The RGS-IBG hosted the workshop to help break down the common misconceptions held by researchers and tutors about Wikipedia and to share ideas for using it as a teaching and research tool. Used as a springboard for further investigation, students (and researchers!) can be encouraged to explore new and interesting avenues of research while developing their digital literacy, online research and critical thinking skills, especially their ability to distinguish reliable sources of information. We all use Wikipedia in some way – this was an opportunity to think more about how and why.
On the flipside, academics are often accused of being out of touch and not practising enough public engagement. By engaging with Wikipedia, geographers can help to improve the quality of geographical knowledge on the web, and build awareness of geography’s contributions to the world.
The workshop helped to alleviate some of the common barriers – “I don’t know how”, “I’m overwhelmed by the size of it” and “I’m not enough of an expert” – by walking the group through the steps for becoming an editor and encouraging them to contribute to something they were interested in.
That’s the beautiful simplicity of Wikipedia – there’s something for everyone, somewhere.
Use watchlists and project pages to keep up to date with your interests
You can watch pages (via your watchlist) to keep track of and react to what’s happening with pages you have created or are interested in. You can join WikiProjects to work with a team of contributors working on a specific topic area of task, and help to highlight areas where contributor input is needed – geographers can get started with the geographical or geosciences projects.
Find articles that could benefit from your expertise, but don’t practice self-promotion
Researchers are uniquely placed to help add citations and information around their thematic research areas — just remember the etiquette and rules around neutrality and verifiability (reliable, published sources – no citing of original research).
Engage with Wikimedia UK – there’s training, advice and support available Wikimania 2014 is a great starting point for finding out what’s new in the world of all things wiki, and includes a dedicated pre-event for educators and those interested in working with Wikipedia on their campus. There’s also a great booklet with case studies on how universities are using Wikipedia in their teaching.
Don’t get overwhelmed and don’t get isolated
Wikipedia is a collective effort – share the workload. You aren’t personally responsible for the world’s knowledge, and you need to work alongside other editors for Wikipedia to achieve its goals. Try not to be anonymous – if people know who you are and what you’re interested in, you’ll fit into the community more quickly.
Recently the Speaker of the House of Commons established a commission to investigate the opportunities digital technology can bring for parliamentary democracy in the UK. This consultation is a public exercise which attempts to explore various themes relating to digital democracy.
Wikimedia UK and Demos, working with Wikimedians, have been exploring whether the norms and values of the Wikimedia community can be applied to this kind of consultation, especially the consensus-based approach to writing and enacting Wikipedia policy.
The experiment has been going well and led to a community-sourced submission to the first theme which was looking at how technology can facilitate better scrutiny of the work of Parliament. You can view this submission here. The talk page is also worth a look as the discussion offered some really useful insights into how the content was reached.
However, we need your help. The second theme of the consultation has now been published and it is about digital representation. We would love for as many people to take part in this exercise as possible. The Commission was really appreciative of the efforts of the community first time around and it would be great to come up with another excellent community-driven submission. You can view the questions that are being asked, and participate in creating the submission, here. You don’t need to be in the UK, or a Wikimedian, to contribute.
A third theme will follow in the next couple of months and a similar approach will be taken then. Finally, once the Commission closes for submissions, Demos and Wikimedia UK will write up a comprehensive report on the process and what we have learned which we will, of course, make available to the community.
Carl Miller from the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos will be speaking on this topic at Wikimania at The Barbican, London, next week. If you haven’t booked your tickets yet, you can do so here.
Thank you for any and all help, it is very much appreciated.
I frequent museums regularly and have learnt what can and can’t make a museum work; they have done a good job at the tank museum. The museum was well organised and laid out. Most of the exhibits were well labelled and easy to find, this was made even easier by the small platoon of volunteer/guides (almost exclusively retired men with a tanky glint in their eye!), who helped me locate a few exhibits I couldn’t find. The size and scale of the place is not to be underestimated, those tanks are big beasts and there are a lot of them!
The main challenge with taking photos is indeed the spacing between the exhibits, which means one inevitably gets other exhibits and signage in the shot. I didn’t have too many problems with the lighting, but it was a nice sunny day, which was useful when it streamed through the warehouse skylights. I did have to keep switching between using natural and artificial light for the photos. I am only an amateur photographer, with no formal training, which may have actually helped. It is my opinion that you can only take a photo of what is in front of you, in the conditions available. I don’t see any of my pictures making it to ‘photo of the month‘, but I feel it is possible to document most of the tank museum exhibits with some degree of success if you aren’t too fussy about the odd wheel or turret either side of your subject.
Notable exceptions include some of their cornerstone exhibits, which the museum has rewarded with a diorama or special setting. These include Little Willie, which is on a revolving pedestal surrounded by perspex (I’m not making it up!); their Mark I tank, which is splattered with mud as part of a WWI trench diorama; and other key WWI exhibits. I will try to detail this on the Wikimedia page as I go through my photos.
Also worth mentioning is that the museum was very much a live museum, there are several large warehouses and workshops, one of which has a public viewing gallery. While these setting aren’t ideal for shooting exhibits, I saw several tanks being shunted around or driven about as they reorganised and I feel a more local Wiki-photographer might be able to take advantage of this. I didn’t make any effort to meet any curator or management. Maybe an initial chat with them, with the right tone might yield some good photos of exhibits that are being moved and maintained (the machine and mechanics that maintain them are as impressive as the exhibits themselves).
Thanks again to Wikimedia UK and the Tank Museum for the opportunity, I’m looking forward to finishing the processing and uploading of to my photos and improving the content of the Wikimedia projects.
Images from the National Library of Scotland’s (NLS) historic collections have been added to one of the world’s most popular websites where they can be seen and shared by people everywhere.
It is the first stage in a partnership between the Library and Wikimedia Commons (WikiCommons), the online repository of free-to-use images, sounds and other media files. It is part of the Library’s commitment to widen access to material in its collections and advance knowledge and understanding about Scotland around the world.
It follows agreement on a new digital content licencing policy at NLS, based on the principle of making information openly available where there are no legal, contractual, privacy or related restrictions.
Last year the Library appointed Scotland’s first Wikimedian-in-Residence, Ally Crockford, who has been working with NLS staff and the public to add content to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and its sister projects.
She said WikiCommons offered NLS exciting opportunities to reach out to a new audience. ‘People will be able to find this material and will be encouraged to share it. Hopefully they will then come back to the Library’s website to see what more is there. This is the beginning of a process that will see much more of the Library’s collections made available worldwide.’
The residency and the uploading of NLS digital content are part of the on-going collaboration between the NLS and Wikimedia UK.
This post was written by Jon Davies, Wikimedia UK Chief Executive
Our office white board now says only nine working days to go to Wikimania. In reality it will be a few more as weekends seem to be as busy as Monday to Friday now.
I’d like to share a few thoughts with our community.
Firstly the next fortnight will disappear in a blur. The big jobs have been done, we have a venue, speakers, food and wifi so there will be a conference and it will be the best Wikimania ever.
Secondly the devil will be in the detail and I am surrounded by people tying down the last bits and pieces, chasing printers, correcting mistakes and making last minute decisions. So be patient if we are slow in replying to anything. We have to make judgements and sorting out someone’s visa application on a call to the British Embassy in Delhi can cause havoc with our otherwise smooth timetables.
Thirdly thanks to the volunteers who are making all this possible. Looking round I can see six people bringing Wikimania to life designing the programme booklet, editing videos, writing a ‘who’s who’ database for the conference, setting up the AV for the venue and a lot of other things I am not even aware of that will contribute to a smooth experience.
In what feels like something of a landmark, iconic UK quiz show University Challenge hosted by journalist and former Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman this week featured a bonus round of questions about Wikipedia editors. UK readers can watch the clip on BBC iPlayer here for the next few days. The whole show is good, but the section in question begins around 5m45 in to the clip.
For Wikipedia to be featured in such a prestigious television show with a core audience of people in higher education is a great acknowledgement of the growing credibility that Wikipedia holds. But how would you fare against the students of Jesus College, Oxford University who faced the questions?
1. In 2012, the philosophy graduate Justin Knapp became the first person to be credited with 1,000,000 Wikipedia edits. He’s especially noted for his work on the bibliography page of which English novelist born in Bengal in 1903?
2. Secondly, what institutions associated with a beverage, and with for instance the Chinese city of Chengdu, give their name to the help space which is, quote: “A friendly place to help new editors become accustomed to Wikipedia culture”?
3. In an interview in 2014, the Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales stated that he “used to edit a lot of entries” about which specific UK political body often symbolised by a red portcullis?
The answers are below, but if you correctly answered any of the questions then you did better than the students, who got each one wrong. A sign that there is still some way to go, perhaps!
This post was written by Daria Cybulska, Wikimedia UK Programme Manager
AdaCamp is a conference dedicated to increasing women’s participation in open technology and culture. It brings women together to build community, share skills, discuss problems with open tech/culture communities that affect women, and find ways to address them. It has been taking place for several years in the US and Australia, but in 2014 it is coming to Europe for the first time. The Berlin AdaCamp will be October 11-12, 2014 at the Wikimedia Deutschland offices. It will also focus strongly on the Wikimedia community in particular.
It is a valuable opportunity for UK Wikimedians to attend a focused event (of only about 50 attendees) where we will focus on learning practical things and planning future projects.
If you have experience in open tech/culture, experience or knowledge of feminism and advocacy and the ability to collaborate with others, you should apply!
We would like to help build a community of UK Wikimedians supporting women in open tech/culture – especially Wikimedia projects – and for that reason we are offering scholarships for UK applicants.
The main meeting point for the community in the UK is the annual OER conference, which this year was hosted at the University of Newcastle. Simon Knight and I attended this year, with support from Wikimedia UK.
Despite some big successes for OER in the UK, trying to open up academic culture from within can feel very much like a struggle. The OER advocates see themselves as a small minority working to change a massive, well-embedded system.
In Wikimedia, we have a different perspective. Open resources are not only freely available and in legal and technical terms are repurposable, adaptable. Our creations – Wikipedia and its sister sites – meet this definition very well indeed.
This post was written by Jon Davies, Wikimedia UK Chief Executive
We have a big white board in the office where we share calendars and meetings; a few months ago I started a box counting down the days to Wikimania on it. However hard we tried it seemed a long way off in the distant future but now with less than three weeks to go we know differently!
The programme may be set, the speakers arranged, the food ordered and the wifi tested and for the first time in thirty years I feel that I actually know my way around the Barbican but the scale of the event is beginning to make itself felt. All around me are volunteers and staff wrestling with the last minute details: how many laptops do we need, where will the walkie talkies be stored, how much cash will we need over the conference days, can you fit a mobility scooter in the lifts? Small details but if everyone is going to have a great Wikimania it is the detail like this we need to get right.
So if we are a little slower than normal answering emails or getting back to you please be patient!
John Byrne speaking at an edit-a-thon on the topic of women in science
This post was written by John Byrne, the Wikimedian in Residence at Cancer Research UK. It was first published here under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence.
In our increasingly internet-enabled world, answering a question or checking a fact can be just a few clicks, swipes or touches away.
In many cases these searches are likely to leave you looking at a Wikipedia page. And if that burning question relates to your health, the desire for information can be far more pressing.
In the case of any health concern it’s important to see your GP as a first port of call. But as more people turn to the web for information as well, how can you be sure that the articles you’re reading on Wikipedia, for example, are accurate and up to date?
This question reared its head in May as numerousmediaoutlets covered US research published in The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association. The research set out to examine the reliability and accuracy of Wikipedia’s coverage of the “Top 10 most costly conditions in terms of public and private expenditure in the United States”.
While it’s hard to disagree with the overall take-home message of the stories – that people shouldn’t be relying solely on sources like Wikipedia to diagnose themselves (something Wikipedia itself is completely clear on) – the study leaves little room for suggestions on how Wikipedia could be improved for patients and the general public – something Cancer Research UK is actively involved in, as we’ll discuss below.
It also led to headlines claiming that “90% of Wikipedia’s medical entries are inaccurate”. Is this a fair representation of the research, and of Wikipedia?
Errors or ‘discordances’?
As the lead researcher on the new study, Professor Robert Hasty, from Campbell University in North Carolina, US, explained in an interview, the study was prompted by seeing young doctors looking things up on Wikipedia.
The use of the site by medical professionals has been the subject of a fair amount of research (e.g. see the summary on p12/13 of this PDF) though mostly looking to answer questions on how much do they do it (answer: a lot) and should they do it (answer: not as a primary source) rather than why do they do it.
In the new study, each of the “10 most costly conditions” the researchers looked at was matched to a relevant Wikipedia article, which was sent out to two randomly assigned junior doctors tasked with assessing the reliability of the content.
They were asked “to identify every assertion (ie, implication or statement of fact) in the Wikipedia article and to fact-check each assertion against a peer-reviewed source that was published or updated within the past 5 years.”
They found many “discordances” in the content, which they later referred to as “errors” in the conclusions of the research (so, unsurprisingly, this word became the focus of the media coverage).
This led them to conclude that “Health care professionals, trainees, and patients should use caution when using Wikipedia to answer questions regarding patient care” and “physicians and medical students who currently use Wikipedia as a medical reference should be discouraged from doing so”.
This was translated into the headlines we mentioned earlier, flagging the “90% inaccurate” figure.
For example – to pick one out of many points the editors have discussed – the study doesn’t say where these “errors” are, meaning it’s very hard to check or change the articles.
For a general readership
To quote the physicist Freeman Dyson FRS: “Among my friends and acquaintances, everybody distrusts Wikipedia and everybody uses it…. The information that it contains is totally unreliable and surprisingly accurate.” – a useful distinction when looking at Wikipedia.
Wikipedia – and its volunteer editors – have always made it clear that it does not offer medical advice, let alone represent a substitute for professional advice, nor is it a medical textbook.
The internal style manual for medical articles is emphatic that Wikipedia’s medical content is aimed at a general readership, and cautions against writing directed at either patients or medical professionals, as well as banning the inclusion of information such as pharmaceutical dosages.
In practice, however, many of the articles do contain technical terms, and this can make some of them difficult for the average member of the public to understand. Clearly, there’s room for improvement.
Part of my role here will be to work with the existing medical editors on Wikipedia to improve our articles on cancer topics, in particular those on four harder-to-treat cancers where there has been little improvement in survival rates in recent decades. These are cancers of the lung, pancreas, brain and oesophagus, which Cancer Research UK is giving particular focus to as part of its new research strategy.
But I will also be addressing other cancer-related content, for example for the Medical Translation Project that translates articles between the over-200 different language versions of Wikipedia.
Cancer Research UK has access, through its own staff and its access to other researchers and clinicians, to tremendous amounts of expertise, both in terms of science and the communication of science, where they have teams trained and experienced in communicating with a wide range of distinct audiences – including through its flagship patient information content.
I’ll be exploring a number of approaches to bringing all this expertise to bear on Wikipedia’s cancer content. The very large annual nerd-fest conference Wikimania 2014 is in the Barbican in London this year, about a mile from the charity’s HQ. This gives a great opportunity to bring Cancer Research UK and many medical Wikipedians together face to face.
Another aspect of the role is that we are planning to conduct research into the experiences of a range of different types of consumers of Wikipedia’s cancer content. There has been very little formal qualitative research into the experiences of Wikipedia’s readers – we hope this project will begin to address this gap, as well as encouraging others to carry out similar projects.
It’s important that we all work hard to reduce unreliability and make the accuracy less of a surprise in Wikipedia’s cancer articles. If you are curious, or interested in helping in any way, please do get in touch below or on my Wikipedia Talk Page. It would be sad if today’s media reporting put medical professionals off engaging with Wikipedia – the site, and the public, need your help.
John
John Byrne is Cancer Research UK’s Wikipedian in Residence
Hasty R.T., Garbalosa R.C., Barbato V.A., Valdes P.J., Powers D.W., Hernandez E., John J.S., Suciu G., Qureshi F. & Popa-Radu M. & Wikipedia vs Peer-Reviewed Medical Literature for Information About the 10 Most Costly Medical Conditions., The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, PMID: 24778001
