DRHA Conference 2014
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The main purpose of this page is to provide a report about the Wikipedia workshop taking place at this conference.
Contributing to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects provides researchers valuable skills of information literacy, in particular high quality writing skills, critical evaluation, and citation styles. It can also give students a sense of purpose in their academic work, and creates free content that can be developed by others, rather than merely consumed. Many universities are already assigning students to improve Wikipedia articles for credit, and national cultural institutions such as the British Library, British Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum, to name a few, have held a Wikimedian in Residence to ensure enhanced engagement with the world's most popular non-commercial online resource.
This workshop introduced the concept of editing Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects to DRHA (Digital Research in the Humanities & Arts) conference attendees. The workshop also included information on common mistakes researchers make when editing Wikipedia, and how to improve articles with illustrations.
The session consisted of the following three sections, which roughly lasted 45 minutes each:
- an introductory discussion about Wikipedia and sharing knowledge on the Internet.
- practical work based on Basic Wikipedia Training.
- an exploration of ways to contribute to Wikimedia other than by writing encyclopedia articles (e.g. sharing images; rendering structured data in visual form; giving research a suitable licence). This part of the workshop also includes a Q&A and more hands‐on Wikipedia editing.
Trainers
The workshop was led by Dr Toni Sant. He was assisted by WMUK volunteer campus ambassador Raya Sharbain.
