Adam Harangozó stepped into the role in December 2025, combining sharing openly licensed content, training and preparing learning resources, with bibliometrics tools to help researchers make their work more visible. The project will last for two years and aims to support LSE and the wider international social science community in developing open knowledge and sharing insights and expertise through the Wikimedia projects. Adam has previously worked as a Wikimedian in Residence for the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and the Blinken Open Society Archives (based in Budapest).

At Wikimedia UK, we are very excited to be working with both LSE and Adam. This is the fourth residency active at a UK university – joining Edinburgh, Exeter, and Leeds – and the first to focus specifically on social science.

As well as joining LSE’s community, Adam joins Wikimedia UK’s community of Wikimedians in Residence who learn from and support each other. LSE’s ‘Research for the World’ strategy aligns closely with WMUK’s aims, setting out how LSE seeks to “generate the knowledge and insight the world needs to build a more sustainable, prosperous and equitable future.”

The post Introducing the new Wikimedian In Residence at LSE appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

10 years ago I turned up for my first day at work as a Wikipedian in Residence at the National Library of Wales. I had a 12 month contract and instructions to hold 3 Wikipedia Edit-a-thons, share some images openly to Wikimedia Commons and monitor the impact. 

A decade later and I’m still here! I’ve transitioned from Wikipedian in Residence to National Wikimedian, to Open Data Manager, with Wikimedia projects still firmly at the heart of what I do at the Library. We have shared over 150,000 images to the Commons with 1.5 Billion views. I’ve held 97 workshops and edit-a-thons, delivered 10 grant funded projects and overseen the creation of thousands of new Wikipedia articles, mostly in Welsh. In this time the role has evolved dramatically but the core principles of openness, engagement and innovation have remained unchanged. 

Reaching this milestone is an opportunity to reflect on the achievements and challenges of the last 10 years, and to think about what the next decade might look like in a rapidly changing digital landscape.

On a personal level the role has certainly helped shape me professionally and as a person. I’ve become a passionate advocate for open access, for the Welsh language and for open knowledge. When I took up the role, my skills lay mainly in research but I’ve learned a huge amount about community building, about impact and evaluation and my technical skills have increased dramatically. I’ve taught myself how to bulk upload to Commons and Wikidata, how to write a SPARQL query and even how to run python scripts and bots, which is incredibly empowering. But the area I love most is strategy. It’s taken a while, but I’ve learned to think strategically about my work; how tasks and projects help build towards broader goals and how to maximize impact, or public benefit, through my activities.

I think it’s important to acknowledge that none of this would have been possible without the continued support of management at the National Library. In my time here I’ve seen many brilliant residencies come and go and the Library’s commitment to this work, long term, is something not often seen in the GLAM sector. I’ve also been given the freedom to try things out, to explore leads that sometimes go nowhere and to implement new ideas. About 6 months into the residency I remember being introduced to Wikidata for the first time at Wikimedia UK’s old London Office. I immediately saw huge potential for describing and linking cultural heritage data and was given the time to explore this further. As a result we became an early adopter of Wikidata in the GLAM sector, hired the world’s first, and only (to my knowledge) Wikidata Visiting Scholar. The library has contributed millions of edits to Wikidata, expanding linked open data about Wales and its people. Time and time again I’ve been given the freedom to design my own projects and to travel to share skills and learn from the global community. I’m certain that a more rigid, micro managed approach would have seen the work and the funding dwindle away early on.

In terms of why the library has continued to fund this work, there are a number of reasons. Firstly impacts such as massive image views on Wikipedia, public engagement and support for the Welsh language align with the institution’s core values. Around 5 years ago we started counting views of Wikipedia pages containing our images as a key performance indicator, reporting quarterly to the Welsh Government. I’ve built relationships with many other institutions through our Wiki work, from universities and GLAMs to governing bodies. In year two we also formed a close relationship with the Welsh Government around their work to support Welsh language technology and education. And all this has led to a number of grant funded projects and collaborations in the digital scholarship space – effectively subsidising the cost of my role, whilst building partnerships, communities and improving Welsh knowledge online.

To some extent the longevity of my residency is probably also down to the ever evolving scope of my work. I’ve always tried to observe how people want and expect to be able to access knowledge and adapt my work to ensure the library is supporting the creation and maintenance of knowledge in that space. 

Early in the residency the focus was very much on Wikipedia. That is where people go for information, so that is where we should be; training new editors, sharing our collections and our knowledge. Many of our early projects focused on these goals. We ran a project on Welsh Pop Music, creating Welsh language articles about Welsh singers and bands. We even convinced a Welsh record label to share short clips of songs, and album artworks to Wikimedia Commons. Another project which I’m particularly proud of focused on creating health related content in Welsh. Welsh Wikipedia lacked key articles about diseases, treatments and mental health topics. I remember a conversation with a first language Welsh speaker who had suffered with depression and anxiety telling me that she was volunteering to write relevant content so that others didn’t have to read about their diagnosis in their second language. For me that was a powerful reminder of why supporting Wikipedia in smaller languages is so important.

In 2018, we hosted the second Celtic Knot Conference at the Library. Supported by Wikimedia UK and originally aimed at engaging small Celtic languages on Wikipedia, the conference has grown in scope to a global Wiki conference for small and minority languages, with participants from all over the world.

Education has also been a focus over the years. Young people in particular rely on the internet to learn. Early in the project educators were often wary of having anything to do with Wikipedia, but we’ve seen a real transformation, with most now embracing Wikipedia, accepting that students are going to use it anyway, and engaging with it to help them understand how it works and how to use it responsibly. In 2019, with funding from the Education Department we developed the “WikiAddysg” (Wiki Education) project, aimed at improving Welsh Wikipedia content related to the secondary school History syllabus in Wales. We consulted with teachers, secured open access to Welsh learning resources from a number of organisations and hired a former history teacher to help us adapt the content for Wikipedia. We even commissioned short educational videos to compliment the articles. For many years we’ve also supported Menter Iaith Môn’s Wikipedian, who has been running Wiki events in schools in Anglesey, North Wales. Wikimedia UK has been super supportive in securing a foothold for Wikipedia in Welsh education and I’m full of hope that this area of work will continue to grow.

We continue to support Wikipedia with regular edit-a-thons, tailored volunteer training and research into automated methods of creating Welsh language articles. However, over time our focus has shifted to encompass data. Over the last decade, the value of open data for research, learning and commerce has been increasingly acknowledged. It allows for siloed datasets to be interlinked, it allows communities to collaborate to improve and enrich knowledge as data and helps power new and innovative tools for knowledge exchange. And this was before the AI boom, where we are increasingly aware that computer models are only as good as the data which powers them.

I think it’s fair to say that Wikidata has become the largest collection of open cultural heritage data the world has ever seen. You can look up an artist, a poet or scribe and see links to their archives in institutions all over the world, or see an artist’s life work in one place. Linked Open Data is now seen as the gold data standard by many – a modern data infrastructure for cultural heritage data with common standards and structure. Like many public sector institutions we have faced constant cuts to our budget, and platforms like Wikidata and Wikibase have been a way for us to begin the process of modernising our data, of linking it to other datasets in Wales and beyond with minimal investment and in an inclusive, open and collaborative way.

Last year, we launched our Welsh Name Authority Wikibase, which already links over 100,000 Welsh people and places across collections and institutions. We’ve also worked closely with the Welsh Language Commissioner since 2023, aligning their data to Wikidata and other Welsh heritage data. Wikidata lets us do this bilingually, so we can make our datasets available in Welsh for the first time. We’ve already seen the value in investing in this Open Data. The Welsh Government, the BBC, The Welsh Biography Online and Mapio Cymru (Welsh OpenStreetMap) have all used our data. We helped improve a popular daily Welsh language quiz app that uses Wikidata to create a huge bank of questions, and what3words launched a Welsh language edition thanks in part to Welsh language Wikidata labels. 

Just last year, the Welsh Language Commissioner launched a new website for their database of standardized Welsh place names, and thanks to the alignment with Wikidata they’ve been able to include images and sound clips from Commons and links to Wikipedia articles, creating a rich user experience. I’m particularly fond of this collaboration as an example of community and institution working together. The idea of combining authoritative data with crowdsourced data not only leads to better tools and services but fosters an inclusive space where everyone can be empowered to contribute their voice, their knowledge and their passions.

There have, of course, been challenges and frustrations along the way. Many fixed term residents finish their posting without having affected fundamental changes within their host organisation, and that’s not to say that these residencies were a failure, just a reminder that the wheels of change move very slowly in many GLAM organisations, and ours is no different. Before I was appointed the library had made a bold policy move (bold at the time) by relinquishing any claim to digital reproductions out of copyright works, and it was this decision which allowed me to get right to uploading content to Commons. But shifting the organisational culture to an “open by default” mentality is an ongoing and occasionally circular conversation. Much of the reluctance to be more Open, in the library and other organisations I’ve worked with boils down to budgetary pressures, a lack of confidence in making big changes to long established systems and sometimes just a difference in interpretation of licensing and copyright law. I’m confident though that things are moving in the right direction, highlighted by our recent release of over 120,000 photographs to Commons, documenting Welsh life in the 1950s and 60s.

The Wikiverse can also be a tricky place to navigate at times. Tools for uploading images and monitoring impact tend to break from time to time, and when they are replaced with new ones the learning process starts all over again. Most of these tools only exist at all thanks to dedicated volunteers, and it would be great to see more support from the Wikimedia Foundation in creating a stable toolset for partner organisations. Once again though it feels like things are now moving in the right direction.

Of course, the biggest challenge facing Wikimedia UK and the wider Wiki movement is how to respond to the rise of Generative AI. It’s also a topic taking up more and more of my time. How good will it get? And how soon? How can we correct mistakes and tackle inherent bias? How do we ensure smaller languages are not left behind? These are just a few of the questions I’ve been asking myself. So as I look to the future I’m left thinking that perhaps the golden age of Wikipedia as a destination has passed. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less important, especially in smaller languages. If, as a society, we continue to value the vision of free knowledge for all, the Wiki projects will continue to be the most effective way of achieving this, and the most effective way of feeding new knowledge into the digital space.

I don’t think anyone really knows how the next ten years will play out but I hope we can continue to build on the momentum towards an Open society and to use new technologies for good; for sharing knowledge more widely in all languages, for reducing bias and for linking our knowledge together across institutions, sectors and cultures. For as long as Wikimedia and its volunteers represent these values I’m confident that Wikimedians in Residence will continue to further the cause, driving digital transformation in their host institutions which benefit society as a whole.

The post A decade of collaboration between Wikimedia UK and the National Library of Wales: Building a sustainable future for Welsh culture online appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

It was heartening seeing so many of our community at the celebration. There were around 40 community members, attending from all over the UK. With the event being online in the midst of Storm Bert raging, it meant that people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend were able to do so.

We were welcomed by our Chief Executive Lucy Crompton-Reid, who thanked the community for the incredible work they contribute to Wikimedia projects and Open Knowledge. To highlight their impact in 2024 there were 231 instances of a lead / organiser / speaker, of which 147 were non-Wikimedia UK staff, or 63.7%. An incredible contribution from the community.

We then launched into a series of lightning talks delivered by members of the Community about their work this year. These presentations were a (small!) selection to highlight the tremendous work  community members have been working on over the last year.

Jason Evans, Open Data Manager and National Wikimedian at the National Library of Wales told us about AI, Placenames and Time Machine experiments at the National Library of Wales.

Dr Kirsty Ross from the University of St Andrews, who is also one of the co-founders of the IDEA network told us about how Scottish Brick History (SBH) and Wikimedia UK. Researchers from the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews collaborated to get a unique dataset about Scotland’s brickworks onto Wikidata, and built web visualisations to showcase the work.

Lucy Moore, a Wikimedian based in Leeds, and who won UK Wikimedian of the year 2022 told us about her Wiki Year!

Nick Sheppard, Open Research Adviser based at the University of Leeds Libraries told us about his journey from his first tentative edit in 2017 (flagged as spam) to becoming a committed advocate for Wikimedia in Universities.

Jonathan Deamer from Liverpool, who describes himself as a Wikimedia hobbyist, told us about attending his first Wikimania in Katowice in Poland this year. He shared with us his highlights from the event and how these have had a tangible impact on his daily editing.

Joanne Forster-Martin, a student at the University of Oxford, and who we met at our recent Train the Trainer weekend told us about the Wiki Women in Red project to uncover the hidden female figures of Jesus College, Oxford.

Adam Harangzo, Wikipedian in Residence at the National Institute for Health and Care Research talked to us about his experience of working with researchers in an impactful way where they contribute to Wikipedia without directly editing it.

UK Wikimedian of the Year Awards

Next, last year’s Wikimedian of the Year, Nick Sheppard, announced the winners of this year’s UK Wikimedian of the Year Awards. Thank you to everyone who made nominations and a huge well done to all the nominees, honorable mentions and the winners highlighted below. 

UK Wikimedian of the Year: Fran Allfrey

Partnership of the Year: Glam E Lab (Andrea Walace and Francesca Farmer)

Up and Coming Wikimedian: User: Peregrinate Avellana (Hazel)

Wiki Loves Earth Winners

From one set of winners to another, we showcased the winners of this year’s Wiki Loves Earth. This was the first time we ran the competition in Scotland and the calibre of photos was incredibly high. There were 700 entries in total from Scotland.

Wales came 4th overall in the competition with over 3000 images entered. Judges were so impressed by the quality of the images and commented on how difficult it was to choose winners. Thank you to everyone who was involved in supporting the competition to run this year; from those who contributed images, the judges and everyone involved in all the behind the scenes work that goes into making it happen.  

You can see the full list of winners for Wales and Scotland.

Finally Dr Sara Thomas, Programme Manager at WMUK told us about a new opportunity for the community to share their learning through a peer learning programme of events.  Please contact her directly at sara.thomas@wikimedia.org.uk if you would like to be involved in sharing your Wiki knowledge, expertise and skills with other community members.

Volunteers can also apply for Project Grants to support their Wiki activities throughout the year. If you’d like to hear about future UK community events and how you can get involved please sign up for our newsletter, or join our membership to help govern the charity.

The post WMUK 2024 Community Celebration – videos and resources appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

Since 2022, the NIHR has been piloting the use of Wikipedia as an innovative platform to share research results. In just over a year, working with researchers, patient and public contributors and NIHR staff, we have updated and expanded 400 Wikipedia articles with findings from NIHR-funded research.

The updated Wikipedia content now includes up to 300 citations to NIHR Evidence, and 200 citations to NIHR journals, plus other references to NIHR-funded studies. Following our edits, these articles have garnered an impressive 75 million views.

The Wikipedia project is now gaining momentum across the NIHR. What started as a pilot will turn into a permanent strand of our dissemination strategy. We expect this to lead to increased evidence uptake in policy and practice, and help to make knowledge more open.

Table: Some of the articles we have edited on Wikipedia and the number of times they have been viewed since our additions

Why should researchers use Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia that is free to use and simple to edit. Contrary to popular belief, its editing policies and army of editors ensure that it is a reliable source of health information. It is also one of the most visited health resources on the internet. In 2019, Wikipedia’s medical content had more than 2 billion page views.

Referencing NIHR research on Wikipedia makes our research more accessible. It reaches a wide audience that includes laypeople and healthcare professionals alike. Studies have suggested that 50 – 70% of doctors consult Wikipedia for healthcare information. It was also found to be one of the most used resources by medical students.

Concerns and preconceptions about the reliability of Wikipedia need to be acknowledged. Yet, in my time at the NIHR, I’ve seen these worries fade away when I explain how Wikipedia works, and its checks and balances for accuracy. Most people are pleasantly surprised at how important Wikipedia is for health information, and how user-friendly it is.

Collaborative Wikipedia editing workshops

There is an appetite for harnessing Wikipedia’s potential. Several NIHR research teams and centres are now interested in integrating Wikipedia editing into their dissemination strategy. Some include it as part of their funding application.

Our thematic editing workshops for researchers, patients and members of the public have been impactful.

Other than access to the internet, there are no technical requirements. Prior knowledge of Wikipedia editing is unnecessary. Technical aspects are taken care of by the Wikipedian so participants can focus on enriching content.

During these workshops, 10-20 participants collaborate and aim to improve the quality of a single Wikipedia page corresponding to their research area.

For example, multiple long-term conditions are an area of strategic focus for the NIHR. But the Wikipedia page on multiple long-term conditions was short and outdated. It lacked evidence from the past 10 years. Following a workshop, the article now includes detailed evidence from NIHR-funded studies. It describes how terminology has changed, the impact of multiple long-term conditions on quality of life, and other updates.

In another workshop, we collaborated with the NIHR’s Mental Health Policy Research Unit. Together, we updated the article on the remote delivery of psychiatric care, known also as telepsychiatry. This expanded article now reflects their research on the practice and impact of telepsychiatry during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Graph: Improved content draws in more readers: Increased monthly traffic of the Multiple Long Term Conditions article following our workshop

Exploring new horizons

We have built a strong foundation for Wikipedia editing at the NIHR, with new opportunities for researchers to share and refine information on vital research. Many more topics could be covered in editing workshops, and previously edited articles can be updated as new evidence is published.

Social care, patient and public involvement, health equity, and global health are areas with untapped potential for Wikipedia editing.

We have started to deliver global health Wikipedia workshops, which will help share global health research with a lay audience, reaching additional people, potentially local audiences too as articles could be translated into other languages as well.

We are exploring how to nurture the next generation of health and care professionals and researchers. We are talking to health librarians and university departments, and suggesting that Wikipedia editing could be an assignment for medical students.

Discover more about the Wikipedia project

Wikipedia offers plenty of opportunities to share research widely. We can bring together a diverse community of researchers and patients to work on sharing health and care knowledge effectively. This will help ensure that more people can access the NIHR’s research, and perhaps also transcend language barriers.

As Wikipedian-in-residence, I’m looking forward to new developments in knowledge sharing, and continued growth in access to information.

To learn more about the NIHR Wikipedia project, contact Adam Harangozo.

The post How Wikipedia can help to disseminate research: an innovative NIHR project appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

In 2022, Martin and Waqās Ahmed researched the extent to which the western art canon was represented on the wiki projects in comparison to the art of other cultures. Unsurprisingly, western art has much higher representation. But with the help of the Khalili Foundation’s images and expertise, as well as native language speakers from the wider Wikimedia community, this residency is filling the gap.

The residency has previously shared over 1500 from all eight Khalili Collections. These are used in 90 different Wikimedia platforms (up from 81 last year). Articles referencing these items and information from the Collection saw a rush of translations from English into other languages, enriching other language Wikipedias with this wealth of cultural heritage. This made it a record year for image views at 78.5 million views of Khalili images across all Wikimedia platforms.

In 2023 the emphasis of the residency shifted from sharing images and creating articles, to running events. Two editathons were hosted by Wellcome Collection and Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford. The Wikimedians of Islamic Civilization User Group hosted two online sessions about using Khalili Collections’ Islamic art in Arabic Wikipedia. Waqās made a presentation to Art UK using this project as a case study of successful sharing of cultural heritage on Wikimedia.

Milestones

• Fifteen new articles in English, Indonesian, Urdu, Malay and Spanish, bringing the total of new Wikipedia articles created to fifty.
• The Musa va ‘Uj article passed Good Article* review, becoming the eighth Good Article from this project.
• The project received an honourable mention in Wikimedia UK’s Partnership of the Year awards, both to the Khalili Collections for sharing images and Dr Glaire Anderson of the University of Edinburgh for using them in her teaching.
• Two images won Featured Picture* awards: one on English Wikipedia and another on Arabic Wikipedia.

• Two Featured Article* awards: Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam in English Wikipedia and Urdu Wikipedia, getting 52,771 page views over the course of the year
• Three articles featured in Wikipedia’s Did You Know? section: Musa va ‘Uj, Falnama, and Gulshan-i ‘Ishq.
• Substantial rewrites of the articles Cultural diversity, World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development, Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, and Falnama. Wikipedia’s articles about cultural diversity were a bit overloaded with legal detail and are now more accessible. These articles are collectively getting more than 10,000 views per month.
• 58,849 page views of English Wikipedia articles relating to the Khalili Collections.

Looking ahead

As the residency continues, Martin hopes to share more articles about art works and about topics that link multiple works (such as exhibitions). The residency also aims to promote cultural diversity more generally, by encouraging the community to improve Wikipedia articles about artists and masterpieces from all the world’s cultures.

For more information on our cultural partnerships, you can visit this page. We also have a Get Involved page which lists some of the ways you can explore exciting partnerships such as this one.

The post Khalili Foundation: Year in Review appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

In August 2023, Queer Britain collaborated with Wikimedia UK to host a Wikimedian in Residence project. From August to November, Evie Moore worked on improving content on Wikipedia and related websites, with a focus on topics relevant to Queer Britain. In this post, Evie reflects on the residency.

Project highlights

Over the past three months, I’ve had the opportunity of contributing to Wikimedia projects as part of my residency at Queer Britain. Despite encountering challenges throughout the residency, specifically limitations due to healing from a broken ankle and undergoing surgery within the residency period, the unwavering support and kindness from the wiki team transformed these obstacles into opportunities. Thanks to this collaborative effort, I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The residency has been both enriching and productive, allowing me to engage with various aspects of the Wikimedia community and make valuable contributions to LGBTQ+ representation on the platform.

Wikipedia article contributions

One of my primary tasks during the residency was enhancing the ‘LGBT rights in the UK’ Wikipedia article, expanding sections on Advocacy Organisations, LGBT representation in politics, Pride Parades, and Rights for Asylum. The comprehensive 1500+ words added aim to provide a well-rounded view of the current landscape of LGBTQ+ rights in the UK. The page is read on average 12,000 times a month so it’s an important source of information.

I also spent time improving the Wikipedia pages of LGBTQ+ figures such as Roberta Cowell. This involved fact-checking, correcting inaccuracies, and ensuring proper referencing. The goal was to provide accurate and comprehensive information about her life and contributions to the LGBTQ+ community.

Wikimedia Commons contributions

I contributed photographic content of the Queer Britain building to Wikimedia Commons. This not only serves as a visual representation but also adds a layer of accessibility for users seeking information about Queer Britain.

Increasing visibility

To enhance the visibility of Queer Britain, I strategically placed links to their page in the ‘see other’ section of related national Queer Museums and Archives. This cross-referencing helps users discover Queer Britain in the broader context of LGBTQ+ history and culture while constructing relationships between Queer museums and archives internationally. 

Collaboration

I engaged with Owen Blacker in discussions about the LGBTQ+ community on Wikipedia and explored the use of LGBTQ+ acronyms across the platform. These conversations were instrumental in gaining insights into the challenges and opportunities within the LGBTQ+ Wiki community.

I collaborated with Alice White on an upcoming edit-a-thon event at the Wellcome Collection, focusing on sourcing articles related to sexual health and education. This initiative aligns with Queer Britain’s commitment to diverse and inclusive representation within the LGBTQ+ spectrum.

I actively participated in the larger residency team, fostering collaboration and learning about diverse Wikimedia projects. Understanding the scope and shape of longer residencies proved beneficial in shaping the direction of my residency.

Research and data collection

Following on from my and Owens’s discussion, I conducted thorough research and collected data regarding the use of different acronyms such as LGBT, LGBT+, and LGBTQ+ This information can serve as a foundation for future initiatives focused on inclusivity and accurate representation, and can be utilised in future debates regarding which Acronym to use across Wikipedia.

Project pages and planning

I created a project page for Queer Britain, providing detailed information about the residency and Queer Britain itself. Additionally, internal planning for a future Wiki event at Queer Britain, titled ‘Queering Wikipedia,’ is underway. This edit-a-thon will emphasise the importance of accessible and open-source information in queer archiving.

Upon my return to the museum, I am looking forward to offering volunteers Wikipedia training, continuing to improve and expand on LGBTQ+ open source articles, collecting more photographic content to upload on Wikipedia Commons, and continuing to push for Wiki to use more inclusive and relevant acronyms for the LGBTQ+ community.

Summary stats

We used the Outreach Dashboard to summarise the impact of the residency on Wikipedia.

In conclusion, my Wikimedia residency at Queer Britain has been a fulfilling experience marked by collaboration, content creation, and community engagement. The impact of these contributions extends beyond the digital realm, promoting a more inclusive representation of LGBTQ+ history and culture on a global scale. I look forward to the continued growth of these initiatives and the positive impact they will have on Wikipedia’s LGBTQ+ content.

The post Queer Britain’s Wikimedian in Residence appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

On Sunday 26th November we were delighted to host our 2023 Community Meeting. It was a chance for our community to gather online, share the work that’s taken place over the last year, recognise that work through the UK Wikimedian of the Year awards, and find out more ways to get involved. 

We were welcomed by our Chief Executive Lucy Crompton-Reid, and then we launched into a series of Lightning Talks.

Lightning Talks

Dr Sarah Rogers, from the Royal College of Nursing’s History of Nursing Forum, told us about the Nurses in Red project.

Alexander – Patient Zero – told us about his journey with Wikipedia, from a young editor to one of the most active 10,000 editors on English Wikipedia.

Richard Davies told us about the work he’s been doing in the Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons coverage of the Welsh town of Wrecsam (Wrexham).

Becky Male told us about her work on the Hunger Strike Medal article, and how this led to a surprising discovery about the collection of Suffragette Pennies at the Glasgow Women’s Library.

Jonathan – WereSpielChequers – told us about the process of becoming an admin on English Wikipedia, and how the project needs more admins.

And Gill Ryan told us about the project that she ran in partnership with Perth Library this year on the Women of Perth.

In memoriam

In the last few years, we’ve sadly lost a few members of the UK Wikimedia community, and so we took some time to recognise the contributions that Lisa Lodwick, Jo Pugh, Richard Haslam, Les Barker and Richard Lawson made to the movement. They will be very much missed. 

UK Wikimedian of the Year Awards

Next we announced the winners of the UK Wikimedian of the Year Awards. For the full details of who won the awards, the fantastic work they’re doing, and who received an honourable mention, you can see this blog.

UK Wikimedian of the Year: Nick Sheppard

Partnership of the Year: Royal College of Nursing’s History of Nursing Forum – Nurses in Red

Up and Coming Wikimedian: Heidi Berg 

Opportunity Fair

And finally we closed with something new for us; the Opportunity Fair. Here we had a selection of projects with which we’d invite our community to get involved, as well as a range of ways that Wikimedia UK can support the community.

Protests & Suffragettes are looking for translators of articles they’ve been creating and improving about Scottish Suffrage/ttes, as well as help improving those articles – more information on their project page, or contact sara.thomas@wikimedia.org.uk.

Nadege Forde-Vidal, Historian & Community Project Developer at Sankofa London Schools is also looking for assistance, in the shape of after-school workshop leaders: www.sankofalondonschools.co.uk / nadege@sankofalondonschools.co.uk 

The National Library of Scotland uploaded a large number of Scottish Chapbooks to Wikimedia Commons / Wikisource during lockdown, with staff proofreading that work. There are still a number of these to be proofread and transcribed, and they can be found here. If you’d like to know more about how to become involved, or are interested in learning more about Wikisource, please contact sara.thomas@wikimedia.org.uk.

Dr Richard Nevell, Programme Manager, talked about Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Earth – we’re in need of assistance with Wikidata for Wiki Loves Earth, and a campaign organiser or organisers for Wiki Loves Monuments – if you’d like to know more please contact richard.nevell@wikimedia.org.uk.

Dr Lucy Hinnie told us about Let’s Connect, a peer learning group for any Wikimedian who is part of an organised group – there are regular events and a whole host of resources, and they can be found through their meta page. Lucy’s slides are here.

Karla Marte, our Programme Evaluation Coordinator, explained our Project and Volunteer Grants, and how they can support individual volunteers – there’s more information about this on our website where you can see examples of past grants, and there’s also an online application form.

Last but not least, our board member Rod Ward told us a little about the Community Development Committee, a new Board subcommittee, whose purpose is to advise the board on community and volunteer issues generally, and to consider any community-related matters that may be delegated to the Committee by the board.

Join us

If you’d like to hear about future UK community events and how you can get involved please sign up for our newsletter, or join our membership to help govern the charity.

The post WMUK 2023 Community Meeting – videos and opportunities appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

Since early 2023 I have been working with the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) and GLAM-E Lab in Exeter as their Wikimedian in Residence. These so-called ‘mini’ residencies are a key part of the Connected Heritage project: you can read all about Leah Emary’s experience as Wikimedian in Residence at the Mixed Museum here.

About RAMM and GLAM-E

The RAMM is the largest museum and art gallery in Exeter. It was founded in 1868 and holds over one million items. It was Museum of the Year in 2012. I have been working with Research Assistant Dr Francesca Farmer: Francesca is based within the GLAM-E Lab, part of The Centre for Science, Culture and the Law (SCuLE) at the University of Exeter. We have received support and guidance from Dr Andrea Wallace, Co-Director of the GLAM-E Lab. GLAM-E is ‘a joint initiative between the Centre for Science, Culture and the Law at the University of Exeter and the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU Law to work with smaller and less well-resourced UK and US cultural institutions and community organizations to build open access capacity and expertise’.

So what have we been doing? Our aim at the outset was for the Residency to scale up current open knowledge practice at RAMM. Dr Richard Nevell, Project Manager, had worked with Dr Wallace previously on the Cast In Stone project, and it was from this collaboration that ideas grew.

Supporting Image Uploads

As part of the Lab’s ongoing work with postgraduate students, earlier this year we supported the upload of a selection of images from the University of Exeter Special Collections. 

They are images from Christopher Saxton‘s 16th century atlas of England and Wales, and are of incredible quality. If you enjoy cartography and/or having a peek at old names for places, these will definitely be of interest to you. You can see the full selection here. If you live in England, you may even be able to spot where you live now.

By integrating these images more widely across Wiki platforms, we have been able to drive more traffic towards Special Collections, and increase viewer numbers.

Upskilling Volunteers

From April 2023, we worked with a group of digital volunteers at the Museum, providing a three-week introductory course to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Volunteers ranged from school leavers to those of retirement age, and had a vast array of experience and interests. Over the course of three weeks, we covered the basics of editing, common questions about Wiki and cultural heritage, and how to plan and formulate impactful edits. This course culminated in an online editing event in May 2023.

We were so taken with the material that we uncovered during this editing session, particularly the work of local historians on Devon Women in Public and Professional Life, 1900–1950: Votes, Voices and Vocations (available via Open Access here) that we have arranged another, larger-scale event in September: Devon in Red!

Devon in Red

Devon in Red is a public facing Wikithon in which authors of Devon Women in Public and Professional Life, 1900–1950: Votes, Voices and Vocations will speak to local volunteers and interested members of the public about their experience of researching this book, with an aim of adding even more information about these exceptional women to Wiki. Many of the women featured in this book do not have their own Wiki pages, and provide fascinating insight into Exeter’s history. 

If you are local to Exeter, you can register for the event here. Please note that some small bursaries are available to enable attendance for those who would otherwise be unable to attend. Please contact us at connectedheritage@wikimedia.org.uk for further information.

Establishing a Legacy

As we move towards the end of the project and the residency, I am working closely with RAMM to develop and circulate materials for volunteers and staff in the future to take charge of their own Wiki training, and to embed digital practice in the Museum going forward. Working with RAMM on this project has been a great pleasure and I am confident that exciting things are on the horizon for both RAMM and GLAM-E in terms of Wiki activity and collection access.

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Introduction and Overview

The Wikimedian in Residence partnership continued at the Mixed Museum from January to March 2023, building on the initial stage of the residency that began in September. This blog posting describes the initiatives focussed on during this time and next steps that both the Mixed Museum and Wikimedia UK might like to take to build on the residency. The End of Residency Report can be found here.

January to March 2023

Sustainable digital volunteer programme for the Mixed Museum

As described in the first report from the residency, editing Wikimedia projects is an ideal basis for a digital volunteering programme for the Museum. However, after the scope and scale of recruiting for and managing a volunteer programme became clear, it seemed desirable to fund a volunteer coordinator for the Museum who could deliver this with expertise and focus, rather than making it part of Chamion’s work. 

I outlined what would be required to create a sustainable virtual volunteering programme for the Mixed Museum, with the hopes that this could be used for a future funding bid. You can read the proposal here: Sustainable digital volunteer programme for the Mixed Museum. 

We had initially planned to create a bespoke, self-study training programme for volunteers based on a set of Google slides and embedded videos taken from Zoom-based training. Because the editing interface of Wikipedia changed quite dramatically in January 2023, the training videos and screenshots were quickly out of date and less suitable for self study, which altered our plans.

Rather than re-record, we took time to consider the implications of future changes to the interfaces making self study videos obsolete, and the considerable investment they take to remain up to date and useful. As the museum doesn’t have anyone to do that ongoing maintenance work, the bespoke training programme would quickly go out of date. We decided to rely on three existing resources for online training (Training Library [Programs & Events Dashboard], The Wikipedia Adventure, and The Introduction to Wikipedia) for a more sustainable future. For more information on which training we decided on and how to contextualise it, see the Sustainable digital volunteer programme for the Mixed Museum document.

Heritage Dot 2.0 Roundtable

In March 2023, Chamion participated in a roundtable discussion moderated by the Connected Heritage team and two other Connected Heritage partners, Dr Jane Secker and Dr Victoria Araj, as part of the Heritage Dot 2.0 conference hosted by the University of Lincoln. 

The discussion touched on how engagement with Wiki-based projects enabled these three cultural heritage organisations to improve the accessibility of their collections, while simultaneously empowering volunteers and members through embedded digital upskilling. The Mixed Museum’s Wikipedia edits were discussed as an example of ways that open knowledge can place overlooked cultural histories into the dominant narrative. Chamion also described the legacy the Residency will have on the Museum’s future projects. 

We were honoured to hear Josie Fraser from the National Lottery Heritage Fund mention the roundtable as a highlight of the conference during her closing remarks. 

Queen Mary University London Microinterns 2023

Two student interns, Leyi and Shannon, joined the Mixed Museum for four weeks in March 2023. The internship followed a similar model to one we ran last year. More about the micro-internship format is in this blog posting March is Wiki micro-internship month at The Mixed Museum and Manar al-Athar.

This year, the interns worked from a Trello board of Wiki tasks. Both Leyi and Shannon focussed on the military history of African American soldiers based in the United Kingdom during and after World War 2. While Shannon focussed on adding personal accounts to articles which read like lists of list of dates, Leyi was interested in adding social history to articles on military bases in England. Leyi experienced some pushback from other editors which she describes in her blog-based reflection [link here]  and was resilient in the face of it. The interns had interesting conversations with Chamion around who feels ownership over different parts of history and how our work editing Wikipedia can have an impact on what is  generally accepted as ‘important’. 

What Chamion and I discovered, having run this internship twice now is that, though the platform is the same and the work is similar each year, Wikipedia editing is like a mirror in that each person sees something different reflected back at them in the process. See the Internship Dashboard for 2023.

Museum Ethnographers Group Conference 2023

The work we did at the Residency around copyright and Wikimedia Commons (highlighted here) was the subject of a paper delivered to the Museum Ethnographers Conference in Cambridge in April 2023. Slides for Museum Ethnographers Group Conference presentation.

In the presentation, the example of the Brown Babies images sits alongside work done by Martin Poulter at the Khalli Collections and Lucy Moore’s recuperative work to enhance the representation of museums in Oceania on Wikimedia projects. The three projects engage in a conversation about what it is to edit Wiki in today’s context and how we can work together to best surmount these and create a more equitable digital space for open knowledge.

Looking at visitor numbers to The Mixed Museum 

Chamion has long been interested in what the Museum’s Google analytics tell her about the numbers of visitors clicking through from Wikipedia links to The Mixed Museum. These so-called referral links make up a small but significant portion of the Museum’s audience. In the period before the Connected Heritage partnership, the Museum had very little traffic from Wiki sources. In fact, it was listed seventh of the referral channels, with 25 visitors coming directly from Wiki links. The top referral site then was a National Archives blog post, with 117 visitors. Since March 2022, National Archives referral rate has stayed relatively steady while the Wiki channel link has seen a percentage increase of 1584!

What is also interesting is that those who reach the Museum via Wiki sources are spending an average of 3.44 minutes on the site, compared to before the Connected Heritage partnership when they visited for an average of 1.27 minutes. Clearly, through more sustained and targeted editing, we have not only attracted more Wiki users to The Mixed Museum, but increased the engagement of these visitors with the exhibitions.

We can also see all the pages which reference the Mixed Museum by using the MassViews Analysis tool. 

Next steps

Though Leah’s Residency is coming to an end, the relationship between the Museum and Wikimedia UK will go on. Chamion will be contributing her insight and knowledge to a new research project dedicated to understanding the barriers that small and medium sized heritage organisations face when contributing to open knowledge. We hope to run the microinternships again in March 2024 and ideas for pursuing the digital volunteering programme are in the works. 

Interested in hosting a Wikimedian in Residence?

If you are involved with a heritage or cultural organisation in the United Kingdom and you think a Wikimedian in Residence might be good for your organisation, please talk to us about it. You can book a half hour meeting with the Connected Heritage team via Calendly or drop us an email.

The post Celebrating The Mixed Museum residency as it comes to an end appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

As a part of the Connected Heritage project at Wikimedia UK, I have been embedded at the Mixed Museum one day a week as a Wikimedian in Residence since September. The Mixed Museum is directed by Chamion Caballero and is a digital museum and archive that contributes to widening knowledge about Black and ethnic minority British history. This blog posting reports on three aspects of the residency:

1. Sharing Mixed Museum’s scholarship and research on Wikipedia
2. Creating a Volunteering Programme
3. The Brown Babies Images

The mini-Residency was initially scheduled to run from September-December 2022 but it’s been so fruitful and interesting for both the Mixed Museum and for Wikimedia UK that we decided to extend it into the first few months of 2023.

Mixed Museum Residency First Steps

The Mixed Museum’s Director Chamion has long been a supporter of Wikipedia and Wiki editing, having written a piece in 2018 about how important it is for academics to write about their work on Wikipedia and not lock academic research behind paywalls. Yet she had never had the time or opportunity to edit or write articles herself. So the Residency gave us the chance to set aside time for bespoke one on one training for her. 

Bite-sized Training Sessions

We decided to break a typical Introduction to Wikipedia training into smaller, weekly sessions rather than the usual 3-4 hour block of time. The first week, Chamion and I met on Zoom and she created an account and a user page. The second week, she created her Wikipedia sandbox and began to play with headings, inserted citations, an image, and an infobox. 

In the third session, she made her first edit to live Wikipedia and we both cheered very loudly! As a sociologist who has relied heavily on UK census data in the past, she was keen to update some misinformation and lack of nuance on the Wikipedia page on Mixed as an ethnicity category in the UK. So her first edit was to change the page summary and to add a key reference. She plans to continue work on this page. 

In our fourth training session, we returned to talking more about what does and does not belong on Wikipedia and some of the guiding principles such as notability, reliable sources, conflict of interest and systemic bias. A theme throughout each of our training sessions has been a wider consideration of how Chamion can continue to thread wiki work into the Museum’s existing workflow, and to fill content gaps on Wikipedia using the Museum’s exhibitions and scholarships. 

Telling the Brown Babies story on Wikipedia

Chamion then spent some time drafting a few paragraphs in her sandbox about the UK’s brown babies, the name given to the children of white British women and African American soldiers born during and after World War 2. The Mixed Museum hosted a successful Brown Babies exhibit which opened in 2020 and the families of these children are keen to to tell their stories more widely and especially to share some beautiful family photographs of the children, some of whom lived at a children’s home in Surrey called Holnicote House. 

There is no Wikipedia page dedicated to Holnicote House, but there is a page for Holnicote Estate, which includes a subsection on Holnicote House. So instead of creating a new page, we decided to embed the history of Holnicote House and the brown babies story onto the Holnicote Estate page. Look what a difference her edits have made: 

Before   

Before there was one sentence about the use of Holnicote House as a children’s home which was buried in the history of the house and outbuildings.

After 

She created a new heading for a history of Holnicote House in the 20th century and added three paragraphs of text about who these children were and how they came to live there. She uploaded an image of the children to Wikipedia (the challenges we faced in our efforts to upload images of the brown babies to Wikimedia Commons will be the subject of another blog posting). I think the addition of the image is a particularly powerful aspect of bringing this history to life. 

Though Chamion’s journey as an editor is just beginning, the impact of her work is shown in the Residency’s dashboard statistics. 12,5000 views of the 5 articles and 1 Commons upload she has worked on!

Creating a Wikimedia volunteering package for The Mixed Museum

One issue for small heritage organisations is that, though there may be many people interested in volunteering for the organisation, the administrative capacity to train and manage volunteers just isn’t there. This is a problem that Chamion faces. We thought that we could perhaps create a digital volunteering programme for The Mixed Museum based on editing Wikimedia Projects in The Mixed Museum’s areas of expertise: the history of racial mixing in Britain. 

This project is particularly exciting in the heritage space because it’s entirely digital: digital museum, digital platform and digital volunteers.

Training the volunteers

To begin with, we envisioned three types of volunteer: 

1. One with confident digital and academic skills who would be keen to learn how to edit Wikipedia
2. One with confident digital skills who might like create digital content for Wikimedia Commons 
3. One who might be a keen researcher, writer, creator or storyteller but who might not yet have the digital confidence to edit Wikimedia projects.

Each volunteer would require a training program which they could complete remotely and on their own time and, when they were ready, a set of tasks which they could begin work on independently. 

To begin, we recorded Chamion’s Zoom-based wiki training sessions and edited those down so that the volunteer training videos would feature Chamion’s voice and be tailored to the digital museum’s context. 

These videos will be embedded into three different Mixed Museum Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons volunteer training programmes, though they are hosted on Wikimedia Commons and YouTube. The training programmes are currently structured as three different Google Slides presentations which volunteers can click through as a self-study study tutorial. 

Managing the volunteers’ work 

A final piece of the puzzle is how to manage the volunteer programme. As the sole full time paid member of staff, Chamion does not have the time to oversee volunteer training and work in real time. So we came up with the idea of managing the training and work with the help of  two Trello boards. One Trello board is to manage the volunteers’ time and work. The second is to keep track of work which needs doing. 

In the first board, each volunteer has a section with their name on it. They can be assigned a training programme and can give updates on their progress or ask any questions on their training there. Once they have completed their training, they can either choose or be assigned a Wikimedia task. 

The second Trello board holds a pool of Wikimedia tasks. In a Wikipedia editathon context, this would be known as a ‘work list’ and would usually be a list of tasks that need doing, the Wikipedia page which needs editing, a list of relevant sources to use and any advanced tutorials a new editor might need to support them. A part of the edithon would involve an editor claiming a task with their initials and going off to work on it. In the Trello board, each card contains these bits of information and the cards are categorised by which type of volunteer they might best suit: 

1. A text-based Wikipedia task (such as adding references to Steve Stacey’s biography page
2. A digital content creation task on Wikimedia Commons, such as uploading 19th century images of mixed race people in Ireland
3. An off-wiki task for someone, such as identifying what’s missing on Wikipedia pages.

Volunteers can either go in and select a task that appeals to them and drag it over to their Trello workspace, or Chamion can select one for them and assign it to them. 

Volunteers can update on their progress and ask questions on tasks within Trello. Any unfinished tasks can be returned to the pool and any finished tasks can be marked as complete and archived, thus providing a record of what has been achieved.

Would you like to be a Wiki volunteer at the Mixed Museum?

We aim to prototype and test the volunteering programme with willing participants in 2023. New to wiki work and interested in helping us prototype the training? Please be in touch.

Is copyright resulting in systemic exclusion?

The Mixed Museum used a series of images to illustrate the Brown Babies exhibition which included the story of children who lived at Holnicote House in the 1940s. From the outset, Chamion was very keen to upload these Holnicote House images to Wikimedia Commons and embed them on relevant Wikipedia pages. 

As we planned the uploads, it became clear that we did not have enough information about the provenance of the images (or where they came from) to allow them to be openly licensed and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Though there may be acceptable levels of risk that a heritage organisation might be willing to take in terms of uploading images which are likely in the public domain because of copyright elapsing or the copyright owner being untraceable, Wikimedia Commons applies a cautionary principle, and won’t accept images unless their status as copyright-free or freely licensed can be firmly established. 

After many weeks of emailing, phone calls and expert copyright advice from three sources, we were able to document a chain of donation and speak with the donor of the image. This donor’s late husband appeared in the photographs when he was a child. This donor is, like Chamion, very keen that the images be shared on Wikimedia Commons. The donor also considers this a family photograph, and her daughter’s inheritance. Yet we cannot establish whether the photos were taken by the Holnicote House employees in the course of their employment (and would therefore be the property of the employer) or if the photographers were not employed by Holnicote House (and therefore copyright would be owned by the photographer or their heir). Either way, because this information cannot be firmly established, these photographs are not able to be uploaded to Commons under existing rules.  

I raised the issue at the Village Pump on Commons, because it seems to me and Chamion that the unintended consequence of this strict application to UK copyright law results in systemic bias against children who grew up in care. And mixed race and Black children in Britain are disproportionately overrepresented in the care system so this issue will impact the family photographs of mixed race and Black people more than others. Please contribute to the discussion on the Village Pump if you’re keen to move this along!

What next? 

The obvious and usual answer to these types of issues is to avoid images from the 20th century or ones where the creator is unknown, ‘complicated’ or ‘problematic’. From a wiki perspective, we often will turn to the low hanging fruit such as 19th century or earlier images or contemporary ones created expressly for Wikimedia Commons. By ignoring ‘complicated’ images such as the ones of the Brown Babies, however, we are systematically excluding important histories. 

In addition, one needs to be very careful particularly about framing mixed race families as ‘problematic’ or ‘complicated’ or ‘not respectable’. This carries racist overtones and there is a legacy of discrimination based on these very categories in England and elsewhere. At Wikimedia UK, we focus “on knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege. We break down the barriers that prevent people and organisations from accessing and contributing to open knowledge, and support the development of people-centred and technical solutions to help eradicate inequality and bias on the Wikimedia projects.” -Wikimedia UK Strategic Framework 2022-2025. This example of the Brown Babies images gives us a chance to dive deeper, to reflect, and to move the dial where systemic exclusion on Wikimedia platforms exists, rather than to avoid these in favour of images or subjects which might be more straightforward. 

Open licensing is a lot of work

That said, the amount of work, expertise, and time involved in this process is prohibitive for many heritage and cultural organisations. We were able to achieve this at The Mixed Museum because of the time dedicated through the Wikimedian in Residence programme and because Chamion was motivated to understand open licensing in the interest of pursuing National Lottery Heritage funding.

The work of establishing ownership, understanding copyright alongside open licensing, the rules of Wikimedia Commons and discussing how it applied in this case took several months. We involved an experienced Wikimedian, a former Wikimedia Commons Bureaucrat and two experts in copyright in the GLAM sector. Not to mention Chamion herself, me, the donor, and my fellow Digital Skills Wikimedian Lucy Hinnie. We also drew on the expertise of the Wikimedia UK community and at the Village Pump on Commons. 

Even after all this work, we’re still undecided about whether we can openly license the Holnicote House images for Wikimedia Commons.

If we consider other cultural and heritage organisations who do not have these resources and knowledge to call upon, for example, a small community archives group, it seems clear that they would not be able to engage with Wikimedia Commons. A group or an individual that is sourcing, digitising and preserving family photographs and would potentially like to license these openly would have a lot of work to do to answer these questions. Even with grant funding, people are just too overstretched with the work of the actual project to engage much with the licensing and copyright issues. As Chamion and I remarked frequently to each other, anyone who wasn’t us would have given up long before we did! 

Interested in hosting a Wikimedian in Residence?

If you are involved with a heritage or cultural organisation in the United Kingdom and you think a Wikimedian in Residence might be good for your organisation, please talk to us about it. You can book a half hour meeting with the Connected Heritage team via Calendly or drop us an email. 

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