of Wikipedia within academia, and the progress that has been made in the understanding of Wikimedia projects as important teaching tools.

Ewan attended the LILAC information literacy conference at Nottingham University in April, where he saw evidence of the growing recognition of Wikipedia as a learning platform.he University of Edinburgh was also awarded Wikimedia UK’s Partnership of the Year award in 2018.

As of April 2019, Ewan has delivered a total of 156 training sessions, trained 635 students, 419 staff, and 260 members of the public, and helped create 476 Wikipedia articles and improve 1946 articles.

Courses at the University which now include a Wikipedia assignment include: World Christianity MSc, Translation Studies MSc, History MSc (Online), Global Health MSc, Digital Sociology MSc, Data Science for Design MSc, Language Teaching MSc, Psychology in Action MSc, Digital Education MSc, Public Health MSc and Reproductive Biology Honours. Working with the Wikimedia projects not only allows students to improve the skills any university wants to develop (such as critical reading, summarising, paraphrasing, original writing, referencing, citing, publishing, data handling), but allows them to have influence beyond the university, with their work being read and influencing thousands of people reading Wikipedia.

Wikimedia UK hopes that the long term success of Ewan’s residency will encourage other universities to also employ Wikimedians to mainstream the use of Wikimedia projects as teaching and learning tools in UK universities. This trend seems to be taking effect already as Coventry University’s Disruptive Media Learning Lab has recently employed Andy Mabbett as a part time Wikimedian in Residence, and we hope that other universities will follow suit.

We would like to thank Melissa Highton, the Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services at the University, for her vision and support of the residency, and Allison Littlejohn, whose research was crucial in showing that it was a worthwhile endeavour. Dr Martin Poulter’s work as Wikimedian in Residence at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, was also instrumental in demonstrating the worth of a Wikimedian in Residence in a university setting.

We wish Ewan and the rest of the team at the University of Edinburgh all the best, and look forward to their further recognition as trailblazers of learning innovation in the higher education sector.

 

Libraries, Librarians & Wikimedia: a round up of our favourite things for the CILIPS Annual Conference 2019

This is a blog in two parts – the first is some session recommendations for the CILIPS conference, and the second is a list of cool stuff about library engagement with Wikimedia….

Tom Murphy VII, CC-BY-SA 3.0

On 3-4 June, in the fair city of Dundee, it’s the CILIPS Annual Conference 2019, where the great and good of the Library and Information Professionals world in Scotland will come to gather.

We are particularly excited to say that our CEO, Lucy Crompton-Reid, will be keynoting on day 1, and there’ll also be a chance to hear from two other members of the Wikimedia community earlier that day.  If you have even a passing interest in how libraries can – and should – engage with open knowledge in general and Wikimedia in particular, then don’t miss these.

So here’s our Wiki-and-friends top sessions to attend:

  • Monday, 12:25, City Suite – Leveraging libraries: Community, open access and Wikimedia – Jason Evans, National Library of Wales Wikimedian in Residence and Dr Sara Thomas, Scotland Programme Coordination, Wikimedia UK
  • Monday, 15:55, City Suite – Keynote 3 – Creating a more tolerant, informed and democratic society through open knowledge – Lucy Crompton-Reid, Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK
  • Tuesday, 11:40, City Suite – Open Access, Plan S and new models for academic publishing – Dominic Tate, University of Edinburgh
  • Tuesday, 14:15, City Suite – The joy of digital – Exploring digital making and scholarship to enable innovation in research libraries – Kirsty Lingstadt, Head of Digital Library and Deputy Director of Library & University Collections at the University of Edinburgh.

Scotland has hosted three Wikimedians in Residence within the library sector – two at the National Library of Scotland, and one at the Scottish Library and Information Council – and so we’re very happy to be able to continue our relationship with the sector through a presence at the conference.  

Here are a few of our favourite things…

Want to know more about how libraries can engage with Wikimedia?  Here’s some of our favourite library things…. We’d recommend that you bookmark these for later reading….

And finally…

We’re also excited to see the release of the Association of Research Libraries’ White Paper on Wikidata, which makes some excellent – and very practical – suggestions as to how libraries can contribute to Wikidata, and indeed, why Wikidata / Linked Open Data in general, is good for libraries in the first place.  Even if you’re unfamiliar with the ins and outs of linked open data, it’s valuable reading, and well explained. https://www.arl.org/resources/arl-whitepaper-on-wikidata/

If you’re at the CILIPS conference, then we hope you have a great couple of days, please do come and say hi!  If you’re not, but would like to follow along on Twitter, you can do so on #CILIPS19

Conway Hall collections helping to improve Wikipedia

Conway Hall library – image by Jwslubbock CC BY-SA 4.0

Last weekend Conway Hall in central London hosted a Wikipedia editathon to improve pages on Wikipedia about 19th century pamphleteers and the subjects they wrotr about. Hundreds of Victorian-era pamphlets have been digitised and placed on CC0 licenses by Conway Hall library, and these are now being uploaded to Commons at the Category:Conway Hall digital collections.

These pamphlets are still being added, and if you want to help us improve Wikipedia by embedding them in relevant Wikipedia pages, you should also check out the GLAM/Conway Hall page for links to articles and subject areas on Wikipedia that need improving. Many of the pamphleteers who authored the publications have Wikipedia pages, and the pamphlets themselves often show the late 19th century thinking around subjects like religion, secularism, politics and society.

Conway Hall hosts lots of interesting events and talks on politics, music and history, all with a progressive, forwardthinking attitude to improving society. We are very grateful that the library has decided to publish its collection of digitised pamphlets on CC licenses so that they can be used on Wikipedia, and this will hopefully lead to a much wider audience for their collection.

There are lots of interesting pamphlets in the Conway Hall collection, exploring 19th century attitudes to railway nationalisation, Siam (Thailand), secularism, socialism and many other topics. There is still a list of articles in the GLAM page listed above that could be created on particular pamphleteers, and there are articles on pamphleteers like Gustav Zerffi, Charles Voysey and Annie Besant. which could have their newly uploaded pamphlets inserted into the articles from Commons.

We hope to do further editathons with Conway Hall library in future, and Alicia Chilcott from the library says that “we are planning to produce a special issue of our Ethical Record journal, focusing on the project and the various workshops that we have run as a part of it”.

We hope that the pamphlets will continue to be embedded in relevant articles on Wikipedia so they can help readers understand the progress of late 19th century thought on social and religious issues. If you improve an article with a document from Conway Hall’s collection, why not get in touch and tell us about it?