Page 41 – WMUK

Connecting knowledge to power: the future of digital democracy in the UK

Wikimedia UK and Demos are encouraging Wikimedians to participate in an attempt to crowdsource a submission to a call for evidence on digital democracy from the Speaker of the House of Commons.

The Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, has established a Commission on Digital Democracy. It will report to Parliament in early 2015 with recommendations on how Parliament can use technology to better represent and engage with the electorate, make laws and hold the powerful to account. As part of their work, the Commission have issued a series of calls for evidence. These are open invitations for members of the public, either as individuals or groups, to submit responses to a series of questions. They have attracted responses from unions, academics, non-governmental institutions and private individuals. The first theme was ‘making laws in a digital age’, and the second on ‘digital scrutiny’. The Commission plans to shortly publish the final three themes.

There is a growing sense that the growth of the Internet has not paid the democratic dividends that it could. Turnout in formal political elections is steadily decreasing, and trust and support in the institutions and offices of mainstream political life are low and falling. Despite many innovative attempts from both within and outside of Government, the daily reality of democratic engagement for most people in the UK would be familiar to generations of British citizens who predate Facebook or email. The rise of the Internet has, broadly, done little to challenge concentrations of power or structures of unequal representation.

Demos is one of Britain’s leading cross-party think tank and it has an overarching mission to bring politics closer to people. They contacted Wikimedia UK to propose an experiment: can an online community be used to source a response to this call? Can the ethos, community and technology like that of Wikipedia be used to engage Wikipedians to come together and collaborate to create a reply? In particular, Carl Miller, Research Director of the Demos Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, wrote this piece for Wired in which he describes Wikipedia as a masterclass in digital democracy.

This conversation has led to what is an experimental attempt to do just that. In theory there are many lessons that any attempt to increase engagement with digital democracy can learn from Wikimedia projects, especially Wikipedia. These include the participatory nature of content development and the nature of content (and policy) being arrived at by consensus. Wikipedians are from a wide array of backgrounds and represent a broad spectrum of views. This could lend itself to effective drafting of the kind of evidence that the Speaker is looking for. Wikimedia UK and Demos would like to establish whether this is indeed the case. In particular, we are seeking answers to the following questions:

How can technology help Parliament and other agencies to scrutinise the work of government?
How can technology help citizens scrutinise the Government and the work of Parliament?
What kinds of data should Parliament and Government release to the public to make itself more open to outside scrutiny?

Everyone is encouraged to try to answer these questions collaboratively, in much the same way Wikipedia articles are approached – using the main page for content and talk page for discussion. Stevie Benton from Wikimedia UK and Carl Miller from Demos will happily answer any questions on the talk page but are equally happy to let the process take its course.

At this point there is no fixed deadline for evidence on the theme of digital scrutiny. However, the Speaker’s Commission will be publishing publishing a single call for evidence covering our last three themes (yet to be announced). The conversation and crowdsourced evidence will be reviewed at the end of June with a view to either continuing the process or submitting as is. If there is appetite among the community, and if the first attempt is successful, there may be further attempts to develop submissions to the later three themes.

At the end of the process Demos and Wikimedia UK will prepare a report on the process and the effectiveness of this kind of approach to crowdsourcing policy and evidence. This paper will be released under an open licence. It is a real opportunity for Wikimedians to influence the debate about digital democracy and both Wikimedia UK and Demos thank you for engaging with this idea.

You can find the consultation page here and we look forward to hearing from you.

Fabian’s thoughts on a few weeks in post

In this post, Fabian Tompsett, Wikimedian and co-ordinator of the Wikimania support team, shares his views on his his first few weeks in post

It has now been a couple of weeks since I started as one of the three Wikimania support staff taken on by Wikimedia, along with Chris McKenna and John Cummings. We started by catching up on all the preparations which have been going on behind the scenes. That has provided us a good basis to work from. Now it’s a matter of getting out there, whether it is amongst our fellow Wikimedians through Wiki Meetups (watch out for some new ones coming up), or spreading the word amongst educational, heritage or open knowledge groups.

Our team has been allocated desks together at the end of the office, which helps us maintain a close working relationship. We each have our particular focus, and a lot of my time goes on following up and developing links in the educational field. There is a real shift in how educators regard Wikipedia: they now see it as much less of a threat, even if they are not quite sure what it has to offer them as educators. Another interesting aspect is that whilst Wikipedia is a household word, not very many people realise that it is the product of a new kind of on-line community. Sometimes explaining the relationship of Wikimedia UK, the charity, to this broader community can be complicated, but more and more people are getting it.

One element we have been involved in is working on the five pre-Wikimania fringe events. These are taking shape now, and offer an opportunity to develop input for Wikimania itself. We are currently looking for volunteers to get involved in these as well. Keep an eye out for a volunteer open day on Saturday 12 July.

Cancer Research UK, Royal Society and Women Fellows…

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

I’m fortunate to have been appointed as Wikipedian in Residence at Cancer Research UK (CRUK), the world’s largest cancer research charity, funding over 4,000 research staff working on cancer. The role will run until mid-December 2014, and is funded by Wellcome Trust, a large UK medical research charitable foundation. I’ll be based at CRUK’s London headquarters, the Angel Building in Islington, working there four days a week. Alongside this, until early July I will also be continuing my six month term, on a one day a week basis, in the same role at the Royal Society, the UK’s National Academy of Science.

Part of the role at CRUK will be to work with the existing medical editors on the English Wikipedia to improve our articles on cancer topics, in particular those on the four common cancers which are widely recognised as having the greatest “unmet need” because there has been little improvement in survival rates in recent decades. These are cancers of the lung, pancreas, brain and oesophagus. CRUK has just announced a new research strategy with an increased focus on these, and my role will complement that. But I will also be addressing other cancer-related content, for example in relation to the Medical Translation Project of WikiProject Medicine.

CRUK 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, from those who write their patient information pages in very plain English to the different teams who produce material for scientists and for a general audience. My boss, Henry Scowcroft, writes for CRUK’s award-winning science blog, and is a Wikipedian. I’ll be exploring a number of approaches to bringing all this expertise to bear on Wikipedia’s content.

Wikimania 2014 in London, about a mile from CRUK’s HQ, gives a great opportunity to bring CRUK and many medical Wikipedians together face to face. A novel 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.

I will also be making presentations and conducting training for key groups of CRUK staff and researchers at their five main research centres in London, Manchester, Glasgow, Oxford and Cambridge. Some of this will be traditional workshop how-to-edit training, but I will also be doing some aimed at people expecting to be able to contribute reviews and comments, but not to do much editing themselves.
On another tack, I will be working on releasing suitable CRUK images on open licences and uploading them to Wikimedia Commons. I think the medical diagrams CRUK has created will be especially useful in Wikipedia articles, and we’re already making substantial progress towards a substantial release of content.

Meanwhile, in another part of town…

At the Royal Society the programme of public events continues with an editathon on Neuroscience on June 7th, bringing scientists and experienced Wikipedians together to improve articles, with the emphasis on key topics in the field. I will also be conducting further training within the Royal Society community, for the Research Fellows, who are early or mid-career research scientists whose work is funded by the Royal Society.

Over the last month I’ve been able to announce that the Royal Society has agreed that the photos it takes of each new Fellow on their election will be released on open licences and uploaded to Commons. The photos of this year’s 50 Fellows will be taken at the formal induction day in July. Other image releases are being discussed, and I’m hopeful will be agreed before my period at the Royal Society ends.

The Royal Society has also offered Wikipedians one year subscriptions to its range of scientific journals, via the Wikipedia Library. Applications are open until May 25th. It is hoped this offer will continue in the future, as with other publishers.

I’m also working on other ideas for things that can continue after my term ends in July. The Royal Society is keen to continue working with the Wikimedia movement, so I expect to be able to leave a solid legacy when my formal term ends.

Women Fellows of the Royal Society

The 2014 elections of fellows took place on April 30, and 50 new Fellows, plus 10 foreign members, were elected. User:Duncan.Hull was as usual wonderfully quick in creating List of Fellows of the Royal Society elected in 2014, which as usual showed that most did not have Wikipedia biographies! Currently only 15 of the 50 have articles on the English Wikipedia, with one (Professor Demetri Terzopoulos FRS) having one on the French WP. Of the Foreign Members, 9/10 have articles, with Professor Jean-Marie Tarascon (who doesn’t even have one on French WP) the only exception. As far as gender goes, there are 7/50 and 1/10 women, who initially had 2/7 (now 4/7) and 1/10 articles. So the overall percentage with biographies is 15/50= 30% , with the women at 2/7= 28.5%. For the 10 Foreign Members we have 90% and 100%.

I see this as reinforcing my suspicions about the often-heard idea that Wikipedia coverage of women scientists is currently poor compared to that of male scientists. This is no coincidence, as there has been considerable effort over recent years put into improving coverage, with several events at the Royal Society and many more across the world, and it has paid off. I continue to see Wikipedia as part of the solution here, rather than part of the problem (to use a favourite figure of speech of that famous woman scientist and FRS, Margaret Thatcher).

Until this new batch of Fellows, 100% of all the female FRSs (past and present) had articles, many very short of course, and I can forecast with some confidence that the three that are still without articles will have them at the latest after the next Ada Lovelace Day in October or International Women’s Day in March, as these dates see a particular concentration of Wikipedia events on Women in Science.

That won’t be the case for the men – taking for example List of Fellows of the Royal Society elected in 2012, there were 44 fellows elected, but only 17 have articles yet. This includes Julian Lewis (biologist), just created very recently after the early death of this cancer researcher and author. As it happens he was the former director of one of CRUK’s research institutes, the London Research Institute, as well as being a FRS.

Two of the women in the 2014 intake already have had new articles started, with Dorothy Bishop (psychologist) now a good length, though Karalyn Patterson remains a one-liner. So then there were three …. to be precise Amanda Fisher, Jenny Nelson, and Sheena Radford (and of course, plenty of men). Let’s hope the arrival of photos on Commons after the July ceremony helps to turn the remaining red links blue.

You can contact John directly about both of these projects on his Wikipedia user page. For the Cancer Research UK project go here, and for the Royal Society project go here.

Falling to pieces: Wikipedia and history

This post was written by Richard Nevell, Assistant Office Manager

Ruins are fascinating. From the columns of ancient Greece to the shattered remains of Coventry Cathedral, they evoke all sorts of emotions. Wonder, incredulity, nostalgia, reverence. During the 18th and 19th centuries they helped inspire romanticism. There’s an exhibition about them at the Tate: Ruin Lust. However, the descent into ruin is often a traumatic event.

In March 2014 the BBC reported on the damage suffered by Krak des Chevaliers, a 13th-century crusader castle in Syria and a World Heritage Site. The damage inflicted during the Syrian civil war contrasted with the view of T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, more than a century earlier, who described it as “perhaps the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world”. Reasonable praise from a man who wrote a dissertation on the subject and got a First from Oxford.

While the castle still stands, one of the most important historic sites in Syria, and a piece of international history, did not escape unscathed. The BBC report shows the damage on the Hall of the Knights, a building of elegance and finery in what appears from the outside an emphatically military complex. Wikipedia has an excellent photo of the hall and it contrasts with the present state. It’s one of nine pictures on Commons of the hall, images which have gained importance as historic documents because of the changes the site has since undergone. That picture, taken in 2009 by User:High Contrast and uploaded four years later as part of Wiki Loves Monuments. Without that competition, the image may never have come to light, but now is a valuable addition to the collection of free images.

As one of the most famous castles in the world, Krak des Chevaliers is well documented in English, and much better in French. But what about less celebrated sites? In May 2012 two earthquakes struck northern Italy. Included in the damaged caused as the Rocca Estense. The Italian Wikipedia naturally has an article on the 14th-century castle, but sadly no other Wikipedias do. However, Commons hosts nine pictures of the castle, six in its state before the earthquake. Three of those images were uploaded as a result of Wiki Loves Monuments, two of them documenting the castle pre-2012.

War and earthquakes may seem a world away from the UK, but our environment is always changing. High-profile historic sites are curated and maintained, but the sheer number means that many fall into disrepair. There are more than 1,000 entries on English Heritage’s buildings at risk register. While archaeological groups may perform photographic surveys, Wikimedia Commons offers the chance for heritage to be preserved in a way everyone can share.

Next time you’re out with you’re out with your camera, maybe you can help preserve a piece of history.

Bekka Kahn to co-ordinate the Open Coalition

Wikimedia UK is delighted to announce a new collaborative project, the Open Coalition. This project will be co-ordinated by Bekka Kahn, who will be working out of the Wikimedia UK office in London.

The Open Coalition is a joint project involving people from Wikimedia UK, Creative Commons, Mozilla, Open Knowledge, OpenStreetMap and other organisations in the open governance, open data and open educational spheres. The objective of the Coalition is to support the development of a stronger network of organizations working in the areas of open knowledge and open access, share experiences, build potential collaborations and find better ways of communicating what work is being done. It will also help other organisations who wish to find ways of becoming more open in their working practice.

Bekka has worked in the open movement since 2005, first as a writer and researcher at iCommons and the African Commons Project, and later as a community manager, administrator and general wrangler at P2PU, where she still works on various projects. She’s written extensively about Open Access, copyright, IP and Open Education, particularly in reference to the developing world.

How you can get involved

There are some simple things you can do to help us build the coalition:

Tweet this: Help spread open collaboration across the web. Join the #opencoalition http://bit.ly/1kXcJuy
Follow @opencoalition on Twitter
Send us an email: bekka.kahn@wikimedia.org.uk
Join our mailing list (coming soon, email Bekka to subscribe)
Join the coalition: take a look at the Wikimedia UK wiki project page, sign up and help to shape the coalition!

Wikimedia UK microgrant leads to Wikipedia Featured Article

At the beginning of 2013, User:WormThatTurned applied for a Wikimedia UK microgrant for resources to improve a host of articles related to the Cornish coast. One of those articles, about Doom Bar, is now a Featured Article on Wikipedia and one the best on the encyclopaedia. He wrote this piece about his grant application last year.

One afternoon in February 2009, I was sitting in a pub with some friends and drinking Doom Bar, a beer I had started drinking ten years earlier because I found the name amusing. I’d been editing Wikipedia for a little while, but nothing big. Idly, I glanced at the back of the beer mat, which said “Where the River Camel meets the Atlantic on Cornwall’s ocean scarred North Coast, a bank of sand, centuries old, known as the Doom Bar protects and calms this beautiful estuary. Legend links the birth of the Doom Bar to the final curse of a dying mermaid who had rejected a sailor’s love only to be shot with an arrow from the spurned sailor’s bow.” It was just the inspiration I needed, and I was writing the article within a week.

One book I found as I was taking the article to good status was Brian French’s ‘Wrecks & Rescues Around Padstow’s Doom Bar’, in the local library. There were also many smaller books on the topic. I gleaned some information from them, wrote it all up and forgot all about them. Fast forward three years and I got it into my head that I’d love to see Doom Bar as a featured article. As part of this, I wanted to go back over French’s book, but struggled getting hold of it as it was out of print and produced by a local publisher at the other end of the country.

I thought I’d give a microgrant a go, to see if it was something that WMUK could help out with. The process was simple, just a few questions which I could answer without hesitation and a link to the book I was after on Amazon. It was approved before the day was over and after a quick email to the office, I received the book.

It’s helped me immensely, reminding me how interesting the topic is and how much information there is out there on paper. I’ve always found it difficult to come back to an article once my passion has waned, so I really appreciate the boost that WMUK has given to me.

To read the microgrant application see here – if you would like to apply yourself to support editing or outreach then read more here

Six weeks in at the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol

This post was written by Marc Haynes, Wikipedia Co-ordinator at the Coleg Cymraeg. You can read this post in Welsh here

In March, after several years on both the Welsh and English Wikipedias under the moniker Ham, I started an exciting new chapter in my Wikipedia career as Marc (Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol). It was the start of six months as Wikipedian in Residence at the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol, an institution that supports teaching and study through the medium of Welsh in universities across the country. This is the first residency programme in Wales, which is a particular honour, and one of the few residencies in a higher educational establishment rather than a GLAM – though as I was to discover, the Coleg has quite an archive of educational content in the Welsh language. My main work so far has been to explore the possibilities for releasing this content under an open licence, with the aim of enhancing coverage on the Welsh Wikipedia.

The appointment came at a particularly auspicious moment as, later that month, the Welsh Government issued a report encouraging the country’s universities to adopt open educational resources. So there is considerable institutional support at the Coleg for open culture, something it has in common with other national institutions in Wales which have been making progress in this direction – perhaps most notably the National Library of Wales, who have uploaded over 4,000 19th-century photographs from the John Thomas collection to Wikimedia Commons.

It’s now six weeks into the residency and I’ve found content that would significantly boost the Welsh Wikipedia’s coverage of topics such as geography, film, television and theatre. What I’ve found mainly consists of text suitable for transferring to the Welsh Wikipedia, in addition to some media files which would be appropriate for Wikimedia Commons. These additions, once permission for them has been secured, will become visible on the project page on the Welsh Wikipedia as they’re made.

In the meantime, the most important part of a Wikimedian-in-Residence’s job remains to be done: holding the events that will bring in new editors and establish a long-lasting relationship between the Coleg’s students and academics, on the one hand, and the Wikimedia Movement. It’s a daunting task, but one I’m looking forward to.

Wikimedia UK welcomes new starters for Wikimania

Wikimedia UK is delighted to welcome three new staff to support the delivery of the Wikimania conference.

John Cummings, Chris McKenna and Fabian Tompsett will be working with the charity until the end of August to support the volunteer conference team. All three are Wikimedians with a good understanding of the movement and the charity.

Chris has been a Wikimedian for nine years under the username Thryduulf. He’s an administrator at the English Wikipedia and English Wiktionary, and also active on Commons and WIkidata. He will be working to ensure that both the community and Wikimania benefit from each other.

John was the Wikimedian in Residence at the Natural History Museum and Science Museum, he also started MonmouthpediA. He’s a Wikimedia UK accredited trainer for communities and organisations.

Fabian has been a Wikipedia editor for over ten years, active on Wikiversity for over three years and ends up editing all sorts of articles. He is really excited to be working for Wikimedia UK as part of the team making sure Wikimania is a resounding success.

Their contributions over the coming months will be very important in helping to ensure that Wikimania London runs smoothly and makes a real contribution to the global Wikimedia movement. You can contact Fabian, John and Chris either by email (first name.surname@wikimedia.org.uk) or on 020 7065 0990.

What happens when you release photos on Wikimedia Commons?

This post was written by Mike Peel

I started making my photographs available on Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons licence in 2006. Since then, I have uploaded over 3,500 photos to Commons, and I plan to upload many thousands more in the future. The main reason I started to upload my photos was to illustrate Wikipedia articles, and that’s still a big reason why I have continued doing so. However, only 16% of the images I’ve uploaded are currently used on the Wikimedia projects. So, why am I continuing to upload so many images?

My hope is that, in the long run, my photos will help preserve history. I hope that they will provide a record of the state of things today to others looking back at this time in the future, in a similar way to how we look at 50-year-old photos today. I want to make sure that those looking back on our history don’t have to worry about the copyright of those images, but can freely use them in their own projects.

However, there is a great shorter-term outcome that keeps me motivated to continue uploading my photographs: how people have been making use of my photos today in ways I never anticipated when uploading them. Some examples of this (amongst many others) include:

In December 2007 I took a photo of the London Eye; I uploaded it to Commons a month later. I was taken aback in August 2008 when I got an email out of the blue from a couple who had recently gotten engaged on the London Eye – they’d found my photo and loved it so much that they had it printed on canvas. Due to a mistake by the delivery company, they accidentally received two copies of it – so they got in touch with me and sent me the extra copy! To this day this print acts as a focal point for my flat.
At Science Online London 2011, which took place at the British Library, I took a photo of Michael Nielsen. The photo was subsequently published by the New York Times, with Michael Nielsen letting me know that this had happened.
More recently, I was contacted by Nature Cymru who wanted to let me know that they had used one of my photos in their latest edition – a picture of seagulls nesting in Conwy Castle. I uploaded this photo as part of a series of photos I took of Conwy Castle, and this was the photo I expected to be of least use – but it turned out to be the first of this set of photos to be reused.

One of the lessons I’ve learnt throughout this is that, realistically, no-one respects the licence that your photo is licensed under – they’ll simply use it for their purposes. If you try to keep full copyright of your photo and deny people the use of the image, then you’ll be ignored – but if you release it under a free license then you’ll be able to reasonably ask for proper attribution. Also, people will generally go out of their way to let you know that they are using your image under a free license, if you ask them to, but if you restrict the use of the image then they’ll simply use it without letting you know.

Responding to recent news about vandalism to Wikipedia

This post was written by Stevie Benton, Wikimedia UK’s Head of External Relations

Last week a story broke in the Liverpool Echo about vandalism to Wikipedia from the government’s computer network. In particular, the story examined edits to the article about the Hillsborough disaster.

I don’t want to focus on the story itself here. Instead, I’ll be looking at how we dealt with it from a communications perspective.

Within hours of being reported in Liverpool, the story was being picked up by media outlets on a national scale, especially by the BBC, and requests for comment and interviews began to pour in.

The first thing we needed to do was look at exactly what was being reported. Reading the coverage from the Liverpool Echo, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, it became clear that the focus was on two points:

Vandalism of the Wikipedia article about the Hillsborough disaster
The vandalism came from computers connected to the government network.

The most important aspect of the story from a Wikimedia UK perspective was the first of the two and this was where we focused our response. Many thanks to Doug Taylor who uncovered the facts about these edits in record time.

There were three key messages we wanted to convey in our response:

That the vandalism to the articles was horrible but was limited to a few edits a long time ago
That the vandalism was removed very quickly by volunteers
That we show appreciation to the thousands of Wikipedians who work to create and curate Wikipedia.

With those messages clear, we could begin responding to the requests for comments while giving brief holding responses to requests for interviews, giving us time to find volunteers willing to speak on the radio. Step forward David Gerard and Joseph Seddon, who managed the possibly unique feat of speaking at the same time on two different BBC radio stations about two different topics.

We were also fielding requests from journalists about how easy it would be to find other edits from the same IP addresses, so an explanation of how Wikipedia works was offered, along with invitations to visit the Wikimedia UK offices. In particular, David’s excellent summary on Radio FiveLive explained to hundreds of thousands of people the basics of editing, some of whom may be intrigued enough to give it a try.

As the story continues to develop and more journalists explore the wonders of edit histories, more coverage of the topic is emerging. However, by engaging with the media effectively and openly, our key messages are continuing to be shared. If there is some good to come from this story, I hope it is a wider understanding of how Wikipedia works and especially that it’s written, edited and organised by a diverse and wonderful group of volunteers.