Friends' Newsletter/2020/Issue 01
Welcome to the summer newsletter
Our first newsletter of 2020 is a little later than usual. Although the world doesn’t look exactly like we thought it would at the start of the year, Wikimedia UK staff and volunteers are still working hard to support greater access to open knowledge - which feels more important than ever, as so many of us have moved to a much more digital lifestyle. We hope that you and your loved ones are safe and well during the current crisis.
You may notice a change of style in this newsletter since our last edition at the end of 2019, which announced the departure of John Lubbock, our Communication Coordinator. Whilst John remains a valued part of the Wikimedia community, Katie Crampton has now taken on the management of Wikimedia UK’s communication channels, and is here to answer any questions you have in regards to this newsletter at katie.crampton@wikimedia.org.uk.
This newsletter is being distributed after two of our biggest events of the year; the Celtic Knot conference and our Annual General Meeting. Videos of various talks and workshops from Celtic Knot, which took place over Thursday 9th to Friday 10th with satellite events on other days, are available on our YouTube channel playlists here and here. We’ll put a blog post out soon with all the highlights.
AGM 2020
On Saturday 18th July we had our Annual General Meeting, an opportunity for members to vote on board elections and essential charity governance, and also for us to network with volunteers and other stakeholders in the UK’s open movement. It's also an opportunity to reflect on the past year, which you can find in our Strategic Report and Annual Accounts are now online. We're very pleased to announce that the three trustees who stood for the board were all elected, as follows:
- Kelly Foster
- Nick Poole
- Doug Taylor
Nick and Doug have both been on the board since July 2015 and so were re-elected on Saturday. Kelly is a new trustee who I'm delighted to welcome to the board for the first time.
All ordinary resolutions were passed by a majority vote. A special resolution was also passed, to enable us to hold online or hybrid general meetings in future.
We heard from Gavin Willshaw, Mass Digitisation Service Manager at the National Library of Scotland, who gave a brilliant keynote presentation on Editing Wikisource: how the National Library of Scotland responded to the Coronavirus crisis. There were also three really interesting, insightful and varied lightning talks - from Andy Mabbett ('Wiki Hates Newbies'), Lesley Mitchell and Dr tara Beall ('Protests and Suffragettes:
As usual, the AGM was also an opportunity to present our annual awards, which were as follows:
- UK Wikimedian of the Year - Caroline Ball for education work and advocacy. She led a high-impact module at the University of Derby (124 articles improved, adding 50,000 words) and has been actively sharing her experience and encouraging others to work with Wikipedia.
- Honourable Mention - Ian Watt for outreach work, training, and efforts around Scotland's COVID-19 data
- Partnership of the Year - National Library of Scotland for the renaissance in wiki work, spearheaded by Gavin Willshaw and the WikiSource chapbooks project
- Honourable Mention - University of Edinburgh for their trailblazing work in education and Wikidata
- Up and Coming Wikimedian - A joint win for Emma Carroll (for the phenomenal work on the Scottish Witch data project) and Laura Wood Rose (excellent work supporting the Edinburgh residency and Women in Red events)
We also presented Michael Maggs with an Honorary Membership, in recognition of his very significant contribution to the charity over a number of years.
UK Covid Response
You may have seen media coverage about Wikipedia’s essential role during the pandemic, with readership up by around 30% across all the Wikimedia projects and the articles related to Covid-19 receiving millions of views a day. But with this rise in users comes the challenge of keeping myths, misinformation and poorly-sourced content out of the large number of articles about the virus. So Wikimedia UK has been working with WikiProject Medicine to mobilise experienced editors in the UK to help address these issues. We have also amplified a UN campaign against misinformation in the light of the pandemic, bringing on board other UK partners to help spread awareness.
Our community has also been working hard to ensure Welsh information on the pandemic up to date. This included keeping infection and mortality statistics in Wales up to date on Wikidata, writing Covid-related articles (including the effects of the pandemic on mental health), and translating key Covid-explainer graphics into Welsh. We noted that it is much harder for smaller language Wikipedias to keep on top of information relating to the pandemic, given the rapidity with which new data and evidence is emerging; and this inspired a panel discussion on this topic at the Celtic Knot conference.
Towards the start of the shutdown, Wikimedian in Residence at the Wellcome Collection found herself inundated with requests from medics and medical librarians for Wikimedia training. Dr Alice White was ideally placed to help the library shift to digital and help direct the medical expertise of Wellcome’s staff towards keeping Covid articles up to date. We also saw more traffic to other medical Wiki pages, with visitors interested in historical epidemics to give better context to our current situation; something that, again, staff at Wellcome were well equipped to support.
Events and partnerships that have moved online
Like many other organisations, Wikimedia UK has had to very suddenly adapt to a world of online-only events and meetings, and change our programme significantly. We have also supported partners in the education, cultural and other sectors with their own transitions. New project and partnership opportunities have also arisen, with many museums and galleries turning their energies to how to open up their collections online in the wake of the shutdown.
England
We held an online event with Banner Repeater for the Digital Archive of Artists Publishing. This is an ongoing partnership, using the Wikibase suite of software to build a database. The project is comitted to challenging the power dynamic of traditional archives - particularly regarding inclusion and accessibility from a post-colonial and LGBTQI perspective - and the flexibility the software enables is vital in this regard. These are relatively small workshops for experts and enthusiasts in artists’ publishing and digital arts, with involvement from Chelsea College of Arts and New York based collections. The aim of the events is to grow the community of contributors and also develop the ontology from the existing structure decided in previous workshops.
Back in August we trained a number of archeology volunteers at the Museum of London, and we ran a follow up session online. Participants were very enthusiastic about the training, and see a gap in Wikipedia’s content about archeological digs that they can very usefully contribute to going forward.
We held a two week editathon with London College of Communications, with two follow up sessions afterwards. The main events were one hour long, with activities for participants to work on in between. We were impressed with the high level of interest in this event, suggesting we can both work with London College of Communications students more broadly in future, and that this model could be attractive to other projects.
We're taking part in the British Library's staff training while they’re at home. One of our programme coordinators gave an introduction to Wikipedia last week, and one of Wikimedians in Residence did a session on Wikidata this week. We provided training materials so the staff could continue their learning beyond the sessions.
We have been working closely with the Science Museum over some months on their Heritage Connector project, and will soon be recruiting for a newWikimedian in Residence position at the museum to support this work.
Our Wikimedian in Residence at the Khalili Collections, Martin Poulter, continues to digitise the eight collections housed by Khalili, each the largest of its type in the world.
Scotland
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The National Library of Scotland has been uploading the Scottish Chapbook Collection to Wikisource during lockdown. Over 70 members of staff – around 20% of the library’s workforce – have been involved in the project. Chapbooks were popular in the 17th-19th centuries, and offer a fascinating insight into Scottish culture of the time. The chapbooks include folk tales, songs and poetry, as well as accounts of accidents, crimes, and religious tracts. There are over 3000 chapbooks in the collection, so this work is not only a huge contribution to open knowledge, but has also allowed a large percentage of the library staff to engage with Wikimedia and develop their skills. The Library hosted Scotland’s first Wikimedian in Residence, as well as a Gaelic Wikimedian, so we’re pleased to be able to continue our partnership with them. You can see more about the project, and the full list of works on the Wikisource Project page - or come along to our AGM on Saturday to hear our keynote speaker, Gavin Willshaw, talk about his involvement as Mass Digitisation Manager at the library.
One of our trainers in Scotland, Ian Watt, worked with our Scotland Programme Co-ordinator to run an online hackathon for Code the City in Aberdeen over the Easter weekend. The hackathon – which was very quickly re-imagined as an online event – focused on the social and industrial history of the city and resulted in the creation of thousands of new records on Wikidata. You can see the full details of the event in this blog post.
Throughout last year we worked to set up a SGSAH (Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities) funded internship, supported both by us and the Society of Antiquaries Scotland and Archaeology Scotland. The project is flexible but was initially centred on finding and filling gaps in openly licensed images of archaeology in Scotland. With the pandemic, our intern had to return home to Italy, so we pivoted to continue supporting the project entirely remotely. We decided to work with Wikidata, and specifically to look at the Women of Scotland Mapping Memorials website, an old project organised by Glasgow Women’s Library. We trained the intern on Wikidata and proposed a property on Wikidata to facilitate this work, following the model of open plaques work by our Code the City trainer, Ian Watt, mentioned above. With community support, we are now preparing the data for import and using quickstatements. From this data we’ll be able to map memorials in Edinburgh, and potentially beyond, for which we do not have images and call upon nearby volunteers to go capture them.
Edinburgh University’s award winning Map of Accused Witches continues to bring impact. Ewan McAndrew, our Wikimedian in Residence at the University, attended the Mapping the Scottish Reformation seminar at the University of Edinburgh Library, where he discussed at length with the project team how Wikidata may suit the project for storing and querying their data. The project leader has now made 2,346 edits to Wikidata and has secured funding to second a postgraduate student to help import biographical data and citation data on Scotland's clergy from 1560 to 1689. Ewan’s also taken on a student intern at the University, Hannah Rothmann, whose first week of training has gone well as you can see from this blog she wrote.
Wales
The National Wikimedian for Wales and Wikimedian in Residence at Menter Môn have started delivering introductory sessions to editing the Welsh Wikipedia on Twitch. We hope these will prove to be a useful way to continue delivering training and outreach to existing and potential contributors during the lockdown.
Gender gap and diverse contributors
March is normally our key activity month for Art+Feminism and International Women’s Day; however this year these planned activities were one of the primary events affected by the pandemic, with not enough time to translate them to online activities. Just before the lockdown we were able to run an on-site editathon with the Design Museum, but not much else. We were also able to run an editathon prior to the lockdown in February at University of Warwick for an LGBT editathon.
At Edinburgh University, we launched a Wikimedia Women in Red student intern in January, with a remit to expand on our gender gap work by promoting events, researching pages to write, creating scaffolded resources, and delivering training. She has been supported to deliver training, created a new blog site, researched names for our first event in February, and prepared resources to help anyone learn how to edit or run Women in Red editing events. As her internship draws to an end, she’s written a fantastic blog for us which you can read here.
The BSHS Ayrton prize recognises outstanding web projects and digital engagement in the history of science, technology and medicine. The University of Edinburgh Wikipedia project “Changing the ways the stories are told” is one of the two Highly Commended projects. The judging panel were particularly impressed with the initiative’s track record of contributions to the infrastructure of knowledge on which research and public engagement in the history of science depend.
We kicked off February in collaboration with University of York with another editathon to help close the gender gap on Wikipedia. Focused on Yorkshire women in STEM, the editathon aimed to highlight the diverse set of role models women have in the field. You can read the blog post about the event here.
The Wellcome Library, where we have a Wikimedian in Residence, continues to hold many events aimed at closing the gender gap. Their more recent events have included Humour & Peril, a Wikimedia Commons editing event, and Gay health & Aids activism, an event for UCL students editing LGBT+ articles.
Upcoming opportunities
We are in discussions with the Archaeology Data Service based at the University of York around sharing some of the information about authors in their database. This work would help see where gaps are for biographies on Wikipedia - a great example of using Wikidata for highlighting gaps in content on Wikipedia.
Wiki Loves Monuments, the biggest photography competition in the world, will run again this year and we’re taking part again! You can find more information about the competition, in which photographers of all skill levels are encouraged to take photos of monuments to add to Wikimedia Commons. The UK winners for 2019 entries can be found here.
Engaging with the global movement and other news
There’s some big changes in the global movement recently, with the Wikimedia Foundation announcing a new Community Culture Statement, empowering the Trusts and Safety team to stop harassment on Wikipedia and its sister projects. There’s also the rebranding of Wikimedia, a process which Wikimedia UK has been providing feedback on both as a community through our brand liaison, Katie, or individually. The Foundation’s branding team are in the second stage of the rebrand; the naming proposals, with feedback having been gathered from affiliates and individuals across the world.
In the wider world, some of our staff have been volunteering their time to cover the protests for Black Lives Matter. Katie attended two of the protests in Hyde Park and at the US Embassy, capturing photos to add to Commons and adding to the related Wikipedia articles. If you have photos or information of the Black Lives Matter protests or history, please consider adding to the collection.