Under the pressure of getting our funding application to the Wikimedia Foundation’s FDC in yesterday morning I suddenly realised it was my third anniversary of being CEO at Wikimedia UK. As my colleague Fabian sitting next to me said, we’ve done quite a lot really haven’t we!
I still reminisce about that first day in 2011 when I discovered our volunteer community and its vast range and the fun we had at the Herbert Museum Backstage pass in Coventry.
Rather more measurable, and going back to the day’s main task, this is the third FDC application we have made. In the first year it was an ever so slightly panicked event with Doug Taylor, a trustee at the time, and I putting it together over a long weekend. Last year was a little better organised, though it needed Daria Cybulska breaking into her holidays and working from her parent’s house to make sure we met our deadlines.
This year has been a smoother process, despite tight deadlines, but demonstrates the amazing journey we have made over the last 1096 days even if there were a few bumps in the road!
This week, after a lot of planning and persuading people to get involved, I ran a Wikipedia editathon to create and improve the pages of women who have been important to classics disciplines. (And I mean disciplines – philology, archaeology, history, ancient theatre, epigraphy, numismatics – the list goes on.)
The idea came about after I went to a conference about over a dozen women in modern history who have made astounding contributions to classics – but who I’d never heard of! Even though I unknowingly am influenced by their work pretty much every day I study.
Astonishingly, I realised that it is not a last-century development that women have been grappling with the thorniest problems of translation, publishing, teaching, engaging in classics scholarship at the highest levels – even gaining public recognition for this – but that women have been doing this throughout the modern period. So, having learned something and fixed my own misperceptions, I wanted to do something that would in a tiny way make it easier for other people to also see what – and when – were these achievements. Where better to do this than in the pages of Wikipedia?
The conference offered a list of names of classicists who deserved good Wikipedia pages, and I started to contact people to see who else I didn’t know was notable. Academics were enthusiastic, suggesting more names – and adding archaeologists to the list.* The Institute of Classical Studies gave me a room and morning coffee. Wikimedia provided trainers and lunch. University libraries loaned me enough books to fill two suitcases, ensuring we’d excellent resources to use on the day – particular thanks are due to the ICS, Senate House and the Institute of Archaeology libraries. The brilliant Dr Rosie Wyles who had organised the original conference agreed to come to tell us about ‘Madame Dacier: 17th-century champion for access’.
I tweeted and emailed, and waited, hoping, that a sensible number of people would turn up.
I need not have worried. Some nine Wikipedia ‘newbies’ came, most in person, two via Skype, and were trained by three Wikimedia trainers. The morning was intensive, as we learned the technical aspects of editing Wikipedia, and discussed more generally the requirements of any encyclopaedia, to be a summary and signpost of what already exists; a means of disseminating existing information rather than a place to create new knowledge.
In practical terms this means avoiding creating original research on its pages, giving a neutral point of view and avoiding conflicts of interest – important for scholars who are experts on their life’s work, but who also have personal interests at stake.
We started editing the pages selected, people expressing surprise that there were whole books published about people who yet were barely mentioned in Wikipedia. This was something the editathon aimed to put right and the room buzzed as we created and improved these scholars’ pages.
Still, by two o clock, we were ready for a change of pace and to listen to Dr Wyles’ talk, arguing that Madame Dacier had not only been a brilliant classicist, but had also in some respects been influential in opening up the study of classics to women.
With another editing session in the afternoon we were able to make a decent stab at our list. Margery Venables Taylor, archaeologist, president and long-time secretary of the Roman Society, had a Wikipedia page created, as did Roman epigraphist, Joyce Reynolds. The pages of Eugénie Sellers Strong, Anna Maria van Schurman, Gisela Richter, Betty Radice, Virginia Grace, and, of course, Anne Dacier, all received editors’ attention.
Was it a success? In terms of what it set out to do, I think so. A lot of enthusiasm and goodwill was also generated, and it showed how classicists and academics can get involved – as many do – with the great resource that is Wikipedia to share what we know about our particular subjects.
And I hear that further editathons are being planned on academic subjects, which I hope will bear fruit!
*The original conference focused on philologists as there has been more scholarly work already done on archaeologists – this seems perfectly reasonable to me.
This post was written by Roberta Wedge, Gender Gap Project Worker
On Wednesday evening a small team of staff and volunteers left the Wikimedia UK office for the Science Museum, for some focussed research on what makes a great Late. These monthly adults-only events are a popular way for galleries and museums to open themselves out to an under-served audience. The V&A claims to be “the original contemporary late night event”, and since 1999, GLAMs large and small have tried their hand at “drinking and thinking” evenings. After many years of sampling, I still think that the V&A and the Science Museum are the best exemplars.
As you may have heard (through the UK-wiki list and on the Water Cooler page within the WMUK wiki), the Science Museum has offered WMUK the opportunity to showcase our work at the Late in November. In October they’re launching their biggest gallery in many years, The Information Age, and unusually, the Late on Wednesday 26 November will be themed around that. We’re very fortunate in being invited to take part.
Last night was one of the best Lates I’ve been to. Not only was the whole museum packed with about 5000 happy people (all over 18 and most under 35, and crucially for my role, about half of them were women), but the range of events was truly impressive. I counted about 30 things going on, most of them free, from pub quiz and game show to demonstrations and workshops. September’s theme was the science of magic and illusion. Make your own zoetrope! Enjoy safe but satisfying indoor explosions with Punk Science! Watch the salinity of the oceans change, speeded up a million times and modelled on a 2m glowing globe! Debunk the Cottingley Fairies!
So as we were sitting in the IMAX theatre, watching the cheerfully scruffy presenters rouse the crowd to participate, we were thinking, what would this look like with a Wikimedia theme? How could we harness their dynamic but informal style to bring out the fun and wonder of wiki-ness? I would love to see a data whiz take on the challenge of filling that floating globe with the traces of Wikipedia edits, different languages ebbing and flowing like ocean currents as Indonesia goes to sleep and Germany wakes up — and the sun never sets on the anglophone empire. We already have high hopes of big-screen audio-visual manifestations of our activities, like Listen to Wikipedia, but it’s all up for grabs. If there’s something you’d love to show off at the Information Age Late, please let me know as soon as possible. We already have almost a dozen ideas, but want to expand the pool of possibilities before meeting with the Science Museum again, when cold reality may have to come into play.
More research is needed: I can’t wait for the next Science Museum Late, on October 29, with the theme of “Food and Drink”.
The aims of the conference are summarised on the conference web site. It particular I noted:
We will be taking a closer look at how authors, readers, funders, publishers and institutions are beginning to integrate altmetrics into their scholarly communication processes — and the challenges that they face along the way.
With a quick overview of recent developments and future plans, we will aim to better understand how and why altmetrics can be of use to the community — and draw further inspiration from those outside academia.
The conference programme is packed with interesting talks and workshop sessions running from 9am to 5/5.30 pm on both days. It is not surprising that the conference was fully booked shortly after the conference was announced.
Wikimedia and Metrics
I will be attending the conference and will present a poster designed by myself and Martin Poulter on behalf of Wikimedia UK. The poster (which is shown and is also available on Scribd) summarises metrics which are available for Wikipedia articles, including usage statistics for articles and media, information on both in-bound and outbound links to and from Wikipedia articles, statistics on the contributions made by editors of Wikipedia articles and statistics on the evolution of articles.
If you are familiar with Wikipedia metrics, if you visit a Wikipedia article you will notice a “View history” button near the top of the window, as shown below for the Global warming article.
Clicking on this button and then selecting the Revision history statistics you will see a comprehensive set of statistics about the article. At the time of writing (9 September 2014) you can see that:
The first edit was made on 30 October 2001.
The latest edit was made 4 days ago.
There have been 4,776 minor edits, 3,307 anonymous edits (identified by an IP address) and 200 edits made by bots (automated edits).
In addition to information about edits to the articles indications are provided on the articles potential impact and levels of interest. For example there are:
8,042 links to the article from other Wikipedia articles
527 links in-bound links to the article.
1,712 watchers (who receive notification of changes to the article).
Over 406,000 views of the article over the past 60 days.
Next Steps
As the world’s fifth most popular web site, Wikipedia shapes public discussion of every area of theoretical and applied science. Its open data and APIs are used by to develop new evaluative tools to assess the impact of a user, set of content, or contributing organisation.
The Wikimedia community welcomes opportunities to exchange ideas on further developments with the altmetrics community. Feel free to leave any comments, questions or observations on this blog post.
Andrew Gray at the British Library Photo: User:Rock drum, CC-BY-SA 4.0
Andrew Gray is a long-time Wikipedian. Having joined in late 2004, while the project was in its infancy, his personal account has racked up almost 50,000 edits.
He is also a librarian by trade, working at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, and holds a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen.
He was then a perfect match for the Wikipedian-in-Residence role at the British Library, a post he held between May 2012 and April 2013.
“The British Library was engaged in a large-scale programme of helping train its curatorial staff to support new ways of working, new audiences, both from a perspective of being open and of being digital,” he explains.
He was involved in a large number of training workshops for British Library staff, as well as having a hand in promoting openness in the organisation, in particular with regards to its content.
“We ran about twenty workshops for eighty library staff,” he recalls. “Outside the library, working with various universities and other institutions, we ran a further forty or so workshops for around 150 attendees. These covered researchers, members of the general public, as well as librarians and library support staff.”
Closing gaps in coverage was a big part of Andrew’s role at the British Library. The first event held under his guidance was an editathon focused around non-Western troops in Europe during World War I.
“We had a number of productive discussions at the event, with Wikipedians and with people actively involved with curating the heritage of the First World War,” he says. “We were able to point out a number of problems in our existing coverage, and discussed ways to try and solve those issues.”
“We were able to focus on non-Western topics as most major topics are already well-covered, and in some cases there is systematically very good coverage across a wide section of that topic.”
He was also involved in events in partnership the International Dunhuang Project (IDP), which aims to digitise materials found in Dunhuang and other archaeological sites near the Chinese end of the Silk Road. It also covers ancient Buddhist sites in the Taklamakan Desert in north-western China and Tibet.
“The project was very keen to do some work with Wikipedia as the multilingual nature of the project fits very closely with what the IDP is trying to do,” he says.
He arranged a editing workshop over several days at the library as part of a broader conference of IDP events in 2012. “We brought in volunteers from Wikipedia, staff from the project itself, and some students and academics from related institutions in London,” he adds. “Over the course of four days we worked on a wide range of articles around the general topic.”
He feels the event helped to improve Wikipedia’s presentation of the topic overall. “Wikipedia’s coverage of central Asian history, as might be expected, is somewhat patchy,” he says. “The work that the IDP did was to help fill in some of the missing gaps.”
“Thanks to the work of one particular volunteer working with some academics, we were able to pull together a list of all the significant archaeological sites in the region, and help identify what we had articles on, what we didn’t, and what we needed to focus on trying to cover.”
“It’s a programme to digitise and make available the letters and correspondence of Charles Darwin. As part of this, the project team have been producing, essentially, a comprehensive biography of everyone Darwin corresponded with.
“Darwin being Darwin, this is essentially a list of everyone who was active in science in Victorian Britain. He was exceptionally prolific — there are letters in the collection from people as unexpected as Karl Marx.”
The project selected several people of historical significance, who weren’t otherwise well-covered by modern literature, and researched them. With several volunteers at the university library, Andrew helped work on Wikipedia biographies based on existing research.
“It was a very productive way of capturing the research that was already being done for the correspondence project,” he adds. “It means this work could reach a broader audience, rather than simply being included in the critical apparatus to a broader project where it might not get so much attention.”
Andrew believes that libraries and Wikipedia are a perfect match for one another, since their goals are one and the same. “We’re in the same business,” he says.
“As a librarian, my job is to try and get knowledge to people who need it, as they need it, when they need it. Wikipedia is in many ways doing the same thing — we are supporting people who are looking for knowledge at their own pace, in their own context… We’re trying to provide that knowledge neutrally, evenly, and without a limit on who we give it to.”
“We don’t want to be the be-all and end-all of knowledge,” he adds. “We want to be able to refer people onwards, to more material, and libraries are the natural place for that.”
This post was written by Daria Cybulska, Programme Manager
Recently released annual review of Wikimedia UK made me look back at 2013. One of the important projects we supported that year was the Natural History Museum and Science Museum Wikimedian in Residence, a project delivered by John Cummings. The work continued long after the official end of the residency in January 2014, and luckily shortly before full preparations for Wikimania 2014 kicked in, John was able to finalise the case study report from his project.
Why did the residency take place? What happened during the project? What are we thinking of doing now?
Open doors
Over the course of the project many doors were knocked at, and from that wide range of ideas we got some very encouraging wins. Below are some highlights extracted from the case study report.
Partnerships with other organisations. John focused on working with external organisations on open knowledge initiatives, many of which lead to further cooperation with Wikimedia UK. Content improvement. Some examples:
The Science Museum has started to open its collection with 50 images of significant objects which around 20,000 people are viewing on Wikipedia each day.
400 photos from the National Media Museum (part of the Science Museum Group) were released to Wikimedia Commons (see here).
Three videos from Science Museum’s Pain Exhibition were released under an open license (e.g. No Pain).
Advocacy work on changing the attitudes and licensing of content towards openness cannot be understated. Much of the project’s time was spent on producing documentation, pilot evidence, and delivering talks advocating open knowledge.
Key reflections
Long duration of the project allowed for many thoughts on future improvements – dig into the later parts of the report (p. 25 onwards) for the whole picture. Some of the highlights are:
Connecting with external organisations has been incredibly powerful throughout the residency. John has worked with a lot of partners thanks to being linked to NHM and SM, and also connected with umbrella organisations such as Collections Trust and DCMS.
John has been a successful advocate of open knowledge throughout the sector, not just focusing on his host institutions – it was one of his key tasks, even though it wasn’t planned as such to start with.
Skills and knowledge transfer between residents was assessed as patchy and often reliant on residents using their free time to volunteer at each other’s events.
It is often difficult to assess how long a project will take to produce positive outcomes.
A valuable insight from the project was that many institutions don’t measure web traffic related to their organisation on other websites. This makes it more difficult to convince them to release content (e.g. they wouldn’t count views on Wikimedia Commons images in their stats). John had ideas of how this could be changed, and we will continue working on it.
Infrastructure development. Looking into the future, John identified many technical developments that would help with the residents’ work.
Any comments and ideas can be directed to John (mrjohncummings-at-gmail.com) or to our GLAM programme (glam-at-wikimedia.org.uk).
This user profile by Joe Sutherland is part of a series about Offline Wikipedia on the Wikimedia blog where it was first published. As well as having created Kiwix, Emmanuel is a developer for Wikimedia UK.
Emmanuel Engelhart’s “offline Wikipedia”, Kiwix, is entirely open source. “Emmanuel Engelhart-49″ by VGrigas (WMF), under CC-BY-SA-3.0
Wikipedia’s goal is to be the sum of human knowledge, available to anyone at any time, but when billions of people have no internet access at all, how can that goal be realized? The answer according to software developer Emmanuel Engelhart (User:Kelson) is quite simple – take Wikipedia offline.
Together with Renaud Gaudin, he invented Kiwix, an open source software which allows users to download a copy of Wikipedia in its entirety for offline reading.
After becoming a Wikipedia editor in 2004, Engelhart became interested in discussions of offline versions of Wikipedia. At the time, Engelhart was in his mid-20s and living in his small village near the town of Vendôme, a few hundred kilometers south of Paris. Learning that a 2003 proposal by Jimmy Wales to create a CD version of Wikipedia, Version 1.0, never made its initial timescale, inspired Engelhart to take action.
He argues that access to information is a basic right that the whole world should be entitled to. “Water is a common good. You understand why you have to care about water. Wikipedia is the same; it’s a common good. We have to care about Wikipedia.”
“Tools are not neutral. They have a big impact on our society and software is [becoming] always more central.” Engelhart says. “We live in an industrial and technical world…so how we make software, what are the rules around software, is really important.”
Kiwix running a copy of Wikipedia in German on an OLPC laptop operated by Engelhart in 2012. “Berlin Hackathon 2012-48″ by Victorgrigas, under CC-BY-SA-3.0
Engelhart elaborated his reasons for creating the software in an email: “The contents of Wikipedia should be available for everyone! Even without Internet access. This is why I have launched the Kiwix project. Our users are all over the world: sailors on the oceans, poor students thirsty for knowledge, globetrotters almost living in planes, world’s citizens suffering from censorship or free minded prisoners. For all these people, Kiwix provides a simple and practical solution to ponder about the world.”
Profile by Joe Sutherland, Wikimedia Foundation Communications volunteer
Interview by Victor Grigas, Wikimedia Foundation Storyteller
Do you have a story about your use of Offline Wikipedia that you’d like to share? We’d love to hear it! Email: vgrigas(at)wikimedia.org
This post was written by Roberta Wedge, Gender Gap Project Officer
Not new: a group of scholars gathering to discuss their chosen subject use the opportunity to expand and update the relevant Wikipedia page.
New: a group of scholars gathering to discuss their chosen subject use the opportunity to make contact with Wikimedia UK. Together we set up an editathon to work on the relevant page, hosted in our central London office, and joined by virtual colleagues.
Last Thursday saw the Anna Kavan Symposium, a day of discussion about this twentieth century novelist, organised by the Institute of English Studies (part of the University of London) in association with Liverpool John Moores University Research Centre for Literature and Cultural History and Peter Owen Publishers.
Last Friday saw the Anna Kavan editathon, a morning of editing the Wikipedia page about her. This collaboration was the brainchild of Catherine Lenoble (User:Cathsign), a French writer whose first edit was a year ago at the Ada Lovelace Day event in Brussels. London is an expensive place to stay, so many of the symposium attendees left immediately afterwards, but remote participation in the editathon was made easier by an etherpad.
Wikimedia UK has that precious resource, meeting space in central London. Our office is near Silicon Roundabout, aka Old Street, on numerous bus routes, and at the junction of two cycle paths. We have coffee and wifi, and laptops to loan and expertise on tap. We extend an invitation to other experts coming to London (and we can even travel to you): give us notice, and let’s see if we can help you improve your subject area on Wikipedia.
Wikimedia UK announces that Padmini Ray Murray is to step down from the charity’s Board of Trustees. She will be taking a new position teaching digital humanities at Shristi School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore.
Padmini joined the board of Wikimedia UK in November 2013 and brought with her an excellent skill set and great enthusiasm and expertise. Her final day as a trustee will be Thursday 18 September. Padmini remains a member of the 2014 EduWiki Conference working group, contributing ideas on themes for this year’s edition of this annual event and actively seeking to bring an appropriate keynote speaker to open the proceedings. Along with Dr Greg Singh, a colleague at the University of Stirling, she is also in the process of ensuring that a number of students from that university are able to attend the conference.
Michael Maggs, Chair of Wikimedia UK, said: “On behalf of the Board I would like to thank Padmini for all of her efforts and support during her time as a trustee of the charity. We all wish her the very best for the future.”
Work is ongoing to appoint a replacement for Padmini which the Board is confident will be completed soon.
Over the next year, starting 22 September, I will be helping my new RSC colleagues, and the Society’s members, to understand Wikipedia and its sister projects, and to contribute to making knowledge of chemistry, and related subjects, more freely available. The job is titled “WikiMedian”, because as well as WikiPedia, it covers those other projects, which are run by the Wikimedia community.
This follows on from my previous Wikipedia residences with Wildscreen (on their ARKive project), with Staffordshire Archives and Heritage Service, at the New Art Gallery Walsall, and with Lancashire County Council’s Museum Service (at their Queen Street Mill), plus shorter projects with a number of other institutions (including West Midlands Police, The Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Black Country Museum, and more). I’ll continue to be Wikipedian in Residence at ORCID. The RSC have already integrated ORCID into their publishing workflow and the two organisations obviously share interests in research and academic publishing.
I’ll be working part time, partly from home, and at the RSC’s Cambridge base one day per week, plus travelling around the UK to various events. I’ll also enjoy spending some days at their palatial London HQ, at Burlington House. My work days will vary to suit the requirements of the post, and my other commitments.
The rest of the time, I’ll still be available, as a freelancer, for other work, not least relating to Wikipedia, and facilitating open space events (for example, I’m MCing GalleryCamp on 23 September). Do drop me a line if you think I can help you with that, or if you have an interest in my RSC work, or if you want to meet socially, after work, in Cambridge.
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