Page 37 – WMUK

New images released are quickly put to use

This post was written by John Byrne, Wikimedian in Residence at the Royal Society and Cancer Research UK

I’ve had two recent uploads of images released by organizations where I am Wikimedian in Residence. Neither of them are huge in quantity compared to some uploads, but I’m really pleased that an unusually large percentage of them are already used in articles. Many thanks to all the editors who put them in articles, especially Keilana for CRUK and Duncan.Hull for the Royal Society images.

The first release was by Cancer Research UK (CRUK), of 390 cancer-related diagrams, including many covering anatomy and cell biology. Many medical editors had said they were keen to have these available, and they have been quickly added to many articles, with 190 already being used, some twice, and mostly on high-traffic medical articles like breast cancer, lung cancer and cervical cancer. A BaGLAMa2 report shows page views in August, traditionally a low-traffic month, of 1.1 million

Wikipedia cancer articles tend to be mostly illustrated with alarming shots of tumours, or purple-stained pathology slides which convey little to non-professional readers. The new images are from the patient information pages on CRUK’s website and explain in simple terms basic aspects of the main cancers – where they arise, how they grow and spread. Some show surgical procedures that are hard to convey in prose.

Many files have generous labelling inside the image. All the files are in svg format, allowing for easy translation of these labels into other languages, which should be especially useful over time. All use the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International licence. All the images of this type that CRUK have are now uploaded, but additional ones should be uploaded as they are created, and other types of image, including infographics, are in the pipeline.

We are also working to change the standard model release forms CRUK uses, so that photos and videos featuring people that are made in future will be easier to release. CRUK also has some very attractive short animations, which in some ways are more culturally neutral and so preferable for use around the world. These avoid model release issues and some should be coming soon.

The other release is by the Royal Society, the UK’s National Academy for the Sciences. I’ve now completed my term as Wikipedian in Residence there, but had got their agreement to release the official portrait photos of the new Fellows elected in 2014, with the intention to continue this in future years. Some photos of their building were also released.

By early September, only a month after uploading completed, of the 72 files uploaded 38 (53%) are now used in Wikipedia articles. The portrait of Professor Martin Hairer, who won the Fields Medal this August is used in 18 different language versions of Wikipedia, having fortuitously been uploaded just before it was announced that he had won the Fields Medal, which is often called the mathematician’s equivalent of a Nobel. Most of the biographies were started after this announcement. Other images of Fellows are used in the French, Chinese and Persian Wikipedias, as well as English. There were 96,000 page views in August for these articles.

The availability of high-quality portraits is very likely to encourage the writing of articles on those Fellows who still lack Wikipedia biographies. There are 15 of these, which is already a better (lower) figures than for recent years such as 2012, where 29 still lack biographies.

Back in the Wikimedia UK Office

This post was written by Fabian Tompsett, temporary Volunteer Support Organiser

After a short break I am back in the Wikimedia UK office, now in the role of providing cover for Katie Chan as Volunteer Support Organiser for about four months. One of the first things I’ve noticed is that the place has a different feel: the team is no longer approaching a big event with a mixture of apprehension and excitement. Things are “back to normal”, but actually, not really!

Wikimania 2014 has given Wikimedia UK a big boost at various levels:

Confidence

There’s a sense of “we did it”, we coped with playing a significant role in delivering Wikimania alongside our partners the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimania London team. Many members of staff have taken a bit of a break but are now back at work with renewed enthusiasm. We have been so happy to get back in contact with some Wikimedians who have had little to do with the chapter recently, as well as meeting up with new volunteers, including a number of Wikimedians of long standing who had not previously engaged with Wikimedia UK. So we also have the feeling that Wikimania had the endorsement of the Wikimedia community in the UK in general. Thank you all.

Innovation

But this self-confidence is not accompanied by complacency. Actually people are focussing on how we can use the experience of Wikimania and some of the new ideas we came across to take Wikimedia UK to a new level. One aspect of this is my new colleague, Roberta Wedge, who is already having an impact on staff by raising issues which affect our engagement with women in various ways. Also as we have attracted a number of volunteers very local to our London Office, we have initiated regular Wiki Wednesdays to help deepen their involvement with the Wikimedia movement. More examples will emerge over time.

Volunteering

In my new role I shall be involved in volunteer support, something dear to my heart. I certainly learnt a lot about volunteer support from being involved in Wikimania, and certainly the Wikimania London team contributed to that learning. As this is a temporary position, part of my work is picking up on the activities Katie has been running. But as I got to know many of the new volunteers who signed up for Wikimania a key part of my work during these four months will be to develop our relationship with them.

We are also asking for input from volunteers to help shape how we make the most of the new opportunities which are arising post Wikimania. To help with this we shall be conducting a survey amongst our volunteers to get a better understanding of their views. However, I would welcome any direct contact from new or long standing volunteers to discuss any ideas you may have.

You can reach Fabian by calling the office on 020 7065 0990 or emailing fabian.tompsett@wikimedia.org.uk

“A significant step towards a sustainable partnership”: Ally Crockford and the National Library of Scotland

This post was written by Joe Sutherland.

Ally Crockford has spent a great deal of time researching in the National Library of Scotland – eight years, in fact – so when the opportunity to open its content for a wider audience came along she jumped at it. “What drew me to working here is the love that I have for the library,” she explains. “I’ve worked here for the last eight years as a researcher and I think it’s an amazing organisation.”

“When I saw the call for a Wikimedian I thought it was an amazing opportunity, because I know how much material is here in the library and how few people get to access that material regularly. To be able to provide access to the collections was wonderful.”

A room full of books has essentially become her habitat by this point. Though originally from Canada, Ally received her PhD in English literature from Edinburgh University, and throughout the programme was heavily involved with the library. Since July 2013, Ally has served as Wikimedian in Residence there.

During her tenure, Ally has worked on several projects aiming to extend the reach of the library’s content to a wider, global audience. One of the projects of which she is most proud was the Anybody But Burns editathon, a quest to fill Wikipedia with information about Scottish poets who don’t have the recognition that Robert Burns enjoys.

“I was really, really pleased with how that came together. It was probably the first event where we saw Wikimedians from the community working alongside contributors who had never used Wikimedia before, but were very interested in Scottish poetry,” she says. “We were working with the Scottish Poetry Library, and we held it in the National Library’s reading rooms, which really was a very special opportunity.”

In fact, the Telegraph named the event as one of “the best places in the UK to celebrate Burns Night”, a title of which she admits to being particularly proud.

Her role has also allowed her to address other issues with Wikipedia, through events organised with the library and with other organisations in Edinburgh. In December 2013, the library worked with the Medical Research Council, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Wikimedia UK to host an editathon on women in science. Not only was the goal to improve coverage of female scientists on Wikipedia, a topic area quite under-represented on the site, but also to increase female participation.

“We had more than twenty people who came along,” she says, “and we had fifteen new articles created and five more improved, a lot of them about women in science who had connections to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. We had speakers as well, women who currently have a significant position in the scientific community.”

“Sally Macintyre, for example, was one of the speakers. It was really quite fascinating because we had a participant who created an article about her in the evening and then later on she was there speaking. That was a fantastic connection to make – to be able to say, ‘you now have a place on Wikipedia’, and to show her her place on Wikipedia.”

Working with Wikimedia UK has helped the library develop a new metadata and digital content licensing policy, which Ally thinks will allow the NLS to open up its resources and release them under less restrictive licenses.

“[It] would put all of our low-resolution content that is in the public domain back into the public domain,” she explains, “which means we can upload it to Wikimedia Commons. At the moment we’ve only uploaded about 250 images, but I’m quite happy with the images we’ve uploaded and I’m really impressed with the way that the library has changed its attitude towards its material.

“They’re still a little bit hesitant, but they are increasingly becoming more open, and they’ve already identified a couple of thousand images to release over the coming months which I’m very excited to see happen.”

“It also means that going forward, as the library digitises more material,” she adds, “that material will also be able to go up. So I think it’s a significant step towards developing a sustainable partnership with Wikimedia UK on the library’s behalf.”

For more on The GLAM-Wiki Revolution, visit the project page, or find out more about the National Library of Scotland Wikimedian in Residence project.

Remember a Charity in Your Will Week

This post was written by Wikimedia UK’s fundraising team

This week is “Remember a Charity in Your Will Week“. Wikimedia UK supports this national campaign to encourage this type of giving; Remember a Charity was set up in 2001 to address the fact that while 74% of the UK population support charities, only 6% currently leave a legacy to them when writing a will.

We are very grateful to the people that make our work growing and supporting the Wikimedian movement in the UK possible, and we’d like to offer more options in how you choose to support us by leaving a small amount to us in a will, or letting us know if this is something you have already decided to do.

Donations to Wikimedia UK fund valuable projects such as our Wikimedians in Residence at the Royal Society and Cancer Research UK, promoting digital literacy through Wikimedia and also running regular events such as our upcoming Women in Classicism editathon.

If you are interested in making an arrangement, or telling us that you have arranged this particularly special kind of gift to make our shared vision of free and open knowledge live on, please do get in touch with Katherine, our Fundraising Manager, by emailing Katherine.Bavage@wikimedia.org.uk. If you let us know about a gift in your will we can keep you updated on what we are achieving and the type of work your legacy will support.

Your pictures on one of the busiest websites in the world?

This post was written by Michael Maggs, a volunteer organiser of Wiki Loves Monuments (and Wikimedia UK Chair)

September is your chance to take part in the annual photography competition to improve Wikipedia. The encyclopaedia is visited by 500 million people every month, and is seeking help from RPS members improve its photos.

Wiki Loves Monuments is aimed at improving coverage of the UK’s listed buildings and ancient monuments, and starts on Monday 1st September. The contest is supported by the Royal Photographic Society, English Heritage, and Wikimedia UK (the UK charity that supports Wikipedia and its sister projects).

We’ve got lots of pictures of Tower Bridge and Stonehenge, but there’s so much more of the country’s heritage to celebrate. There are tens of thousands of eligible sites, so check out the UK competition website and see what’s nearby. As well as prizes for the best image, we have a special prize this year for the best image of a listed building on one of the ‘At Risk’ registers.

It doesn’t matter when your photos are taken so long as they are uploaded during September 2014. If you took some stunning pictures back in April, or five years ago, you can still upload them.

In line with the charitable and educational aims of the contest, you’ll need to agree to release your entries under a free licence allowing them to be freely used by anyone for any purpose, including Wikipedia. You retain copyright, and can require anyone using your images to attribute them to you as photographer.

Help us show off your images of your local history!

The competition is open until Tuesday 30 September. You can see full details of how to enter here.

Welcoming our Programme Intern

This section was written by Daria Cybulska, Programme Manager

One of Wikimedia UK’s key aims as a charity is to teach under-represented groups how to edit Wikipedia (women make up about 10% of editors), and develop under-represented content (e.g. Women in Science). Wikimedia UK has been running ‘Women in Science’ editathons for the last two years – one of the first ones was the much acclaimed Royal Society event to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day in 2012 ) – as a part of the wider Ada Lovelace Day celebrations.

In 2013 our editathons have expanded and received extremely positive responses from the attendees and in general. They were organised with a strong support from the Medical Research Council, which enabled us to deliver events in partnerships with other organisations who hosted them and invited people from their networks to attend. Since then we have been contacted by various organisations interested in collaborating with us further.

Thanks to the popularity of these activities we decided to give more capacity for organising these diversity events (logistics can take a lot of time and effort!), and perhaps even growing the group of people who are interested and keen to be involved in this programme.

This leads me to welcoming Roberta Wedge, our Programme Intern, who is joining us for four months to particularly focus on Ada Lovelace 2014, but also support the gender gap activities in general. (To learn more about the role visit this page.)

This section was written by Roberta Wedge, Programme Intern

Wikipedia is a miracle of human ingenuity and vision and hard work. It can transform lives, and perhaps even save them, as with the recent Ebola initiative. It is also fraught with human difficulties and limitations. One result of that – and one of the worst or most worrying aspects of Wikipedia, from my perspective – is that the vast majority of editors are male, with all the ramifications that that brings. If women’s voices are not heard, and women’s stories are not told, the world as a whole is the poorer. The same goes for every under-represented group.

One of the best and most heartening aspects of Wikimedia UK (and, from what I know of them, other chapters and the Foundation too) is the acknowledgement that this gender gap is a problem, and the commitment to changing the situation. There’s a relevant parallel here. Educators and employers in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) know that they have to work intelligently to build the pipeline (encourage girls in) and stop the leaks (keep women in the workforce). Just as women in STEM are under-represented but present, so are women in Wikimedia projects less likely to join and more likely to leave.

I’ll be working on this with Wikimedia UK until the end of the year. One of the main things I want to do is organise editathons, and possibly other events, to engage more women to edit, and to encourage everyone to edit related subjects. The biographies of women in science are an obvious starting point. I expect I’ll be approaching GLAMs, universities, and learned societies, both existing and new partners, as potential hosts.

Once Ada Lovelace Day is over, there’s Women’s History Month on the horizon. Aside from organising events, and finding ways to persuade those of you reading this to set up your own events, I want to collect ideas that might help structural change. One example: a volunteer (who I won’t name, without his permission) mentioned in passing that for each biography of a man that he creates, he makes a point of creating at least one about a woman. It’s a simple step, but it makes a difference.

If you have any ideas, please get in touch.

Castles in the digital age

When you spend time on one of the busiest websites in the world it’s amazing what patterns emerge.

A few weeks ago I was leafing through a borrowed copy of The Historian. It had been passed on to me because there was a piece about castles. As I leafed through its immaculately presented pages I was stopped by an eerily familiar photo. There was Rochester Castle on a beautiful sunny day, a sky blue backdrop, and the medieval cathedral peeking out behind.

That stopping power was important. For me at least, a good photograph makes me want to learn more, especially on Wikipedia where a plethora of links can drag you into a maze full of interesting twists and turns.

I knew where that snapshot came from. It was unmistakably the main photo on the Wikipedia article about the castle. I was also lucky enough to have met the man responsible for it. The photographer is Clem Rutter who has more than a decade’s experience of writing for Wikipedia, and apparently a decent photographer to boot.

It was an exciting moment of recognition, mixed with a bit of pride that The Historian was happy to use the picture. I decided to send Clem the magazine so he could see how good it looked in print, where it illustrated a piece by a professor of history. But this blog isn’t about the magazine. I want to say thank you Clem for taking that photo.

I hope you admire the picture as much as I do.

Have you been inspired to emulate Clem? Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 starts on 1 September, but you can take pictures in advance so go out and get snapping!

Does Wikimania save lives?

This post was written by Fabian Tompsett, Wikimedian and co-ordinator of the Wikimania support team, and originally published here.

I am just coming to the end of a four-month stint working for Wikimedia UK helping to deliver Wikimania 2014 at London’s Barbican Centre. It was all quite exciting and as The Signpost put it was “not too bad, actually”. In the whirl of events seeing dozens of hackers bringing hacking home to Hackney, hunched over their laptops, while other devotees were busy tweeting, it became all too easy to miss some key aspects of the event, and so to fail to recognise that Wikimania contributed to saving lives.

Wikipedia is not just a website, it is also a somewhat heterogeneous international community which thrives on face-to-face encounters in meatspace. For myself my involvement gained an extra dimension when I started attending the regular London Meetups six years ago. It was meeting other human beings rather than tapping away while staring at a computer screen which made it interesting.

So, this August the London Meetup page modestly subsumes Wikimania within its calendar of monthly events, within an expansion to a three day event with between 2,000 and 4,000 attendees (so much for “British understatement“). But in essence it is the face-to-face interactions outside the formal sessions which make Wikimania such a powerful event. I don’t want to be dismissive about the formal sessions and all the hard work which went into them, it is just that I want to focus on the other aspects and use this to show why I believe Wikimania saves lives.

A couple of weeks after Wikimania a discussion opened up on the Wikimedia Ghana list which spoke of an initiative by Carl Fredrik Sjöland of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine who have teamed up with Translators Without Borders to set up a Translation taskforce. As they explained a couple of years ago “We believe that all people deserve high quality healthcare content in their own language.” Faced with the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa the focus of these activities has shifted to finding people to translate information about Ebola into the relevant indigenous languages. There is something similar happening through the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team who have also been very active developing mapping resources for the medics on the ground.

I had hoped to make it to the OpenStreetMap 10th Birthday Party (the London celebrations were held nearby, to coincide with Wikimania) but I got caught up in other things and only arrived after most of the people had left. But that was precisely what Wikimania was like: you find out more and more about it in the aftermath.

Graph indicating the comparative amount of Wikipedia content available for readers in different circumstances. Nearly all indigenous languages in Africa are comparable to Gujarati.

Another aspect I found out afterwards was Denny’s comments on A new metric for Wikimedia where he discusses the availability of Wikipedia in different languages. Considering the recent Ebola outbreak above, this is not just a “nice idea”, but something which requires support now. Often it is not so much getting hold of finances, but finding a way in which those people with the relevant language skills can be linked up with and given the resources to make things happen.

An important aspect of this is that the speakers of these languages are not just passive recipients of knowledge generated in the geographical north. They can also contribute their own knowledge. This also touches on the notion of cognitive justice as developed by Shiv Visvanathan in The search for cognitive justice

Cognitive justice is not a lazy kind of insistence that every knowledge survives as is, where is. It is an idea which is actually more playful in the sense the Dutch historian Johann Huizinga suggested when he said play transcends the opposition of the serious and the non-serious. Play seeks encounters, the possibilities of dialogue, of thought experiments, a conversation of cosmologies and epistemologies. A historical model that comes to mind is the dialogue of medical systems, where doctors once swapped not just their theologies but their cures. As A. L. Basham put it, the dialogue of medicines, each based on a different cosmology, was never communal or fundamentalist. It recognized incommensurability but allowed for translation.

This is a viewpoint which has been taken up in what is called Open ICT for Development, where “openness” is understood to include the the participation of communities in the governance of their own lives.

So what I found out in the aftermath of Wikimania is the question: Does Wikimania save lives? Can it help people get together and come up with practical methods by which people get in touch and existing initiatives can find that they are taken to a higher level? Will it have an affect in this example and save lives? So in this sense Wikimania is not over. It’s legacy depends on what action people take in its aftermath.

So I am writing this blog because I want you to see if there is something you can do to help either the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team or the Translation taskforce find more support for their projects in fighting Ebola.

“The institutions that are loved survive”: Pat Hadley and the York Museums Trust

This post was written by Joe Sutherland

Pat Hadley was part way through a PhD in archaeology at the University of York in the summer of last year when he decided to leave to explore new areas in which to apply his skillset. A natural scientist with a digital background, he is interested in the “ways in which the public engages with the past”. For him, Wikipedia is an ideal platform to investigate this.

Since late 2013, he has worked as Wikimedian in Residence at York Museums Trust, helping them to share their collections through Wikipedia and its sister projects. An archaeologist of ten years, and a contributor to Wikipedia since 2011, Pat had been keen to find a museum in York interested in opening up access to their content.

In September 2013, Wikimedia UK supported the York Museums Trust, and two other institutions, in their search for a Wikimedian in Residence. The YMT is a charitable body which manages three museums, a contemporary art space, and a public gardens in the city.

“[The YMT] is a brilliant test case for the GLAM-Wiki project, because it’s almost the most typical set of museums you could possibly imagine, all in one space,” Pat explains.

Despite his background in academia, he was surprised to land the role. “I heard that the new scheme was going along, but I had no idea it would be me,” he says. Through a series of “happy accidents” he found himself looking for a project at the same time that applications were open and ended up with the job.

In his time at the YMT, Pat has run many major projects. They have ranged from training sessions for the institutions’ volunteers and staff, donations of content held by the museum to Wikimedia Commons, and a public editathon.

One of his first projects revolved around Tempest Anderson, a doctor, amateur photographer and volcanologist from 19th-century York, whose images have been retained on glass lantern slides. “The museum was planning to do a high-resolution digitisation of those anyway,” Pat explains, “and they’re public domain, so they were one of the key early collections for the project to target.”

As one of the first projects to take place during his tenure, he did face challenges during the work. “Unfortunately we only managed to get 56 images released by the end of the residency, but we got five of those used on the English, German and French Wikipedias. So we’re already beginning to make ripples across Wikipedia. Hopefully in the next few months the museum will be releasing the rest of the images.”

The work on Anderson was built upon in March 2014, in an event focused on the luminaries of historical York. “It was a nightmare to think of a theme that could bring all the collections together,” Pat says.

As such, the day allowed the improvement of a wide variety of topics on Wikipedia, ranging from natural history to fine art to archaeology. Several YMT curators presented their areas of expertise to a determined collection of sixteen participants, most of whom had never edited before.

The topics covered in the editathon included York-based artists such as Mary Ellen Best. “She was a Victorian artist who painted domestic interiors mostly in watercolour,” Pat says. “She wasn’t painting the kinds of things that were popular among Victorian artists.

“She wasn’t getting much recognition at the time, but there were a significant number of her paintings in the collections here. As a result we were able to release some of those and have some volunteers and experienced Wikipedians work together to get her a very reasonable biography, and even got a ‘Did You Know’ on the front page of Wikipedia. That was fantastic.”

Andrew Woods, curator of numismatics at YMT, had an active role during the day. He focused on the Middleham Hoard, a collection of Civil War-era coinage that was discovered in the eponymous market town in North Yorkshire. “Since we acquired it, it had lain dormant. Despite the fact it is this astonishing, very important hoard, we hadn’t done anything with it,” Andrew explains.

“It doesn’t really fit with our gallery spaces,” he adds, “so what we were really keen to do is to put it on display digitally. We had the coins imaged by a volunteer and we put those images onto Wikimedia. From there they’ve really taken off–a whole page has been written about the hoard, and they’ve been used in a number of different ways thereafter. So it’s taken a hoard that nobody really knew anything about and made it visible to so many more people.”

Overall, the partnership has led to “YMT becoming more open”, says Pat, and he argues that Wikimedia should be a key part of the missions of GLAM institutions moving forward. “They need to be connected. Somebody once said it is the institutions that are loved by everyone that survive.”

“If there are central funding cuts,” he adds, “the museums that share their collections and generate love by giving their knowledge and gardening it out… they are the ones that are going to survive through crises. They’re going to get more people supporting them in all sorts of ways.”

For more on The GLAM-Wiki Revolution, watch the full documentary, or find out more about the York Museums Trust Wikimedian in Residence project.

Upcoming Training for Trainers session in Edinburgh

Wikimedia UK is committed to supporting our volunteers. To encourage them to teach others how to edit Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, we are running a weekend training workshop. This will take place on the weekend of 1-2 November in Edinburgh, and we would particularly encourage anyone from Scotland and the north of England to attend.

The workshop will be delivered by a professional training company and aims to improve delegates’ abilities to deliver any training workshop. It’s especially relevant to anybody who already runs Wikimedia-related training, or is very interested in doing so in near future.

The workshop is a chance to:

Get accredited and receive detailed feedback about your presenting and training skills
Get general trainer skills which you can then apply when e.g. delivering specific Wikipedia workshops
Share your skills with others
Help design a training programme that serves Wikimedia UK in the long term.

The course will run from 9:30 am-6:30pm on Saturday and 9am-5pm on Sunday. A light breakfast and lunch will be provided. We should also be able to cover travel and accommodation if you let us know in advance.

If you are interested in attending, please indicate your commitment by registering on this page but please note that places are limited.

If you are not able to attend this time but would like to take part in the future, please let us know by email to volunteering@wikimedia.org.uk – we will be offering more sessions in the future.

Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions. We can also put you in touch with past participants who will be able to share their experiences with you.