Page 24 – Upcoming Events

#1lib1ref at the University of Edinburgh

I’ve been interested in Wikimedia projects since taking part in the University of Edinburgh’s Women and Medicine editathon in February 2015, when I wrote an article on the Scottish doctor and women’s medical health campaigner Margaret Ida Balfour. I enjoyed researching her life and achievements and found it immensely rewarding and satisfying to see her page appear on Wikipedia (and at the top of Google search results!).

Since then, I have gone on to receive training as a Wikimedia Ambassador from Ewan McAndrew, the University of Edinburgh’s Wikimedian in Residence, and led my own small training session for the Library’s Centre for Research Collections staff and volunteers. At the upcoming History of Medicine editathon, I’m exploring Wikimedia projects beyond Wikipedia, starting by testing out Wikisource with one of our recently digitised, out-of-copyright PhD theses.

Hunting citations

However, it’s not just the big, research-heavy element of Wikipedia that interests me; I also like using the Citation Hunt Tool to improve the quality of existing content. The tool provides the user with a paragraph of text from Wikipedia which contains a statement not backed up by reliable evidence (and therefore labelled with the ^{[citation needed]} tag). The challenge is to track down a trustworthy source, such as a peer-reviewed journal article or news article from a reputable publication, in order to back up the statement made in the text. It’s very satisfying when you discover an appropriate source and, as the statements can come from anywhere on Wikipedia, it’s easy to end up researching a range of bizarre and random topics.

In one of the examples I’ve worked on, I used a press release from the official San Francisco 49ers website to confirm the statement that American Footballer Justin Renfrow “signed a contract with San Francisco 49ers on May 18, 2015 along with Michigan State’s Mylan Hicks.”

#1Lib#Ref

I first dabbled with this tool last January as part of Wikipedia’s #1lib1ref campaign to mark its 15^th birthday. At one of our team meetings, Library staff set about making 32 edits to Wikipedia, some using the Citation Hunt Tool and others using their own knowledge and research. We therefore had a very clear target to beat this year! Wikimedia has added a new feature to the tool, so users can now select citations from a topic of interest, rather than just being provided with a completely random statement from the encyclopaedia. Added to this, many of my colleagues were using the visual editor for the first time and feedback was that this made the whole editing process far easier and more enjoyable.

Despite this, one of the big issues raised by colleagues was how to define exactly what can be considered a reliable source. There is lots of information on Wikipedia’s help pages about this issue but a short one-page guide to using reliable sources would be useful for occasions such as this. I personally got into a spot of bother when I used a source which, although published and available on Google Books, was not considered by the Wikimedia community to be reliable enough…

All in all, library staff and our colleagues from the Learning Teaching and Web division managed a grand total of 63 edits, meaning we almost doubled last year’s effort. There are rumours of a friendly rivalry with our colleagues at the National Library of Scotland… this will certainly encourage me to add a few more citations!

Gavin Willshaw

Digital Curator

Library and University Collections

University of Edinburgh

@gwillshaw

Wikimedia UK and National Library of Scotland announce new Gaelic post

The Callanish stones, a prehistoric site on the Western Isles of Scotland - Image by lolaire~commonswiki — The Callanish stones, a prehistoric site on the Western Isles of Scotland – Image by lolaire~commonswiki

The Gaelic language is to be promoted through one of the world’s most popular websites thanks to a new role based at the National Library of Scotland.

Dr Susan Ross, who learned Gaelic as a teenager and has since gained a doctorate in Gaelic studies, has been appointed the world’s first Gaelic Wikimedian in Residence. This year-long Wikimedian in Residence post will see her working with the Gaelic community across Scotland to improve and create resources on Uicipeid, the Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is the world’s most popular online encyclopaedia of which Uicipeid forms one part. It has been in existence since 2004 and currently has more than 14,000 pages of information in Gaelic. Dr Ross will work with the existing community of users to identify priorities for development and encourage new users to begin contributing.

Over the coming year Dr Ross will collaborate with Gaelic speakers, community groups and organisations to improve Uicipeid content by offering training and edit-a-thons. The work will also seek to promote use of the extensive Gaelic resources held by the National Library of Scotland, many of which can be accessed online.

Dr Ross, who has been contributing to Uicipeid since 2010, said: ‘Contributing to Gaelic Wikipedia builds a 21st century information source where knowledge, in Gaelic, about both the Gaelic world and the wider world, can be stored and shared. It is a great opportunity for Gaelic speakers to exercise reading and writing skills in a creative, informal, collaborative environment and I’m excited about the possibilities to get more people involved.’

Gill Hamilton, Digital Access Manager for the National Library said: ‘We were impressed by the number of high quality applications we received from Gaelic speakers to fill this role which demonstrates the importance in which it is held. Susan emerged as the best candidate and we look forward to working with her as she develops this exciting role.’

Daria Cybulska, Head of Programmes and Evaluation at Wikimedia UK said: ‘Issues of diversity and equality are central to Wikimedia UK’s vision and we work to enable people from all ethnic and linguistic backgrounds living in the UK and beyond to enjoy increased access to their own heritage. This project will be crucial in addressing this focus, and we are really looking forward to supporting it.’

The initiative is a partnership between the National Library of Scotland and Wikimedia UK, the charity that supports and promotes the free online encyclopaedia. It is supported by grants from Bòrd na Gàidhlig, the agency responsible for promoting Gaelic language throughout Scotland and internationally, and Wikimedia UK.

The National Library has some of the best collections of Gaelic material anywhere in the world and has been working hard in recent years to make much of this material as available online. This material demonstrates the key role played by Gaelic in Scottish history and culture.

Wikimedia UK Education Summit #WMUKED17

Wikipedia in Education meetup - Image by Josie Fraser — Wikipedia in Education meetup – Image by Josie Fraser

Blog post by Josie Fraser, educational technologist and trustee of Wikimedia UK

If you would like to attend, please sign up on the Eventbrite page.

The Wikimedia UK Education Summit takes place on February 20^th at Middlesex University, London, in partnership with the University’s Department of Media.

It follows on from the successful 2016 Wikimedia UK Education Meetup. Wikimedians and educators working in schools, colleges, higher education and adult education met in Leicester to help inform the work of Wikimedia UK in relation to education, and connect to others using (or wanting to use) Wikimedia projects. The day showcased educators supporting learning and actively engaging learners using a range of projects, including Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikidata.

This event will continue to build connections and share expertise in relation to Wikimedia UK’s work in formal education. Everyone is welcome – whether you are just getting started and want to find out more about how Wikimedia projects can support education, or you are an established open education champion!

Why should educators attend?

The day will open with two talks. Melissa Highton (Director of the Learning, Teaching and Web Services, University of Edinburgh) will talk about the benefits of appointing a Wikimedian in Residence. If your institution is looking for an effective, affordable and innovative way of actively engaging students and supporting staff development through real world knowledge projects, this is a not-to-be-missed talk!

Stefan Lutschinger (Associate Lecturer in Digital Publishing, Middlesex University) will talk about incorporating Wikipedia editing into the university curriculum. Stefan will cover the practical experience of using Wikimedia projects with formal learning communities.

There will be a range of workshops throughout the day – ideal for those looking for an introduction to specific projects, or to brush up on their skills. Workshops include Wikidata, Wikipedia in the Classroom (and using the Education Dashboard), and how to maximise the potential of a Wikimedian in Residence in a university setting. There will also be a session looking at identifying and curating Wikimedia project resources for educators, helping to support others across the UK. Alongside all of this will be a facilitated unconference space for attendees to discuss subjects not covered by the planned programme.

Please consider signing up here for a lightening talk (of up to five minutes) to share projects and ideas, or email karla.marte@wikimedia.org.uk.

What can Wikimedia UK offer educators?

Wikimedia UK is the national charity for the global Wikimedia movement and enables people and organisations to contribute to a shared understanding of the world through the creation of open knowledge. We recognise the powerful and important role formal education can and does play in relation to this, but also the challenges sometimes faced by educators in relation to institutional adoption and use of Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia.

This summit offers educators and Wikimedians in the UK the opportunity to work together to help learners and organisations connect and contribute to real world projects and to the global Wikimedia community.

Wikimedia UK can support educators in a wide range of ways: providing events, training, support, connecting communities to volunteers, and helping identify potential project funding.

Can’t make the summit, but want to be involved?

Become a Wikimedia UK member – membership is only £5 per year and provides a range of practical benefits – directly supporting the work of the organisation to make knowledge open and available to all, and being kept in touch about Wikimedia UK events, activities and opportunities. You can join online here.

The first week’s highlights from #1lib1ref

We are just over a week into the second annual #1lib1ref campaign, where we “imagine a world where every librarian adds one more reference to Wikipedia.”

We are just over a week into the second annual #1lib1ref campaign, where we “imagine a world where every librarian adds one more reference to Wikipedia.”

Wikipedia is based on real facts, backed up by citations—and librarians are expert at finding supporting research.

This year’s campaign launched on January 15, to celebrate Wikipedia’s sixteenth birthday. As of Monday, participants have made over 1,543 contributions on 1,065 articles in 15 different languages.

We know that more librarian meetups, events, editathons, webinars, coffee hours, tweets, photos, sticker-selfies, blog posts and more have happened—share them on social media to help spread the campaign! Here are a few highlights from the week.

IFLA white papers

Following a year-long conversation with the International Federation of Library Associations, they kicked off #1lib1ref by officially publishing two “Opportunities Papers” emphasizing the potential for collaboration between Wikipedia and academic and public libraries.

Showing the story of a citation

#1lib1ref provides a great opportunity for communities to create resources about how to contribute to Wikimedia projects. Below are great new ones made for the campaign:

Wikimedia Deutschland made a great video explainer in both English and German.
NCompass Live hosted a webinar: The Wikimedia Foundation’s Alex Stinson alongside Wiki-Librarians Jessamyn West, Phoebe Ayers, Merrilee Profitt and Kelly Doyle provided an overview of the ways different library communities can improve Wikipedia.
Wikipedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh, Ewan McAndrew, developed excellent introductory videos for how to contribute to #1lib1ref!

A global story grows bigger

The campaign is already bigger than last year, as we’ve already surpassed our contributions from last year and we’re not even finished yet. To capture the scope and excitement, we created a Storify to capture and share some of the most interesting of last week’s tweets, which numbered over 1,000.

We still have two more weeks to go! Keep pushing to get your local librarians and libraries involved with the campaign, and help share the gift of a citation with the world.

Alex Stinson, GLAM Strategist
Jake Orlowitz, Head of the Wikipedia Library
Wikimedia Foundation

Wikidata: the new hub for cultural heritage

This article is by: Dr Martin Poulter, Wikimedian In Residence at the University of Oxford – This post was originally published on the Oxford University Museums blog.

There is a site that lets users create customised and unusual lists of art works: works of art whose title is an alliteration, self-portraits by female artists, watercolour paintings wider than they are tall, and so on. These queries do not use any gallery or museum’s web site or search interface but draw from many collections around the world. The art works can be presented in various ways, perhaps on a map of locations they depict, or in a timeline of their creation, colour-coded by the collection where they are held. The data are incomplete, but these are the early days of an ongoing and ambitious project to share data about cultural heritage—all of it.

Judith_with_the_head_of_Holofernes — Judith with the head of Holofernes, Self Portrait (1610s) Fede Galizia, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art

Wikimedia is a family of charitable projects that are together building an archive of human knowledge and culture, freely shareable and reusable by anyone for any purpose. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, is only the best-known part of this effort. Wikidata is a free knowledge base, with facts and figures about tens of millions of items. These data are offered as freely as possible, with no restriction at all on their copying and reuse.

Already, large amounts of data about artworks are being shared by formal partnerships. The University of Barcelona have worked with Wikimedians to share data about Art Nouveau works, recognising that it is far better to have all these data in one place than scattered across various online and offline sources. The National Library of Wales has employed a Wikidata Visiting Scholar to share data about its artworks, including the people and places they depict. The Finnish National Gallery, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the National Galleries of Scotland are among the institutions who have either formally uploaded catalogue data to Wikidata, or made data freely available for import. To see the sizes of these shared catalogues, one just has to ask Wikidata.

Wikidata logo – Image CC BY-SA 3.0

Wikidata queries can be built using SPARQL, a database query language not for the faint-of-geek. However, there is an open community of users sharing and improving queries. The visualisations they create can be shared online or embedded inside other sites or apps. Developers can build applications for the public; easy to use, but offering a distinctive view of Wikidata’s web of knowledge.

One such application is Crotos, a family of tools generating image galleries and maps of art, filtered by format, artist, place depicted and other attributes. Crotos shows images of the art, so it only includes works with a digital image available in Wikimedia Commons. Wikidata itself has no such restriction: it describes art whether or not a freely-shareable scan is available.

So while the Wikidata site itself might not have mass appeal, the service it provides is gradually transforming the online world, providing a single source of data for some of the most popular web sites and apps. Those “infoboxes” summarising key facts and figures at the top of Wikipedia articles are increasingly being driven from Wikidata, so dates, locations and other facts can be entered in one place but appear on hundreds of sites.

The really exciting prospect is that of building visualisations and other interactive educational objects, integrating information from many collections and other data sources. Wikidata would be interesting enough as an art database, but it also shares bibliographic, genealogical, scientific, and other kinds of data, covering modern as well as historical topics. This allows combined queries, such as art by people born in a particular region and time period, or works depicting people described in a particular book.

Wikidata is massively multilingual, using language-independent identifiers and connecting these to names in hundreds of languages as well as to formal identifiers. In a way it is the ultimate authority file; a modern Rosetta Stone connecting identifiers from institutions’ authority files, scholarly databases and other catalogues (Hinojo (2015)).

There are thousands of properties that a Wikidata item can have. Just considering a small selection that are relevant to art and culture, it is clear that the number of possible queries is astronomical.

Many features of an art work can be described:
- instance of: in other words, the type. Wikidata has many types to choose from, from oil sketch and drawing, via architectural sculpture and stained glass, to aquatint and linocut
- collection
- material used
- height, width
- genre, movement
- co-ordinates of the point of view
People and places can be connected to an artwork: depicts, creator, attributed to, owned by, after a work by, commissioned by.
There are relations between people: parent, sibling, influenced by, school of, author and addressee of a letter.
People can also be connected to groups or organisations: member of, founder, employer, educated at.

With so many kinds of data, Wikidata draws in volunteer contributors with varying interests. Just as there are people who will sit down for an evening to improve a Wikipedia article or to categorise images on Wikimedia Commons, there are people fixing and improving Wikidata’s entries and queries. As with Wikipedia, Wikidata benefits from the intersection of different interests. Contributors speak different languages and have different background knowledge. Some are interested in a particular institution’s collection, while others are interested in a particular style of art, others in a given location or historic individual. Hence one entry can attract multiple contributors, each motivated by a different interest.

Over time, Wikidata’s role in Wikipedia will expand. Explore English Wikipedia and you find many list articles, such as List of works by Salvador Dalí or List of Hiberno-Saxon illuminated manuscripts. At the moment, these are all manually maintained, but a program—the ListeriaBot—has been created to turn Wikidata queries into lists suitable for Wikipedia: see for example this (draft) list of paintings of art galleries. Catalan Wikipedia, with a much smaller contributor base than the English language version, is already using the bot to write list articles such as Works of Jacob van Ruisdael, saving many hours of human effort. As automated creation of list articles becomes more widespread, cultural institutions that share catalogue data will help ensure the correctness and completeness of these articles.

Jacob van Ruisdael 'River Landscape', Pushkin Museum — Un paisatge del riu amb figures, by Jacob Van Ruysdael (1628/1629–1682), Museu de Belles Arts Puixkin

Like Wikipedia, Wikidata depends on Verifiability: any statement of fact is expected to cite or link a credible published source. Hence it has active links to catalogues and other formally vetted sites, which usually supply more scholarly detail and primary research than Wikidata itself. So Wikidata is not a replacement for cultural institutions’ catalogues. The hub metaphor is apt: it is a central point, linking together disparate resources and giving them a useful shape. Its credibility will always depend on the formally vetted sources that it cites, and there will always be users who want to check what they read by following up the citations. In practice, this means that sharing ten thousand records with Wikidata is a way to get ten thousand incoming links to the institution’s own catalogue. What’s more, the free reuse of Wikidata means that other sites will use those links.

Wikidata and its partners have a huge task ahead of them, but the potential reward is vast. We could have data on all artworks, browsable in endless and genuinely new ways, with connections to their official catalogues, their physical locations, and scholarly literature. The sooner the cultural sector as a whole gets involved, the sooner we can bring this about.

References

Note

I am grateful to Wikidata users Jane Darnell (User:Jane023), Magnus Manske (User:Magnus Manske – creator of User:ListeriaBot) and Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing) for many of the useful links in this article.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence.

So you’ve decided to become a Wikipedia editor…

By John Lubbock

The learning curve when you start editing Wikipedia and its sister projects can be steep. To help you get started, we’ve compiled some advice that will help you navigate the complexity of the Wikimedia projects.

Check out the Getting Started page for general advice and information about how Wikipedia works before you start editing. There are a lot of written and visual tutorials as well as links to policies and guidelines used on the site. A quick look at the main editorial policies of Wikipedia, known as the Five Pillars, is also worthwhile.

1) Identify a subject area you know about

Usually people have a particular area that they know about or are interested in. Wikipedia has project pages where people with similar interests go to discuss writing. They’re a great place to see what subjects you can contribute to – they often have advice on what work needs to be done in their area: Directory of Wikiprojects.

For example, if you’re interested in increasing the number of articles about women on Wikipedia, look at the Women in Red project page.

2) Fight the desire to create a new article straight away

There are lots of ways to contribute to Wikipedia, and creating a new article is a big step when you’re starting out. Instead, you could try:

Making copyedits (correcting mistakes).
Improving stubs (enlarging small articles) Here’s a Twitter bot that lists stubs for you.
Contributing to red link lists (a red link is a page that does not exist on WP yet).

3) Start with a reference

Wikipedia is the best available version of the evidence about any subject, so if you have factual books at home, find a good fact and insert a reference on a page about that topic. Be careful, however; some subjects have higher referencing criteria, especially the medical pages, so if you’re not a specialist in a complex area like medicine, start with a simpler subject area.

Finding reliable sources can be difficult, so here is a page with tips on how to identify these. You can also check out the Wikipedia list of Open Access journals and the Directory of Open Access Journals with reliable research that can you can reference.

4) Upload some photos to Commons

As well as Wikipedia, one of the most important Wikimedia projects is Wikimedia Commons. If you’re more of a visual content creator than a writer, your photos might be useful to illustrate articles on Wikipedia.

Uploading to Commons means you agree that others can use your content for free without asking you as long as they give you credit as the author of the work. This agreement is called an Open License or a Creative Commons license, which go by odd names like CC BY-SA 4.0.

There are monthly photo competitions: current challenges are on drone photography, rail transport and home appliances.

You can also use the WikiShootMe tool to see what Wikipedia articles and Wikidata items are geolocated near your present location. Why not take images of some of the places listed and add the photos to their pages and data items?

5) Try to identify content gaps

The English Wikipedia now has around 5.3 million articles, but the type of content skews towards the interests of the groups of people who are more likely to edit it. There’s lots of articles on Pokemon and WWE wrestling, but less about ethnic minorities, important women, non-European history and culture, and many other topics.

There is a tool that you can use to search for content gaps by comparing one Wikipedia to another to see which articles exist in, for example, Spanish, but not in English. You can try it out here.

6) Talk to other people in the community for advice

Wikipedia has a help section with advice on how to get started, including a message board for asking questions and a help chatroom. There are also Facebook groups and IRC channels if you’re that cool.

If you’re one of those kinds of people who enjoys interacting with actual human beings in real life as well as online, there are social meetups for the Wikimedia community every month in London, Oxford and Cambridge, and periodically in Manchester and Edinburgh. There are also lots of events you can come to about specific subjects, many of which are hosted by our Wikimedians-in-Residence.

—

A lot of people use Wikipedia but never edit it, and consequently never think about how much effort goes into creating it. Participating in the creation of knowledge yourself is a really instructive way to discover how knowledge is created and structured, and the issues we face in producing accurate and impartial knowledge.

If you speak another language, you can practice by translating articles from English into a target language, and at the same time help people to educate themselves for free in another part of the world.

The world can feel disempowering sometimes, but if you help to create a good article or upload a good photograph, it could be seen by hundreds of thousands of people, and you could make a difference to someone’s education, or government policy, or the visibility of minority cultures.

So if you’ve decided to become more involved in Wikipedia or its sister projects this year, thank you! Wikimedia UK is here to support you, so don’t hesitate to get in touch and ask for advice. Wikipedia has always been, and will continue to be a work in progress, and we think that provides exciting opportunities to help create a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

#100womenwiki – A global Wikipedia editathon in partnership with the BBC

Jimmy Wales interviewed at the BBC 100 Women event – Image by BBC/Henry Iddon CC BY-SA 3.0

By Lucy Crompton-Reid, Chief Executive, Wikimedia UK

On 8th December 2016, Wikimedia communities around the world held a multi-lingual, multi-location editathon in partnership with the BBC to raise awareness of the gender gap on Wikipedia, improve coverage of women and encourage women to edit. In the UK, events took place at BBC sites in Cardiff, Glasgow and Reading as well as the flagship event at Broadcasting House in London; while around the world, events took place in cities including Cairo, Islamabad, Jerusalem, Kathmandu, Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Sao Paulo and Washington DC. Virtual editathons were organised by Wikimedia Bangladesh, and by Wikimujeres, Wikimedia Argentina and Wikimedia México for the Spanish-language Wikipedia. Women in Red were a strategic partner for the whole project, facilitating international partnerships between the BBC and local Wikimedia communities, helping to identify content gaps and sources and working incredibly hard behind the scenes to improve new articles that were created as part of the project. The global editathon was the finale of the BBC’s 100 Women series in 2016 and attracted substantial radio, television, online and print media coverage worldwide.

The events were attended by hundreds of participants, many of them women and first-time editors, with nearly a thousand articles about women created or improved during the day itself. Impressively, Women in Red volunteers contributed over 500 new biographies to Wikipedia, with nearly 3000 articles improved as part of the campaign. Participants edited in languages including Arabic, Dari, English, Hausa, Hindi, Pashto, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Urdu and Vietnamese, and were encouraged to live tweet the event using the shared hashtag #100womenwiki.

The online impact of #100womenwiki was significant, however of equal importance was the media coverage generated by the partnership. The BBC has a global reach of more than 350 million people a week, so this was a unique opportunity to highlight the gender gap, to raise the profile of the global Wikimedia community, and to reach potential new editors and supporters. In the UK, I was interviewed by Radio 5Live and Radio 4’s prestigious Today programme, while my colleague Stuart Prior and I appeared on the BBC World Service’s Science in Action programme. Dr Alice White, Wikimedian-in-Residence at the Wellcome Library, was also interviewed by 5Live and Jimmy Wales came to Broadcasting House to be interviewed by BBC World News, BBC Outside Source and Facebook Live. The story was featured heavily on the BBC’s online news coverage on 8th December – with an article by Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight that you can read here – and the project was covered by the Guardian, the Independent and Metro in the UK, and other print and online media across the world.

Women editing Wikipedia at the BBC 100 Women editathon - Image by BBC CC BY-SA 4.0 — Women editing Wikipedia at the BBC 100 Women editathon – Image by BBC/Henry Iddon CC BY-SA 3.0

The partnership with the BBC would not have been possible without the vision and energy of Fiona Crack, Editor and Founder of BBC 100 Women. After the events I spoke to her about what had been achieved and she reflected on how the combined reach and audience of the BBC and Wikimedia inspired and engaged people interested in women’s representation online. She commented “It was a buzzing event here in London, but the satellite events from Kathmandu to Nairobi, Istanbul to Jakarta were the magic that made 100 Women and Wikimedia’s partnership so special”

Clearly a project like #100womenwiki, focused on a single day of events, could never be a panacea for the gender gap on Wikimedia. After all, this is a complex issue reflecting systemic bias and gender inequality both online and in the wider world. With more lead-in time and resources, the partnership could have been even more successful, involving more Wikimedians and engaging and supporting more new editors. However, events and partnerships like these demonstrate that the gender gap is not an entirely intractable issue. Within the global Wikimedia community, there are a significant number of people who are motivated to create change and willing to give up their free time contributing to Wikipedia and the sister projects, organising events, training editors and activating other volunteers and contributors in order to achieve it. As the Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK, committed to building an inclusive online community and ensuring that Wikipedia reflects our diverse society and is free from bias, this is, inspiring, encouraging and humbling.

The Welsh Gender Equilibrium: Welsh becomes the biggest language Wikipedia to achieve gender balance!

Editors at work at Swansea University - image by Llywelyn2000 — Editors at work at Swansea University – image by Llywelyn2000

In the last few years many editathons have been held in Wales encouraging people to write articles on women. Many new Women editors have been trained at the History Department at Swansea University since their first editathon in May 2014 and others at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth and at Machynlleth and Ruthin.

The efforts to improve and increase articles on women on Welsh Wikipedia has been steered by Wikimedia UK Wales Manager Robin Owain and a strong and committed Welsh Wikipedia community. The Welsh Wikipedia currently has nearly 90,000 articles and is ranked 60th largest out of a total of 284 language Wikipedias all over the world, punching well above its weight.

In June 2016 the proportion of biographical articles about women on Wiki Cymru was 32%. Yesterday saw that balance turned on its head for the first time on any Wikipedia with more than 10,000 articles. There are now 9,312 biographies on women and 8,123 of men on Welsh Wikipedia, and we hope that the success of achieving a more gender balanced site encourages more women to become editors.

Wikimedia UK is helping to build an inclusive online community and ensure that the Wikimedia projects reflect our diverse society and are free from bias. Wales Manager Robin Owain says that, “The number of biographies is now balanced, which is a big achievement for a small Wikipedia, but we now need to look at other factors such as increasing the content of articles from being male orientated, to being more balanced and gender neutral.”

Source:

The calculation of the gender of all biographies is made through a Wikidata Query on this page.

BBC 100 Women: Is the internet sexist?

Women editing Wikipedia on Ada Lovelace Day - Image by Jwslubbock — Women editing Wikipedia on Ada Lovelace Day – Image by Jwslubbock

BBC to partner with Wikipedia editors in a global 12 hour ‘edit-a-thon’

The BBC has today announced a collaboration with Wikipedia editors around the world to hold a 12 hour global ‘edit-a-thon’ on Thursday 8th December 2016 to encourage more female editors on the site and increase articles about women. This multi-location, multilingual event is a partnership between the BBC, Wikimedia UK, and members of the Wikipedia community.

Recent figures show women are 27 times more likely to be abused online, and in the developing world nearly 25% fewer women than men have access to the Internet.* The absence of powerful females online is also apparent. Only an estimated 15% of Wikipedia editors are women and less than 17% of biographies are of women. And over the last three years, half of the BBC’s 100 women listed do not have a Wikipedia article.

Combining the reach and resources of both Wikipedia and the BBC World Service, the edit-a-thon will aim to make a visible impact on one of the world’s most visited websites which averages more than 18 billion page views per month.

It will run for a day across various global locations including Cairo, Delhi, Dhaka, Jerusalem, Islamabad, London, Glasgow, Miami, Moscow, Sao Paulo, Kabul, Kathmandu and Washington DC. Editors in locations around the world will add unrepresented women to the site, improve the existing coverage of women, and edit articles of their choosing.

Edits in languages including Arabic, Dari, Hausa, Hindi, Pashto, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Urdu and Vietnamese will be recorded and live tweeted, with the shared hashtag #100womenwiki. The event will be shown on the BBC’s live page bbc.co.uk/100women, on BBC World News and on its social media platforms over the course of the day.

Fiona Crack, BBC 100 Women Editor, said:

“Working in news we know that women are more likely to share the stories they get online than men – but the internet can be a negative place for women. Instances of revenge porn and trolling are much higher for women. It seemed a fitting end to the season to find way of addressing some of that sexism. The edit-a-thon will see the BBC making content around some of the forgotten and exceptional women, who deserve profiles on Wikipedia, but who don’t currently appear. We’re hoping for new pages, new edits, added photos, better citations, longer articles and more women editing in more languages. This is an ambitious project, but enlisting women to contribute is a great way of making the internet less gender biased.”

Lucy Crompton-Reid, Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK, said:

“Wikimedia is committed to building an inclusive online community and ensuring that Wikipedia reflects our diverse society and is free from bias. We are very excited to be working with BBC 100 Women to encourage more women around the world to contribute to Wikipedia and increase coverage of women on the world’s free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”

The edit-a-thon will mark the end of this year’s BBC’s 100 Women season which has seen three weeks of thought-provoking broadcast and online special reports, debates, programmes and journalism, running online at bbc.com/100Women, on BBC World News TV, and on the 29 global languages services of BBC World Service Group, as well as network news.

ENDS

*Sources:

If you’re a woman, you’re 27 times more likely to be abused online.
If you’re doing research, only around 17% of notable profiles you’ll find on Wikipedia are of women.
If you’re in the developing world, nearly 25% fewer women than the men around you have access to the Internet.

Notes to Editors

The BBC attracts a weekly global news audience of 320 million people to its international news services including BBC World Service, BBC World News television channel and bbc.com/news.

BBC World Service delivers news content around the world in English and 29 other language services, on radio, TV and digital, reaching a weekly audience of 246 million. As part of BBC World Service, BBC Learning English teaches English to global audiences. For more information, visit bbc.com/worldservice. The BBC attracts a weekly global news audience of 320 million people to its international news services including BBC World Service, BBC World News television channel and bbc.com/news.

BBC World News and BBC.com, the BBC’s commercially funded international 24-hour English news platforms, are owned and operated by BBC Global News Ltd. BBC World News television is available in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide, and over 433 million households and 3 million hotel rooms. The channel’s content is also available on 178 cruise ships, 53 airlines, including 13 distributing the channel live inflight, and 23 mobile phone networks. BBC.com offers up-to-the- minute international news and in-depth analysis for PCs, tablets and mobile devices to more than 95 million unique browsers each month.

For more information re BBC World Service contact: kayley.rogers@bbc.co.uk

Wiki Loves Monuments 2016: follow up and thank you!

Every year thousands of people from across take part in the world’s largest photography competition. After a hiatus in 2015, the UK took part in this year’s competition. The winners were outstanding, and if you haven’t seen them yet you can do so on our blog.

For the UK, 266 people uploaded more than 6,270 photos. This brings us one step closer to our ultimate goal which is to have an image of every historic site in the country. An impressive 3,911 of these came from three people, and altogether eight people added more than 100 photos to the competition. Some of these people are veteran editors who dive into the competition, some have taken part in our previous competitions, and at least one person created their account during the competition. The competition motivates people to go out and photograph their surroundings.

All the images sit on Wikimedia Commons, the image database that underpins Wikipedia and its sister sites. A proportion of these will end up in Wikipedia articles, on Wikidata, WikiVoyage, or even WikiBooks, about 15.4% as of writing from the UK entries across the three editions. The rest build a valuable free resource of visual media that can be used for journalism, graphic design or many other disciplines in which creators need open licensed images. Ending up on Wikipedia is not the be all and end all (there are only so many images that will fit on a page!) but does reach a huge audience.

So we want to give a big thank you to everyone who took part in the competition this year! We would especially like to thank top contributors Edwardx, Philafrenzy and Mike Peel.

And finally, congratulations to Colin and Richard J Smith whose photos of the interior of the Royal Albert Hall and Perch Rock Lighthouse respectively placed second and third in the international competition.