Friends' Newsletter/2021/Issue 01
Wilder's Folly, Nunhide, the United Kingdom by Mark Edwards
2021 AGM and community day
Wikimedia UK's 2021 AGM and community day will be taking place on Saturday 10th July. After some consideration, we have decided that this year's event will again be held online.
This year we will have three vacancies for elected trustees, with two board members having to retire in accordance with our articles, and one who has come to the end of their current elected term but has indicated that they will stand again. We would like to strongly encourage community members to consider standing for election this year.
Alongside community experience, we would be keen for people to stand with any of the following skills or experience:
- External relations
- Charity or copyright law
- Charity governance
- Working with or in the cultural sector
However this is not essential. What is more important is a commitment to open knowledge and the work of Wikimedia UK, and a willingness to take on the responsibility of being a charity trustee and board director of a limited company. There is more information about what this means here. We strongly value diversity in Wikimedia UK's board of trustees and this year, would particularly encourage younger people (aged under 40) to stand.
If you would like an informal conversation with our Chief Executive or one of the trustees about what being on the board involves, and potentially standing for election, please do send Katie an email (to the address above) and we will set up a call. We will send out details of the formal process for standing for election nearer the time.
Finally, please do consider becoming a member of Wikimedia UK if you are not already. Whilst we value community attendees for the day, only members are entitled to vote and stand for election. Membership costs just £5 a year, although we welcome additional donations.
Women’s History Month
We’re pleased to say that Women’s History Month, so heavily impacted in 2020 by the sudden lockdown, was a fantastic success this year. With so many people online, we’ve been discussing how to grow our collection of videos, making our work and others in the open knowledge movement easily accessible. Throughout March we released a series of videos interviewing women who are closing the gender gap on Wikipedia and its sister projects. While it is not only a woman’s responsibility to close the gap, we wanted to champion these women and their brilliant projects. You can watch the full series on our YouTube with the following guests:
- Kira Wisniewski, Executive Director of Art+Feminism – an intersectional feminist non-profit organisation that directly addresses the information gap about gender, feminism, and the arts on the internet.
- Dr Rebecca O’Neill, Project Co-ordinator at Wikimedia Ireland, Vice-Chair of Women in Technology and Science Ireland and Secretary of the National Committee for Commemorative Plaques in Science and Technology.
- Dr Victoria Leonard – Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Postdoctoral Researcher in Late Ancient History and Founder and Co-Chair of the Women’s Classical Committee – who will be talking about her work to increase the visibility of women in classics on Wikipedia, through #WCCWiki.
- Dr Alice White, Digital Editor at Wellcome Collection and former Wikimedian in Residence at Wellcome Library.
- Lucy Crompton-Reid, Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK, rounding up the month with our gender gap projects and ways to get involved.
Wikimedian in Residence at the Science Museum ran a public Wikithon for International Women’s Day. The event was attended by 13 editors who added a staggering 24,000 words to Wikipedia, created 96 articles on women, and added 281 references.
We partnered with a number of organisations to run editathons focused on gender gap, including at the Leeds City Museum, and Edinburgh University. At Edinburgh, monthly Women in Red editathons continue. At the March event, the president of the student Women of STEM society, had helped crowdsource a list of women activists as part of the Choose the Challenge theme for International Women’s Day 2021. The list continued to be worked on as part of a week-long celebration of International Women’s Day at the University. 50,000 words were added over the course of the week, and Professor Linda Bauld, one of the highest profile academics at the University of Edinburgh keynoted an event discussing the representation of women on digital platforms. ( in terms of advocacy, the resident submitted a chapter for a new Open Access book on Wikipedia and Academic Libraries on the work to improve the number of biographies of women on Wikipedia over the last five years. The chapter will be published in September.)
We also connected with Devil’s Porridge Museum, where we learnt a team member is performing some duties of a Wikimedian in Residence -type project. It’s a one year project looking at archival research on those who worked at the factory, particularly women, with a view to building a database and creating biographies for notable women on-wiki. At the Science Museum, the resident kicked off a collaboration with a Manchester University PHD student to help increase the representation of minority groups within the Science and Industry museum history (women, working class factory workers, and opportunities that the factories made towards the minority groups themselves.)
Minority and indigenous languages
At the National Library of Wales, the work has been led primarily by project grants from the Welsh Government. For example, for the WiciPics project, Welsh Language Descriptions were added to all 1822 Wicipics images, and all images were also shared on the People's Collection Wales platform. The resident is also overseeing a crowdsourcing project to collect Welsh place names for listed buildings in Wales, for Wikidata. By March, 7000 Welsh language labels were added. The resident Wikimedian is also working on uploads of Welsh portraits from the Library collection.
The Scottish government agreed to relicense their Flickr account from CC-BY-NC to CC-BY to bring it in line with OGL as per their website, which has allowed us to save a number of images which had been put up for deletion. We uploaded 2580 images from Scots Gov’s flickr account - they are proving quite popular with 1.7m pageviews in March - and covid related videos released by the Welsh Government. Working with Viae Regiae project to support Wales and Wikidata related elements; the project seeks to map early modern Britain, and seeks the input of the National Library of Wales and Wikimedia UK in mobilising volunteer efforts around importing information in Wikidata and navigating existing data structures related to settlements and historic sites. The NLW and WMUK have experience in this area having imported information on listed buildings.
Supported by our Programme Coordinator in Wales, we are running a community Wikiproject destubbing the 1,000 most important articles. 150 articles have been destubbed so far. We are also supporting other Celtic language communities in developing their Wikipedia projects - on kw-wiki, for example, we created a Person infobox.
Underrepresented heritage – with a growing focus on decolonising collections
We funded and have been collaborating with the Punjabi Wikimedians on a Amarjit Chandan project - uploading images from British based Punjabi poet Amarjit Chandan’s archive with images from both India and the UK, and creating content around them.
At the British Library, we launched the Wikimedian in Residence project. It’s the second time we’re partnering with the Library on a collaboration. We were clear from the beginning that underrepresented heritage is of particular interest for us, and now the resident is developing, amongst other things, three specific areas of Knowledge Equity were developed: India Office Records (IOR) collaboration; the Bengali books project and an Art + Feminism event in collaboration with the University of Arts London.
The collaboration with the India Records Office was consolidated with the identification of two datasets for a small project on Wikicommons, Wikisource and Wikidata, with a view to scaling up for more reference materials if successful. The datasets include 54 volumes of Annual Administration Reports in Bengal (1870s-1936) and 124 volumes of India Office Lists (1860-1947). They detail main events in governmental categories over the year they cover, including geographical issues, legislature and local information. Materials would be linked to the Wikisource India portal. The resident spent time discussing the implementation of an information box on uploads, contextualising the potentially harmful and triggering content of these colonial papers. With our support, they now have a technical solution to this, and will work with the IOR to find suitable wording, in tandem with British Library policy and the input of the internal BAME Working Group, to address this issue succinctly.
This initiative connects with a project which was already in motion when the resident joined - the Bengali books project. The Two Centuries of Indian Print project is running a competition to proofread text from Bengali books digitised by the project, now hosted on Wikisource. This is in partnership with the West Bengal Wikimedians User Group. In the first two weeks of the competition more than 1,000 pages have been worked on by contributors. The project hopes to engage more with this group in the coming year with events to broaden awareness, knowledge and use of Wikis in South Asia.
The residency at the Khalili Collections continues to facilitate content creation. For example a new article on the Sitara (textile) went live and appeared on the Did You Know section of the English Wikipedia main page, the 15th article from this project to get a DYK and the 24th article created by the project (including translations). An article on Khalili Collection of Islamic Art was also created. This type of content, highlighting valuable collections of non-Western art, connects to the knowledge gaps research that was recently delivered by Martin Poulter and Waqas Ahmed.
In terms of networks and building communities of practice, we continued to support two university-based groups that are working on decolonising knowledge. London College of Communications Student Changemakers’ Decolonising Wikipedia Network continues to develop, with events and staff training delivered. We are looking at a staff secondment model to add capacity (LCC staff would be dedicated to working on the network, supported by us). At the University of St Andrews , the Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) network was launched in April, and the group is now focusing on recruiting more interest, and discussing the focus of work.
Climate change and sustainability
Climate change is a new theme for Wikimedia UK, and as such we are supporting emerging partnerships and projects that will both deliver on the theme, and help us develop our thinking in where our impact could sit.
- The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations are sharing text and images under an open licence. With John Cummings leaving the UN, this work will continue with Wikimedia UK as the lead. So far we have delivered an event for staff, and are looking at setting up a formal agreement with FAO.
- DecarboN8 at the University of Leeds delivered a workshop in April. DecarboN8 is a network of university-based researchers working with the transport sector to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As part of this, the group wanted to improve Wikipedia articles about decarbonisation efforts and transport in the UK. The organisers hope that this can build into sustained editing from DecarboN8 to share information.
- COP26 - we are looking at how to best capitalise from the summit being held in Glasgow this year. We’ve registered to be present in the programme. At the British Library, the resident met with BL Labs to discuss a pilot project of thesis data regarding climate change being uploaded to Wikidata.
Higher education’s engagement with Wikimedia as a digital literacy tool
We’ve checked in with course leaders in Wikimedia in the Classroom courses about plans for the coming year. Across the sector, there was a continued reliance on remote teaching, with some courses trialing in-person teaching. Amongst the courses we support, remote teaching was the most common method, which presents challenges for students based in China where editing is restricted. The UK government is considering reducing funding to higher education; the details remain to be established, but further economic pressure on universities means we may see partners having to cut courses. Wikimedia UK has an ongoing need to emphasise the value of engaging with Wikimedia in improving vital digital skills.
At the University of Derby a new journalism module was started by Caroline Ball, which was run with support of a volunteer. We think this model could act as a framework for future classroom course interactions and how volunteers can help. We are in discussions with a few potential courses, to photojournalism and digital literacy skills at the London College of Communication; we also delivered a workshop for teachers at the British Chinese Language Teaching Society in April.
Beyond courses, we engaged with a good number of universities on individual activities, which may build up to a larger collaboration. At UCL we delivered a guest lecture to the Web Technology course, similarly at UEA we spoke to Digital Humanities Studies students. We delivered a number of editathons with universities, at University of Leicester we supported a centenary editathon in February across three sessions, at University of York we run an editathon in April, at University of West of Scotland we delivered an introductory wiki session in February, which led to creation of a project page for the collaboration (now in scoping). We were also in discussions with the University of Highlands and Islands about a wiki collaboration to mark their ten year anniversary.
The Residency at Edinburgh University remained incredibly productive despite difficulties experienced across the sector. Now in its fifth year, the project has expanded beyond Wikipedia in the Classroom and is engaged through many of the university’s departments.
- A new community of practice is being set up at the university library, with an intern position over summer to support work.
- Our resident met with the Career Service in March to discuss an accredited 80hr Wikipedia editing volunteer Edinburgh Award to begin on a trial basis in October 2021 to March period.
- A 4-part podcast series with the University’s influential Teaching Matters blog is being discussed with various academics, students, and Wikimedians – to take place in May.
- In terms of Wikimedia in the Curriculum, the Translation Studies MSc Wikipedia assignment took place earlier this year. This semester students have been invited to consider how best to support global understanding of black and postcolonial history through their 1,500-2,000 word translation assignment (list of articles on assignment page). Reproductive Biomedicine BSc Wikipedia Assignment will continue for its 6th year in September 2021. The resident also ran an introductory editathon workshop on the Computer Science course programme at invitation of course leader, and Open Source advocate and student, Ritwik Sarkar. A crowdsourced list of Forgotten Heroines of Computer Science was compiled and the hope is this will lead to further project work with the undergraduate programme. Lecturer and course leader on the Stars, Talismans and Robots Honours course on Islamic Art, wrote a blogpost on her experiences teaching with Wikipedia and seems keen to repeat the experience in the following years.
Further, at the British Library the resident is working on a proposal in collaboration with UCL’s Masters programme to host an MSc student for three weeks full-time or six weeks part-time to assist with work on the IOR project pilot, and to showcase and report on effective engagement with Wikimedia in a cultural context.
Wikimedia in schools
We continue to work on the schools education project in Wales, supported by the National Library of Wales (NLW) and Menter Mon. Remote activities were delivered for schools around the Wicipics project. Continuation of work will depend on project funding. The resident at NLW has also been working with Ennyn Cymru on a grant application for creative reuse of open content in schools to educate about fake news.
Digital literacy
The work continues with Code The City group based in Aberdeen, which combines elements of data literacy and civic engagement. This is led by Ian, a volunteer who continues to build the CTC collaboration - linking in with Aberdeen cultural organisations, and running hackathons at CTC with a wiki angle (the event itself was focused on environment). There was a Wikidata taster session. In terms of current work, it’s best to quote Ian: “We now have a smaller-scale project, also to support Aberdeen City and Shire Archives, which kicks off in the first week of May 2021 to transcribe the Register of Returned Convicts 1869-1939. Some of the key aspects of the data have already been transcribed but there is much that has not yet been captured. We’ll follow the same pattern as last time: share directories of photos of the pages of the register, spreadsheets for transcriptions, and a note of who is transcribing and who is checking which entries, with a Slack Channel for communication between volunteers. There are only 285 convicts listed. We’re also looking at the georeferencing of addresses from historical maps which will be exciting. We hope that with sufficient number of volunteers to transcribe the data it should be completed in under four weeks. The project will be coordinated by Sara Mazolli, a postgraduate student at Edinburgh University who will be an intern at Code The City for 10 or so weeks.”
We have continued working with the Science Museum on a residency and, in parallel, Wikidata/image uploads (focusing on development of Schema and upload processes). Importantly, we have been supporting this partnership through a paid staff secondment, which, having lasted 8 months in 2020, has been extended in 2021.
Khalili Collection residency extended
The cultural partnership with the Khalili Collections is continuing. It was originally intended to last a single year until February, but now Martin Poulter is employed as Wikimedian In Residence on an ongoing basis. Around four hundred images have been released to Wikimedia Commons, with around six hundred more to come, and there is a growing data set about the collections on Wikidata. Towards the end of 2020 the work focused on Khalili's collection of Enamels of the World. The project has now moved onto Khalili’s largest collection – the world's largest private collection of Islamic Art – and a distinct collection relating to pilgrimage and the Hajj. Concepts relating to the Hajj are getting Wikipedia articles for the first time. Details of the project are on GLAM Wiki.
Leeds Museums & Galleries
Wikimedia UK have been supporting Leeds Museums & Galleries since 2019. Staff at Leeds Museum & Galleries have been proactive in organising events, inspired by the efforts of projects such as Women in Red and the Women’s Classical Committee, and have sought to improve Wikipedia and the representation of its collection and artists. WMUK has provided support in the form of training and advice. Despite the challenges of the COVID pandemic, work with Leeds Museum & Galleries continues. The experience of the project is benefitting other organisations, and the person who worked as a project placement 2019 is now the Wikimedian in Residence at the Science Museum.
- In 2019 we ran a number of in-house "first editing steps" sessions for curatorial colleagues; we also recruited a project placement (User:Leedsproject2019) to start exploring the potential of our collections to add biographies to address gender gap, etc.
- In 2020 we ran our first Wikithon - one at Leeds Industrial Museum on women in industry; Leeds Art Gallery also did a scoping exercise to see which how many artists from the collection were present here; we also introduced some volunteers to editing who are making changes to existing pages; we also collaborated with Leeds Libraries and the British Library on the Women in Leeds event.
- In 2021, one volunteer's first new page was accepted (Violet Crowther) and we are hoping to run further training in the future as we know there's a keen appetite; we're also keen to explore ways we might be able to add images of our collections to Commons (slowly, tentatively and with thought) later in the year; we're also keen to hear from people with experience to share, since we have no official Wikipedian.
We're looking forward to the year ahead, potentially with the idea of getting more of our volunteers involved.
National Lottery Heritage Fund
We are excited to say Wikimedia UK is one of the organisations awarded funding by The National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF) Digital Skills for Heritage initiative, aiming to raise digital skills and confidence across the UK heritage sector. Our project ‘Developing open knowledge skills, tools and communities of practice for sustainable digital preservation’ is one of 12 grants awarded to address three distinct areas; driving digital innovation and enterprise, providing answers to organisations’ most pressing concerns, and empowering collaborative work to achieve common aims.
Digital skills are more relevant and necessary than ever as heritage organisations affected by the pandemic look toward a more resilient future. In October 2020, NLHF published the findings of its survey of over 4000 staff, trustees and volunteers at 281 heritage organisations, identifying the current digital skills and attitudes of the sector. The results highlighted what tools and training organisations needed to weather the pandemic and move forward into a more resilient and creative future.
We already have a strong track record of collaborating across heritage and cultural organisations, developing strategies to embed open knowledge and engaging with wider virtual audiences. Over two years, the £119,000 fund will be used to develop skills, tools and communities of practice for the sustainable digital preservation of heritage. Engagement will be through a range of opportunities, from short webinars explaining the role of open knowledge and the scope it holds for sharing and engaging in collections, through to close collaboration on the development and delivery of strategic plans for open knowledge. We hope participating organisations will be enabled to ensure heritage is better explained as well as preserved for the long term.
Underrepresented people and languages
This year our annual Celtic Knot conference for underrepresented languages has been adapted in partnership with Wikimedia Norway into the Arctic Knot. Using a similar event model of sharing practices and resources useful in building small language wikis, the Arctic Knot will shift the focus to languages in the Arctic Circle. Wikimedia UK will be supporting Wikimedia Norge with communications and promotion, and we welcome any questions about the conference.
In Scotland, our Programme Coordinator Sara Thomas worked with the Scots Language Centre to deliver edithathons on the Scots Wiki. The mixed model of the events worked well, with the Scots Language Centre offering linguistic support to those who are more comfortable speaking Scots than writing it, and Sara offering Wiki support. We’re pleased with the results of the project to turn what was a Wiki highlighted for having many mistakes, to one with a strong community of editors who hadn’t been involved before the story broke.
Welsh Wicipedia
Coleg Cymraeg have started uploading their articles on music in Wales on a CC-BY-SA licence. This is a direct result of our work, when Mark Haynes was appointed in March 2014 and advised the Coleg on Creative Commons licences, which resulted in policy change. Since then, most of the academic work which goes on the Coleg Portal is on an open (CC-BY-SA) licence.
Partnership with the Royal Commission and Aberystwyth Uni
This new project was consolidated during Spring and a number of online meetings took place to use the ‘Cherish’ project as content for the teaching of Welsh Baccalaureate in Ynys Mon (Anglesey), Gwynedd and Ceredigion.
Combined views of images on 64 language wikis of Gov + Senedd in February (6,433,389), March (10,851,622) and April (17,817,922): 35,092,397. This is twice the number of views in 2020.
Wikiprojects in Wales
The Foundation’s #WikiForHumanRights: 2021 Challenge saw the creation of 58 new articles based on human rights and climate change.
WikiLovesEarth - the competition has been discussed on-wiki for two years; as the National Library of Wales, with Welsh Government grant and WiciMon will be entering, the cy-wiki community also decided to take part, with Llen Natur also a main partner. Wikimedia UK agreed to join in. Up to 4 May, other partners include Natural Resources Wales, Welsh Mountaineering Group, Eryri National Park, Dyfi Osprey Park, Royal Commission etc.
Birthday celebrations
In January Wikimedia UK joined in with the global celebration of Wikipedia’s 20th birthday. We hosted a party on the evening of the anniversary, and were delighted to be joined by so many of our members, volunteers, supporters and partners. We were so grateful for the outpouring of kind words offered at the event, and though we weren’t able to see you all in person, we very touched by the warm community we have. Jimmy Wales joined us and spoke on the incredible achievements of the last two decades and his hopes for the Wikimedia movement’s future. We also had six short talks from our volunteers and partners, highlighting the great work happening in the community.
As we were unable to eat birthday cake together, we ran an online baking competition #WikiLovesCakes on social media, which was brilliantly fun and very well received. We were delighted to have celebrity judge Sandi Toksvig, presenter of the Great British Bake Off and host of QI, join our Chair of the board, Nick Poole, as volunteer judges. The winning cake was the fantastic Women in Red tribute by James Slack, deemed ‘lovely and thoughtful’ by Sandi. Highly commended baker went to our very own Natasha Iles for her great biscoff and madeira cake pop of the Wikipedia globe.
Beyond the celebrations, Wikipedia’s birthday proved an excellent opportunity to highlight our message of open knowledge for everyone. Our Chief Executive, Lucy Crompton-Reid, had three radio interviews with Radio 4, Times Radio, and Radio France International. Our Director of Programmes and Evaluation, Daria Cybulska, was interviewed by First News Youth Magazine.
Other
The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations are sharing text and images under an open licence. With Wikimedian in Residence John Cummings leaving the UN, this work will continue with Wikimedia UK as the lead.
In January Wikimedia UK launched the beta version of our new website. We hope to make the website live soon, and are working hard to get all the images captioned with credits and page content finished.