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ROH Students Editathon: Improving Wikipedia’s articles on dance

This post was written by Rachel Beaumont of the Royal Opera House and was originally published here. Re-used with kind permission.

Try to describe Wikipedia to someone who’s never heard of it and they won’t believe you. A free encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, which is actually useful? But you’ve never likely to have that conversation anyway; with more than 6 billion page views a month, Wikipedia is the fifth most popular website – and an amazing resource for the sharing of knowledge on a global scale.

Wikipedia is a work in progress, and dance is one of the areas that needs improvement. At the Royal Opera House we’re passionate about sharing our love of ballet and opera with the world – and Wikipedia is one of the best ways to do that. That’s why we’ve teamed up with Wikimedia UK to host a number of ‘editathons’ – focussed sessions to improve particular articles. In our previous editathons – on Ashton and MacMillan – we opened the invitation to everyone. But this time we turned our attention to the ROH Student Ambassadors.

The ROH Student Ambassadors are selected from the ROH Students scheme to be passionate advocates for the work of the Royal Opera House within their respective universities. They’re passionate, creative and confident, and share our love for opera and ballet. We invited them to an evening performance of Swan Lake, and in the afternoon set them to work on editing Wikipedia on a subject of their choice. Joining us were experienced Wikipedians Tim Riley and Jonathan Cardy, who provided invaluable insight into the ins and outs of editing.

The Ambassadors made tremendous improvements to a wide range of articles. Some chose to focus on Swan Lake, and worked on the pages of original choreographer Lev Ivanov, producer of The Royal Ballet’s production Anthony Dowell, and dancers Jonathan Cope and Derek Rencher, who created roles in the premiere of Dowell’s 1987 production.

Others began work on the huge task of improving John Cranko’s status on Wikipedia, whose minimal presence in the encyclopedia does not reflect his significance in 20th-century ballet. They improved his article, and created an article for Onegin, one of Cranko’s most popular ballets.

The others looked to figures and works from across the history of ballet: Ivan Vsevolozhsky, director of the Imperial Theatres and a crucial figure in the creation of The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker; Kenneth MacMillan’s Elite Syncopations; Royal Ballet dancer Melissa Hamilton and Birmingham Royal Ballet dancer Jenna Roberts; and choreographer Hofesh Shechter, whose first work for The Royal Ballet has its premiere this month.

Alicia Horsted, Student Ambassador for the Open University, said: ‘As a Wikipedia user I really appreciate the articles that are available, so to be able to add or create something to help other people who would like an insight into a potential interest, or further the knowledge of die-hard fans, is absolutely brilliant. I found the experience addictive and it really captured my attention (which is hard for someone who is fidgety and easily distracted!). I can’t wait to continue the work I began in the editathon’.

Steven Cuell from Oxford University ‘spent the day researching the life and work of Lev Ivanov, whose work (and Wikipedia page!) is often forgotten under the shadow of Marius Petipa. It was exciting and rewarding to spend a day sharing knowledge that will, in its own little way, make information more accurate and accessible for ballet lovers everywhere’.

Kathleen Greene from the London College of Music said: ‘Wikipedia is such a helpful resource to many that being part of the editathon made me feel like I was contributing to something hugely important. And as a bonus, it was all to do with the arts! A great experience definitely worth trying’.

Jonathan from Wikimedia UK summarized: ‘It was lovely to be able to work with such a lovely bright bunch of people!’

Is there anything you’ve noticed isn’t on Wikipedia and should be? Then get cracking! Find out more about how to edit Wikipedia.

Wikimedia Foundation adopts Open Access Policy to support free knowledge

The black and white photo shows someone turning the pages of a research textbook — Open access scholarship is central to Wikimedia’s mission to empower people around the world to participate in knowledge creation. This image was used by the London School of Economics in its 1973 appeal for funds for its library. Photo by London School of Economics and Political Science’s Library, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

This post was originally published on the Wikimedia Foundation blog by Dario Tarborelli and Yana Welinder. Re-published under CC-BY 3.0 unported

The Wikimedia Foundation is committed to making knowledge of all forms freely available to the world. Beginning today, our new Open Access Policy will ensure that all research work produced with support from the Wikimedia Foundation will be openly available to the public and reusable on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites. We are pleased to announce this new policy at the 18th ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2015).

“Wikimedia is committed to nurturing open knowledge for all, unrestrained by cost barriers,” said Lila Tretikov, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “The Wikimedia movement has a longstanding commitment to open access practices. Today, we are excited to formalize that commitment with this policy.”

Over the past decade Wikipedia has been the subject of hundreds of academic studies on topics such as flu forecasting, the influence of major global languages, and Wikipedia’s own geographic imbalances. The Wikimedia Foundation has made this research possible through a commitment to making Wikipedia’s data open and accessible.

Open access scholarship is central to Wikimedia’s mission to empower people around the world to participate in knowledge creation. Access to these open sources is critical to ensuring that articles on Wikipedia are reliable, accurate, and reflect our ever-evolving understanding of the world. Paywalls and copyright restrictions too often prevent the use of academic research in this effort.

Our new Open Access Policy builds on previous efforts led by the Research Committee, members of WikiProject Open Access, and the Foundation’s grantmaking team. It will ensure that all research the Wikimedia Foundation supports through grants, equipment, or research collaboration is made widely accessible and reusable. Research, data, and code developed through these collaborations will be made available in Open Access venues and under a free license, in keeping with the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission to support free knowledge. The policy sets guiding principles that govern future collaborations between researchers and the Foundation, we wrote a set of frequently asked questions to provide guidance and best practices on the applicability of the policy.

Heather Joseph, the executive director of SPARC, an international open access coalition of research libraries, commented on the policy launch: “The Wikimedia Foundation continues to lead by example in its efforts to democratize access to knowledge. By adopting an Open Access policy to make all outputs of the research that it supports freely accessible and fully useable to the public, the Foundation will help speed the pace of discovery and innovation around the globe.”

The Wikimedia Foundation is proud to join the growing ranks of leading institutions with open access policies.

Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Scientist, Wikimedia Foundation
Yana Welinder, Senior Legal Counsel, Wikimedia Foundation

Scotland’s second Wikimedian in Residence

This post was written by Sara Thomas, Wikimedian in Residence at Museums Galleries Scotland

As I write this, I’m sitting in the library of the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art. There’s a pleasing amount of public wifi, and an excellent cup of tea. This week I’ve also been in Kelvingrove Museum, telling the Curatorial Forum more about what this Residency will involve, and in the Glasgow Museums Resource Centre, meeting more people and getting a tantalising peek inside the stores. It’s only week two, but I’m really enjoying this job so far.

This is the second residency in Scotland, with the first in the expert hands of Ally Crockford. Mine is a year-long project with Museums Galleries Scotland, the first four months of which will be spent on secondment to Glasgow Museums. It’s very much a networked residency (not unlike Pat Hadley’s with the Yorkshire Network Project) and will see me working with multiple institutions across Scotland. I am more than excited.

I’ve lived in Glasgow since the late nineties, and so it’s with great pleasure that I get the opportunity to talk open knowledge in some of the institutions in which I’ve spent so much time over the years, particularly Kelvingrove Museum. I’m also delighted to be able to investigate the collections surrounding the Kelvin Hall project, which is currently under development, and see how we might use them to enrich the encyclopedia. Even though it’s only week two, a good many leads have already presented themselves, and I’m hopeful that my residency will be able to kick start a longer term relationship between these institutions and Wikimedia. I’ll let you know how I get on…

First Welsh university edit-a-thon creates new articles on medieval women

This post was written by Robin Owain, WMUK’s Wales Manager, and originally published on the Wikimedia Foundation’s blog

On 28 January 2015, Prof. Deborah Youngs and Dr Sparky Booker of Swansea University ran the first edit-a-thon at a university in Wales. The aim was to improve articles on women and reduce the gender gap on Wikipedia – by getting more women involved as editors and increasing coverage of medieval and early modern women on Wikipedia.

This Medieval Women Edit-a-thon was organized as part of “Women Negotiating the Boundaries of Justice”, a four-year research project on the history of women’s access to justice in Britain and Ireland between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries (led by Prof. Youngs and funded by the AHRC).

About 45 people attended and around 30 participated in editing. Participants included undergraduates, postgraduates, academic researchers and librarians from Swansee University — and workers from Paris. Three quarters were women, and only three had previously edited Wikipedia. A few spoke Welsh, and therefore, some of the jargon was in that language (being my mother tongue). We were also joined by researchers from Trinity College, Dublin, who were keen to update material on Irish women. Their focus was on Alice Kyteler and Petronilla de Meath, her servant, who were the first women to be tried for witchcraft in medieval Ireland. This inspired one of the editors in Swansea to write about Gwen daughter of Ellis, the first person to be executed on charges of witchcraft in Wales.

The online connection with Dublin was mainly through emails. Looking back, it would have been helpful to use video conferencing — for a more personal touch, which is so important when training editors. Independent researchers in the US were also interested in participating remotely. This is definitely something to consider for future events, as new technology can enable anyone, anywhere in the world to take part in training and discussions, as well as in the editing itself.

I have strong personal feelings about gender equality on Wikipedia (especially the English Wikipedia), where I think the number of female administrators should be at least half the total. In my opinion, this would help reduce the ‘bullying’ which happens so often. On the Welsh Wikipedia, the discussions hardly ever become over-heated; and three of our longest serving administrators happen to be women.

At my side were Jason Evans, the new Wikipedian in Residence at the National Library of Wales, and Marc Haynes, former Wikipedian in Residence at Coleg Cymraeg (the federal Welsh language university); they helped people with simple wiki code (Wiki markup), in both Welsh and English. After an hour or so of training, it was time to get down to the actual editing.

Our participating editors worked individually and in groups, on a variety of different articles featuring women from Wales and Ireland during c.1000–1600. Some editors worked on subjects of their own personal research and others suggested women we had identified before the edit-a-thon. We thought these women deserved their own new articles — or serious edits to the existing articles they were featured in. Many notable women only appear in the articles of their husbands, fathers, or other male family members; they deserve coverage in their own right.

During this Swansea edit-a-thon I tried something new: getting new editors to create links from their user page to the project page immediately! In the past, the actual wiki-coding was kept back – too long in my opinion. This worked well: they took to it like ducks to water and created other links – to my user page and to each other’s. As soon as they realized how simple it is, inhibitions evaporated!

Bringing people’s attention to weaknesses of Wikipedia is a good thing: drawing their attention to the fact so many notable women do not have articles on Wikipedia encourages a change. It would be interesting to have a room full of men who also wish to close this gap. An edit-a-thon of men who don’t see the injustice could be even better! Why do some men only write about military killing machines, ignoring the death and pain caused by them? For example, if women were to write the article on the 2011 military intervention in Libya, I’m sure it would also contain images of the civilian death and destruction caused by these machines. We need a change in minds and we need to take the ‘romance’ out of war. Maybe the next edit-a-thon shouldn’t focus on writing articles about women, but debunking the male, jingoistic attitude of many mainstream articles.

Jason Evans, Wikimedian in Residence at the National Library of Wales, recently announced an edit-a-thon to be held at the Library on April 10th. It will be based on Welsh photographers — including the Magnum photographer Philip Jones Griffiths, whose defining images captured the horrors of the Vietnam War. One of the two images uploaded by Jason (as an example of things to come) depicts a bandaged woman tagged as a ‘Vietnamese civilian’. I certainly hope that those who write about American bombers, tanks and other killing machines will also add such images to these articles.

Outcomes

Participants found the Medieval Women Edit-a-thon successful and enjoyable: in a single day, they created 6 new articles and edited 10 articles about notable Welsh, English and Irish medieval women. More importantly, they became comfortable with editing Wikipedia and plan to keep contributing.

Prof. Deborah Youngs noted that:

“The exercise of writing in this style, and making sure that our articles were written very clearly and simply in as factual a manner as possible, was a very enjoyable and we succeeded (we think!) in keeping our opinions out of it. Of course, even as we got used to encyclopaedic writing style, we also became accustomed to the very liberating thing about the Wikipedia format – that we can change the articles so easily as new information comes to light and as other editors in the community comment on it – and now that we have a core of enthusiastic editors, we know that while this was the first edit-a-thon in Swansea University, it won’t be the last.”

Three other direct outcomes include:

5,000 images of Egyptian artifacts held at Swansea University will be uploaded to Commons on a CC-BY-SA license.
The university’s Athena Swan team voiced their interest in holding a similar edit-a-thon later this year, to increase the number of articles on women from all areas of life.
Cardiff University has also requested a similar edit-a-thon.

The main aim of the Swansea edit-a-thon was to increase content based on women c.1000–1600; the outcome, however, was more about changing mindsets.

Call For Proposals: the Wikipedia Science Conference (deadline 8 May)

This post was written by Dr Martin Poulter, Wikipedian and the convener of the Wikipedia Science Conference

Wikimedia UK and Wellcome Trust are delighted to welcome session proposals for the Wikipedia Science Conference – the first of its kind – taking place in London on the 2nd and 3rd of September.

The two-day conference reflects the growing interest in Wikipedia and its sister projects as a platform not just for communicating science but for scientific research and publishing. Last year, a clinical review paper authored on Wikipedia was published in a peer-reviewed academic journal. Meanwhile, scientists and Wikipedians are using papers, data, and figures to improve Wikipedia and related projects such as Wikidata .

Using these free, open platforms, scientific content is benefiting both from increased impact and an increased opportunity for checking and review. This in turn is a benefit of open-access publication models which make the outputs of research free for anyone to reuse and repurpose.

The two keynote speakers are Dr Peter Murray-Rust of the University of Cambridge and Dame Wendy Hall of the University of Southampton. Professor Hall was a founding director of the Web Science Research Initiative and is a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Association for Computing Machinery, previously leading the ACM and the British Computer Society. Dr Murray-Rust, a chemist, campaigns for open sharing of scientific publications and data. He leads the Content Mine project to extract data from published papers and has called Wikidata “the future of science data.”

The rest of the programme will consist of invited speakers, sessions suggested through this call, and an “unconference” block in which participants create their own sessions on the day.

The conference is arranged by Wikimedia UK and will be hosted by the Wellcome Trust at its premises on Euston Road in London. The Trust is a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving extraordinary improvements in health by supporting the brightest minds. Wikimedia UK is the national charity that supports Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects, and is a voice for free and open knowledge in all its forms.

You can learn more about the conference, and submit your proposal, here

Women’s History Month retrospective – Rosalind Franklin’s birthday

This month we are taking a look back at some of the Wikipedia gender gap projects we have worked on over the past couple of years. Today, we go back to July 2013…

Back in July 2013 Wikimedia UK partnered with the Royal Society and the Medical Research Council’s National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) to celebrate the birthday of Rosalind Franklin, the scientist whose work laid the foundations for the discovery of the structure of DNA.

This special event featured an opportunity to learn how to edit Wikipedia with a focus on articles about women in science. Eminent female scientists, including Professor Dame Athene Donald of Cambridge University, led a panel discussion and a presentation on the life and work of Rosalind Franklin.

This event was part of a series to celebrate the centenary of the Medical Research Council and experienced trainers and librarians were on hand to offer expert assistance. The day proved to be a success, engaging new and experienced Wikipedia editors alike and 85% of attendees were female. You can read more about the initiative here

Wicipediwr Preswyl yn Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru: Mis un – gosod sylfaen

Mae’r ffocws yn ystod wythnosau cyntaf y preswyliad wedi bod ar gwrdd â thimau o wahanol adrannau yn y Llyfrgell. Mae’r ffaith fy mod wedi gweithio gyda llawer o’r staff am bron i ddeng mlynedd wedi gwneud cyflwyniadau ychydig yn haws. Fodd bynnag, roedd hyn yn bennaf yn gyfle i egluro natur y preswyliad ac i hyrwyddo ei nodau a’i amcanion. Mae’r cyfarfodydd hyn hefyd wedi meithrin syniadau ardderchog sydd wedi helpu i siapio’r cynlluniau hyd yn hyn.

Un o amcanion mawr y preswyliad yw cynnal nifer o Olygathonau ac mae cynlluniau diddorol ar y gweill yn barod. Mae’r Golygathon cyntaf, ar y 10fed o Ebrill, yn rhoi ‘ffocws’ ar Ffotograffwyr Cymreig gan gynnwys Philip Jones Griffiths, un o brif ffotograffwyr yr ugeinfed ganrif. Mae digwyddiadau’n cael eu cynllunio ar amrywiaeth o bynciau gan gynnwys Cyfraith Gymreig Ganoloesol, y Rhyfel Byd Cyntaf, y Wladfa Gymreig ym Mhatagonia a Rygbi yng Nghymru. Bydd y Golygothonau’n cynnwys cyflwyniad i Wicipedia a hyfforddiant sylfaenol ar gyfer golygyddion newydd.

Bydd staff y Llyfrgell hefyd yn cymryd rhan. Yn dilyn cyflwyniadau rhagarweiniol bydd yr holl staff a gwirfoddolwyr y Llyfrgell yn cael cynnig gweithdai hyfforddi fel y gallant ddod yn olygyddion eu hunain, ac rwyf eisoes wedi siarad â nifer o bobl sy’n awyddus i ddechrau arni. Er bod staff y Llyfrgell yng nghanol proses ailstrwythuro mae’r ymateb i benodiad y Wicipediwr wedi bod yn gadarnhaol ar draws y sefydliad. Maent yn awyddus i gymryd rhan ac i gefnogi’r prosiect. Yn sgil hyn mae nifer o fentrau eisoes yn cael eu datblygu. Mae’r adran arddangosfeydd wedi cytuno i dreialu’r defnydd o godau QRpedia mewn arddangosfa fawr sydd ar y gweill, ac mae Tîm y We yn gweithio ar osod Botwm ‘Dyfynnu ar Wicipedia’ mewn i’n hadnoddau ar-lein a fydd yn cynhyrchu dyfyniad mewn Wiki-markup ar gyfer Wicipedia. Mae trafodaethau wedi dechrau gyda phartner allanol – Casgliad y Werin Cymru – am newid ei bolisi trwyddedu delweddau fel y gallai cyfraniadau yn y dyfodol gael eu llwytho i fyny i Gomin Wicimedia ac efallai’r cynllun mwyaf cyffrous yw’r bwriad i rannu tua 20,000 o ddelweddau digidol o gasgliad y Llyfrgell. Unwaith y byddwn wedi datrys rhai materion technegol dylem allu defnyddio Glam Wiki Tools i lwytho casgliadau cyfan i Gomin Wicimedia a chaniatáu i’r byd gael cipolwg o’n trysorau cudd!

National Library of Wales residency, month one: laying foundations

The photo is a black and white portrait of Philip Jones Griffiths — Renowned photographer Philip Jones Griffiths

This post was written by Jason Evans, Wikimedian in Residence at the National Library of Wales

The focus during the first weeks of the residency has been on meeting with teams from various departments in the Library. The fact the I have worked with many of the staff for nearly ten years made introductions a little easier. However this was primarily a chance to clarify the nature of the residency and to promote its goals and objectives. These meetings also spawned excellent ideas which have helped shaped plans thus far.

A major objective for the residency is to hold a number of editathons and plans are already firming up. The first editathon, on the 10th of April, will ‘focus’ on Welsh photographers including Philip Jones Griffiths whose defining images captured the horrors of the Vietnam war. Events are being planned on a variety of topics including medieval Welsh law, World War I, the Welsh colony in Patagonia, and Welsh rugby. Editathons will include an introduction to Wikipedia and basic
training for new editors.

Library staff will also be involved. Following introductory presentations all staff and library volunteers will be offered training workshops so that they can become editors themselves, and I have already spoken to a number people who are keen to get started.

Despite being in the midst of a major restructuring process staff throughout the institution have reacted positively to the arrival of a Wikipedian. They are keen to get involved and to support the project. As such a number of initiatives are already being developed. The exhibitions department has agreed to trial the use of QRpedia codes in a major upcoming exhibition, and the web team are working on installing a ‘Cite on Wikipedia’ button into our online resources, which will generate a ready-made web citation in wiki markup.

Discussions have opened with an external partner – People’s Collection Wales – about changing its licence policy so that future contributions could be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and, perhaps most exciting are plans to share around 20,000 digital images from the library’s collection. Once we have ironed out a few technical issues we should be able to use GLAM-Wiki tools to upload en masse to Wikimedia Commons and allow the world a glimpse of our hidden treasures!

Women’s History Month – revisiting our work on the Wikipedia gender gap

The Wikipedia gender gap is well documented and is one of the biggest challenges facing the global Wikimedia movement. To help support this campaign Wikimedia UK is running a retrospective review of its projects related to gender over the last few years. This will take place during March – Women’s History Month.

As a chapter Wikimedia UK recognises the importance of all types of diversity within our community and gender is an important aspect of this. With only around 8-14% of Wikipedia editors identifying as female there is much to be done to ensure that the incredible knowledge resources of the Wikimedia projects are reflective of the sum of all knowledge.

We are also seeking personal opinion pieces from people involved in some of those projects to explore how we can do better and why it is important we as a movement take on this challenge. If you would like to share your gender gap-related projects and stories, please do get in touch, either through the comments on by emailing stevie.benton-at-wikimedia.org.uk

In related news, the Wikimedia Foundation has recently announced that its Inspire Grants Programme will focus on supporting projects related to the Wikipedia gender gap until the end of April. This is an experiment that, if successful, may see a more theme-focused grants programme in future. You can find out more about the programme here.

New recommendations outline ways to strengthen Europeana’s future relationship with Wikimedia

This post was written by Liam Wyatt and was originally published here. Re-used with kind permission.

In light of the Europeana 2020 strategic plan, what shape should Europeana’s relationship to Wikipedia and the wider Wikimedia community take in the years to come? To find an answer to this question, a Europeana Network Task Force was formed with a mix of people drawn from the Europeana network of GLAMs as well as active members of the Wikimedia community. It was chaired by Jesse de Vos from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, now at Wikimedia Netherlands, and had a clear mission to reach final recommendations that benefited both Europeana and Wikimedia.

Together, the group has produced a report outlining ten ways in which Europeana and Wikimedia can build on their successful cooperation.

The first task was to create an overview of all past Wikimedia activities that Europeana has had involvement in. This list of past and current projects was built on-wiki (where else?) and shows very clearly the depth and breadth of the existing relationship.

The second half of the six-month review then focused on developing 10 strategic recommendations which would make this relationship even stronger over the next five years.

“Europeana has a long standing relationship with the Wiki community. With the development of the GLAMwiki Toolset, publishing to Wikimedia has become an intrinsic part of our publication policy and we would like to expand on this relationship for the benefit of our data partners. The recommendations in the report of the taskforce amplify that ambition, and we will investigate how we can act upon each of them.”
(Harry Verwayen, Europeana Foundation)

This can be achieved by considering a Wikimedia-component to both current and future projects. Europeana can also play an important role by enhancing relationships between GLAMs and the Wikimedia network, as well as sharing knowledge about practices in each of these communities.

An important aspect of the report was the recommendation that Europeana further integrate its systems and technology with Wikipedia and other Wikimedia platforms.

Wikidata is a key part of this, as a fast-growing project with enormous potential for linking collections, carrying out authority control, and synergy with Europeana’s systems.

The introduction of a dedicated Wikimedia coordinator and ‘product owner’ was another significant outcome. The creation of this position means that each of the ten recommendations can be fulfilled to their full potential. This new team member can also look at the opportunities to integrate Wikimedia in each of the major forthcoming Europeana projects, such as “1914-18”, “Sounds” and “Fashion”.

A final element to the report considers the possibilities for cooperation between Europeana and Wikimedia as they seek external funding for projects, with the possibility of Europeana becoming Wikimedia’s first movement-partner.

Each of the different strands to the report offers groundwork for exciting developments that can form future planning, and we would like to thank all members of the Task Force, as well as numerous others who gave their valuable insights during the creation of this report.