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.
As things stand, there are large gaps in information about climate change on Wikipedia, and the content we do have is heavily weighted in US and European data. What’s more, it’s clear with only a quick search that information about policy and technology is often out of date. These factors convey a greater sense of uncertainty around climate data than is warranted by recent developments.
At Wikimedia UK, we believe that addressing Wikipedia’s gaps will better inform people about climate action. Wikipedia is the ideal platform for unbiased, cited climate information, as it already has a global audience of billions. It exists in over 300 languages and has an established, dedicated volunteer editing community of nearly 300,000 editors and contributors. The 59 million articles these editors create and maintain are accessed by over 1.5 billion unique devices every single month. We bought Climate and Environment into our 2022-25 Strategic themes to ensure a core focus on addressing the gaps. Consequently, we’re delighted to announce we have launched our first-ever climate residency in partnership with the University of Exeter.
Tatjana Baleta has been recruited as Wikimedia Visiting Fellow at the University of Exeter, within the Global Systems Institute (GSI) academic community. Embedded within this centre of excellence for climate research, Tatjana will work alongside several world-leading climate scientists, including those at the UK Met Office with whom the GSI has a strategic partnership. She will also be amongst researchers from other disciplines who are looking into climate impacts, climate justice, biodiversity and energy.
Tatjana is a conservationist and science communicator with an interest in the power of knowledge to drive change. She has a BSc in Ecology & Evolution and Genetics and a BMedSc(Hons) in Cell Biology. With a growing understanding of the global environmental crisis, she also completed an MPhil in Conservation Leadership, which she then applied to her conservation career. Tatjana is passionate about sharing her love for the natural world, and particularly about using that communication to instigate positive change.
Dr Andy Richards, Manager at GSI said of the partnership “We are very excited to be working with Wikimedia UK and the Wikimedia community, and hosting Tatjana as the first ever Wikimedia Visiting Fellow focused on climate change. We are passionate about providing unbiased and open information and making it as widely accessible as possible. Wikipedia is a powerful resource to do this.”
Well-known Wikipedian and climate change researcher Dr Femke Nijsse outlined how important Tatjana’s work is: “Wikipedia plays a key role in overcoming polarisation, but this is only possible when its content is of high quality. Involving academics means that errors and biases can be spotted and resolved more rapidly.”
If you’d like to get in touch with Tatjana, you can reach her at t.baleta@exeter.ac.uk.
We are designing our next Train the Trainer (TtT) course, and looking forward to hearing from interested volunteers.
TtT trains volunteers who are keen to deliver Wikipedia editing events. Volunteer trainers play a key role in the delivery of Wikimedia UK programmes. They extend our work to underrepresented communities and help them be part of Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. They train new and existing editors across the country. Demand for training often outstrips staff capacity to fulfil, and we’re conscious that our existing networks do not always allow us to reach all the communities with whom we’d like to work.
This training will equip candidate trainers with the skills, experience and resources to deliver a standard ‘Introduction to Wikipedia’ editathon. We will look to discuss both online and in-person events during the training.
We will have another session on ‘Developing Community Partnerships’ focusing on establishing partnerships with new communities. This session is open to applications from accredited trainers as well. It will also be an opportunity for candidate and accredited trainers to get to know each other.
Expressions of interest are welcomed from all. However, given the current demographic mix of our training network, we are particularly interested in hearing from Black, Asian and minority groups; women; and members of LGBT+ community.
The in-person training will take place in London. We will cover travel and accommodation costs, and will provide lunch and refreshments.
3.12.2022 Saturday/10:00-16:00/in-person: Debrief – mockup editathon & Theory of online and in-person training
4.12.2022 Sunday/10:00-16:00/in-person: Developing Community Partnerships
What you could expect from us
Full training and support to deliver a standard ‘Introduction to Wikipedia’ editathon and similar events
Access to event materials
Ongoing support
Volunteer expenses where appropriate
Job references upon request
What we would expect from you
Familiarity with, or desire to increase your knowledge of the Wikimedia Projects, particularly Wikipedia. Pre-course support can be provided if you feel that you would benefit from this in order to fully participate in the training
Full attendance at the training course
To lead training for a minimum of 2 events per year. This would be a mixture of third party events which we would field to you, and those you would organise yourself. Please note that we do receive requests for training to be delivered within office hours
To be responsive to communication from Wikimedia UK staff and fellow volunteers
To complete basic reporting, including returning sign up information
To represent Wikimedia UK well during the time in which you are volunteering
To adhere to our Safe Spaces policy, and the Code of Conduct
How to apply
Places are limited to make sure that each participant gets individual attention and feedback, so please apply via the following forms to express your interest. Call for interest will close on the 28th of October. You will hear from us by the 4th of November to confirm your place.
A new Wikimedia Residency is starting this month, in mini format. One of our Connected Heritage Digital Skills Wikimedians, Leah Emary, will work with The Mixed Museum for one day a week between September and December 2022. The residency has a few goals:
To work with Director Chamion Caballero and others affiliated with the museum to incorporate material from their collections into the Wikimedia Projects.
To understand existing practices at the museum and incorporate Wikipedia editing, Wikimedia Commons uploads, and Wikidata where possible.
To identify gaps on Wikipedia around the history of racial mixing in Britain and use the museum’s scholarship, research and expertise to fill them.
To train and upskill museum staff, volunteers, interns and freelancers in how to edit Wikimedia projects.
This partnership is especially exciting for Wikimedia UK, because it addresses an important and under-represented topic on the Wikimedia projects.
The Mixed Museum, with only one full-time staff member, relies heavily on partnerships to conduct its exciting and innovative work. In addition to co-curating exhibitions with academics and artists, the museum currently hosts a folk musician as the organisation’s first Artist in Residence. Director Chamion Caballero says that partnership work is critical to small organisations like The Mixed Museum, not only for producing new and creative content, but also for building robust support networks that help increase the capacity to connect, learn, share and grow. She notes that for the museum, ‘our partnerships have helped all involved to reach wider audiences, as well as access ideas, skills and funding that would be much more difficult to achieve alone.’
The residency builds upon the work of two interns earlier this year, who improved Wikipedia articles based on research for the Mixed Race Irish Families in Britain, 1700-2000 exhibition. You can find out more about that project here.
Host a resident
Are you interested in hosting a mini-residency at your heritage or cultural organisation? Come see what Connected Heritage is all about at our free, hour long webinar on Thursday 13th October at 12:30pm.
Book a 121
If you know you’re a good fit and would like to talk about hosting an editathon or undertaking a Wiki project at your organisation, book a half hour online meeting with the team.
By Robin Owain, Programme Manager for Wales at Wikimedia UK
This year, in Wiki Loves Earth, editors from all over Wales went out into protected areas such as Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs), National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty etc with cameras clicking in all directions! At the end of the day, for the number of images, Wales received the Silver Medal on the international podium for photographers, out of 36 nations. The judging at the international level now begins.
Last year’s 1,892 photos now look meagre compared to this year’s massive 5,041 images! The 10 best images will now go through to the final, but as far as numbers are concerned, Wales came second out of 36 nations, with Germany first, Kazakhstan third, Brazil fourth, and Russia fifth. Small is beautiful!
To many photographers, taking an aesthetically pleasing image, technically correct, and visually stunning are important. To me, as one of the editors (in my own time, of course), it’s equally important that we have lots of images which illustrate Wikipedia articles and which document all aspects of our natural environment. Quality and quantity!
For the second year running, the National Library of Wales, Menter Mon and Wikimedia UK organised the competition. Within weeks, we had new partners, including the Welsh Government, all three National Parks: Eryri (Snowdonia), Pembrokeshire and the Brecon Beacons as well as the Ramblers. Other existing partners included Natural Resources Wales and Llên Natur, the largest Welsh language nature society.
The National Library’s Open Data Manager, Jason Evans said, “The National Library of Wales is thrilled to be able to work with Wikimedia UK to support this fantastic competition for the second year in a row. Once again the standard of photography and the number of entries has been exceptional. It is so important to capture and record the ever-changing beauty of our natural environment and to make that content freely available to all.”
WLE 2022 was a quick snapshot of the rich diversity of one small corner of our global biosphere: a record of flora, fauna and fungi, as they were in the summer of 2022. Future snapshots could be used to show the differences in the biosphere, and the impact of climate change. If Wikipedia could better illustrate this change, we could help negate the effect. So let’s get these images on Wikipedia articles, and make a difference!
The winning image in Wales is by User:Mjw999, featured above. It shows Three Cliffs Bay within the Gower Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in South Wales. Judges Iestyn Hughes and Simon Evans, both prominent local photographers, felt that the image captured the diversity of this beautiful landscape, which includes fresh water streams, a salt marsh and towering limestone cliffs.
In second place this year is User:Naff14 with a well executed shot of a Puffin on Skomer Island, collecting flowers for his nest building.
And in third place, the judges agreed on a more abstract image of a rock on Rhossili Beach on the Gower by User:Suntooth. The judges felt that the image invoked the power of the wind and sea whilst the patterns in the sand echoed the branches of trees.
Also highly commended was the following image of footprints in the sand dunes at Gronant by User:ClwydRuth. The judges were keen to include this image as a way of raising the profile of the important but little known habitats of Gronant Dunes.
By Daria Cybulska, Director of Programmes and Evaluation at Wikimedia UK
My adventure with the Wikimedia movement started in 2012, 10 years ago. Ten years is a long time, and when I joined as a staff member at Wikimedia UK, freshly established as a charity, there were already plenty of established community members around me. I remember coming to the global Wikimania conference in 2012, where in the opening session the audience of over a thousand people were asked to stand up, and then sit down in sequence depending on how long they’ve been in the movement – starting from the newcomers. As I sat through the countdown, embarrassed by my short tenure, I got the message that what’s valued in the movement is your length of service, and a direct connection to the key moments in its history.
With English Wikipedia being established in 2001, I now have roughly the same tenure in the movement as the longest standing stalwarts at that point of Wikimania 2012. Somehow I don’t feel like one of the movement’s wise old women, despite living through some of its rather interesting moments. I also note, gladly, the movement’s tentative shift towards celebrating its newcomers.
At a recent Wikimania the countdown went from the longest standing to the newest participants, with the newbies getting an ovation when they are the last people standing.
When I joined Wikimedia, not long after completing a philosophy degree, I thought of Wikipedia as an experiment in epistemology of testimony, in how you decide to believe the information shared by someone else. Turns out things are much more complicated than that single angle, especially because the Wikipedia project doesn’t happen by itself – it’s made by people and their interactions, and that’s complicated.
Since my early days I’ve been exposed to a number of beliefs about Wikipedia and its movement which I approached with suspicion. As a way of reflecting on my ten years with Wikimedia, I’m sharing five of my enduring hesitations, meaning approaches I came across that I’m suspicious of and try to mitigate (I could go for a commemorative ten hesitations but even I would find that a bit demotivating!).
Daria at Wikimania in 2014
Build it and they’ll come
This is a common adage in the techno-social projects and movements, where you believe that when you set up a tool, a space (in terms of tech and logistics), people will appear and engage with it. I’ve had conversations with potential partner institutions believing that if they set up their own wiki, it will work just as wonderfully as Wikipedia itself, with volunteer contributors appearing out of nowhere. This might work sometimes but usually doesn’t, and it’s true even within Wikipedia across its many internal projects – the magic of Wikipedia isn’t uniformly distributed. Providing community support and facilitation is non negotiable, so is designing inviting ways of getting into the project, especially if we want to ensure inclusion. I captured some of these thoughts within a collaborative book project I supported, Collective Wisdom.
Move fast and break things
Another common tech phrase speaks to the spirit of fast iteration, putting out minimum viable products and getting them critiqued in order to improve quickly. I have fully embraced sharing my thinking and documents early and can’t quite imagine working on something without colleagues’ eyeballs on it. But moving fast and breaking things feels quite individualistic and doesn’t give justice to the communities that may be using or relying on whatever is being broken (even if to improve it).
I’m also forever astounded by how many things in the movement have been quick temporary decisions that somehow solidified into permanent solutions (not dissimilar to when you move to a new house and a temporary DIY solution you did in week 1 is somehow still there 10 years down the line). The added complication is that people come and go, and at one point nobody remembers why something is done the way it is, and who to ask about changing it.
Rely on hive mind
Because of this distributed knowledge in a distributed system, we often don’t know who has the information we require. It can be useful to crowdsource answers to a problem at hand; however, it relies on people having the time to engage. Wikimedia movement hasn’t really cracked knowledge management (has anybody?) but more effort put into documentation and making knowledge accessible would be a good thing.
Revere open knowledge
Of course I think open knowledge is a good thing and a force for good. Wikipedia has been called the last best place on the internet, and as much as I’m not into exceptionalism, perhaps there’s something to it. Often the partnerships I set up with external organisations are motivated by the inherent belief that working on open knowledge simply contributes to some greater good. However, I believe that it’s useful to be self critical about openness. This thinking has developed somewhat in recent years, with examination of ‘ethics of open’, or reflections on how the nature of the open movement is excluding some people.
Together with these tensions and criticisms there is no shortage of ideas within the movement of how to change things. Hopefully I’m wrong, but sometimes I do think that master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house – or at least that it’s pretty hard.It does seem difficult to change the Wikimedia movement, which I’ve experienced acutely while working on the implementation of the global 2030 Wikimedia vision of knowledge equity. Generalising, it’s hard for newcomers and their fresh ideas to get heard and accepted, while the thinking of the longstanding members is constrained by operating within existing movement structures and approaches (even if they’ve been DIYed!). On top of that, the movement is so beautifully amorphous that even if there are good ideas of what to change, it’s hard to know how to implement – and we’ve even tried complexity theory which is supposed to be good for such settings.
Taking the long view, however, things have changed somewhat. During that first Wikimania I attended in 2012, the organisers ran out of conference t-shirts for women – they didn’t expect quite so many of them to turn up. These days we speak of barriers to participation, ensuring friendly spaces, and try to think about how participating in Wikimedia may benefit people, rather than the project itself. I hope that with ten years of experience on my back I can continue to support and amplify these good ideas.
Dr Sara Thomas, Scotland Programme Coordinator for Wikimedia UK
On International Women’s Day, I ran training for long-term Wikimedia UK partners Protests & Suffragettes and Women’s History Scotland. The editathon focused on Scottish Suffrage(ttes), and is just one of a series of events that they’ll be running over the next few months.
A few days after the event, I was tagged in a brilliant Twitter thread from one participant and new Wikipedia editor Becky Male. Becky had been working on the Hunger Strike Medal article. I was really struck not only by her new-found enthusiasm for Wikipedia editing, but also by this quote: “Knowledge activism matters because, for most people, Wikipedia is their first port of call for new info. I did the Cat and Mouse Act in GCSE History. Don’t remember learning about the medal or the names of the women..”
We often talk about Knowledge Activism in the context of fixing content gaps that pertain to voices and communities left out by structures of power and privilege, and how the gender gap manifests in different ways on-wiki. I thought that this was a great example of how the Wikimedia community’s work is helping to address those gaps, so I reached out to Becky to ask if she’d like to write a blog for us which you can read below. Thanks Becky!
Picture of the English suffragette Emily Davison, date unknown, but c.1910-12. CC0.
By Becky Male, @beccamale
Joining Wikipedia was one of those things I’d thought about doing from time to time – I’d come across an article that was woefully short and think to myself “someone should probably do something about that”. But fear of accidentally breaking something stopped me.
But then it’s International Women’s Day, and Women’s History Scotland, Protests & Suffragettes and Wikimedia UK are organising an Editathon to get some of the information P&S has found – they’ve created fantastic educational resources on the Scottish suffrage movement – added to Wikipedia. This is the Knowledge Gap: even when things are known about women, that knowledge hasn’t made it on to Wikipedia. It’s most people’s first port of call for new information, which makes this a big problem.
So I signed up and did the intro tutorial. A misspent adolescence on LiveJournal meant the leap from basic HTML to editing in source was fairly small. And there’s something about sitting in a Zoom call of two dozen women, all a bit nervous about this process too and being told “It’s okay, you really can’t screw this up that badly” that’s genuinely reassuring – failure’s a lot less scary when you’ve got backup.
Offline, I volunteer at Glasgow Women’s Library digitising artefacts. Creating the article on the Suffragette Penny sounded like a perfect extension of that. But it was wisely suggested that I should pick an existing article for my first. The Hunger Strike Medal needed work and was similar enough to get me started.
I studied the Cat and Mouse Act for GSCE History so I already had some background knowledge of the suffragette tactic of hunger striking. I cleaned up the lead, separated the information into sections and added a few other interesting titbits – as I learned at the Editathon, Wikipedia users love trivia. But the biggest change I made was to the list of medal recipients.
The medal was the WSPU’s highest honour – not only had a woman been gaoled for her beliefs, she’d risked her life and health for the cause. The hunger strikes and subsequent force-feeding by prison authorities contributed to early deaths, caused serious illnesses, and destroyed women’s mental health. They suffered horrifically and their sacrifices deserve to be remembered.
The list is now over 90 names, each one sourced, each medal confirmed. Some I found in books, maybe just one line about them. Others I found with a Google search, the suggested images showing me new medals the deeper I went, leading me to the sites of auction houses and local museums. My favourites, though, are in newsreels from 1955, women well into their 60s still proudly wearing their medals.
There’s another 60+ hunger strikers whose medals haven’t been found yet. Some names I moved to the Talk page if the evidence doesn’t support them on the list. I can’t say for sure that this is the most comprehensive list of WSPU hunger strikers but I think it’s likely – I certainly haven’t found one anywhere else.
And I’ve still got that Suffragette Penny article to write.
Militant suffragette Janie Terrero (1858-1944) wearing her Hunger Strike Medal and Holloway brooch c1912. CC0.
