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.

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.

The post UK based Punjabi artist opens up his archive appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

The previous 12 months has seen all of us challenged like never before. Collectively and
individually we have faced new ways of living and changes to how we work and volunteer.

As a staff and Trustee team we are sending our appreciation and thanks to each one of you for your dedication, commitment, passion and belief that time volunteered on open knowledge is time well spent.

Thank You!

The post Thank You To Each and Every Amazing Volunteer! appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

I have steered my students away from Wikipedia for years, envisioning my role as a teacher to show students how to carry out ‘real’ research. But this year convinced me it was time to change my attitude, and so for 2020’s Fall term I put editing Wikipedia at the heart of Stars, Robots and Talismans: Science, Magic and Medieval Islamic Visual Culture, my fourth-year Honours module. I normally approach my undergraduate classes as workshops, encouraging collaborative experiments with digital tools, so experimenting with Wikipedia was a natural step. But unlike previous class experiments, I didn’t know the first thing about editing Wikipedia and neither did the students. And while a few of the students had studied Islamic art with me before, none  came with any background in history of Islamic science and technology. Moreover, all of us were facing the uncertainties of our first online semester necessitated by Covid-19 restrictions. It was completely unfamiliar terrain that we would have to navigate together, in some cases while in different countries and time zones.

What better time for a new experiment?

Luckily for me, Edinburgh has its own Wikimedian-in-Residence, Ewan McAndrew, whose Wikimedia in Education guide (created by Wikimedia UK and the University of Edinburgh) provided a helpful overview of case studies that illustrate how other academics were using Wikipedia in the classroom. Ewan and I met and discussed my initial inspiration, which came from my colleague Stephennie Mulder’s experience with scrapping a traditional research paper in favour of Wikipedia editing in her Islamic art course at the University of Texas.

To work out the project logistics Ewan connected me with two other academics, Alex Chow, in Edinburgh’s School of Divinity and Sasha Litvintseva, in Film Studies, Queen Mary University of London, who generously shared their advice and experience. Thanks to them I was able to get the idea off and running quickly without having to reinvent the wheel. Following Mulder’s example, I asked my students to imagine they had been hired as consultants for a major museum. Their mission for my course was to use their art history research and writing skills to improve the public’s knowledge of Islamic science and the occult in advance of an exhibition. They were to research and improve an article by editing and adding new text to existing articles, adding bibliography. In addition to revising text and adding citations to existing articles I asked the students to illustrate them with images of scientific instruments and illustrated manuscripts. Thanks to Ewan, the students and I learned about a new landmark partnership between Wikimedia UK and the UK-based Khalili Collections, to release research content and high resolution images of world art masterpieces on Creative Commons licenses. The Khalili Collections encompass one of the world’s great assemblages of Islamic visual culture, including scientific instruments and manuscripts. This image component of the editing project gave the students experience with Wikimedia and introduced them to issues around image copyright, which is key for art historians.

I provided the students with a pre-selected list of Wikipedia articles keyed to our weekly course topics. Based on the topics they chose I divided them into small groups of 2 or 3 students and asked them to work collaboratively on the Wikipedia article (the groups also functioned as their autonomous learning groups, or ALGs for the term). At mid-term the groups would present briefly on what they had accomplished.  Ewan set up a Wikipedia project page on Islamic Visual Culture with the list of target pages the students would be editing, and which provided helpful links to training and other resources. He also created a Dashboard page so that we could monitor and quantify the edits being made as part of the assignment. In the first week of the course he led the class through an optional live two-hour online Wikipedia training session to get the students started with Wikipedia accounts and basic skills. We recorded the session for those who couldn’t attend the live session.

With Ewan’s help, the students rose to the challenges. They organised digital meet-ups in small groups, brainstormed, discussed, and coordinated drafts. They researched and wrote new content on medieval Islamic contributions to history of science, technology and the occult, diversifying articles that had previously represented these topics mainly from an Anglo-European perspective. And since most of the students in my course were female, simply by participating in the assignment they contributed to a more diverse Wikipedia (editors have tended to be a homogenous group: white, male, 30s, from tech disciplines). Regardless of gender, all the students contributed strong research and writing skills to a more interdisciplinary Wikipedia. They brought perspectives from art and architectural history and Fine Arts to the work of editing History of Science articles, creating their own  intersections between science and art. They contributed images to articles that previously had privileged text and intellectual content exclusively. Collectively the students contributed some eight thousand words and eighty-five references to nine articles, which have received some 772,000 views to date.

I was worried going into the term that the students would dislike the experiment, that they would be put off by the necessity of having to learn yet another new digital tool at an already difficult time. A few weeks into the course they had spoken frankly about the stress of knowing that what they created would be out there in the world as free and public knowledge, their sense of worry and responsibility to do this work ‘right’. I was therefore surprised at mid-course feedback that specifically mentioned the Wikipedia project as something that was going well in the course. They appreciated how the editing process had gotten them thinking about knowledge dissemination. Thanks to their efforts Wikipedia’s freely-available knowledge is now a bit more diverse and globally representative. In a year that brought pervasive systemic injustices into stark relief,  our experiment in applying our knowledge outside the classroom gave us a sense that we were creating something positive, something that mattered. As one student commented, “Really love the Wikipedia project. It feels like my knowledge is actually making a difference in the wider world, if in a small way.”

Find out more about Wikimedia UK’s education initiatives in the blog tag, and visit Glaire Anderson’s website here.

The post Editing Wikipedia: Stars, robots and talismans honours course appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

We’ll be using Zoom, with a conference link sent to all Eventbrite sign ups, so claim your free ticket here. If you’re not sure how to use Zoom, you can watch instructions on this support page, or contact us with any queries. While the AGM is an opportunity for our members to vote on essential governance of the charity, we also encourage participation from volunteers, partners, supporters, and anyone else who’s interested in the Wikimedia community in the UK.

Agenda

11am Welcome and introduction, including technical onboarding

11.15am Keynote talk from Gavin Wilshaw, Mass Digitisation Manager at the National Library of Scotland, on the Wikisource project that the library has been delivering since the March shutdown

11.35am Q&A with Gavin, and contributions from other participants about their work on Wikimedia during and in response to the pandemic

12noon BREAK

12.15pm A global movement – short updates on Wikimedia 2030, the rebranding project, and the Universal Code of Conduct

12.30pm Lightning talks

1pm BREAK (+ social networking)

2pm Start of the formal AGM: reports, questions and announcement of voting results for the Resolutions and Elections

3pm Wikimedian of the Year and Honorary Member Awards

3.30pm Thanks and close

Proxy voting

All voting for this year’s AGM will happen by proxy. Our current Articles of Association require members to be present in person at the AGM to vote on the day, something we’re not able to facilitate this year. This means all votes must be submitted by the proxy deadline which is 2pm on Thursday 16th July. You can find the director candidate statements here, ask them questions here, and read through the resolutions we’ll be voting on here.

Voting packs have been sent to all members by email, but if you haven’t received one and you think you should have, please do get in touch with Katie at membership@wikimedia.org.uk.

Sign up

You must register for the AGM on Eventbrite rather than on wiki as we need your full name, not Wikimedia user name, and we’ll be sending out video conference links to all attendees registered through Eventbrite closer to the date.

If you have any questions or more general comments, please do get in touch with Katie at membership@wikimedia.org.uk.

We look forward to seeing you next Saturday!

If you’d like to join Wikimedia UK as a member or renew your current membership, you can do so here. To support free access to knowledge through our programmes, you can support us here.

The post Just one week left to sign up for our 2020 AGM! appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

This article was jointly authored by Thomas Shafee and Jack Nunn from the WikiJournals board, and edited by John Lubbock of Wikimedia UK.

The WikiJournals are a new group of peer-reviewed, open-access academic journals which are free to publish in. The twist is that articles published in them are integrated into Wikipedia. At the moment, there are three:

• www.WikiJMed.org (the original medical journal)
• www.WikiJSci.org (science, technology, engineering and mathematics)
• www.WikiJHum.org (humanities, arts, and social sciences)

WikiJournals are also highly unusual for academic journals, as they’re free for both readers and authors!

What WikiJournals hope to achieve:

The  aim of these journals is to generate new, high-quality peer-reviewed articles, which can form part of Wikipedia. As well as new articles, submissions can include existing Wikipedia pages, which are then subjected to the exact same rigour as any other submission.

The hope is that this new way of publishing peer-reviewed content will encourage academics, researchers, students and other experts to get involved in the process of creating and reviewing high-quality content for the Wikimedia project. It also allows participants a way of putting their contributions on their CV with an easily definable output (including DOI links and listing in indexes like Google Scholar).

When an article gets through the peer review process, there are two copies. The Journal copy can now be reliably cited and stays the same as a ‘version of record’ alongside the public reviewer comments. The Wikipedia version is free to evolve in the normal Wikipedia way as people update it over time, and is linked to the Journal article.

Since 2014, articles have been published on massive topics like Radiocarbon Dating and niche topics like Æthelflæd. They’ve also published meta analyses, original research, case studies, teaching material, diagrams and galleries!

How to get involved!

If this sounds like the sort of thing that you’d like to get involved in, support, or just spread the word on, there’s plenty of ways to contribute!

School projects

So here’s an example for a teacher. You have a class of 30 keen students who would normally all write an essay on a subject, have it read once, then never seen again. An alternative could be to have students in groups of 5 each chose a section of a neglected Wikipedia article to update and overhaul (there are millions of stub and start class articles to choose from). Each group writes a section of the article, then proofreads each others sections (WikiEdu has a great dashboard for this). Once the article is up to scratch, it’s submitted to the relevant WikiJournal who reaches out to experts in the topic to give in-depth feedback on what can be improved. If you and your students are able to fully address those comments then the article can be published and you and your students have just generated a new Wikipedia article read by thousands, and an academic article to put on their CVs!

Teachers who would consider using this method as an assessed class exercise can ask for advice from Wikimedia UK. We think that this workflow offers a useful alternative to simply having students write parts of Wikipedia articles in class, which may be harder to assess, and doesn’t provide a final product as tangible as a published journal article.

Academic outreach

The current priorities for the WikiJournals are to expand and improve representation on their editorial boards, and to invite article submissions. If you would like to volunteer in these roles, we encourage you to talk to the WikiJournal organisers.

If you are based in a UK academic institution at a course that has a strong strategic overlap with Wikimedia UK’s strategic priorities, you can also email education@wikimedia.org.uk to talk to us about providing advice on using WikiJournals as part of your course.

Individuals

The journals always welcome new submissions. Whether they’re written by a professor or a student, all go through the same process. You could get a team together to submit a brand new article. Or maybe you could overhaul and submit an existing Wikipedia page. You could even help translate an existing article.

They have a public discussion forum (typical for a wiki, unusual for a journal!) where you can share ideas for improvements, other projects they could reach out to or point out gaps in Wikipedia’s content where they could invite researchers to write an article.

Each journal has a twitter and facebook account (@WikiJMed, @WikiJSci and @WikiJHum) so feel free to chat with them there. You can even suggest social media posts or accounts to follow. Not into social media? Maybe put a poster in your university tearoom.

The post What are WikiJournals? appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

In December 1996 I published on the web around 150 of my poems under the title ‘Rebel ar y We’ (‘Rebel on the Web’); subsequently changed in 2005 to ‘Rhedeg ar Wydr’ (Running on a Glass (roof)). They were published on the open web, with no charge to access them. Little did I think at the time that it would take 20 years for the cultural sector in Wales to follow suit. Some establishments such as the National Library of Wales and Coleg Cymraeg (Federal University) opened their doors, others, such as the BBC, carefully and gradually unlocked their doors, and others such as Cadw (the counterpart of English Heritage) kept their doors tight shut, with a ‘Crown Copyright’ notice clamped on every one of their two million images and text.

In the Welsh newspaper Y Cymro on the 12th February 1997 I said, “Many people have asked me to publish an old-fashioned-type-paper-book of poems, but I prefer publishing on the latest technology – sharing my poems freely to every person on this planet. The same week, Golwg mentioned that “Robin warned that publishers must move on with the age, or face the fact that the Welsh language will be left to die, on the shelf of an old and dusty library. The volume of poems (for what they’re worth!) can still be accessed on the Web Archive.

On the one hand we have moved on in the last 20 years: more than a thousand ebooks have been published in Welsh since that first one in December 1996, and the National Library are currently uploading text and 120,000 images under a free and open licence onto Wikimedia Commons. On the other hand, we can NOT upload one image from Cadw onto Commons, unless a sum of £40 per image is paid to them! ‘Ownership’, selfishly, is still a cornerstone of most people’s live – not only establishments such as Cadw – but also to many individual authors who believe that stamping a copyright notice on their work will possibly, one day make them a fortune! Yet, if a Welsh language book sells 2,000 copies – it’s a bestseller! The idea of sharing information and literature freely disappeared from the Welsh psyche in the 1980s. But it’s coming back, and coming fast.

In the spring of 2015 BBC Wales released many articles to Wicipedia Cymraeg and their text has been used on cy-wiki. This was a large and brave step, and surprisingly: the world did not end. Today, BBC Wales have used Wikipedia to create a game in celebration of tomorrow’s St David’s Day. Geolocations on the List of Welsh Saints were used to create fictitious saint names on the BBC website, which includes links to both Welsh and English Wikipedia articles. Another brave step, and the solid, metal door opens another inch.

We look forward to seeing more content being shared openly by the BBC; for at the end of the day, it’s all about sharing and widening access to information that we as licence fee payers and taxpayers have paid for. And sharing on the world platform is better than storing content in metal filing cabinets in cold archives of dusty, archaic establishments.

Try the game for yourself.

The post The BBC and A Game of Saints appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

The Budapest Open Access Declaration is one of the defining documents of the Open Access movement. It says that free, unrestricted access to peer-reviewed scholarly literature will “accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.”

To bring about this optimistic vision, there needs to be some way to deliver this knowledge directly to everyone on the planet. Rather than broadcasting to passive recipients, this needs to encourage repurposing and remixing of research outputs, so people can adapt them into educational materials, translate them into other languages, extract data from them, and find other uses.

Fifteen years after its creation in January 2001, Wikipedia is emerging as that creative space. Wikipedia is not a competitor to normal scholarly publication, but a bridge connecting it to the world of informal learning and discussion. Wikipedia is only meant to be a starting point: its credibility does not come from its contributors, who are often anonymous, but from checkable citations to reputable sources.

Being “the free encyclopedia” reflects not just that Wikipedia is available without charge, but that it is free for use by anyone for any purpose, subject to the requirements of the most liberal Creative Commons licences. These freedoms are a part of its success: on the article about your favourite topic, click “View history”, then “Page view statistics”: it is not uncommon to see a scientific article getting thousands of hits per day.

When a team in 2015 announced the discovery of a new hominid, Homo Naledi, the extensive diagrams, fossil photos and other supplements they produced exceeded the size limit set by their first choice of journal, Nature. So they went to the open-access journal eLIFE. As well as publishing the peer reviews along with the paper, eLIFE uses a very liberal licence, so figures from the paper made it possible to create a comprehensive Wikipedia article for Homo Naledi, and to improve related articles.

There are many more cases where a research paper is adapted into a Wikipedia article which acts as a lay summary. For example, the article on Major Urinary Proteins was written by scientists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute based on, and using figures from, papers they had published in PLOS open-access journals.

Editing Wikipedia used to involve learning a form of markup called “wiki code”. Thanks to some software development, this is no longer necessary. When you register an account, each article presents two tabs “Edit” and “Edit source”. “Edit source” gives you the old wiki code interface; but “Edit” gives a much more straightforward wordprocessor-like interface. Especially handy is the “Cite” button, which can convert a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) into a full citation.

Still much about Wikipedia is poorly-designed and dependent on insider knowledge. Luckily there are insiders who are keen to share, and training is available. The Royal Society of Chemistry, Cancer Research UK and the Royal Society are amongst the scientific bodies which have employed Wikipedians In Residence. As WIR at the Bodleian Libraries, I have run events to improve articles on Women In Science and am celebrating Wikipedia’s 15th birthday working with researchers and students from the Oxford Internet Institute to improve articles about the “social internet”.

Wikimedia encompasses more than just Wikipedia: it is an ecosystem of different projects handling and repurposing text, data and digital media. There are many sites that you can use without charge to share or build materials, but Wikimedia is distinctive in being a charitable project existing purely to share knowledge, with no adverts or other commercial influences.

Wikimedia Commons is the media archive, hosting photographs, diagrams, video clips and other digital media, along with author and source credits and other metadata. It currently offers just under 30 million files, of which tens of thousands are extracted from figures or supplementary materials from Open Access papers. It’s a massively multilingual site, where each file can have descriptions in many languages, and one of the repurposing activities going on is creating alternative language versions of labelled diagrams.

Wikidata describes itself as “a free linked database that can be read and edited by both humans and machines”. It holds secondary data: not raw measurements, but key facts and figures concluded from them. Looking up Platinum, for example, gives the element’s periodic table placement, various official identifiers and physical properties. Wikidata holds knowledge about fifteen million entities, including species, molecules, astronomical bodies and diseases although the number is still rapidly growing.

What’s exciting about Wikidata is the uses it can be put to. Making data about many millions of things freely available enables a new generation of applications for education and reference. Reasonator gives a visually pleasing overview of what Wikidata knows about an entity. Histropedia (histropedia.com) is a tool for building timelines (try “Discovers of chemical elements”, then zoom in).

There are eleven Wikimedia projects in total each with its own strengths and flaws. My personal favourites include Wikisource – a library of open access and out-of-copyright text, including for example Michael Faraday’s Royal Institution lectures – and Wikibooks which aims to create textbooks for every level and topic from ABCs to genome sequencing.

As open access becomes more mainstream, technical and legal barriers around research outputs will diminish, so more research will become as “useful as it can be” through the Wikimedia projects. That benefits the research in terms of impact and public awareness, but it also benefits the end users who, in a connected world, are everybody.

The post Wikipedia and Open Access: making research as useful as it can be appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

Digitisation is not universal. Many archaeological societies would like to digitise their publications, particularly those which are out of copyright, but time and money can be difficult to come by. But progress is being made, and the ADS is a valuable resource to researchers.

NEW RELEASE: English Heritage Monographs. 84 titles covering some of the country’s most iconic heritage sites http://t.co/Y0EfpX56sE

— ADS (@ADS_Update) October 30, 2014

The release was so popular the ADS server struggled to keep up with the demand.

EH Monographs so popular our download server is struggling, please just open one at a time everyone — ADS (@ADS_Update) October 30, 2014

But what does this mean for Wikipedia? These books aren’t just reliable sources, they are written by some leading archaeologists, the likes of Philip Barker, Francis Pryor, and Timothy Darvill. In many cases, these are the definitive works on a particular subject. The 1990 survey and history of Carlisle Castle should be the starting place for anyone looking for detailed information on the site. The account of the excavations at Beeston Castle are the most detailed available.

The breadth and depth of these books is tremendous, and cover prehistory right up to the 20th century. It’s not hard to imagine how they could be used in Wikipedia. The pages on Acton Court (224 words) and Camber Castle (265 words) are both very short, yet have entire books written about them. Battle Abbey (686 words), Wroxeter Roman city (698 words), and Bodmin Moor (1,037 words) could be a lot more detailed and during November was read more than 1,000 times. Even sites as well known as Hadrian’s Wall which have lengthy articles could benefit from the quality of information available.

Wikipedia has an important role to play, not just in helping people discover this information but in accommodating a general audience. These monographs are often technical, and Wikipedia can be an easily accessible bridge. By using these sources to improve Wikipedia, editors are also helping English Heritage and ADS spread this information and making it more accessible.

Work has already begun: an IP has visited many of the relevant articles and added the publication available through ADS and English Heritage as a source, but there’s plenty still to do. So browse through the list and see if something catches your eye. Maybe you can be the one to make a difference to the reader.

In case you missed it ADS and @EnglishHeritage have released 84 EH Archaeological Monographs http://t.co/XgsIlQFy5M pic.twitter.com/H6AOICBYKL — ADS (@ADS_Update) November 10, 2014

The post English Heritage and the Archaeological Data Service: What does it mean to Wikipedia? appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

This post was written by Dr Martin Poulter, Wikimedia UK volunteer and Wikipedian

As part of Open Access Week, I’d like to explore some overlaps between Open Access and what we do in Wikimedia, and end with an announcement that I’m very excited about.

We who write Wikipedia do not expect readers to believe something just because Wikipedia says so. We cite our sources and hope that readers will follow the links and check for themselves. This is a kind of continuous quality control: if readers verify Wikipedia’s sources, then bias and misrepresentation will be winnowed out. However, we do not yet live in that ideal world. A huge amount of research is still hidden behind “paywalls” that charge startlingly high amounts per paper.

Here in the UK, a lot of progress is being made in opening up research, thanks to the policies of major funding bodies including Research Councils UK and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. This is a difficult cultural change for many researchers, but Wikipedia and its sister sites show that a totally open-access publishing system can work. These sites also provide platforms that give that greatest exposure and reuse for open access materials.

Open Access in the Broadest Sense

There is much more to open access than being able to read papers without paying. The OA agenda is about getting the full benefits of research, removing technical or legal barriers that restrict progress. You may sometimes hear about “Budapest” OA, referring to the 2002 declaration of the Budapest Open Access Initiative which said that open access would “accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.”

Open Access is ideally about unrestricted outputs to all the outputs of research, not just the finished research paper. Can the expert community get hold of the data and run their own analysis to check the conclusions? Can a lecturer use a paper’s figures to make educational materials? If not, it is arguably not open.

Openness is not just about whether you can access research outputs, but whether you can repurpose and reuse them. On Wikipedia, we want to use diagrams with text labels and translate those labels into other languages for our global audience. Some image formats make this easy while others make it difficult. Researchers will not just want to look at data tables but want them in a format that can be copied into their software for analysis.

We can also ask for open access to information about the review process: what faults did reviewers identify in the submitted paper, and what editorial changes were made as a result? We could also include open access to measures of impact: the metrics that help to show if a new finding is significant for its field or for public debate.

Metascience, the study of the scientific process, is all but impossible without open access. If we want to test whether different funders of research get different results, we need to mine large amounts of data about research studies. This requires not just the research outputs themselves but data about how, when, and by whom the studies were funded. To study biases in publication, you need to know not only what was published but also what trials have been conducted.

Wikipedia and the Open Agenda

Wikipedia and its sister projects embrace all aspects of “open” in the Budapest sense, not just that readers do not pay. The articles themselves can be copied, analysed, and reused by anyone, for any purpose. An article’s evolution, including any reviews it has gone through, is publicly examinable. Many kinds of data are available; about users’ contributions, about the number of edits, or about the readership of articles. These data give us ways to assess the reach and significance of experts’ contributions to Wikipedia.

For scientists, improving Wikipedia is not just a way to feed public curiosity about their work: it could improve science itself. A team at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge have for years been sharing their database of proteins on Wikipedia. Not only does this combine their data with other knowledge about the proteins, but it allows a new audience to improve the database.

Wikimedia sites offer new models for academic publishing. A few weeks ago saw the first peer-reviewed paper to be authored on Wikipedia: a clinical review paper about dengue fever. Among the new challenges for the journal was how to credit the authors for this paper with 1,373 contributors. Alongside this “Wiki-to-Journal publication” there is “Journal-to-Wiki”, exemplified by several articles published on Wikipedia by the journal PLoS Computational Biology.

A software “robot” called the Open Access Media Importer takes photos, diagrams, and video clips from suitable research papers and uploads them to Wikimedia Commons, with full attribution to the original authors and paper. From Commons they can be used to illustrate Wikipedia articles or materials on any other site.

Wikidata, the newest Wikimedia project, has many millions of facts and figures about everything from Ebola virus disease to the Hubble Space Telescope. At Wikimania this Summer, Peter Murray Rust, the University of Cambridge chemist who coined the term “Open Data”, said “Wikidata is the future of science data. […] We [Wikimedians] are going to change the world.”

So there is a rapidly expanding overlap between science and Wikimedia. How will the scientific community – including researchers, educators, publishers, funders, and scholarly societies – keep up? A vital next step is to get people together in the same room: professionals and volunteers; bold innovators and curious newcomers.

This is why Wikimedia UK is working towards holding the first ever Wikipedia Science Conference. This will take place next September 2015 in London. It is a chance to explore how all aspects of openness – including open access, open data, open scholarship, and open source software – can transform the world’s understanding of, engagement with, and even practice of science. Details are still being worked out, but we have a long time to prepare and to make this a landmark event. We hope to see you there.

The post Using Wikipedia to open up science appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

This post was written by Wikimedia UK Associate, Dr Martin Poulter

The first of April this year is a significant date for researchers here in the UK. It’s when a new policy comes into place, beginning a journey towards open access (OA) for publicly funded research.

This is a top-down policy from the Government’s (via the Finch Report), the Research Councils, and other funding bodies, but it follows years of campaigning by a grass-roots movement of academics and librarians. Open Access made headlines last year in what the Guardian dubbed “the Academic Spring”, when many academics started a boycott of journals that lock research papers behind a “paywall”.

The official policy is a huge step forward for open access in the UK, and comes at a time when the European Commission has announced its own OA policy. Just in the last few weeks the White House announced a new policy to make the reports of taxpayer-funded research openly available.

These developments affect whether the public can access reports of taxpayer-funded research without meeting a paywall. The UK policy affects new research papers, not those already published. It also affects how research is licensed: whether you and I have rights to copy and adapt the text or images of a paper.

However, the open agenda doesn’t stop at access to research results. There is also increasing pressure for public access to the underlying data and for greater openness and transparency around the process of research, for example with standardised information about funding.

Attending an event at the Royal Society recently, there was agreement about the merits of open access, but wide disagreement about the consequences. Will commercial publishers be banished from the academy, or will pay-to-publish mean they charge twice for the same work? Will more scientific papers be published, or fewer? Will learned societies – some of whom support their work with non-open-access journals – go extinct or will they flourish even more?

However, there has been relatively little mention of how this affects Wikimedia (meaning Wikipedia, its sister projects such as Wikiversity, and the communities that support them). For a lot of research, Wikipedia and Wikimedia are a gateway to a huge global audience, including taxpayers who ultimately fund public research, and including academics in poorer countries who are less able to access the original papers.

WIkipedia itself is written, reviewed and illustrated by volunteers. Some of us have day-jobs in universities or research institutions, but for those who don’t, the paywalls lock away content that could really help us improve articles on difficult academic topics. The difficulty of getting the best sources, while so much junk research and opinion is freely accessible, has a dumbing-down effect on the web: Wikipedia seeks to counter that trend, and open access would make that easier for us.

Wikipedia contributions are challenged, checked and reviewed through various formal and informal processes, so it’s not just the person writing articles who needs access to the original research: other users need access to verify that the Wikipedia summary is fair and accurate.

The question of licensing is no less important. Wikipedia and its sister sites require illustrations, and if researchers’ figures and video clips, such as the one on this blog post, can be freely copied and adapted, with attribution of the original authors, that would be an enormous boost.

Under the new open-access policy, publicly-funded researchers will face a choice between “gold” and “green” publication. Gold open access makes papers immediately available under a Wikipedia-compatible Creative Commons Attribution licence. Green OA means that papers are published normally but also made freely available after a delay of between six months and two years.

Green OA can involve a Wikipedia-compatible licence, but licences with a non-commercial (NC) option are also considered green under the new policy. Non-commercial activity is hard to define and so NC licences prevent some legitimate educational uses. That’s why NC content is not compatible with the Wikimedia projects. We have to hope that researchers will avoid non-commercial clauses and that their institutions will educate them so that they understand the significance of the decision.

Fortunately, there are simple solutions to making research academically credible and Wikipedia-compatible. There are peer-reviewed journals whose contents all have a Wikipedia-compatible licence, including the PLOS journals, or the new PeerJ. These are just examples and many alternatives are available.

Wherever researchers publish their papers, they can share figures, video clips or other media through services such as Figshare, which has a Wikipedia-compatible licence, or through Wikimedia’s own media-sharing site,  Wikimedia Commons. This is a way to assert ownership of those media and the authors’ right to be credited, while at the same time giving the greatest opportunity for public benefit.

I hope that scientists and scholars, when deciding where to publish research, will give a thought to the Wikipedia authors who are trying to improve articles about their topic.

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