Friends' Newsletter/2023/Issue 01
Welcome to Friends' Newsletter, 2023/Issue 01
Welcome to Wikimedia UK’s Spring newsletter. This always feels to me like a time for hope and optimism - particularly living in a rural area, where I think the changing seasons are felt more keenly than in a city. However, there is still much to be concerned about within our society, with the UK recently downgraded to ‘obstructed’ in the Civic Freedoms Index, and the Online Safety Bill representing a real threat to freedom of expression. Now more than ever, we must work to protect the concept of open knowledge for all. You can find out how Wikimedia UK and our partners - including individual contributors, community leaders and organisations - have acted on this commitment in our most recent Strategic Report. Within this newsletter, you can read about some of the many different projects and partnerships that Wikimedia UK is currently involved with. These activities are focused on our three strategic themes of knowledge equity, information literacy and climate and underpinned by a commitment to inclusion, community and accessibility.
Lucy Crompton-Reid
Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK
Staff Changes at Wikimedia UK
There have been a number of changes to the staff team at Wikimedia UK in the last few months. Dr Richard Nevell and Dr Sara Thomas have both been promoted to two newly created Programme Manager roles. Richard now has particular responsibility for England and major projects, while Sara is leading on the other UK nations and volunteer development. Meanwhile our Director of Programmes and Evaluation, Daria Cybulska, has been seconded to the Sheila McKechnie Foundation on a part time basis.
Our longstanding Director of Finance and Operations, Davina Johnson, retired at the start of the year. We wish her all the best in this next chapter of her life. To replace Davina, we have recruited a new Head of Finance and Operations, Sharon Mitcheson, who joined the team in January.
Online Safety Bill
As readers may be aware, the long heralded Online Safety Bill - which started life as the White Paper on Online Harms, published in April 2019 - is now making its way through Parliament. The Bill will establish a new regulatory framework for online services, with Ofcom becoming the new regulator - with the power to levy fines and even criminal sanctions against non-compliant providers. Both Wikimedia UK and the Wikimedia Foundation have highlighted concerns about the Bill for the past four years, urging the government and Ofcom to consider the implications for small, user moderated and/or public benefit websites. However as it currently stands, the requirements of the Bill in terms of content moderation, age gating and user verification are incompatible with Wikipedia’s model. We are therefore proposing a series of amendments to the Bill to be debated in the House of Lords after Easter, in the hope that changes can be made to protect our movement and safeguard open knowledge. If you are interested in supporting our advocacy efforts regarding the Online Safety Bill, please email lucy.crompton-reid@wikimedia.org.uk.
Minority and minoritized languages
Doubling the number of articles on Welsh Wici
Wikimedia UK recently helped the editors on the Welsh language Wikipedia to more than double the number of articles! This project was led by our Wales Manager Robin Owain. In November, 136,061 articles suddenly became a massive 277,367 - not bad for a language with only 700,000 speakers. In the list of languages per number of speakers, Wales is now 18th out of around 334. Cornish, by the way, is 6th.
All the new articles are about films - films from all over the world. To do this, a very large database was created by downloading information from Wikidata and open film databases. This was then passed through the Auto Wiki Browser, a semi-automated tool which helped publish the new articles on cy-wiki. The publishing was done by volunteers, and the creation of around 5,000 new categories in the last few months crowned the project.
If no information existed on Wikidata, then a special code was left in the body of the article, which, as soon as the info is added on WD then full sentences will appear in the article. This is disallowed on the English WP, but is enabled on all six Celtic languages. Small is beautiful! For example, the population of Cardiff is a short, simple code eg {{pop}} which automatically will bring into the article the most recent population of all communities, parishes, towns etc. With films, if you add a recently given award to the director, filmstar or the film itself onto Wikidata, then it will automatically appear within the Welsh article. Perhaps one day, all wikis will follow suit!
Cornish place-names
Cornish language charity Akademi Kernewek and Cornwall Council asked Robin Owain (our Wales Manager) to bring their database of standardised place-names onto the Wikimedia projects. The process began with adding the place-names on Wikidata, and a new property was created for that purpose. More here.
By now, 3,624 place-names have been matched, which is around a half of the whole database. Two of our volunteers, Simon Cobb and Davyth Fear have been part of the work. Davyth, by the way, recently wrote his 1,000th wikipedia article in Kernewek; he is also Chair of the Celtic Editors Group. Wikimedia UK has been supporting the Cornish language, for some time now: indeed, some of you will remember our Celtic Knot Conference in Penryn (or maybe we should use the Cornish standardised spelling: ‘Pennrynn’), Cornwall, back in 2019. If you would like to help with unmatched place-names, please contact Robin Owain.
Scots wiki writing drive
2023 has seen two Writing Drives take place over at Scots wiki (in January and March), both focusing on stub articles which require language improvement. Using PetScan, we shared a list of these articles with the community, and editing took place throughout the week. Other tasks involved fixing [citation needed] tags, inputting citations generally, and other such tasks which could be taken on by those less confident in their written Scots.
Community support
Train the Trainer
We organised an online trainer catch-up in February. 14 trainers attended the call out of 53 active trainers. We talked about trainer activities in 2022, plans for 2023, and ideas and challenges ahead. We conducted a poll to find out about the training needs of our volunteer trainers. Half of the participants declared interest in training on how to run hybrid events. The second most popular training theme was anti-oppression. We are currently researching and planning how to deliver these two trainings within this year. Our next trainer catch-up will take place in May.
Volunteer Supporters Network
Wikimedia UK has partnered with Wikimedia Argentina in a funding application to take on the running of the Wikimedia Volunteer Supporters Network for the next year. The programme of work plans to build on a successful track record of skillshare workshops, networking, peer learning, and annual meeting, bringing together those in the movement who are particularly focused on supporting volunteers.
Northern Ireland
Women’s History Month at Queen’s University Belfast
On International Women's Day, Wikimedia UK partnered with Wikimedia Ireland to support an editathon with Queen's University Belfast, under the Women in Red banner. Focusing on women in science, we're hopeful that this was the first of more events run by QUB, and also that with the appointment of a Programme Manager at Wikimedia UK whose remit includes Northern Ireland, that we will have additional capacity to be able to support such events.
Scotland
Inverclyde Community Development Trust
Programme Manager Dr Sara Thomas (formerly Scotland Programme Coordinator) has been working with the Inverclyde Community Development Trust on a programme of Wikipedia training with volunteer groups in the Inverclyde area of the West of Scotland. Funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, this digital heritage skills project empowers local people to research the history and heritage of their area, and improve its coverage on-wiki.
University of Edinburgh
The Women in Red editathons continue with the February event including a participant from the Society of Experimental Biologists creating an article about Beatrice Grant n. Campbell (1761-1845) who was a Scottish author and teacher from Kilmartin in the early nineteenth century.
The Wikidata Map of Accused Witches has a new intern to quality assure the data. Developer Richard Lawson has been asked to make improvements in line with suggestions but the student intern, Claire Panella, will work part-time to support the team in terms of quality assuring the data and making sure the data and visualisations are consistent and working as expected. Claire has been inducted and started with comparing the gender and names of 3,217 accused witches in the Survey database with the gender and names for the accused witches in Wikidata using RStudio to compare the information in the two databases.
University engagement with Wiki projects
University of Kent MA History module is running two training workshops for MA students, with volunteers supporting activities in november. We organised volunteer support, focused on in-person training with some advice over email, especially around one student’s editing on the Arabic-language Wikipedia.
At SOAS, we offered course support for the course leader for a module on the Politics of Resistance.
Anglia Ruskin University journalism course - We’re supporting a course leader with a group of second year journalism students. The editing element took place in March, with two lots of two sessions: introductory sessions on 7th and 9th March and feedback sessions on 2st1 and 23rd March. The students will be split into four groups, so there are four sessions to deliver for the cohort.
Canterbury Christ Church University digital humanities module - Supporting a course leader with a group of second year history students. This year Dr. Catriona Cooper took over a module, ‘Humanities in a Digital World’, which involves an editathon. There are two classes, totalling 30 students. Two how-to-edit sessions were delivered on 13th February to a group of students in digital humanities.
At the University of East Anglia we are supporting a course leader with a group of archaeology students: we will run an introduction to Wikipedia editing in April.
Connected Heritage
We’re pleased to share that we have been awarded further funding by the National Lottery Heritage Fund to extend our Connected Heritage project, enabling us to reach new organisations and offer further residencies at cultural heritage organisations.
As part of Connected Heritage recently started a mini Wikimedian in Residence project with the Royal Albert Memorial Museum. Lucy Hinnie is the resident, working with Francesca Farmer (based at RAMM) and Andrea Wallace (based at Exeter University). The intention is to help RAMM share content and use the experience to advocate for other GLAMs in South West England to engage with Wikimedia projects, tying into the GLAM-E Lab initiative led by Professor Wallace.
The Mixed Museum residency continues, led by Leah Emary. The project is expected to reach a conclusion in March after the museum hosts a pair of student interns over a four-week period. Leah has produced excellent volunteer resources, guiding people through editing Wikipedia and helping them direct their efforts in a way useful to the Mixed Museum. This is a model which could usefully be reproduced elsewhere.
During March we also supported microinterns at the Manar Al-Athar Archive, building on a similar micro internship last summer.
The Connected Heritage team led a successful pair of workshops for the Scottish Jewish Heritage Centre, with a good turnout for the introductory and follow up sessions. They were an enthusiastic audience of volunteers and staff and prepared several pages which are being shepherded through Wikipedia’s notability policies by the Connected Heritage team.
As well as an LGBTQIA+ wikithon in February, in March we had a workshop with Queer Britain and the Heritage Trust Network in March, at which the teams were able to start queering the National Trust wiki pages by referencing NT books and putting ‘Prejudice and Pride’ research into the public domain.
Global Systems Institute Residency for climate
We’ve been delighted by the progress of our first climate residency, with Tatjana throwing herself into work at the University of Exeter’s research hub. She has been collaborating with subject matter experts and has received her first expert review as a result, on the topic of social cost of carbon (counting as a high-impact article).
The first editathon was held at the end of January. It was a hybrid event that saw 13 editors learn how to edit Wikipedia and then work to improve climate change articles on the platform. Over just one hour we worked on 8 articles including topics from energy security to soil carbon, adding 1.04k words and 6 citations. Editors were working on English, Spanish and Chinese Wikipedias. One of the editors also spotted some misinformation about coral and climate change, which can now be corrected.
The February editathon was held on the 23rd of February. The event was online only due to the ongoing university strikes. Tatjana led the training and was joined by Stuart Prior as co-trainer. Su-Laine Brodsky was also in attendance to provide additional insights.
Two organisations have been engaged to release media onto Commons – Climate Visuals and Carbon Brief. 4000 graphs have also been released from Our World in Data. Currently sorting the climate change related graphs from the others and will need to cross-reference with existing files on Commons from Our World in Data.
See also Wikipedia:WiR/Global Systems Institute, and the Edit for Climate Change Dashboard.
British Library Residency
The Residency at the British Library has concluded after a thorough staff handover, though Lucy Hinnie will be staying on with us in her capacity as a Connected Heritage Project Lead.
Back in 2021, as part of our work with residency at the British Library the West Bengal Wikimedians User Group to the Two Centuries of Indian Print. Since then and collaboration with curators at the British Library and with better access to metadata and images, Bengali Wikimedians have transcribed 39 books from the collection including translations of Shakespeare.
You can see the Library’s project page and Lucy’s blog on Lord Chamberlain’s Plays to see how the residency concluded.
State of Open Con
The State Of Open Conference brings together organisations, communities and advocates of open data, technology and knowledge. This year, Wikimedia UK was excited to attend SOOC23, where we spoke with attendees from across the sector about our particular role in the open knowledge movement. It provided us with a great opportunity to network with like-minded individuals, learn about emerging trends and technologies, and gain new insights and perspectives.
Keynote speakers included the Labour MP and shadow science minister Chi Onwurah, Google’s vice-president of Infrastructure Eric Brewer, and Open UK CEO Amanda Brock. Representing the Wikimedia Foundation was Movement Advocacy Manager Franziska Putz, who took part in a panel discussion on the relationship between open data and diplomacy. We were also delighted to hear from Jimmy Wales, who gave a fascinating keynote lecture on Wikimedia’s role in open-knowledge sharing and the challenges that both the Wikimedia projects and open knowledge sector faces today.
Join us
We’re very grateful to and proud of the network we’ve built around our chapter. You can support the governance of the charity by becoming a member, or support our projects through a donation, or volunteer on some of the projects above.
We’re on social media if you’d like to connect with us there, we always appreciate new followers and sharers of our news; Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. You can also follow our blog, which has more details on some of the activities mentioned in the newsletter.