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!
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!
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.
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.
One corner of the room – detail of photo by Machi Takahashi of ATR Creative who joined the event from Tokyo and was one of the speakers. CC BY-SA 2.0
This post was written by Kimberly Kowal of the British Library and was originally published here. Reused with kind permission.
Without looking, you can’t know what’s there. That was our experience locating maps amongst the one-million British Library images released to the public domain. We had not guessed that 50,000 images of maps were lurking there. So how were they singled out?
Answer: with the help of our friends (the crowd!) using several methods.
Semi-Manually
A dedicated team of volunteers looked at individual images and applied the tag “map” on flickr. The work was organised using a synoptic index in Wikimedia Commons, providing a systematic method of looking at each volume and tracking shared progress. Over 29,000 map images were identified in this way.
Day-long event
The British Library hosted a one-day event, in concert with Wikimedia UK, to which volunteers were invited to kick-start the effort. In between working, the 30 participants enjoyed tours and talks from speakers representing online mapping efforts, including OpenStreet Map and Stroly. The day’s activities were captured in Gregory Marler’s engaging description, Lost in Piles of Maps, and a series of photographs from ATR Creative.
Ongoing crowd activity
The bulk of the work took place online over the next two months. With the wiki tools built by J.heald to guide and coordinate contributions, 51 volunteers approached the work, book by book, often focussing on geographic areas of interest. Together, they made short work of what was a huge task; 28% of the books were completed after the first 72 hours; 60% were reviewed in the first 20 days; after five weeks over 20k new maps were found in 93% of the source volumes.
Automated methods
But surely maps can be identified automatically? It’s true that well before the organised effort just described, one user produced algorithm-guided tags for this image set, which resulted in the addition of well over 15k map tags.
By the end of December 2014, every image in every book had been reviewed, and between the manual and automatic tagging, over 50k maps had been found. Since then, we have been working to clean up the data, including reviewing rogue tags, rotating images, splitting maps, and removing duplicates, to derive a final set of data. Next step: georeferencing.
The tagging project was presented 12 February 2015 at the EuropeanaTech 2015 conference as a short talk and poster, Case Study: Mapping the Maps.
In the report the Committee makes a series of important recommendations which will influence the future digital skills of the UK. Perhaps chief among these is the recommendation to “define the internet as a utility service, available for all to access and use.” This would place access to the internet on an equal footing with access to water and energy and is an acknowledgement of just how fundamental the internet is to our modern way of life.
The report makes a number of recommendations and statements that are of particular interest to Wikimedia UK. The countries that ranked above the UK in a recent digital study had all “invested heavily in digital ‘foundations’, including up-skilling the population in technical expertise and digital capability…” These skills are extremely important and we believe that the use of Wikipedia and other open knowledge projects as both teaching and learning tools can offer great benefits to digital literacy.
The Wikimedia movement globally is making great strides towards the acceptance and appreciation of Wikipedia as a learning and teaching tool. Countries such as Israel, Serbia and Sweden are taking advantage of the capacity and scale of the free encyclopedia in creative ways within their education systems. The UK should likewise adopt the use of Wikipedia and other open knowledge projects.
One point from the report indicates a key, and timely, shift – effectively, the “3Rs” will become “3Rs and a D”. Explicitly stated in objective four of the report: “No child leaves the education system without basic numeracy, literacy and digital literacy.” This is a very welcome development. The use of Wikipedia in formal education settings from Key Stage 4 onwards could make a significant contribution to not only digital literacy skills but to core life skills such as critical thinking.
Many universities are reporting that undergraduates have not only digital skills gaps when they arrive at university, but gaps in critical thinking and key information literacy gaps too. We are currently exploring a number of ways in which using the Wikimedia projects can bridge these crucial skills gaps effectively. We welcome thoughts on this so please get in touch if you’d like to be involved.
The report calls for a single “Digital Agenda” within government following recent initiatives looking at developing greater digital democracy and the use of digital tools to replace civil courts (digital justice?). There needs to be a great deal of joined up thinking and shared ownership of work within government and the public sector for these initiatives to be introduced effectively and efficiently into one distinct package to support digital citizenship. The voluntary sector has a significant role to play in this.
If you would like to learn more about why Wikipedia belongs in education, please contact our education organiser, Dr Toni Sant – toni.sant{{@}}wikimedia.org.uk
‘Impact’ is a perennial concern for organisations, including Wikimedia chapters. Showing that what you’re up to makes a difference: contributing to free knowledge.
It’s a familiar topic if you’re a researcher and can affect whether you get funding. It’s one thing to be able to say that your article has appeared in a journal with a circulation of 10,000 copies but that doesn’t necessarily show that it has influenced people. Ideally you want to see people talking about your research, sharing it with other people, and using it to inform their own work. This is often done by counting how many times an article is cited in other publications, but misses out the likes of social media and newspapers. Altmetric.com measures the digital impact of articles, and recently announced that they are now including Wikipedia in their statistics.
This is a significant step. Wikipedia is the 6th most visited website in the world and receives about 500 million unique visitors every month. Not only is it one of our first sources of information in the digital age, it is read on an incredible scale. If your work is being used there, it is reaching far more people than would otherwise be possible.
So why is the inclusion of Wikipedia something to celebrate?
In short it’s another step towards recognising the reach and importance of Wikipedia and might encourage academics to interact with it. Already groups are considering Wikipedia as part of their outreach work when applying for funding. The Atlas of Hillforts Project, a joint project between the University of Oxford and the University of Edinburgh, specifically mentioned Wikipedia in terms of data dissemination and received £950,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. One more incentive might help people get involved and it creates a positive feedback loop. The better quality information Wikipedia has, the more likely academics will be to improve it.
Importantly, this move might help encourage open access. Researchers and academics generally understand conflict of interest issues, so the key way of making it more likely that Wikipedia will cite your work is to make it available to as wide an audience as possible through open access.
Overall any initiative which might increase the quality of Wikipedia in the long run and improve its reputation is surely a good thing.
This post was written by Prof. Deborah Youngs and Dr Sparky Booker of Swansea University
On Wednesday 28th January, 2015, Prof. Deborah Youngs and Dr Sparky Booker of Swansea University ran the first editathon in Wales organised to improve articles on women on Wikipedia. This day was focussed on reducing the gender gap on Wikipedia – both in terms of increasing content about medieval and early modern women, and getting more women involved as editors. Below, Deborah and Sparky report on the day.
***
The idea for the event came out of a conversation with Robin Owain on how to raise the profile of Welsh women on Wikipedia. We had just begun a four-year research project on the history of women’s access to justice in Britain and Ireland, 1100-1750 (funded by the AHRC). Robin had seen us interviewed about the project on BBC Wales Today, and thought our research would be a good fit for a women’s history editathon.
We were interested in improving content about any notable women in history, but we focused on Welsh and Irish women because they are the subjects of our own research. Preparing for the day was an eye-opener, and we realised that many key women had no articles at all. We were surprised that Jane Dee, wife of the infamous Elizabethan natural philosopher, and Senana ferch Caradog, wife of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn Fawr, did not have their own entries, even though they were notable in their own right, and their husbands had well-developed, extensive articles written about them. On the other hand, it was very heartening to see how many well-referenced and extensive articles there were for some medieval Irish and Welsh women. Some articles, like that of Gormflaith ingen Murchada, were the products of other editathons, and some were the work of dedicated solo editors.
As it was the first time we had arranged such an event, we decided to start with the staff & students connected to our own College of Arts & Humanities at Swansea. We were soon joined by four researchers from Trinity College, Dublin, who were keen to update material on Irish women. They focussed on Alice Kyteler and Petronella de Meath, her servant, who were the first women to be tried for witchcraft in medieval Ireland (Alice escaped her sentence of death by fire; Petronella sadly did not). We also had remote interest from independent researchers in the US. We hadn’t been aware of how much scope there was for remote participation in the editathon, but in future events, this is definitely something to pursue, as the technology ensures that anyone, anywhere in the world can be part of the group and could take part in training and discussions as well as the editing itself.
The day in Swansea began with tea and coffee, and the group assembled. It was a mix of undergraduates, postgraduates, academic researchers, and librarians, most of whom did not have a Wikipedia account and had never edited before. We started the training off by signing people up and Robin from Wikimedia UK guided them through the basics of editing on Wikipedia. 14 new user accounts were created on the day in Swansea, and two in Dublin. Jason Evans, the recently employed Wikipedian in Residence at the National Library of Wales, and Marc Haynes, former Wikipedian in Residence at Coleg Cymraeg, also helped people get comfortable with the formatting.
Wikipedia, yay!
It wasn’t just formatting to learn however; there were also key guidelines for writing on Wikipedia that were quite different to how most of us editors usually wrote, since we are trained in academic writing. The policy on avoiding plagiarism and using proper citations made us right at home, but the importance of a neutral point of view, making sure not to make an argument in our articles, and the ‘no original research’ guideline were both less natural for many of us. However, 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.
After completing our hour or so of training, it was time to get down to the actual editing. Our participating editors worked in groups and singly, on a variety of different women from Wales and Ireland from c.1000-1600. Some editors worked on subjects of their own personal research and others on suggested women that we identified before the editathon as crying out for their own new page or serious edits to their existing article. We had a line open to the Dublin team and Robin was able to troubleshoot their formatting queries. Over the day, as a group, we created six new pages, four in English, one in Welsh, and one in Greek. They can be viewed here.
The Greek and Welsh pages were particularly interesting, since we had realised with Robin that there was a great deal to be done adding content from English language articles to those in other languages (and vice versa). For those with adequate language skills, there is a chance to make a huge contribution using information that is already on Wikipedia.
We stayed editing until 5pm (with a short break for lunch!) and had a really enjoyable day. Our new editors reported that they found the training and editing interesting and fun and that many were interested in participating in more editathons in the future to keep working to close that Gender Gap.
And now that we have a core of enthusiastic editors, we know that while this was the first editathon in Swansea University, it won’t be the last. On the day itself there were discussions about where to go next. The university’s Athena Swan team voiced their interest in holding a large, university-wide event later this year to increase the number of articles on women from all areas of life. For us: we will continue to edit. We hope that our four-year project will bring to light fascinating, powerful women who deserve to be better known, and who will help our understanding of women’s access to law in times past. And when we do, Wikipedia will be one of the first to know.
By using this site, you agree we can set and use cookies.
‘Impact’ is a perennial concern for organisations, including Wikimedia chapters. Showing that what you’re up to makes a difference: contributing to free knowledge.
