By Katie Crampton, Communications Coordinator at Wikimedia UK
The goal of Wikipedia is to create a world where everyone has access to all available knowledge, but in order to do this, we need to reflect all global viewpoints. Increased engagement and representation of marginalised groups and topics on Wikipedia has been a significant strategic goal of Wikimedia UK’s work to combat inequality and bias. While there are many ways that institutions of power and privilege can exclude people, we will be focusing on the gender gap this Women’s History Month and critically examining how women are portrayed on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects.
It is crucial to fight to improve the representation of women, non-binary individuals, and related topics on Wikipedia. We must ensure that the free global information resource, which is read more than 15 billion times a month, is conveying everyone’s narrative if “you can’t be what you can’t see.” Women, people of colour, persons with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, and people who reside outside of the United States and Western Europe are included in this. Those individuals and their tales already exist; they don’t require a Wikipedia entry to make them come to life. The “first stop” for many of us, though, when we want to learn about the world is Wikipedia.
On Wikimedia, people of any gender can and do devote time and effort to solving gender inequity. This could be done in a variety of ways, including writing fresh stories on women, hiring more female editors, increasing awareness of the gender pay gap, etc. Editing Wikipedia is becoming more and more recognised as a type of knowledge activism that addresses information gaps and sparks debates about how knowledge and information are produced, vetted, and challenged online.
At Wikimedia UK we organise projects that help close the gender gap on Wiki, like our partnership with The National Galleries of Scotland worked with us to achieve greater gender parity for the artists represented on Wikipedia. In our lead volunteers – volunteers who organise events and projects supporting our work – we have achieved gender parity.
If you’re interested in attending events aimed at closing the gender gap, check our events page for upcoming opportunities.
By Leah Emary, Wikimedian in Residence at the Mixed Museum
In March 2023, university students from Queen Mary University London and the University of Oxford will learn how to edit Wikipedia and upload to Wikimedia Commons as a part of a micro-internship program.
Microinterns at the Mixed Museum
Microinterns at the Mixed Museum will spend 4 weeks as interns with the following schedule:
Week 1: The interns will be introduced to the team at WMUK and the Museum and get trained in how to edit Wikipedia and upload to Wikimedia Commons.
Week 2: In the second week, they will choose which topics and pages they would like to work on and begin to edit live Wikipedia and to upload images to Wikimedia Commons.
Week 3: In the third week, they will continue to edit, with support from the Connected Heritage team.
Week 4: In the fourth week, they will reflect on their experiences either in a blog posting or in a social media campaign.
The interns will be able to ask questions and get support over Slack, use Zoom and email to keep in touch with both the Wikimedia and Mixed Museum teams, which will give them experience with tools essential for a remote work environment.
Two interns from the University of Oxford will spend a week as micro-interns in the Manar al-Athar digital photo archive. On their first day, the interns will be trained in how to edit Wikipedia and upload to Wikimedia Commons, and will spend the rest of the week editing, with support from the Connected Heritage team as well as Manar al-Athar staff.
By George Colbourn, Fundraising Coordinator at Wikimedia UK
The State Of Open Conference brings together organisations, communities and advocates of open data, technology and knowledge. This year, Wikimedia UK was excited to attend SOOC23, where we spoke with attendees from across the sector about our particular role in the open knowledge movement. It provided us with a great opportunity to network with like-minded individuals, learn about emerging trends and technologies, and gain new insights and perspectives.
A particularly enjoyable aspect of this conference was the diverse range of topics covered, including cutting-edge developments in open software and hardware, best practices for team collaboration and the ethical considerations of open technology. Attendees were able to choose from a variety of sessions, workshops, and keynote speeches, allowing them to tailor their experience to suit their particular interests.
In addition to the educational aspect, this conference was a fantastic chance to connect with others, providing a chance for Wikimedia UK representatives to meet new people and form meaningful connections with potential collaborators or volunteers. After three years of largely online working, this event provided an opportunity to learn from industry experts, connect with peers, and gain exposure to the latest technologies and trends.
Although Wikipedia is a globally recognised and utilised resource, many attendees we spoke with were not aware of the specific work that Wikimedia UK undertakes to contribute to the open knowledge movement. Therefore, it was great to be able to speak with those unfamiliar with our organisation and to discuss our work in the fields of cultural heritage, information literacy, and open knowledge advocacy. Our efforts sparked numerous questions and discussions regarding how Wikimedia can help shape the future of open technology and how to get involved with our projects.
Whether we were talking with experienced industry professionals or students just starting out, the conference was a highly positive and rewarding experience, and it was great to speak with others who recognized the benefits of open collaboration and knowledge sharing. As a first-time attendee representing Wikimedia UK at a conference, I was struck by the passion for open technology felt throughout the community. The commitment to advancing and promoting this sector was evident, and the experience reinforced the critical role that Wikimedia plays in this field. I was delighted to see the overwhelmingly positive response from many of the attendees towards the important work that we do.
Thank you to everyone who supported us during SOOC23, especially our volunteers Ian Watt and Navid Nezafati!
By Leah Emary, Wikimedian in Residence at the Mixed Museum and Connected Heritage Project Lead at Wikimedia UK
As a part of the Connected Heritage project at Wikimedia UK, I have been embedded at the Mixed Museum one day a week as a Wikimedian in Residence since September. The Mixed Museum is directed by Chamion Caballero and is a digital museum and archive that contributes to widening knowledge about Black and ethnic minority British history. This blog posting reports on three aspects of the residency:
Sharing Mixed Museum’s scholarship and research on Wikipedia
Creating a Volunteering Programme
The Brown Babies Images
The mini-Residency was initially scheduled to run from September-December 2022 but it’s been so fruitful and interesting for both the Mixed Museum and for Wikimedia UK that we decided to extend it into the first few months of 2023.
Mixed Museum Residency First Steps
The Mixed Museum’s Director Chamion has long been a supporter of Wikipedia and Wiki editing, having written a piece in 2018 about how important it is for academics to write about their work on Wikipedia and not lock academic research behind paywalls. Yet she had never had the time or opportunity to edit or write articles herself. So the Residency gave us the chance to set aside time for bespoke one on one training for her.
Bite-sized Training Sessions
We decided to break a typical Introduction to Wikipedia training into smaller, weekly sessions rather than the usual 3-4 hour block of time. The first week, Chamion and I met on Zoom and she created an account and a user page. The second week, she created her Wikipedia sandbox and began to play with headings, inserted citations, an image, and an infobox.
In the third session, she made her first edit to live Wikipedia and we both cheered very loudly! As a sociologist who has relied heavily on UK census data in the past, she was keen to update some misinformation and lack of nuance on the Wikipedia page on Mixed as an ethnicity category in the UK. So her first edit was to change the page summary and to add a key reference. She plans to continue work on this page.
In our fourth training session, we returned to talking more about what does and does not belong on Wikipedia and some of the guiding principles such as notability, reliable sources, conflict of interest and systemic bias. A theme throughout each of our training sessions has been a wider consideration of how Chamion can continue to thread wiki work into the Museum’s existing workflow, and to fill content gaps on Wikipedia using the Museum’s exhibitions and scholarships.
Telling the Brown Babies story on Wikipedia
Chamion then spent some time drafting a few paragraphs in her sandbox about the UK’s brown babies, the name given to the children of white British women and African American soldiers born during and after World War 2. The Mixed Museum hosted a successful Brown Babies exhibit which opened in 2020 and the families of these children are keen to to tell their stories more widely and especially to share some beautiful family photographs of the children, some of whom lived at a children’s home in Surrey called Holnicote House.
There is no Wikipedia page dedicated to Holnicote House, but there is a page for Holnicote Estate, which includes a subsection on Holnicote House. So instead of creating a new page, we decided to embed the history of Holnicote House and the brown babies story onto the Holnicote Estate page. Look what a difference her edits have made:
Before
Before there was one sentence about the use of Holnicote House as a children’s home which was buried in the history of the house and outbuildings.
Wikipedia page for Holnicote House before the edits
After
She created a new heading for a history of Holnicote House in the 20th century and added three paragraphs of text about who these children were and how they came to live there. She uploaded an image of the children to Wikipedia (the challenges we faced in our efforts to upload images of the brown babies to Wikimedia Commons will be the subject of another blog posting). I think the addition of the image is a particularly powerful aspect of bringing this history to life.
Wikipedia page for Holnicote House after the edits
Though Chamion’s journey as an editor is just beginning, the impact of her work is shown in the Residency’s dashboard statistics. 12,5000 views of the 5 articles and 1 Commons upload she has worked on!
Project dashboard showing stats
Creating a Wikimedia volunteering package for The Mixed Museum
One issue for small heritage organisations is that, though there may be many people interested in volunteering for the organisation, the administrative capacity to train and manage volunteers just isn’t there. This is a problem that Chamion faces. We thought that we could perhaps create a digital volunteering programme for The Mixed Museum based on editing Wikimedia Projects in The Mixed Museum’s areas of expertise: the history of racial mixing in Britain.
This project is particularly exciting in the heritage space because it’s entirely digital: digital museum, digital platform and digital volunteers.
Training the volunteers
To begin with, we envisioned three types of volunteer:
One with confident digital and academic skills who would be keen to learn how to edit Wikipedia
One with confident digital skills who might like create digital content for Wikimedia Commons
One who might be a keen researcher, writer, creator or storyteller but who might not yet have the digital confidence to edit Wikimedia projects.
Each volunteer would require a training program which they could complete remotely and on their own time and, when they were ready, a set of tasks which they could begin work on independently.
To begin, we recorded Chamion’s Zoom-based wiki training sessions and edited those down so that the volunteer training videos would feature Chamion’s voice and be tailored to the digital museum’s context.
These videos will be embedded into three different Mixed Museum Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons volunteer training programmes, though they are hosted on Wikimedia Commons and YouTube. The training programmes are currently structured as three different Google Slides presentations which volunteers can click through as a self-study study tutorial.
Managing the volunteers’ work
A final piece of the puzzle is how to manage the volunteer programme. As the sole full time paid member of staff, Chamion does not have the time to oversee volunteer training and work in real time. So we came up with the idea of managing the training and work with the help of two Trello boards. One Trello board is to manage the volunteers’ time and work. The second is to keep track of work which needs doing.
In the first board, each volunteer has a section with their name on it. They can be assigned a training programme and can give updates on their progress or ask any questions on their training there. Once they have completed their training, they can either choose or be assigned a Wikimedia task.
Trello board with a pool of Wikimedia tasks
The second Trello board holds a pool of Wikimedia tasks. In a Wikipedia editathon context, this would be known as a ‘work list’ and would usually be a list of tasks that need doing, the Wikipedia page which needs editing, a list of relevant sources to use and any advanced tutorials a new editor might need to support them. A part of the edithon would involve an editor claiming a task with their initials and going off to work on it. In the Trello board, each card contains these bits of information and the cards are categorised by which type of volunteer they might best suit:
A digital content creation task on Wikimedia Commons, such as uploading 19th century images of mixed race people in Ireland
An off-wiki task for someone, such as identifying what’s missing on Wikipedia pages.
Volunteers can either go in and select a task that appeals to them and drag it over to their Trello workspace, or Chamion can select one for them and assign it to them.
Trello board for volunteers to update their progress and ask questions
Volunteers can update on their progress and ask questions on tasks within Trello. Any unfinished tasks can be returned to the pool and any finished tasks can be marked as complete and archived, thus providing a record of what has been achieved.
Would you like to be a Wiki volunteer at the Mixed Museum?
We aim to prototype and test the volunteering programme with willing participants in 2023. New to wiki work and interested in helping us prototype the training? Please be in touch.
John Stockley and his mother. The babies born to black GIs and white British women were labelled ‘brown babies’ by the African-American press, far preferable to ‘half-caste’, the term used at the time in Britain.
Is copyright resulting in systemic exclusion?
The Mixed Museum used a series of images to illustrate the Brown Babies exhibition which included the story of children who lived at Holnicote House in the 1940s. From the outset, Chamion was very keen to upload these Holnicote House images to Wikimedia Commons and embed them on relevant Wikipedia pages.
As we planned the uploads, it became clear that we did not have enough information about the provenance of the images (or where they came from) to allow them to be openly licensed and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Though there may be acceptable levels of risk that a heritage organisation might be willing to take in terms of uploading images which are likely in the public domain because of copyright elapsing or the copyright owner being untraceable, Wikimedia Commons applies a cautionary principle, and won’t accept images unless their status as copyright-free or freely licensed can be firmly established.
After many weeks of emailing, phone calls and expert copyright advice from three sources, we were able to document a chain of donation and speak with the donor of the image. This donor’s late husband appeared in the photographs when he was a child. This donor is, like Chamion, very keen that the images be shared on Wikimedia Commons. The donor also considers this a family photograph, and her daughter’s inheritance. Yet we cannot establish whether the photos were taken by the Holnicote House employees in the course of their employment (and would therefore be the property of the employer) or if the photographers were not employed by Holnicote House (and therefore copyright would be owned by the photographer or their heir). Either way, because this information cannot be firmly established, these photographs are not able to be uploaded to Commons under existing rules.
I raised the issue at the Village Pump on Commons, because it seems to me and Chamion that the unintended consequence of this strict application to UK copyright law results in systemic bias against children who grew up in care. And mixed race and Black children in Britain are disproportionately overrepresented in the care system so this issue will impact the family photographs of mixed race and Black people more than others. Please contribute to the discussion on the Village Pump if you’re keen to move this along!
What next?
The obvious and usual answer to these types of issues is to avoid images from the 20th century or ones where the creator is unknown, ‘complicated’ or ‘problematic’. From a wiki perspective, we often will turn to the low hanging fruit such as 19th century or earlier images or contemporary ones created expressly for Wikimedia Commons. By ignoring ‘complicated’ images such as the ones of the Brown Babies, however, we are systematically excluding important histories.
In addition, one needs to be very careful particularly about framing mixed race families as ‘problematic’ or ‘complicated’ or ‘not respectable’. This carries racist overtones and there is a legacy of discrimination based on these very categories in England and elsewhere. At Wikimedia UK, we focus “on knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege. We break down the barriers that prevent people and organisations from accessing and contributing to open knowledge, and support the development of people-centred and technical solutions to help eradicate inequality and bias on the Wikimedia projects.” -Wikimedia UK Strategic Framework 2022-2025. This example of the Brown Babies images gives us a chance to dive deeper, to reflect, and to move the dial where systemic exclusion on Wikimedia platforms exists, rather than to avoid these in favour of images or subjects which might be more straightforward.
Open licensing is a lot of work
That said, the amount of work, expertise, and time involved in this process is prohibitive for many heritage and cultural organisations. We were able to achieve this at The Mixed Museum because of the time dedicated through the Wikimedian in Residence programme and because Chamion was motivated to understand open licensing in the interest of pursuing National Lottery Heritage funding.
The work of establishing ownership, understanding copyright alongside open licensing, the rules of Wikimedia Commons and discussing how it applied in this case took several months. We involved an experienced Wikimedian, a former Wikimedia Commons Bureaucrat and two experts in copyright in the GLAM sector. Not to mention Chamion herself, me, the donor, and my fellow Digital Skills Wikimedian Lucy Hinnie. We also drew on the expertise of the Wikimedia UK community and at the Village Pump on Commons.
Even after all this work, we’re still undecided about whether we can openly license the Holnicote House images for Wikimedia Commons.
If we consider other cultural and heritage organisations who do not have these resources and knowledge to call upon, for example, a small community archives group, it seems clear that they would not be able to engage with Wikimedia Commons. A group or an individual that is sourcing, digitising and preserving family photographs and would potentially like to license these openly would have a lot of work to do to answer these questions. Even with grant funding, people are just too overstretched with the work of the actual project to engage much with the licensing and copyright issues. As Chamion and I remarked frequently to each other, anyone who wasn’t us would have given up long before we did!
Interested in hosting a Wikimedian in Residence?
If you are involved with a heritage or cultural organisation in the United Kingdom and you think a Wikimedian in Residence might be good for your organisation, please talk to us about it. You can book a half hour meeting with the Connected Heritage team via Calendly or drop us an email.
By Esma Gjertsen, Volunteer Coordinator at Wikimedia UK
We organised the most recent iteration of our Train the Trainer (TtT) course in 2022 in the first week of December.
TtT trains volunteers who are keen to deliver Wikipedia editing events. Volunteer trainers are at the heart of delivering Wikimedia UK programmes. They act as community leaders and extend our work to underrepresented communities. They train new and existing editors. We currently have 45 trainers in 33 different locations across the country.
This term 15 trainers attended our course. The training equipped candidate trainers with the skills, experience and resources to deliver a standard Introduction to Wikipedia workshop. The second part of the training focused on Developing Community Partnerships. This session brought together candidate and accredited trainers and served as an opportunity to network as well as learning about how to establish connections with different communities and institutions.
Objectives
“I want to feel ready and confident to run a successful edit-a-thon.”
Candidate trainers expressed their objectives for attending the TtT as:
Improve confidence in delivering training
Learn how to support new editors from non-academic backgrounds
Explore how to handle difficult questions
Structure engaging and interesting sessions
Approach institutions and communities
Contribute to controversial subjects on Wikipedia
Organise translation events
Commitments
“I will revisit the role-play scenarios to inform the outreach to museums that I’m going to do.”
Following the training, our trainers committed themselves to:
Get in touch with their networks to scope out editing events
Translate materials to their native languages
Identify who to contact
Study the TtT checklists and template emails in organising future events
Follow up with existing contacts
Think about how to engage better with participants after events
Set up and promote volunteering projects
Share learnings with colleagues
Find framework/funding for Wikimedian residencies
Follow more people on social media, and actually take up space
Feedback
“Really enjoyed the training, learnt a lot and look forward to putting it into practice.”
We are glad to see that our trainers had an overall good experience. We received 9 responses (60%) to our questionnaire that requested feedback for the pre-training information, training sessions, communication, training venue, catering, and online experience. All participants rated their experience 4 and above out of 5.
Introduction to Wikipedia
Developing Community Partnerships
We noted the following constructive feedback with appreciation:
Shadowing the lead trainers to see how to set up the dashboard, the worklist, etc.
Shorter day for especially online participants
More time for interactive exercises such as role-playing
Providing more context about the training content
Interaction between the in-person and remote participants
We will strive to improve future sessions with these in mind. We will particularly pay attention to develop opportunities for bringing together in-person and remote participants, thus creating a truly hybrid experience for all.
To celebrate Wikipedia’s 22nd birthday on Sunday 15 January, the University of Leeds is sharing poems inspired by conversations between two poets, postgraduates in the Faculty of Biological Sciences, and staff in the Library and Digital Education Service:
WikiWays: a Wikimedia poem by Matt Harveytakes a playful look at Wikipedia to encourage everyone to ‘share their knowledge’ through the Wikimedia suite of sites…‘not just Wikipedia, all Wikimedia’.
Hira Khan, one of the postgraduate researchers on the project, said: “This project is an amazing initiative and is a great starting point for me, as a scientist, to fulfil my responsibility in making science more accessible and understandable. The Wiki family is a much more regulated and robust source of information than I previously anticipated. I believe there is a heavy misconception on how Wiki is regulated and is usually referred to as an ‘untrustworthy source’. It was quite enlightening to see otherwise.”
Beth Soanes, another postgraduate researcher on the project researcher, commented: “Working on this Wikimedia project alongside my research has been a truly enriching experience… Going forward, I would like to continue to provide Wikimedia Commons with figures and schematics to aid articles in my area of interest… I will also continue to use Wikimedia as a resource myself, and hope to contribute to Wikidata in particular more and more throughout my career. I am especially interested in open accessibility in science, and see this as a new frontier in science communication.”
Wikipedia: the world’s largest free online encyclopaedia
Contributors toWikipediahave sought to support free knowledge, open collaboration, and trust on the internet. In times when disinformation and polarisation have been challenging our trust in information and institutions, Wikipedia is as relevant as ever.
Today on Wikipedia, more than 55 million articles can be accessed in over 300 languages, for free, and without advertisements, all created by volunteers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wikipedia saw record-breaking increases in daily traffic with a growing community of medical professionals contributing knowledge about COVID-19 to the platform. Studies have shown that Wikipedia is one of the most-viewed sources for health information, and its role in providing trusted access to information about COVID-19 in the pandemic led to a milestone collaboration with the World Health Organization in October 2020.
“In a world where information is increasingly commoditised, Wikipedia’s model has always been based on the belief that knowledge belongs to all humans,” Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said. “Wikipedia forces us to step outside of our echo chambers and contend with what a shared understanding of the world could really look like. After all, a Wikipedia article is the same no matter who or where you are in the world, and if something isn’t right in the article, you can change it.”
Wikipedia includes an enormous amount of freely available knowledge about art, but to a large extent it describes visual art in terms of the Western canon, even in non-European languages. We can redress this balance by writing about art works and artists from other traditions and cultures. You might have in mind a visual arts topic to work on or, if not, we have “target lists” of artists and masterpieces from many different cultures.
These events will include basic training in wiki-editing and an experienced Wikipedian will be on hand to help you make lasting improvements to the topic you choose.
The London event is hosted by the Wellcome Collection on Euston Road and the Oxford event is in partnership with the Khalili Research Centre and hosted at Wolfson College.
Spaces at these events are limited and can be booked free online through EventBrite:
By Dr Richard Nevell, Programme Coordinator for Wikimedia UK
I’m a big fan of the Archaeology Data Service (ADS). Its online library is packed with digitised articles, books, and reports. Looking in from the outside I have seen its content grow and become ever more useful.
The ADS hosts a lot of data about people, places, and publications. Wikidata is an open source database in the Wikimedia network of websites; founded in 2012 it has grown to include a huge amount of information. Both sites continue to grow, and there are some points where they can complement each other.
Back in 2020, I got in touch with the ADS to ask if they could share a spreadsheet of their identifiers for individuals so that I could add them to Wikidata. Adding ADS identifiers to Wikidata entries on individual archaeologists means it would be possible to find out what information Wikidata has on these people. For the ADS, it means they can import other identifiers such as Open Researcher and Contributor IDs (ORCIDs – maintained by researchers) and International Standard Name Identifier (ISNIs – used by libraries and archives). The process of reconciling the two datasets would help with the quality of both, highlighting inconsistencies or duplications.
As a (slightly late) celebration of Wikidata’s 10th birthday, below I’ve explained some of the ways in which Wikidata has helped illuminate the ADS, and the process I followed to add the information.
What is a Wikidata item
If you’ve not come across Wikidata before, the obvious question is how is it meant to be used? The website is designed to be machine readable, so rather than containing information in prose it’s broken down into discrete ‘statements’. This means the information in Wikidata can be picked up by the likes of Google, and Wikidata can be a centralised hub for standardised information for the Wikimedia projects.
Wikipedia is available in 300+ languages which presents a maintenance challenge. For example, when a census is released Wikipedia editors have to update thousands of pages; if the data is stored centrally that makes the process dramatically easier. That’s just one application of Wikidata, other possible uses include creating interactive timelines, like this one showing folks in the ADS with a known birth and death date, and automating brief summaries of topics.
Histropedia timeline screenshot
Whereas Wikipedia has articles, Wikidata has ‘items’. Each one is about an individual topic. For this blog post, that means a person can have an item about them, and a publication can have an item. They can then be linked together. Wikidata’s inclusion criteria are broader than Wikipedia’s, so you don’t need to have a Wikipedia article to end up in Wikidata. Crucially, people with Wikipedia pages will have more detailed items in Wikidata. Just take a look at the item for Ian Hodder (who has Wikipedia articles about him in 19 languages) compared to the one for Peter Arrowsmith (no Wikipedia page).
A closer look at the data
The ADS hosts scans of reports from a host of archaeological service providers in the UK and articles in county journals. Even when documents aren’t available, they still host some meta-data about the publications. As a result their data leans heavily towards British archaeologists.
Buddle chart showing the citizenship for people in the ADS with an article on the English Wikipedia.
You can see that when querying Wikidata’s country of citizenship data. The above buddle chart shows the citizenship for people in the ADS with an article on the English Wikipedia. 733 people are citizens of the United Kingdom, and 506 are citizens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, though there is undoubtedly a lot of overlap. The next most common countries are the USA (115), Great Britain (65), and France (43) [full results]. You can look more widely to include anyone in the ADS dataset on Wikidata, even if they don’t have an article about them. The pattern is very similar, with the same five countries at the top.
Wikipedia’s content has a gender gap: as of 24th October 2022 the English Wikipedia has 1.9 million biographies and 19.36% are about women. This is based on what is recorded in Wikidata – it’s all interconnected. Narrowing it down to archaeologists, the English Wikipedia has 5,129 biographies and 22.15% are about women. So archaeology isn’t doing too badly in the context of English Wikipedia. 1,869 of these archaeologists with biographies on the English Wikipedia have an identifier in the ADS and 22.79% are about women. The actual number will increase over time as further matches are made and new articles are created, but this likely represents the majority of the matches that can currently be made.
A screenshot of the results from the linked query as of 24 November 2022.
If we widen the search to include all the people in the ADS with a Wikidata item, 4,641 have a gender and 24.09% are female.
Given the UK focus of the dataset, it’s not surprising that the ten most common places of education from people in the ADS (where Wikidata has information, for people with articles in English) are all in the UK. You have to go down to 18th to find a university from outside the UK (Harvard).
A screenshot of the results from the linked query as of 24 November 2022.
Where people work is heavily skewed towards universities. Looking at just people in the ADS who have articles on the English Wikipedia, universities account for nineteen out of the twenty most common workplaces. Archaeologists in universities are more likely to end up with Wikipedia articles than folks in commercial archaeology or the museum sector. If we drop the requirement of having an article on the English Wikipedia, the results have more variety. Because people outside academia are less likely to have articles, the data available for people in commercial archaeology will be much poorer.
A screenshot of the results from the linked query as of 24 November 2022.
The ADS doesn’t just have entries for archaeologists. Historians, geneticists, and numismatists all appear in their dataset. The ADS even has an entry for Billy Bragg. Yes, that Billy Bragg. I double checked just in case. So aside from archaeologists, what professions do people in the ADS dataset have? For this bit, let’s look at everyone in the ADS with a Wikidata entry, not just people with articles on the English Wikipedia. It’s not surprising that a historian is the most common job amongst the dataset.
A screenshot of the results from the linked query as of 24 November 2022. Only occupations with a photograph linked appear in the above montage, in the full query there are more occupations listed.
Steps to make it work
Back in 2020 the ADS provided a spreadsheet of their data, with columns for given name, surname, initials, date of birth, date of death, ORCIDs, ISNI, and the ID in the ADS database. For most people in the data set, it was a matter of name and ID in the ADS database.
The first step was adding this data to a tool called Mix’n’match. It’s a staging area before Wikidata, where information can be matched to what already exists. The idea is to add a new ID to Wikidata items where they already exist and to create new items where they don’t exist yet. If in doubt, create a new item in Wikidata. They can always be merged later if it turns out there is a duplicate.
Mix’n’match does some automated matching based on IDs such as ORCIDs or ISNIs, and then suggests some possible matches based on names and information such as dates of birth and death.
With more than 55,000 people in the spreadsheet, there is a lot to get through. There were some 1,500 matches that were low-hanging fruit but it has taken more than two years to get nearly 7,000 matches. The approach has been to use Mix’n’match to confirm suggested matches and to manually add ADS IDs to Wikidata items; the latter is done when I’m confident I’ve found a match. The Mix’n’match suggestions were very, well, mixed so I came up with some custom searches to try to narrow things down. I looked for people who published in the field of prehistoric archaeology but who don’t have an ADS ID, antiquarians with no ADS ID, French archaeologists with no ADS ID, people who published in the Sussex Archaeological Collections with no ADS ID (and other journals with an extensive back catalogue on the ADS), and variations thereof. As it turns out, there are quite a few of each who don’t appear to be in the ADS.
Soon, there will be the decision about what to do with the remainder. Should 48,000 names be imported to Wikidata with little more than an ADS ID and we trust that they may be enriched over time? It’s a possibility, but I’ve not considered it much yet. It has the most value for Wikidata where it can be linked to another item. For now at least, the ADS have a bunch of new ORCIDs, INSIs, and Wikidata IDs they can enrich their site with, and a few entries they may want to merge.
The more information there is in Wikidata – the more sourced statements about where people went to school or university, where they worked, and so on – the more useful it becomes, and you can help add information. New to Wikidata? The University of Edinburgh have a short introductory video to get you started.
November 29th sees the return of Giving Tuesday, where for 24 hours, Wikimedia UK will be calling on the generosity of our supporters to raise funds for our work in promoting and developing knowledge equity.
Knowledge equity refers to the expansion and diversification of valued knowledge. It looks to engage with the understandings, expertise and experiences of communities who have historically been excluded from social discourse.
Systemic bias and historic repression are key reasons for this marginalisation, yet by increasing knowledge equity on platforms like Wikipedia we all benefit from the shared resource we’ve improved.
Dr Sara Thomas on Wikimedia UK’s knowledge equity projects. Sara is our Scotland Programme Coordinator, so her focus is mainly on partnerships and collaborations with Scottish organisations and individuals. Watch on YouTube.
Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has developed into a central hub for the world’s knowledge to coexist, accessed across the planet and enabling us to learn, contribute and share. As the validity, trustworthiness and editorship of Wikipedia has grown, so has its reach and diversity of content. With over 260 million page views per month, the online encyclopaedia has become an almost all-encompassing source of information.
Helping Wikipedia to represent the sum of all human knowledge is no simple task however. The systemic biases and cultural inequalities we see in the world around us are reflected in Wikipedia’s content. These biases are widely varied, relating to gender, culture, geography and religious worldviews among others. In addition, the biases on Wikipedia and its sister projects like Wikidata are both internal and external. Factors such as the availability of published sources, internet accessibility and political censorship result in a highly unbalanced level of engagement with Wikimedia across the world, the result being that European and North American issues and culture are covered more extensively.
Knowledge Equity is a strategic focus for Wikimedia UK – our work in this field has resulted in a significant impact on the breadth and quality of cultural content on Wikimedia projects, as well as the diversity of groups and communities engaging with open knowledge. Together with key collaborators we have worked extensively on closing the gender gap, preserving minority languages, and delivering projects that increase access to underrepresented cultural heritage.
Our work with community groups, museums, galleries and educational institutions has made significant contributions to addressing inequality and knowledge gaps on Wikipedia.
Quote accompanied by images from Wikimedia Commons: African American soldiers draw rations at the camp cook house at their station in Northern Ireland. Illustration from Medical Botany, digitally enhanced from rawpixel’s own original plates 120. Haeckel Discomedusae 8 cleanup.
Quote accompanied by images from Commons: Portrait of Flora Macdonald Reid, Artist. Salvation of Mankind (detail) by Phoebe Anna Traquair 1886 to 1893.
Quotes from some of our partners in knowledge equity. See more quotes in this Commons category or by following us on social media, where we’re sharing stories until Giving Tuesday.
For example, our partnership with the Khalili Collections – launched in 2019 – led to a research project in 2021 focusing on the diversity of visual arts content on Wikipedia. The research undertaken by Dr Martin Poulter and Waqās Ahmed highlighted significant biases, showing that Wikipedia gives many times more coverage to visual art from the Western tradition than for all other cultures’ visual art combined. Through this research, we have been able to propose actions that will give Wikipedia a more global perspective on visual arts. It also highlights to the global community of editors where the knowledge gaps lie, resulting in work to significantly improve articles on previously underrepresented culture.
Waqās Ahmed, Executive Director of the Khalili Foundation, on the partnership between Wikimedia UK and the Foundation. The Khalili Foundation has a Wikimedian in Residence, Dr Martin Poulter. Watch the video on YouTube.
Through a University Arts London (UAL) staff secondment, the Decolonising Wikipedia Network was formed. The network ran training events for staff and students so they could play an active role in the decolonisation of knowledge, making their Wikipedia editing a form of knowledge activism. We also run our annual Celtic Knot conference, showcasing innovative approaches to open knowledge and open data that support and grow Indigenous language communities
Supporting Wikimedia UK for this year’s Giving Tuesday will enable us to continue engaging new organisations, communities and individuals to deliver impact through these unique projects. Together we can support communities across the UK to create and share knowledge, wisdom and experience where systemic bias and other barriers have previously inhibited representation.
The need for reliable information online about our climate is more apparent than ever. Which is why Wikimedia UK launched our first climate-focused residency in partnership with GSI at the University of Exeter. Tatjana will work alongside several world-leading climate scientists, including those at the UK Met Office. We’re delighted to welcome Tatjana to our team, and hope everyone in the editing community will give her a warm welcome.
By Tatjana Baleta, Wikimedia Visiting Fellow at Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter
I am a South African conservationist and science communicator with an interest in the power of knowledge to drive change. As the Wikimedia Visiting Fellow at the GSI, I will be working with researchers and the Wikimedia community to make climate change knowledge more accessible, expand and strengthen the quality of climate change information available on open knowledge platforms and to combat dis- and misinformation.
My fascination with the natural world led me pursue a BSc in Ecology & Evolution and Genetics and a BMedSc(Hons) in Cell Biology. With a growing understanding of the global environmental crisis, I then completed an MPhil in Conservation Leadership.
I have worked internationally in research and communications on marine species monitoring, marine litter monitoring, marine protected area design research, conservation technology, species prioritisation and conservation-decision making.
As an avid science communicator, I am passionate about sharing my love for the natural world, and particularly about using that communication to instigate positive change.
I’m really excited to dive into this opportunity to explore open knowledge systems and contribute to climate change resource accessibility.
