Train the Trainer 2022 – call for participants

Would you like to receive training on how to deliver Wikipedia editing events? Wikimedia UK are now inviting expressions of interest in our next round of Train the Trainer, due to take place in early 2022. We are delighted to say that we’ll once again be partnering with Trainer Bhav Patel.    

Volunteer trainers play a key role in the delivery of Wikimedia UK programmes, helping us to achieve our strategic objectives by delivering Wikimedia project training to new and existing editors across the country.  Demand for training often outstrips staff capacity to fulfill, 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.  

In the past, we’ve offered our main Train the Trainer programme as a 3-4 day in-person training course, and it has often focussed on training design and pedagogy. This time however, we’re taking a slightly different approach, which we hope will offer more flexibility to our volunteer trainers, and which we have developed in response to feedback from the community, and from partner organisations.  

The aim of this round of training will be to equip Volunteer Trainers with the skills, experience and resources to deliver a standard ‘Introduction to Wikipedia’, such that would take place at a standard online editathon or wiki workshop  Drawing on the experience of a number of trainers and staff, we have developed a set of training slides and exercises which can be delivered without the requirement for the Volunteer Trainer to do their own course design.  In time, and should they so desire, members of this cohort could be supported to deliver training in-person, and with their own design.  

Expressions of interest are welcomed from all, however given the current demographic mix of our training network, we are particularly interested in hearing from women, members of the LGBT+ community, and non-white people.

Dr Sara Thomas and Bhav Patel outline the content of the Train the Trainer course.

Course content and key dates

The course would be organised as follows, all sessions would be held online over Zoom:

  • Briefing: Thursday 27th January, 6-7pm. Introduction session.
  • Experience: Saturday 29th January, 1-5pm. Trainees would attend an Editathon / Wiki Workshop as participant observers.
  • Debrief: Sunday 30th January, 1-5pm. Trainees would discuss and debrief the Saturday session, exploring how and why the training was put together.
  • Practice: February. Trainees will run their own online Editathons / Wiki Workshops in pairs or groups of three. These sessions will be organised by Wikimedia UK, probably with partner organisations who will be aware that they are helping new trainers. We are also open to trainees setting up their own practice sessions, if they know a group with whom they’d like to work.

What we would expect from you if you decide to join 

  • Full attendance at the training course as outlined above.
  • To lead training for a minimum of 2-3 events per year. This would be a mixture of third party events which our Programmes Team 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 Event Organisers, including in advance of the event, and to complete basic reporting, including returning sign up sheets, afterwards.
  • 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.
  • 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. 

What you can expect from us

  • Full training and support to become a trainer for editathons and similar events.
  • Access to materials for participants.
  • Ongoing support from the Programmes Team.
  • Job references upon request (paper / email / LinkedIn as required).
  • Reasonable volunteer expenses where appropriate.

How to apply

Please fill in the Google Form here. Applications will close on the 9th December, and all successful applicants will be notified by 14th December.

Further background information

Volunteer Trainer is one of two main volunteer roles available at Wikimedia UK, the other being Board Member. In 2020, in light of the demand for online training, we ran an Online Training for Online Trainers course for our existing trainer network, and our last in-person training for new trainers took place in November 2019. 

The Wikimedia UK Volunteer Trainer Role description.

Three months of Connected Heritage

By Dr Lucy Hinnie, Digital Skills Wikimedian at Wikimedia UK.

As we begin to look towards 2022, and move towards the end of 2021, we thought it was a good time to reflect on the first three months of the Connected Heritage project at Wikimedia UK.

The projects so far

In August, Leah and I began our posts as Digital Skills Wikimedians. Our first task was to familiarise ourselves with the cultural heritage landscape in England and Wales, and to identify potential participants for our first series of introductory webinars. Many emails, tweets and messages were sent out into the world, and we were lucky to have a great response to our offering.

September was the month of webinar creation: we worked hard to design an hour of content that was welcoming, informative and engaging, and offered an overview of the project and our vision. We rehearsed with some willing Wikimedia UK colleagues and developed the presentation into something we are very proud of!

The webinars started in earnest in October. We were blown away by the enthusiasm from participants, and the wide variety of groups and organisations represented. We ran four webinars, and engaged with new faces from all over the cultural heritage sector.

November has been busy thus far: we ran an additional webinar for evening participants, and our first Wikithon for potential partners who had attended a webinar and were interested in the next step. We are in the preliminary stages of our first partnerships, and broadening our understanding of what our audience is looking for. The Wikithon in particular was a great success, with over 10 new editors trained and engaging with Wikimedia through Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

What next?

We have another webinar running before the year concludes: if you’re thinking ahead to 2022, and wishing you’d attended one earlier, now is the time! The session will run from 2pm on Thursday 2nd December and we’d love to see you there. We’ve had great feedback from participants saying they are feeling more confident, more engaged and positive about Wikimedia and open knowledge.

Thinking further ahead?

If you’re feeling the end of year burnout already, and would rather look towards 2022, we’re one step ahead: we’ve set up four introductory webinars and a Wikithon! Start your 2022 with some Connected Heritage, we’ve got webinar sessions running on 18th January, 2nd February, 17th February and 4th March, and an International Women’s Day Potluck Wikithon on Friday 11th March. You can sign up now via Eventbrite.

I’d like to partner with you – how do I do this?

In short, let’s talk. We have a meeting calendar set up here, and you can book in for a slot to chat with us about your questions regarding your organisational needs and aims. Or you can email us at connectedheritage@wikimedia.org.uk. We’re looking forward to hearing from you.

Talking strategy with Wikimedia UK’s community

Last week I had the pleasure of facilitating an online meeting for members of our community to help shape the future direction of Wikimedia UK. This was attended by a broad cross section of our community including staff, trustees, partners, editors and donors. I was particularly pleased to see a number of former staff and trustees of the charity, all of whom are still closely involved in the movement. 

Aim of the session

Wikimedia UK works on a three year strategic planning cycle, and we are now developing our new strategy for 2022 to 2025. I gave a brief overview of the process that the organisation is currently engaged in and what’s happened so far. Our schedule is aligned with our application deadline for funding from the Wikimedia Foundation, for which we’ll be applying for multi-year funding for the first time.

Introductions

As part of the introductions, everyone shared their aspirations for the meeting, with key themes being to make connections, understand Wikimedia UK’s priorities and engage with the wider community. The meeting was also another opportunity (following our AGM in July) to introduce our new Chair of Trustees, Monisha Shah. Monisha shared a little of her own background, and why access to knowledge is so important to her. She explained that she has a portfolio career focused on board roles within the arts, culture and media sectors, following high level roles at the BBC. Monisha emphasised her interest in hearing from the community. She noted that she is not active on social media but that volunteers were welcome to contact her via LinkedIn or the Wikimedia UK team. 

Blue Sky Thinking

After this introduction, we split into three breakout groups to finish the statement “wouldn’t it be fantastic if…” for what we’d like Wikimedia UK to achieve in the next three years. This generated lots of great ideas and objectives which coalesced into some key themes, as follows:

EQUITY

A high proportion of responses to the prompt question above were focused on equitable participation and representation. This ranged from diversifying the UK’s editors, administrators and membership, through to working with small language Wikipedias, delivering diaspora outreach, and supporting initiatives to repatriate knowledge as a form of decolonisation.  

CLIMATE

There were several responses focused on the climate crisis, with an aspiration for us to be able to offer wide-ranging and trusted information about the climate crisis across multiple languages. There was a question over whether Wikimedia UK should be applying pressure on the government regarding the crisis. On a practical level, it was felt that in the first instance Wikimedia UK needs to identify what we can do to support editors documenting and sharing information about climate change (including those involved with WikiProject Climate Change)

OPEN KNOWLEDGE

Many responses to the prompt statement “wouldn’t it be fantastic if” involved the opening up of knowledge and information. Under this general umbrella was an aspiration that all publicly funded institutions should commit to ethical open access as their default position; and that we are able to address copyright law to ensure that publicly funded research has to be made available under an open licence. Other responses included more partnerships with heritage organisations, local history initiatives and archives; more Wikimedians in Residence; and more work with diverse communities and collections. A number of responses were specifically about images – such as every notable structure in the UK having a photo and Wikidata item, and working with external partners to ensure an image for every UK article. 

EDUCATION

It’s clear that the Wikimedia UK community remains deeply concerned about misinformation and disinformation. There is a strong commitment to helping young people understand how knowledge is created and shared, and develop information literacy skills. There is also a clear ambition to have an impact on the school curriculum – particularly in England (following our success in Wales) – and to have more residencies in Universities. 

PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT AND AWARENESS

A number of responses were focused on the public’s understanding of Wikimedia. In particular, it was felt that there needs to be more understanding that Wikipedia is a tertiary source that can be edited by anyone, and greater awareness and use of the sister projects, such as Wikisource. It was noted that Wikimedia UK should have sufficient technical development capacity to be actively contributing to MediaWiki development for Wikimedia’s sister projects. The perennial issue of the distinction between Wikimedia UK and the Wikimedia Foundation was also raised.

COMMUNITY/MOVEMENT

Two out of the three breakout groups identified an objective to diversify Wikimedia UK’s funding base so as to be less reliant on our core grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. It was also suggested that the role of affiliates will be under more scrutiny with the creation of the Movement Charter and Global Council; and that within that context, Wikimedia UK needs to be clear about its purpose and relevance. Other comments were more focused on community engagement, with a number of responses around a theme of developing closer relationships between the affiliate and online communities, and enabling people who engage with our programmes to become more involved with the work of the organisation, contributing to the movement in broader ways.

Emerging Strategic Themes

After this very productive session, I introduced participants to the key themes which have emerged from the board and staff away days held earlier in the autumn. Once these are finalised, they will form the basis of our programme development and delivery over the next three years:

  • Knowledge Equity
  • Information Literacy
  • Climate Crisis

A number of other areas have been identified, which we believe are essential to delivering an effective programme. These are still in draft form, but include community, advocacy, communications, equity, diversity and inclusion, and organisational resilience and sustainability.

It was encouraging to see the extent of the overlap between the themes that emerged from the board and staff away days, and the priorities identified through this community session. 

Engaging Volunteers

At this point I handed over to Daria Cybulska, Wikimedia UK’s Director of Programmes and Evaluation, to lead the final session of the meeting. This was focused explicitly on community, and asked participants to respond to the following questions, in a plenary discussion:

  1. As a community member, where do you see an opportunity to get involved in the emerging strategy, and what would you need from WMUK to support that?
  2. How could the Wikimedia UK community deliver the ideas generated so far?

These prompted a wide range of responses, contributions and further questions. I’ve summarised the key discussion areas below, all of which have given the team food for thought in terms of volunteer engagement and support:

  • Do we have communities of interest or communities of place? Do volunteers see themselves as aligned with a particular project – e.g. English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons – or the chapter? And does this matter?
  • People’s journey into Wikipedia is often through competitions such as Wiki Loves Monuments. How can we use this knowledge to galvanise more participation? Other entry points are vandalism and correcting typos. How can we use this knowledge to support editor recruitment? There’s something important about small, accessible tasks as a way to start. It could be correcting typos, or adding categories and references to articles.
  • This led to an interesting discussion about the use of the word ‘editathon’ which might suggest something that’s a slog, requiring stamina and discipline. Should we change the language to focus more on words like workshops, training, introductory sessions etc. It was noted that increasingly, work lists for online editing events have tasks across a broad range of activities, reflecting different levels of digital confidence and time constraints.

Wrapping up and next steps

I wrapped up the session by explaining that I would be sharing the draft strategic framework for 2022 – 2025 later this month (November) and welcome feedback on it. Please watch this space for that! And thanks again to everyone who attended. It was wonderful to see people (even if it was over Zoom) and to hear from our community about what’s important to them in the creation of Wikimedia UK’s next three year strategy. 

UK based Punjabi artist opens up his archive

Written by the Punjabi Wikimedians User Group

UK based Punjabi writer and photographer, Amarjit Chandan opened up images from his archive. Aside from images photographed by him, the archive includes images from his father, Gopal Singh Chandan, a full-time photographer and other public domain images. 

Amarjit Chandan has a Wikipedia account of his own and has tried himself adding images to Commons in the past years. Punjabi Wikimedians User Group approached him to see what help he needed, also asking if he’d be interested in releasing further content. 

Punjabi Wikimedians User Group collaborated with Wikimedia UK to execute this project. As the collection had a connection to both affiliates, it felt like a great opportunity to collaborate. Amarjit Chandan was more than glad to give his photographs but he needed support to create multilingual Metadata regarding the photographs, handling the captions and helping with the upload. Multilingual metadata was important to include as it helps the Punjabi community to search and access the data easily. User:Gurdeepdali who is an independent photographer worked as an online Wikimedian-in-Residence for the project.

File:Amarjit Chandan-Chandigarh-1979-Pic Dev Inder. CC BY-S.A 4.0.

As of 19 June 2021, a total of 471 images have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and at least 54 distinct images (11 % of the total images) are being used across languages and projects with the maximum images being used on Punjabi Wikipedia followed by English Wikipedia and Wikidata. More photos followed. 

Aside from helping illustrate articles on Punjabi personalities on Punjabi and English Wikipedias, the images help capture lives of Punjabis across three continents. Chandan was born in Kenya where his father was a political activist as well. He moved to India at the age of eleven in 1957 and eventually migrated to the UK in 1980.

In 2020, both collaborators were excited to start work on it then in 2020, but the pandemic, COVID-19, meant we couldn’t run in-person events that were planned for this. We still went ahead with the wiki content work, and Punjabi Wikimedians are currently planning to organise an online editathon to add more photographs to relevant Wikipedia articles. You can get in touch with gillteshu@gmail.com or sonichotian@gmail.com for any future plans, and we welcome any multilingual editors who can help add the images to articles in various languages.

If you’re interested in how you can get started with your own cultural heritage project as part of a GLAM organisation, we’ve got a series of free webinars for any cultural heritage professionals. There’s just two more webinars in 2021, on the 9th November and the 2nd of December, sign up here.

2021 Palestine-Wales editathon

By Robin Owain, Wales Programme Manager for Wikimedia UK

Wikiproject Palestine-Wales was a month-long editathon, which took place in August 2021, between Wikimedia UK and Wikimedia Levant. The event generated a total of 242 new articles.

Wikipedians from both communities listed the most important articles from their respective languages and translated them as a token of friendship. The wikiproject contributed to reducing the cultural as well as content gap on Wikipedia, and strengthened the bond between the State of Palestine and Wales, both Levantine and Welsh communities.

Half way through the programme, the organisers reached out to the Cornish editors who flocked over to the project in droves. They created a list of subjects based on Cornwall (for example, King Doniert’s Stone (Cornish, Welsh, Arabic, English, Stargazy pie and an article on the Cornish language revival) which were subsequently translated into Arabic and Welsh. This was their first Wikiproject and 7 editors participated; all in all, 32 editors contributed. There’s a Welsh saying that it’s easier for two mountains to get together, than two people; in this case we got three mountains!

The themes were mostly cultural: food, places of interest, women of note, education and COVID-19. Among the articles written in Arabic and Cornish on Wales were, Gwenno Saunders (English, Arabic, Welsh, Cornish), bara brith loaf and Aberystwyth University. The Cornish editors created 44 new articles, just shy of the Palestine editors who wrote 57 articles, and the Welsh community created 142 new articles.

In the context of languages, perhaps the winners are the Cornish speakers. There are 300 million Arabic speakers, 750,000 Welsh speakers and around 2,000 Cornish speakers. However, the number of articles per language was:

Cornish – 44

Arabic – 57

Welsh – 142

So the winner is… all 3 communities!

Ada Lovelace day 24 hour global editathon

On the 12th October, an international 24 hour editing marathon will start in Aotearoa New Zealand to improve the coverage of women in Wikipedia. The relay of volunteer editing starts midday in Aotearoa and continues with Australians joining in, passing the baton from timezone to timezone. The event in the UK starts at 2pm UK time finishing back in Aotearoa New Zealand 10 hours later.

The event runs for a whole day to ensure that anyone with access to a computer, anywhere in the world, can join at a time when they are free to. In the UK with the easing of covid restrictions, it is possible to join either in person or online.

Participants will learn how to edit Wikipedia, working from redlists of notable women in science and mathematics who do not yet have Wikipedia articles. Everyone’s efforts will be contributing to reducing the online gender gap.

The event is organised by the international group Women in Red, a volunteer organisation within Wikipedia whose aim is to reduce the gender gap in the disportionate number of Wikipedia biographies devoted to men. It takes its name from red links in the online encyclopedia; ones which are yet to have a corresponding article. Women in Red was started six years ago in Mexico by two volunteers, a British and an American, and now has thousands of followers and hundreds of active editors but no budget, office, or hierarchy. When the group was formed, 85% of Wikipedia biographies were about men. Since then the community has created over 167,000 new articles about women, at a rate of about 70 a day. Together participants work in parallel on Wikipedias in over 30 other languages to reduce the online gender gap and give visibility to notable women from the past and present.

The date chosen, 12th October, is Ada Lovelace Day, named after the 19th century British mathematician, daughter of the mathematician Lady Byron and Lord Byron. Ada is regarded as the world’s first computer programmer. Ada Lovelace Day celebrates women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). 

The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia began in 2001 and now has 6 million articles in English and over twenty million more in hundreds of other languages. It is now the eighth most visited website and one of the few that is run by a non-profit. The Wikimedia Foundation, based in San Francisco, keeps Wikipedia running but major decisions about its content and future direction are made by the global community. All the content is written and kept up to date by about 250,000 active volunteers around the world.

For more information on how to join the UK editathon see the Wikipedia event page. For more detail on the global event go to WikiAda24.org.

Wikimedia UK returns to the office, but trials a new way of working

By Lucy Crompton-Reid, Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK

On 16th March 2020, the UK Prime Minister asked the nation to stop non-essential contact and travel; a week before the start of what we now know to be a series of ‘lockdowns’ designed to contain Covid-19. I was working from home that day and immediately called my colleague Davina Johnson, Director of Finance and Operations for Wikimedia UK, to discuss bringing forward the closure of the office. As she works part-time and was therefore not in the office either, we decided that we would both go in the next day – along with any other staff who wanted to do so – to gather files, equipment and other things that we thought we might need if we were working remotely for a few weeks or months. 

Of course, it has turned out to be a lot longer than a few weeks. Writing this blog post at the end of September 2021, I have been in the London office a total of four times since March last year. Whilst some staff have been in the office more regularly (notably Davina, along with a new Operations Coordinator who joined the team in July this year), most have been working at home throughout the pandemic. This has brought some unique challenges, as many of you reading this will be familiar with, but it has also brought some unexpected benefits. Programme Coordinators based in Scotland and Wales noted how, with everyone working from home, they felt more connected to the rest of the team. More effort has been made to share information online, and to find new ways of engaging with each other away from the office; and remote staff were not, as in former times, half forgotten as we all trudged into the meeting room and handed around biscuits and cups of tea while someone tried to make the AV work for a hybrid staff meeting. 

Maintaining this feeling of parity and a shared organisational culture regardless of where staff are based is only going to become more important to Wikimedia UK. For one thing, our team has grown over the past year, and we now have five staff who are fully remote, while ten are notionally based in our London office. As we emerge from the pandemic, we are also moving to a hybrid model of working, in which staff will only be expected to work in the office on agreed days and for specific purposes. 

Earlier this year, the Board of Trustees considered the options for future working, looking at what it might mean for the organisation to become wholly virtual, to return to office-based working, or to embrace more flexible working. They all agreed that as a small charity working within the socio-technological space, we have the opportunity to create a work culture and environment that combines the best of home working with intentional moments of in person gatherings across our staff, board and wider community for strategising, creative exploration and social connection.

In practice, we are moving to hybrid working whilst the country still grapples with Covid-19. Although all staff are now fully vaccinated, case numbers continue to be high and include ‘breakthrough’ infections in people who have had the vaccine. We have therefore put in place a series of measures to try to reduce the risk to staff and guests, and to make a gradual return to using the office as safe as we can for everyone. These include a requirement for a negative lateral flow test for any staff, board member or visitor to the office. For the time being we are also restricting the number of people in the office at any one time to a maximum of six. Alongside this, we are consulting with all staff individually to determine what their working pattern might look like within this hybrid model. 

As a small organisation, we have the luxury of creating something that works for everyone, and takes individual preferences into account. But we will almost certainly make mistakes along the way. Over the next six months – or perhaps even longer – we will need to codify our expectations for how often staff will be in the office, and within what parameters they will be required to attend external meetings and events. We also want to consult with members and volunteers about their needs, and the shape of future community-focused activities. For anyone trying to reach us, email is probably still the best route. Whilst staff are now starting to return to the office, we can’t guarantee that there will always be someone there to answer the phones. It will probably be some months before we can be really clear with our stakeholders and the wider general public about how ‘open’ our London office really is; and I hope you will bear with us as we navigate this new reality. For now though, I’m just pleased to be able to meet up with staff and board members in person for the first time in 18 months. It’s been a long haul.

Connected Heritage webinars

As part of the National Lottery funded Digital Skills for Heritage initiative, Wikimedia UK is running webinars to showcase what Wiki-based platforms and digital skills can offer organisations in a GLAM heritage context.

Our webinars will cover open knowledge, the digital skills gap, digital preservation and how WMUK is addressing those issues through this project. Participants will be provided with access to resources and materials to take back to their organisations, and the opportunity to follow up with the project and engage in partnership.

You need only attend one webinar: sessions are free, open and no prior Wiki experience is required. We hope to see you there!

Webinar dates

Friday 8 October at 10am; [Eventbrite]
Thursday 14 October at 2pm; [Eventbrite]
Friday 15 October at 10am; [Eventbrite]
Thursday 21 October at 2pm; [Eventbrite]

Follow us on Twitter for project updates, and you can contact the team at connectedheritage@wikimedia.org.uk

Webinar leaders

Lucy Hinnie

Hello, I’m Dr Lucy Hinnie and I’m really excited to take on this new role as part-time Digital Skills Wikimedian on the Digital Skills for Heritage project. I was drawn to the public-facing relationship-building of this role, and the intersection of Wikimedia and the heritage, cultural and education sectors.

I’ve been working with Wikimedia UK in some capacity since March 2021, when I took on the role of Wikimedian-in-Residence at the British Library. I am passionate about engaging people, working with new ideas, concepts and ways of knowing. I believe in the power of open knowledge as a tool for social change, and in empowering people to tell their own stories.

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Leah Emary

My name is Leah Emary and I have recently started working alongside Lucy Hinnie at Wikimedia UK as a Digital Skills Wikimedian on the Connected Heritage project. The project is headed up by Richard Nevell and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Together we will be working with people at heritage organisations to contribute knowledge and open resources on topics which are currently underrepresented across Wikimedia projects. 

I am new to Wikimedia UK but have worked as an academic librarian in the UK and the USA and hope to continue to pursue the values which attracted me to librarianship: sharing resources and knowledge and engaging with digital and information literacies. I began teaching students and colleagues to edit Wikipedia a few years ago and find it good fun. Crucially, it’s a great method for teaching digital skills along with information literacies and critical approaches to knowledge authority.

Celebrating #WCCWiki at 50!

By Dr Victoria Leonard, FRHistS

In July 2021, #WCCWiki marked an important milestone. The initiative, designed to improve the online representation of those who identify as women and non-binary, held its fiftieth Wikipedia editathon. Since 2016 when the initiative began, our community has come together each month to edit Wikipedia pages for women and non-binary people, share resources and practical tips for editing, and to offer training for those new to the task. Organised through the Women’s Classical Committee UK, #WCCWiki has done fantastic work in transforming the online representation of classicists who identify as women and non-binary, and helping to challenge Wikipedia’s intractable gender gap. Classics is very broadly conceived, including historians, archaeologists, theorists, translators, poets, and others who work on the ancient world.

But the implications of our success reach far beyond one platform. #WCCWiki has spread awareness and understanding of Wikipedia and why it’s so important, especially to those invested in knowledge transfer, as much of our community is. We have upskilled classicists to use and improve Wikipedia, tools which have then been transferred into classrooms around the world. We have built an activist network based on solidarity and dynamic action, and we have demonstrated how hard-won research skills really are transferable and can make a huge difference to environments beyond grant applications and writing articles.

Julia Caldwell Frazier was one of the classicists to have a new entry written about them on the English Wikipedia in 2021.

Before #WCCWiki got started, the heritage of women and non-binary people in classics, both historical and contemporary, was a largely unrepresented online demographic. An estimate in 2016 found that only 7% of biographies of classicists on Wikipedia featured women. #WCCWiki has worked hard to make this demographic a highly visible and accessible part of classics.

We’ve created or edited more than 450 Wikipedia pages for those classicists who identify as women and non-binary, including path-breaking foremothers who were only referred to on their husband’s pages, such as Dr Miriam T. Griffin, Dr Annie Ure, and Professor Leslie Brubaker. One of our long-standing members, Richard Nevell, calculated that, as of 28 July 2021, 17.7% of the total of biographies of classicists on Wikipedia feature women. This is a significant rise from December 2019 when the number of biographies of women classicists was 16.3%. With every month, the proportion of Wikipedia biographies featuring classicists who identify as women or non-binary continues to increase.

Our pace of change means that on average every other day, a page for a woman or non-binary person is created or edited. #WCCWiki articles have featured regularly on Wikipedia’s front page and an increasing number have achieved Good Article status. #WCCWiki franchises have been inspired internationally, from Durham in the UK, to Winnipeg in Canada, to Ohio in the US. Our Wikipedia pages have been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, and we have boosted their impact on social media, mainly on Twitter, where posts have reached 50,000+ people.

Richard’s calculations demonstrate the huge leaps #WCCWiki is taking, especially in comparison with Wikipedia in other languages. 34% of new articles about classicists on the English Wikipedia created between December 2019 and July 2021 feature women, which is twice that of the German Wikipedia, and triple that of French. Whilst #WCCWiki edits and creates pages in a variety of languages, English does predominate. Richard’s stats reveal the gender bias on Wikipedia without initiatives like #WCCWiki working against them.

A graph showing the percentage of biographies on different Wikipedia about classicists that are women. Created by Richard Nevell using data in denelezh and queries on 28 July 2021

Initiatives like #WCCWiki and the Wikiproject Women In Red are still essential in tackling Wikipedia’s gender gap. Between 84% and 91% of Wikipedia editors are male, and only around 19% of biographical pages feature women overall. At 17.7%, the representation of those classicists who identify as women and non-binary still lags behind the more general gendered trend. So, there is much more to do. Everyone is welcome to join us online as we edit together on or around 22nd of each month, 13.00-15.00 GMT+1. For more information, check out our Project Page, and #WCCWiki on Twitter. Now we’re looking forward to our 100th editathon, come and join the party!