This guest post was written by Stuart Maitland, Founder, Mediwikis
Mediwikis is a platform built on Mediawiki that supports the medical learning community in the UK. Medical students use Mediwikis to collaborate and share best practice, ideas, and learning strategies at their university, and to tap into the knowledge of students at other universities.
Medical students are in a perfect position to share the examples of best practice occurring in their institution – as part of their teaching they are often taught by a wide range of experts in their respective fields, and quickly have to build learning strategies for remembering large amounts of information. By enabling students to share the information and resources taught at their university on an open and collaborative platform, those resources can be shared and compared with students at other universities across the world.
Mediwikis’ enthusiastic editors tell us they contribute information to Mediwikis to “pay it forwards” to the next generation of medical students, and feel pride of being part of such a community. They feel ownership and academic self-esteem for contributing to the project and producing something that other students would find helpful.
We have been working with Wikimedia UK to realise this goal of making the information students write open and accessible to all. Our previous license, the CC Non-Commercial No-Derivatives, was certainly too restrictive for students to reuse the information in building their own resources, and the chapter has helped us to understand the benefits of open licence, and helped us in changing our license.
As Mediwikis is introduced to more universities, we begin to see the diversity of education methods for medicine in the UK and overseas. I hope that medical students everywhere will be able to utilise the strengths of certain universities and their peers across the country.
To find out more about Mediwikis, please visit us at www.mediwikis.com
This article was first published in Archaeology Scotland’s membership magazine and is reproduced with kind permission. Written by Doug Rocks-Macqueen, Cara Jones, Jeff Sanders and Leigh Stork.
We all use (and love!) Wikipedia, but we are sometimes frustrated by the quality of the content on the Scottish Archaeology pages. We decided to do something about it and in Spring 2014, the Edinburgh Archaeology Wiki Club was born! Our aim is to meet up once a month and gradually improve the content of Wikipedia pages on Scottish archaeology. As archaeologists, we are regularly required with our work to go and visit archaeological sites in Scotland and are able to take lots of photographs that we are then able to upload. We are also familiar with a lot of the sites, are used to dealing with archaeological information, and have access to good data. We felt that we couldn’t complain about the quality of Wikipedia if we didn’t do something about it ourselves!
However, let’s go back to our first meeting. We were fortunate that Wikipedia provided two Wikipedians-in-residences (Pat Hadley and Ally Crockford) for our initial meet up. They were able to supply us with instructions, do’s and don’ts, and guide us through our initial steps of editing. Both have become a point of contact and support for our group, helping us to tighten up our wiki-editing skills. It is worth noting that (at the time of writing) there are currently two Wikipedians-in-residences in Scotland, and they are here to help you! One great aspect of Wikipedia is how supportive it is as an organisation. One of us (Doug) was funded by Wikipedia to go to the 2014 Wikimania in London and was able to bring back new skills and knowledge to share with the group. Wikipedia takes its contributors seriously and helps support them when they can.
So why do we do this? Well, for one, we are fairly like-minded people who believe passionately that knowledge should be accessible to all, and one way to help disseminate this knowledge is by using an established digital platform (Wikipedia) that is utilised by so many. Wikipedia is one of the top ten visited websites in the world – think about how you use Wikipedia in your daily life – for example to plan your holiday (“ahh I can see that there is an Neolithic Chambered Cairn near us”) or to find out more about your favourite TV programme (“hmmm how accurate really is 10,000BC?”). Go a step further and think about how you could possibly use Wikipedia to encourage visitors to actually visit your local heritage, sometimes by simply adding a photograph (“my goodness – those ramparts look amazing, I must go see that site”).
How easy is it to edit Wikipedia? There are strict rules involved with editing or creating Wikipedia pages – you have to declare any potential conflict of interests on your biographical page, and (when adding text) you must also reference reputable source material. That said, it is actually an easy thing to do and if you get stuck there is a whole army of online advisors out there who are more than happy to help. It is also a fun thing to do once a month – whether you are a group of friends or perhaps a community heritage group.
What is next for our group? Well, we are still learning, but as a group (and some of us are better than others!) we are learning together (i.e. Cara takes a lot of photographs on her travels…Doug helps upload them!). We have two fringe events scheduled at national conferences this year where we hope to help other archaeologists engage with Wikipedia and we have also had enquiries through social media from other archaeologists keen to create a Wiki Club in their area. Watch this space…or rather, Wikipedia page.
Go further
Check out one of our earlier Wikipedia entries on Leckie Broch – can you help improve it?
If you would like to learn more about what we do or if you would to set up a Wiki Club in your area, please get in touch with Cara on twitter @carajones82
March has raced by, and while April is nearly upon us Wikimedia UK has a programme of events for everyone.
The month kicks off with a Wiki Hour of Power at the University of Edinburgh students, staff, and academics are invited to spend their lunch hour editing Wikipedia. It’s a monthly event, and the last one coincided with International Women’s Day.
There are five meetups scheduled this month across Leeds (12th April), London (12th April), Oxford (19th April), Edinburgh (22 April), and Manchester (26 April). Most take place on the weekends, except for the one in Edinburgh which is on a Wednesday. It’s an opportunity to meet other Wikimedians. There is a full list of upcoming meetups so you can find one near you, and if there isn’t one perhaps it’s time to start one yourself!
For those of you with a GLAMorous side, GLAM-Wiki 2015 organised by Wikimedia Netherlands takes place in The Hague in the middle of the month. Closer to home the GLAM Committee will be discussing all things related to Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums on 21 April. Join the conversation to learn about what the charity does in this area.
On top of all that there is training available for the GLAM upload tool, helping you get to grips with mass uploads. The tool underpins some of the charity’s fantastic work, such as uploads from the National Library of Scotland (look, here’s a castle). Two dates are available, but if you’re interested and can make either session leave a note at the foot of the page.
We hope to see you at our events in April, but most importantly of all enjoy editing!
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.
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!’
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
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
Sara Thomas, Wikimedian in Residence at Museums Galleries Scotland
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…
The Medieval Women Edit-a-thon at Swansea University focused on women’s access to justice in Wales, Britain and Ireland. Photo by Swansea University, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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.
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.
Dame Wendy Hall, one of the keynote speakers at the Wikipedia Science Conference
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.
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…
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
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!
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