How Wikipedia infiltrated academia

Martin Poulter, Wikimedian in Residence at the Bodleian Libraries Oxford – image by Jwslubbock CC BY-SA 4.0

By John Lubbock, Communications Coordinator of Wikimedia UK

It was about 2007 when Wikipedia hit the mainstream. Millions of students were using one website to get an introduction to their new course subjects, and many, of course, were not particularly careful about their use of copy and paste.

In a way, Wikipedia was the victim of its own success. It expanded rapidly and gained a place in the public consciousness before the community and organisations that support it had a chance to catch up. Wikipedia is supported by a network of charities, with the Wikimedia Foundation – which owns Wikipedia– based in San Francisco, and local Wikimedia chapters set up in other countries where big editing communities existed and had begun to organise themselves. Wikimedia UK wasn’t formally established until 2009.

By that time, many in academia had already formed a bad opinion of Wikipedia, with the perception of it as unreliable and lacking academic rigour resulting in it being discounted as a useful tool. Underneath this, some educators saw it as a competitor: what would be the use in professors if all the facts were freely available?

But by 2016, journal articles were being published which looked at the remaining obstacles to using Wikipedia in academia, with writer Piotr Konieczny noting that:

“Wikipedia is not our foe but rather an ally—a new and, perhaps, somewhat uncouth ally—but an ally nonetheless, and one that I will argue that educators should embrace more wholeheartedly for the good of our students and the wider society.”

When the UK Wikimedia chapter was founded in 2009, its community had to consider what the local organisation should do; what was its purpose? There are a number of English-speaking countries with local Wikimedia chapters, and with 3 million articles the English language Wikipedia was already the biggest of the nearly 260 language versions of the encyclopaedia, so the charity instead looked to form partnerships with the UK’s world renowned cultural institutions.

To do this, an entirely new kind of role was created, called a ‘Wikimedian in Residence’. In 2010, Wikimedia contributor Liam Wyatt began the first ever residency by organising a volunteer placement as Wikimedian in Residence at the British Museum. In 2011, the University of Bristol hosted a Wikimedia ambassador, and the British Library followed suit with an appointment from 2012-2013.

Since then the charity has collaborated with a very wide range of institutions including Bodleian Libraries, British Library, Cancer Research UK, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Royal Society, York Museums Trust, Wellcome Library, and the University of Edinburgh. Many other universities and cultural sector organisations have run smaller-scale projects and events supported by our charity and the volunteer community in the UK.

Wikimedians in Residence are often tasked with training staff members at their host institution to use Wikipedia (and its sister projects like Wikidata) as part of their work as an academic, curator, librarian or researcher. With time and increased exposure, the cynicism towards Wikipedia has turned into a realisation of its importance as a communication tool read by hundreds of millions of people every month.

Wikipedia monthly statistics (English version only) from Wikimedia Foundation stats page.

In a recent report on the PLOS science and medicine blog, Rice University’s Kaden Hazzard noted that,

“Wikipedia pages on physics have a huge impact. The numbers speak for themselves. The page “Quantum computing” is viewed in excess of 3,000 times every day. “Nanotechnology” is viewed in excess of 2,000 times per day. Even a topic like “Monte Carlo method” is viewed 2,000 times per day. I could teach every semester for my entire lifetime and not reach as many students as these Wikipedia pages reach in a single day.”

Wellcome Library Wikimedian in Residence Alice White training secondary school pupils to edit Wikipedia at Imperial College London in 2018 – image by Jwslubbock CC BY-SA 4.0

Educators are coming to realise two things: firstly, that there is no point ignoring Wikipedia, and secondly that used correctly it can complement traditional study methods in useful and new ways.

There are now lots of case studies of universities using Wikipedia in and out of the classroom, such as a professor who got his students to improve pages on Islamic art at the University of Austin, Texas; the Wikipedia editing club at Dundee dentistry school, WikiEdu’s Classroom Program, the Medieval History MA at Sheffield University, Welsh Baccalaureate including editing Welsh Wikipedia, and the Women’s Classical Committee Wikipedia workshops, to name just a few.

Back in 2013, the Guardian ran a piece entitled ‘Should university students use Wikipedia?’ Use in what way, I would ask? The article demonstrates a number of misconceptions about Wikipedia that still exist to some extent, and conflates ‘using’ Wikipedia with citing it, but does still show that attitudes were slowly changing.

Wikipedia is a summary of secondary sources, and not what we would call an ‘academic level’ source. We don’t want people to cite it, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t use it. Abstinence-only Wikipedia education doesn’t work, so the important thing is to get them to use it in the right way, as a starting point for research which can teach important writing, IT, and critical thinking skills.

The important question for us as the Wikimedia community in the UK now is how to encourage course convenors at universities to use the Wikimedia projects as part of their courses. Educators like Carl Gombrich, who runs the BASc Arts and Sciences combined degree at UCL, and Stefan Lutschinger who lectures in Digital Publishing at the University of Middlesex have both been using Wikimedia projects to help teach students digital skills, and we hope to see many more universities following this trend.

Wikipedia is not just a free encyclopaedia, it’s about free content that anybody can reuse, remix, and consume in any way they want to. Creating openly licensed materials that can help people educate themselves for free, and which artists, journalists, and others can use in their work is vital to keep creativity flourishing. In this, Wikimedia UK has the same aims as universities, and we provide valuable resources that they can use to educate their students.

We haven’t debased education, we’ve democratised it. Perhaps there are some universities who revel in their status as ivory towers, and will never work with us. But I don’t think that’s the majority of them, and as they are increasingly staffed by digital natives, I think that the future is promising for an ever deeper partnership between Wikimedia and education.

New Year Wikimedia ideas from Magnus Manske

Magnus Manske presenting at Wikidata Lab VIII 2018 – image by Mike Peel CC BY-SA 4.0

By Magnus Manske, MediaWiki developer and longtime Wikimedian

The new year is just over two weeks old, but the WikiVerse already celebrated a joyous event: Wikipedia’s 18th birthday! 50 million seems to be the number of the day – 50M articles across Wikipedia editions, 50M files on Commons, 50M items on Wikidata. But all this free content does not appear in a few big strokes, it comes from millions of uploads and edits. Your work, our work, build this vast repository of knowledge, one small action at a time. I would like to use this opportunity to share with you a few of those actions I have been involved with in these first few days of the year.

My hope is to inspire you to look at new areas of our project, to take a leap and follow an interesting tangent, but above all, to remember that every edit, every cited reference, every vandalism revert adds to the Sum Of All Knowledge, and that it will be valuable to someone, some day, some place.

Images

An image from the Stadtarchiv Linz am Rhein – image CC BY-SA 4.0

Sometimes, knowledge is already present in our project, it is just cleverly hidden, and begs to be released. For example, Wikidata has many items about people, some of them with an image. Wikidata also has items about paintings, and some of these have an image as well, but they might not have a “depicts” statement.

But if the image of the painting is the same used for a person, it is likely (though not guaranteed!) that the person depicted in the painting is that person. A simple SPARQL query shows us about a thousand of such item pairs. And even if the image is not of the person (for example, sometimes a painting by a painter sneaks into the item as a painting of the painter), it can be an opportunity to remove a wrong image from the item about the person.

Similarly, over 1700 Wikidata items use an image of a church, but another “church item” uses it as well, often revealing either a wrong image use, or a duplicate item.

User:Christoph_Braun has used my Flickr2Commons tool to upload over a thousand historical images released under a free license by the Linz am Rhein city archive to Commons. You can help put these pictures to good use, by finding Wikidata items (and by extension, often Wikipedia pages) without an image, by coordinates or by category. If you want to add free images to Wikidata items, but don’t want to go hunting for them, the FileCandidates tool has hundreds of thousands of prepared possible image-to-item matches waiting for you. And if you would like to add more “depicts” statements to items, topicMatcher is there for you (also offering “main subject” and “named after”).

Mix’n’Match

Mix’n’Match is one of my more popular tools, especially with the authority control data fans. It has passed 50 million entries recently, most of which are waiting to be matched to a Wikidata item. To cut down on the number of entries that need the “human touch” to be matched, I have various helper scripts running in the background to automatically match entries to items, when it is reasonable safe to do so.

One of these helper scripts uses the name, birth, and death year for biographical entries to find a match on Wikidata. Since entries are imported from many different sources, getting metadata (such as birth/death dates) for an entry is not standardized. I had already written bespoke code to extract such dates from the entry descriptions for several catalogs, but this year I sat down and systematically checked all ~2000 catalogs for date information in their entries, and to extract them where possible. The fact that one finds dates ranging from plain years, over ISO format, to free-text French, requires individual code for every single catalog with dates. This is now complete, as of a few days ago. Initial runs led to over ten thousand new matches with Wikidata. Of course, all those matches are turned into Wikidata statements as well, where the catalog has an associated property.

In a similar fashion, I have code to extract third-party identifiers (e.g. VIAF) from descriptions or web pages of entries. These can then be used to match entries to items, or to add those identifiers as statements to an already matched item. Matching on such identifiers requires them to be present in Wikidata, so adding such statements on Wikidata proper directly helps Mix’n’Match (and everyone, really). If you want to give it a try, this list has over 1000 items that likely have a GND (and probably VIAF) identifier, but are missing from Wikidata.

Some catalogs are more easy to match to Wikidata than others. Entries with ambiguous names and no description are hard. Biographical entries with a description, birth, and death date are much better. Taxonomic entries with Latin species names are easiest, as we have a Wikidata property for those, and plenty of species to match to. Usually, automated matching can get >90% for these. However, this new catalog about fossil plants has less than 3% matches. A new area to be imported and curated on Wikidata!

Matching Mix’n’Match entries to items helps Wikidata only if there is a property associated with the Mix’n’Match catalog. Likewise, it is helpful to link from a property to the associated Mix’n’Match catalog(s). I have created a new status page that shows missing links and inconsistencies. This complements my reports on individual catalogs. All of these reports are updated regularly.

This and that

Most Wikipedia articles have an associated Wikidata item. However, newly created articles are often not immediately linked to Wikidata, via a new or an existing item. These “Wikidata-orphaned” articles can be found “by wiki”, for example English Wikipedia. It is a constant battle to prune that list manually, even with a game for that purpose. The number of such orphaned articles shows a curious pattern of “mass-matching” and slow build-up. Some investigation shows that a Wikidata user regularly creates new items for all orphaned  articles, across many wikis. While this links the articles to Wikidata, it potentially creates a lot of duplicate items. Worse, since these items are blank (apart from the site link to the article, and a title), automated duplication detection is hard.

To get a handle of the issue, I found all blank items created by that user in that fashion.

That list amounts to over 745K (yes, 3/4 of a million) blank items. For convenience, I have created a PagePile for them. Please do note that this is a “snapshot”, so some of these items will receive statements, or be merged with other items, over time.

Structured Data is coming to Commons!

For starters, there are multi-lingual file descriptions, but statements should follow during the course of this year. Since this is using Wikibase (the same technology underlying Wikidata), it will use (more-or-less) the same API. I have now prepared QuickStatements to run on Commons, however, the API on Commons is not quite ready yet. Once the API is functional, you should be able to edit Commons MediaInfo data via QuickStatements, just as you can edit Wikidata items now.

I had a few reports on PetScan dying for certain queries. It turns out that using a huge category tree (say, >30K sub-categories) will cause the MySQL server to shrug, taking PetScan with it. I have re-written some of the PetScan code to run several smaller chunks of such a query instead. It seems to work well, but please report any strange results to me.

I hope this little tour has given you some ideas or motivation for work on our project. Happy new year everyone, and may your edits not be reverted!

Follow Magnus on Twitter.

#WikipediaDay – Wikipedia turns 18

Wikipedia birthday cakes made for Wikipedia’s 16th birthday – image by Beko CC BY-SA 4.0

By John Lubbock, Wikimedia UK Communications Coordinator

January 15 is the anniversary of the day on which Wikipedia was launched in 2001. I first got involved with Wikipedia in 2011, when I volunteered at a party organised by a friend of mine for Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary. 18, although a coming of age in many countries, doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as the 10th or 20th anniversary, and so there’s no big party this year, but we are marking it on social media anyway with the hashtag #WikipediaDay, and asking people to send us messages about why they value Wikipedia, why they think others should value Wikipedia, and what they would say to someone to encourage them to become a Wikipedia editor.

We’ve also released a video interview with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, which is on our YouTube channel, as well as on Wikimedia Commons, where you can download it to reuse however you want.

We’d love to hear how everybody else is celebrating Wikipedia Day, and what you are looking forward to doing or working on with any of the Wikimedia projects this year. There are lots of important Wikimedia events coming up this year, and we hope to work with more academic and cultural institutions than ever before to grow Wikipedia and help people use it in an effective way. The Structured Data on Commons will hopefully finish, which will lead to big improvements on Commons, and there will be lots of work to promote and document Wikidata as it continues to evolve into an important project in its own right. So send us a message on social media and tell us what you’re doing and what you’re looking forward to!

Using bots to change the landscape of Wikipedia

A robot by Banksy in New York – image by Scott Lynch CC BY-SA 2.0

This post has been written by User:TheSandDoctor, an admin on English Wikipedia. An original version of this article appeared on Medium.

A Request for Comment (RfC) is a process for requesting outside input concerning disputes, policies, guidelines or article content. As an admin on the English Wikipedia, I deal with these kind of bureaucratic issues regularly.

For a bot task to be approved on the English Wikipedia, a request, called a Bot Request For Approval (BRFA), must be filed. If there is determined to be sufficient need warranting the task, a member of the body which provides oversight on bots, the Bot Approvals Group, will generally request a trial. If the trial goes to plan, the task is usually approved within a couple of days following the trial’s completion. In the event that there are issues, those are then resolved by the submitter(s) and the reviewing member(s) are notified. This is then followed by, potentially, a new trial. In the event that things went according to plan this time around during the retrial, the task would most likely be approved shortly thereafter.

After a successful Request for Comment, I knew it was time to get to work on my next Wikipedia bot. Little did I realize at the time, that this would be the most controversial task that I had filed to date and would end up triggering an unprecedented series of events I never predicted, culminating in the rare re-opening of a Request for Comment. The change that resulted in this series of events? Moving the year an election or other referendum took place from the end to the front of the page name. For example,

United States presidential election, 2016 would become 2016 United States presidential election or Electoral fraud and violence during the Turkish general election, June 2015 would be renamed Electoral fraud and violence during the June 2015 Turkish general election, with the old titles being valid redirects as to avoid the breakage of any incoming links.

It was October 17, 2018 and the opening of the approval request started off as countless others I had filed did in the past, with routine questions being asked by a volunteer Bot Approvals Group member, in this case the user named SQL. It was at this point when there were some indications that this would not go as smoothly as I had previously experienced. It was slightly unusual when the normally quiet and routine process began to attract more attention from editors and other members of the Bot Approvals Group, who began to express concerns regarding the RfC itself. In particular, concerns were expressed that there was not enough participation within the original Request for Comment and that it was inadequately advertised at the various relevant noticeboards watched by editors who may be affected by the proposed article naming convention change. By October 20th, the unprecedented happened. The decision was made to reopen the Request for Comment, and the discussion kicked off once again, with the bot approval request taking a temporary backseat. The reopening of a Request for Comment is a fairly unusual measure that while possible, is seldom done or deemed necessary.

Following the RfC’s reopening, there was thorough discussion on both sides of the debate, which lasted an additional 31 days. On November 20th, 2018, the findings of the original close were confirmed. The consensus was that the naming convention was to be updated as proposed and, as a direct side effect, the bot task which I had submitted was given a renewed life. The upholding of the initial close, this time with clearer support, effectively cleared the way for a trial run. It was decided on the task’s discussion page that roughly 150 articles would be renamed in the trial of my task approval request. The task to move the pages to correspond with the updated naming conventions was approved on November 27th, following the successful completion of the trial and after leaving a few days holding time for any further comments or technical concerns.

From November 27th until early December, TheSandBot enacted the consensus achieved by the Request for Comment, moving (renaming) over 43,000 election related pages within a couple of days.

When a page is moved/renamed, mediawiki, the wiki software which Wikipedia uses, creates a redirect from the old title to the new one. This is done in an effort to prevent the breakage of any links to the older title. Instead of visiting the old link and receiving the equivalent of a HTTP 404 error, readers are instead merely redirected to the new location. Move operations have either two or four parts, each of which takes one edit. In the case of the former, since both parts of a move operation take one edit each (a redirect page creation and a move), two edits are performed for every ‘move’. In the latter case it is slightly more complicated, but the actions are doubled. Taking advantage of this property, I was able to save time and reduce the size of the task script. As a consequence, despite the fact that approximately 21,000 articles were moved, the logs indicate 43,000 were and registered over 86,000 edits within that time frame (see figures above/below).

From left to right: total number of edits over the account lifetime, further statistics regarding the edits made within the past year.

An example of the four edits per page move mentioned above. N signifies a page creation, m signifies a minor edit, which page moves are considered automatically by the software

With the successful completion of all the specified page moves, it is the end for that particular task. Now it is time for me to move onto different ones, like the recently approved task removing article specific templates from drafts. There is always more work to do within the largest online encyclopedia that is Wikipedia.

Find out more about TheSandDoctor’s work at thesanddoctor.com.

WikiCite conference 2018

Group photo – WikiCite 2018 (can you spot Jason?) – image by Satdeep Gill, Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0

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

Imagine a world in which anyone could use an open citation database to support free knowledge, with rich information about every citable source.

Any Wikipedian or Wikipedia advocate will tell you that one of the great strengths of Wikipedia is its citations. In fact, a Wikipedia article is only as strong as its citations. They provide evidence for the statements made in an article but they also provide a gateway to reliable secondary sources for deeper learning.

In recent years Wikipedia has been overtaken as the fastest growing Wikimedia project by Wikidata – a linked open database of facts – or the Wikipedia of data, if you like. Wikidata has grown at a tremendous rate, as people and institutions use it as a hub for their data, joining up the world’s open data in an interconnected web. Quite organically, it began to act as a platform for sharing bibliographic and citation data, to the point that 40% of Wikidata’s 60 million items now describe academic papers and articles.

Watch a video about Wikicite from the 2017 Wikidata convention in Berlin

The emergence of Wikidata has lead to the growth of the WikiCite movement which aims, broadly speaking, to harness the power of structured data to create open structured data for all citations used in Wikipedia.

This was my first WikiCite conference, and what became clear to me from day one was that this is very much a project still exploring its scope and trying to understand its place in the Wikimedia family of projects. But already there is a growing community of librarians, Wikimedians and data scientists keen to explore the potentials of the overarching concept.

Potential benefits of WikiCite are varied and wide reaching, and they serve separate communities in different ways. For example, since Wikidata items can be labelled and described in 100s of languages, any structured citations on Wikipedia become multilingual, which has clear benefits for smaller language communities. And structured citations would make it much easier for us to analyze the diversity and quality of citations being used in Wikipedia projects. It would allow us to map works which cite other works, or pick out retracted papers, making it easier to manage the relevance and quality of citations across multiple languages.

Approximately 1% of Wikipedia users click on a citation when they read a Wikipedia article, and this rises to 30% or more for more academic topics such as mathematics and engineering. And whilst these might seem like low numbers, 1% is still around 76 million clicks a month. So structured citations, in a standardised format that links to deeper data about a work (hopefully facilitating access to a digital copy of the work or providing details of physical holdings), will certainly add value to the current system for citations which are essentially comprised of strings of textual information.

Implementing this kind of fundamental change to Wikipedia, across multiple language editions presents huge technical and social challenges in itself, and as such it has been proposed that any conversion to structured citations should start small, on smaller Wikidata-friendly language versions of Wikipedia, before tackling English Wikipedia, with its nearly 6 million articles.

However the WikiCite vision is even bigger and more ambitious.

Participants at Wikicite 2018 – image by DarTar, Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0

Imagine Wikidata items for every citation on Wikipedia, and then consider the added value of a massive centralised, or ‘federated’ bibliographic commons, where individuals, institutions and organisations can give access to bibliographic corpora, ranging from collections of niche scientific papers to a country’s entire publishing output – a library catalogue for the sum of all human knowledge. That may sound implausible, but Wikipedia didn’t become the 5th largest website in the world by dreaming small.

As you can imagine, this larger ambition has a few potential issues, which is why it is currently referred to as ‘the moonshot option’. There are questions around the technical ability to host, manage and maintain all this data in a standardised and centralised way. And if you decentralise the data to multiple instances of Wikibase (the platform which powers Wikidata), then how do you ensure that all these databases retain the semantic structure required for consistent and seamless communication between instances?

[pdf-embedder url=”https://wikimedia.org.uk//wp-content/uploads/2018/12/WikiCite_2018_-_WikiCite__gender_diversity_visibility.pdf” title=”WikiCite_2018_-_WikiCite_&_gender_diversity_visibility”]

Wikicite presentation on gender diversity by Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight – Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0

Another important question which comes out of this conference is: how do we ensure that any development is inclusive of other languages and cultures? Done properly this initiative should make it possible to have a greater diversity in sources on our Wikipedia. For years, the use of Western sources to inform readers about non-western concepts, languages and societies has been bugbear for Wikipedia.

In Wales, we have already embarked on a project to share the ‘Sum of all Welsh Literature’ via Wikidata, in a bid to encourage the use of Welsh publications to cite articles about Wales, its people and culture. And we heard of similar projects getting under way in other parts of the world. In Sweden, for example, the local Wikimedia chapter are working with the National Library to openly share data for around 700,000 works from the Swedish Bibliography.

Many challenges lie ahead, but it’s clear from the diversity of people and projects at this conference, that Wikicite is very much already happening.

To find out more about the project, check out the Wikicite Wiki page

University College London undergraduates will create their own course text using Wikibooks

UCL Arts and Sciences undergraduates working with Wikimedia UK – image by Carl Gombrich, with permission.

Professor Carl Gombrich, Programme Director for UCL’s new interdisciplinary course, Arts and Sciences (BASc), approached Wikimedia UK early this year to talk about his interest in using a Wikimedia element in the Approaches to Knowledge module of the degree.

This semester, the course began and 150 students are now working on creating chapters for an Open Educational Resources book which will be constructed by the students on Wikibooks, and then published by UCL Press, the Open Access publishing journal that UCL has recently established.

After initially discussing the use of Wikipedia itself as the basis for the course, it was decided that it would be hard to assess the contributions of a large number of students using Wikipedia. Contributions are more likely to get deleted, and the students would likely be looking at improving only a small number of quite core Wikipedia pages related to epistemology. So it was decided to have them collaboratively create a book together on Wikibooks, so that students could still gain an insight into how open source platforms like the Wikimedia projects, function.

UCL is interested in what working with Wikimedia projects can teach students in terms of research and academic skills, and the media literacy which comes with a deeper understanding of the guidelines for Wikimedia projects. They also liked the idea of being able to make a textbook and the meta-approach of people creating knowledge about knowledge.

Dr Richard Nevell has been helping as a volunteer, and Wikimedian Katie Chan held a training session for staff on Wikipedia and Wikibooks before the course began. Hannah Evans gave an opening lecture for the course before an initial workshop where students got into teams to decide what subject area they would work on.

The groups could choose from:

  • Knowledge and imperialism
  • Knowledge and truth
  • Knowledge and evidence

The groups will write chapters of 1200 words. These will all go on Wikibooks, and the best ones will be collected into a book which will also be published by UCL Press, the UCL Open Access repository. The project will also tie into a UCL education conference on April 1, 2019, where students will be presenting about the work they are doing.

Wikimedia UK is now working with many different universities across the country, and you can read more about what different courses are doing with Wikimedia projects on our website.

Mozfest 2018 roundup: how Wikimedia UK has been engaging with other Open organisations

Delphine Dallison presenting at Mozfest 2018 – image by Jwslubbock, Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0

Wikimedia UK has been attending Mozilla’s conference in London for a few years now, as we attempt to build deeper connections to other organisations working to promote open knowledge. This year, we presented a discussion entitled ‘Under the hood: how understanding Wikipedia’s internal structure and community can teach media literacy’. This was a relaxed hour and a half presentation with about 20 participants who asked questions throughout the talk.

Programmes coordinator Stuart Prior talked about the processes of decision making, dispute resolution, and guidelines which help editors decide on what facts to summarise within Wikipedia articles. Scottish Libraries Wikimedian in Residence Delphine Dallison discussed the structural problems with Wikipedia content being written by a small number of editors from a limited social and geographical background, and communications coordinator John Lubbock discussed some of the problems with how media discusses Wikipedia, and some of the common myths that prevent a more nuanced understanding of the Wikimedia projects.

But Mozfest is an important event for people working in Open communities for the possibilities it offers of engaging with people working on related projects. Wikimedia Foundation ED Katherine Maher was at the event, talking about the Foundation’s work and priorities, and staff from Wikimedia Deutschland and other Wikimedia groups were also there. We talked to people from Communia, fighting the damaging EU copyright directive which could harm access to free knowledge, as well as staff from the Open Data Institute and Open Knowledge International. One idea discussed was to begin hosting Open organisation networking meetings for staff from groups like ODI, OKI, Mozilla, Wikimedia, OpenStreetMap and others to make connections and find possible areas for collaboration.

Communications coordinator John has also been participating in the Mozilla Open Leaders programme, which supports people working on Open projects to develop their ideas. As part of this, John has been writing a communications strategy for promoting Wikidata, primarily in the UK, but which could be used by other Wikimedia organisations or non-Wikimedia groups who use Wikidata. We hosted a Wikidata meetup at the Wikimedia UK office recently and talked to people working for MySociety who are using Wikidata to collate and visualise political data using Wikidata. Although Wikidata is becoming increasingly important, there has not been any coordinated outreach attempt to promote the project to governmental or educational institutions who may benefit from its use.

Educational institutions in particular are increasingly offering Data Science courses to students, and Wikimedia UK believes that Wikidata is an incredibly important tool to learn data literacy. Over the next few months we hope to work with others using and promoting Wikidata to come up with a shared set of ideas, messages and resources that people can use to promote Wikidata. If you have ideas, you’re welcome to comment on the Github repository for the project.

Green Men & Gargoyles: The Dumfries Stonecarving Project

Scotland Programme Coordinator Sara Thomas is working with tara s Beall, of the Dumfries Historic Buildings Trust, to support their new Stonecarving project. The project is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, Holywood Trust and the People’s Project, and runs from August 2018 to July 2019.

I’ve known tara Beall for a while – our paths first crossed when I was the Wikimedian in Residence at Museums Galleries Scotland, working with Glasgow Museums, and we were organising an editathon to do with the Showpeople of Scotland, with whom tara had worked for some years. (Their lifestyle and culture is once again under threat, due to regeneration plans in Govan, which would affect one of their permanent yards). Months later she came to an editathon which was focussed on improving the article on (Scottish political activist, rent strike organiser and one of Glasgow’s first woman councillors) Mary Barbour, and then we ran an editathon at the Glasgow Women’s Library with tara’s Strong Women of the Clydeside (SWaC) project team, and then another (also for SWaC) at the Mitchell Library when I was Wikimedian at the Scottish Library and Information Council.

Early morning over New Bridge, Grant McIntosh Photography, CC-BY-SA-4.0

It was at that point that we started to talk about her new project, based in Dumfries, which would focus on the stonecarving heritage of the area. Wouldn’t it be great to include a Wiki element to this, she asked? Well yes, I thought.

“Creative heritage projects almost always have websites, but the information they generate is not sustainable – who is looking after the sites five years on? Often, the information generated by publicly funded projects is lost (from the digital realm) after a few years … Wikipedia is a key knowledge platform, and an excellent way for us to deliver an international audience to our local heritage project (and vice versa).” (tara s Beall)

A few months later, we were in Dumfries, and tara is pointing me towards a pub – well, actually, she’s pointing me to the incredible carving on the building that houses the pub. I snap a picture to use later in the workshop as an example. Looking around, I can see that it’s not the only example of this kind of work in the town. In fact, it’s not even the only example on this street.

Crichton Church, by Grant McIntosh Photography, CC-BY-SA 4.0

When it comes to community heritage, it’s all too common to see excellent digital outputs disappear shortly after the project finishes – websites that expire, apps that aren’t maintained, content held on a third-party commercial service that’s bought over and subsequently vanishes… and so it’s been good to work with organisations that see the potential in using open licensing, and engagement with the Wikimedia projects, to ensure more sustainability in the dissemination of their digital outputs. I was grateful to be able to input into Historic Environment Scotland’s Archaeology Programme’s “Sharing Our Stories” document, which offers advice to those groups looking to make the most impact in sharing the results of their project.

The Dumfries Stonecarving Project aims to promote the rich stonecarving heritage of the area, and includes practical taster sessions, summer schools with local young people, an exhibition, and workshops and ‘stonecarving quests’ with photography groups to record some of that heritage. Using Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, the project seeks to give this heritage a global audience, disseminating it through channels which have longevity, and which can, through tools like Magnus Manske’s GLAMorgan, give them insight into where their content is being used.

“We are also delighted to be offering workshops to local photography clubs (like the Dumfries North West Photography Club) where they can learn about Creative Commons licences, and best practice for uploading their images to Wikimedia. And because the images are shared under an open licence, everyone can enjoy the beauty of our sandstone heritage. Dumfries has an amazing history of stonecarving, and a wealth of local buildings with incredible carvings on them — from ‘green men’ to gargoyles. Working with Wiki will allow us to get a large number of local people engaged with these histories and interacting with Wikipedia – getting local people involved in preserving their heritage.” (tara s Beall)

Greyfriars Church, Brian Madill, CC-BY-SA 4.0

And so it’s later on that evening, in a community centre very close to Lincluden Abbey – voted one of Scotland’s favourite “Hidden Gems” during Dig It!’s 2017 Scotland in Six campaign – that I find myself chatting away to a keen group of photographers, who had the week previous walked around their town, taking some incredible pictures of listed buildings. I tell them a little about Wikimedia Commons, and the other Wikimedia projects, show them how to upload, how to use the Wiki Loves Monuments interactive map, and away they go. That evening we uploaded 80 pictures to Commons, and by a few days later, that number stood at over 170. You can see their pictures here, in a category that includes pictures of Dumfries, but also of other buildings and monuments in Scotland that the group had photographed. There are some great pictures in there, some of which have now been added to pages on English Wikipedia, including that for Dumfries itself. Over 15,000 people have read that article since.

That session was the first of a few that we’ll be running over the next few months, and I’m really excited to see what comes next!

Wikipedia’s photo competition Wiki Loves Monuments announces 2018 winners

The winners of the UK section of the world’s biggest photo contest Wiki Loves Monuments have just been announced, with the judges awarding fIrst prize to this stunning image of Gloucester Cathedral cloisters taken by Christopher JT Cherrington.

Chris has written a short blog post on the Wiki Loves Monuments website explaining how he took his winning image.

The 2018 contest

Wiki Loves Monuments is the world’s biggest photographic competition, with a total of 260,607 images submitted to the 2018 competition from all over the world. In the UK, 13,185 images taken by over 500 photographers were entered.  The competition aims to gather high quality, openly-licensed images of historic sites from all over the world.

The contest is an incredible opportunity to document and preserve our heritage for future generations, and this year saw a particular focus on the capture of internal shots, as well as of those sites which were lacking a freely-licensed image in Wikidata, the knowledge base which sits behind Wikipedia.

Among this year’s winners are three castles (all in Wales), two lighthouses (New Brighton and Bass Rock), and one museum (Arbroath).

This year saw a marked increase in submissions from Scotland, with over double the number of entries submitted this year than in 2017.  Wikimedia UK worked with Historic Environment Scotland’s publicly-available database of listed buildings and scheduled monuments to add over 27,000 new eligible items to Wikidata, vastly improving the coverage of Scotland.

PIctures submitted to this year’s contest are already being used to illustrate Wikipedia articles, and Wikimedia UK would like to extend their warmest thanks to all those who submitted entries, helping to significantly improve access to this knowledge.

The top ten UK winners now go forward to the international judging stage of the contest, where they will compete against the best images from some 55 other countries. The first, second and third placed UK winners receive £250, £100, and £50 respectively, with seven Highly Commended winners receiving £25 each.

Additional prizes have been awarded for the best three images from England, from Scotland and from Wales. Archaeology Scotland has also sponsored a special prize for the best photograph of a site in Scotland: a free 1-year membership including the Archaeology Scotland Magazine as well as access to their learning resources.

One of the competition’s judges noted that the quality and variety of images submitted continues to increase:

“Each year the standard of entries for Wiki Loves Monuments UK rises. Browsing through the long list of almost 250 images was made enjoyable and easy because of the quality of the images and the variety of locations from across the British Isles on display, narrowing it down to a shortlist of just 10 was a much harder process. It is a real pleasure to have been involved in the judging of this competition and to see the skill and dedication of the winning photographers recognised.”

Find out more about the prizes on the Wiki Loves Monuments website.

Winners

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The winners are as follows. Click the title for access to more details and high resolution copies on Wikimedia Commons.

UK winners

UK highly commended

Scotland

Wales

England

Special prize

The most prolific photographer of “new” UK historic sites was Paul the Archivist, who uploaded more than 200 pictures of sites which hadn’t previously been represented in the database.

For the complete list of the UK award winners and shortlisted images, well as access to high-resolution copies, see the winners’ page on Wikimedia Commons.

‘Can my business have a Wikipedia page?’

Image from UK Black Tech’s stock photo project to increase Open Licensed photos of black people in business and tech – Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0

So you’re a business. You’ve got a company that’s number #3 in the UK at making spoons, or something like that, and you want to make sure that when people search for your company, they can see you’re legit because a Wikipedia page confers an aura of legitimacy on your noble pursuit of creating the best spoons in the land.

You tried to make a page for your spoon business before, but for some reason it disappeared. No doubt the anti-spoon lobby have got their knives out for you in their cynical attempt to stop people using your quality products. You’ve found the charity responsible for Wikipedia in the UK (that’s us!) and you want to know how you can get your spoon business listed on Wikipedia.

I’m afraid that we may have some bad news for you. You see, Wikipedia is not a business directory. It’s not the Yellow Pages or whatever website has put the Yellow Pages out of business. So you probably need to stop and think ‘is my business notable enough to be in an encyclopaedia?’ It’s estimated that there are somewhere around 200 million companies in the world, so only very few of these will be famous enough to appear in an encyclopaedia.

Maybe you don’t know the answer because you’re not sure what makes something notable enough to be on Wikipedia. Well, luckily we have a set of Notability guidelines for that.

The basic criteria for notability is that “a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject”. So I’m afraid that links to your own site, quotes in articles about another subject, or references to other self-published sources like blogs, petitions or social media posts just won’t meet this standard.

[pdf-embedder url=”https://wikimedia.org.uk//wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Verifiability_and_Notability_-_tutorial.pdf”]

A presentation on verifiability and notability – Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0

This standard isn’t supposed to be easy to meet. Your business might be doing really well, it might make the biggest spoons in Britain, but if you’ve not had the Times, or at least the local newspaper down to cover your amazing spoon production in an article which is specifically about your business, then as far as Wikipedia is concerned, it’s not going to be notable enough. But don’t get disappointed. If you want your spoons to be famous, you need to concentrate on getting some media coverage for those spoons. Wikipedia can only cover what has been already published elsewhere.

If your company is notable, it’s likely that someone will eventually get around to creating a page for it. You’re just going to have to be patient. If you try to create the page yourself, without really understanding the core rules of Wikipedia, you might make some mistakes, like putting in Non-Neutral Point of View language, which will show others that you might be connected to the subject matter, and result in the article’s deletion for Conflict of Interest (CoI) editing.

You should also most definitely not pay someone to create a page for you. Paid editing, without a declaration that someone is being paid to edit, is against the rules. If the page for a company keeps getting made and then deleted, editors may ban the creation of the page indefinitely. In 2015 Wikipedia editors uncovered a group trying to make money by scamming businesses by telling them they could make and protect their company’s Wikipedia articles.

The main lesson in this is that if you are going to use Wikipedia properly, you really have to understand how it works. You can’t just stumble into it and start changing important things without appreciating what you’re allowed to change and what kinds of edits are acceptable.  On English Wikipedia, you can’t even create new articles anymore without having a registered account with a certain number of edits.

We recognise that this can be frustrating and offputting to some businesses who could theoretically have good reason to interact with Wikipedia. However, there are things your company could consider doing to make it more likely that someone will create a page for you. You could consider releasing photos of your company or its products under an Open, Creative Commons license, meaning that these photos can be used on Wikipedia.

All the content on Wikipedia is shared on Open Licenses, so we can’t use any media about your company unless you publish it specifically on an Open License. The Welsh music label, Sain Records, released the cover art of many of their Welsh-language records on Open Licenses, along with 30 second clips of some of their artists songs. This means there is now much better coverage of the company and its products on Wikipedia.

A guide to the different types of Creative Commons Open License, and what you are allowed to do with the content published on each one. Image via ANDS.

I have been trying to do outreach to the music industry to encourage them to donate content, like photos of their artists, which Wikipedia editors can use to improve pages on notable musicians. There are lots of black and ethnic minority musicians who don’t have pages on Wikipedia, and we would like to change that. Again, we don’t encourage people who work for music companies to make pages about their artists, but if those companies would like to work with Wikimedia UK, we could organise Wikipedia editing workshops for fans of the artists, and use photos donated by the artists’ companies to create pages for notable people who deserve to be on the encyclopaedia.

We’ve already had a very fruitful collaboration with the Parliamentary Digital Service, who released official parliamentary photos of MPs in 2017, and you will now see that most MPs pages use their official photograph in the infobox on the right of the page.

The best way to learn how Wikipedia works is to get involved. Come to our events. Come to meetups to talk to other Wikimedians and ask their advice. The community is huge, and has over the past 18 years created a complex set of rules to govern the living, constantly changing nature of Wikipedia. We think it’s an amazing achievement, and that’s why we treat it as so much more than an advertising platform.