Friends' Newsletter/2024/Issue 02
Welcome to the summer 2024 newsletter
Welcome to Wikimedia UK’s summer newsletter. At least, according to my calendar this is summer, even if my thermostat (here in Scotland) doesn’t quite agree!
We’ve got plenty of good things going on in the charity. It was wonderful to get together with some of the Wikimedia Foundation’s staff and trustees at an event in London with Wikimedia UK staff, trustees, volunteers and partners. One attendee commented that he hadn’t expected to see so many “wiki heroes” – from very long standing editors to volunteers who have joined the community more recently but who are making a significant contribution to open knowledge.
One of the highlights in the Wikimedia movement’s annual calendar is Wikimania, which is currently taking place in Katowice, Poland. A number of staff and volunteers from the UK are attending this year’s conference in August, and connecting in person with fellow Wikimedians from around the world. Closer to home, the Celtic Knot Wikimedia Languages Conference returns in September, and this year we’ve teamed up with Wikimedia Community Ireland who will be hosting the event in Waterford.
Our Annual General Meeting will also take place in September, where members of the charity will elect trustees and vote for (or indeed propose) resolutions. Good governance is integral to the work of any charity, and this year we are particularly keen for members of the Wikimedia editing community to put themselves forward to become trustees. To stand for election or participate in the AGM you must be a member of the charity, which costs just £5 a year (sign up here).
Be sure to check out the section on our new animations – a very exciting project with Ritzy Animations that used images from Wikimedia Commons to bring our work to life in both English and Welsh. There's more on how we'll be using these below. Please share these on your own social media channels to spread the message about our important work!
Lucy Crompton-Reid
Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK
Celtic Knot 2024
As mentioned in previous newsletters, the Celtic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference is taking place in Ireland in September, and registration is now open! The Celtic Knot is a gathering that acknowledges the diversity of Celtic language communities and their presence within the global Wikimedia ecosystem. Rooted in the spirit of collaboration and community empowerment, it serves as a nexus for language enthusiasts, Wikimedia contributors, cultural advocates, academics and researchers to come together and explore innovative approaches to language preservation, promotion, and recognition of Celtic and minority languages in the digital space.
The conference will take place on 25-27 September 2024, onsite in Waterford City, Ireland. Keep an eye on the event page for more updates including details about the venue, programme and registration soon! Details about the venue, program, registration and other updates will be added to the event page in due time.
We are looking forward to receiving your contributions to the program and scholarship requests!
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to the organising team: Richard Nevell (WMUK), Amy O'Riordan and Sophie Fitzpatrick (Wikimedia Community Ireland), or Léa Lacroix.
Wikimania 2024
Every year, hundreds of Wikimedians come together to celebrate free knowledge at the annual Wikimania global conference. The 19th edition of Wikimania is taking place this week in Katowice, Poland from 7th–10 August as a partnership between Wikimedians of the Central and Eastern Europe region and the Wikimedia Foundation. It's hosting free knowledge leaders from around the world to discuss issues, report on new projects and approaches, build networks, and exchange ideas.
Wikimedia UK staff have had a number of proposals for talks accepted, including our Director of Programmes and Evaluation, Daria Cybulska, on The Changemakers’ Toolkit; CEO Lucy Crompton-Reid who is contributing to a session on public policy advocacy; and Dr Sara Thomas, Programme Manager, who will be presenting on the Volunteer Supporter's Network with Wikimedia Argentina, and a lightning talk entitled "Monsters, legends and mythical creatures: A Wikidata Folk(lore).
Come say hi to us if you're there, or catch the talks from the UK community and beyond online.
Wiki Loves Earth 2024
Wiki Loves Earth is an annual international photography competition aimed at capturing the beauty and diversity of our natural world. The hope is that if we can illustrate Wikipedia with images of nature it will map the effects of climate change as well as drive home the importance of these areas of natural beauty and the animals and plants that inhabit them.
This year, Wales, Ireland and, for the first time, Scotland took part in the competition. Each nation will have a round of national judging before the winners of that round are submitted to the international judging panel. Photographers submitted their shots throughout June and July to stand a chance to win while helping us document the important natural wonders of our world.
The next stage of the competition is an announcement of the winners from each country, which will be submitted to the international judging.
🏴 Wales page
🏴 Scotland page
🇮🇪 Ireland page
Bringing our mission to life through animation
As an organisation deeply committed to the principles of open knowledge and free information, Wikimedia UK has always sought innovative ways to engage with our community and promote our cause. Which is why we were very excited to work on a new chapter of outreach efforts: the launch of our new animations, designed to illuminate our work and bring about a greater understanding of our mission.
We collaborated with a fantastic animation studio called Ritzy Animation who have helped us to bring our ideas to life, using images from Wiki Commons, which they’ve beautifully animated. There are four animations in total, with an introduction to Wikimedia UK, and then one for each area of our programmatic aims; Knowledge Equity, Information Literacy, and Climate and Environment.
Watch all of the animations on our YouTube, where they’re available in both English and Welsh. The animations were created with openly licensed images from Wikimedia Commons, full accreditation here.
Food and Agriculture Organisation
WMUK have been working with the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations since 2019, helping them share text and images from reports and developing them into content that can be used on Wikipedia. By releasing this content under an open licence, we have helped the FAO reach an audience of 3 million people a month through the English Wikipedia alone, covering topics such as food safety, biodiversity, and forest restoration. Sharing research about climate change has become increasingly important for WMUK and working with the FAO helps to make high-quality research more accessible.
We are also collaborating on a submission to Expo 2025 to have working with the Wikimedia projects recognised as an example of best practice. If that is successful, it will incentivise more collaboration with Wikimedia to share high-quality information.
National Library of Wales
Wide-ranging content work took place at the National Library of Wales, where Jason Evans champions Wikipedia as the Open Data Manager. Welsh Wicipedia were the first language wiki to achieve gender parity, and that’s still an important aspect of the work in Wales, with 525 new articles about women were added to Welsh Wicipedia through the Library. Preservation of the Welsh language is also an important area, with 600 new Wikidata items for missing Welsh electoral districts with EN and CY labels and descriptions added. 150 CY labels added to Welsh churches, 213 new Wikidata items created for Welsh historic buildings, 4200 edits (adding coordinates, admin district, etc.) to improve data for Welsh historic monument items in February, 3000 in March, 7598 in April.
Repatriations and museums event
Programme Manager Sara Thomas attended a University of Glasgow CREATe event in April entitled From Scotland to the World: Repatriation and Museums. The event focussed on the repatriation/rematriation of objects from various international museums to communities of origin, including the rematriation of the Ni'isjoohl totem pole from the National Museum of Scotland to the Nisga’a people of British Columbia. There were some interesting insights and reflections on the ability of Scottish museums to return objects, and the process of the development of organisational policy around these matters. In relation to Wikimedia UK work, there were also interesting reflections on the ethics and respectful approach to working with intangible and other cultural heritage artefacts within the Wikimedia projects.
RAMM residency
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A series of magic slides were uploaded by RAMM as part of the ongoing Wikimedia partnership. In honour of World Environment Day a selection of slides showing different types of fungus were uploaded to Commons. These fascinating images were bought in 1933 by the Royal Albert Memorial College as a teaching aid for local classes: each files is a photographic print, hand-coloured by CT Green who was an amateur botanist and medical practitioner in Cheshire.
Heritage Guard Network
The Heritage Guard Network Risk Working Group is a wiki network launched recently to promote the crowdsourcing of information about cultural and natural heritage in danger. Wikimedia UK were invited to join the network due to our work with the SXNCH project, documenting the intersection between cultural and natural heritage. Our Programme Manager, Richard Nevell, represents WMUK on the Risk Working Group, sharing experience of working with projects such as SXNCH and the Gazetteer of Libyan Heritage.
Richard’s shared a number of lessons with the group, such as how we’ve found that Researchers see value in sharing stuff on Wikipedia, but are time poor which limits availability to edit. We’ve also found that because Wikipedia is ubiquitous it provides an opportunity to shape people's understanding of the environment. Cultural and environmental heritage are inextricable – from conservation challenges in museums as they respond to extreme weather to the impact of climate change on historic sites (drought, flooding, erosion, etc). As Wikimedia organisations we can play an important role in making engaging with Wikimedia easier for experts and find ways to remove the friction.
Climate residency at GSI
Our main project in the Climate strand of our programmes is the residency with the Global Systems Institute at Exeter University. Earlier this year Wikipedia was used at the University as a teaching tool in an editathon for the MSc Global Sustainability Solutions students. Working in pairs, students updated Wikipedia articles on the environmental policy they had been assigned to work on for other aspects of their coursework. The Resident, Tatjana Baleta, also gave a presentation to bioscience lecturers about using Wikimedia in teaching at their “New Ways of Learning” seminar in April.
Permission was secured for the graphics created for the Global Systems Institute’s Tipping Points report to be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in April. The Resident wrote a few paragraphs of content from the GSI’s Tipping Points reports, the content was reviewed by experts before editing it into Wikipedia.
Tatjana collaborated with a fellow Resident Adam Harangozo at the National Institute for Health Research to devise a collaborative event with experts from NIHR and the European Centre for Environment & Human Health, focussed on reviewing and improving articles under the sub-theme climate change and human health. The group worked on the article Indoor air quality.
Tatjana spent two days at the Met Office in March to engage the researchers there. She gave two seminars about Wikipedia, and had meetings with the Met Office’s Knowledge Integration team about how they could include Wikipedia outputs in their communication activities.
April marked a half year point of the second year of the residency. Cumulative project achievements for the project to date (October 2022 - April 2024) are:
- More than 120 editors have been trained over 13 editathon events.
- More than 450 articles have been edited to varying degrees (as a cumulative effort from both trainers (4) and trainees).
- These articles have been viewed 53.2 million times since they were first edited.
- Of these, 20 articles have undergone completed expert review.
From October to April, as a result of editathon events, more than 40 editors have been trained to edit Wikipedia’s climate change articles, and 64 climate change-related articles have been improved. These articles have been viewed over 3.74 million times since they were edited.
Cloud seeding case study: The United Arab Emirates recently faced its worst floods in 75 years, causing four fatalities and hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to buildings and restructure. In the wake, rumours on social media have been circulating that the UAE’s cloud seeding program is to blame for the severe deluge. As people scramble to make sense of what they hear online, they head to Wikipedia for more information. The Wikipedia article Cloud seeding in the United Arab Emirates has racked up over 200,000 views in the past 30 days – an increase of over 90% compared to the previous month. But there was a problem: Expert consensus published in the news is that anthropogenic climate change, and not cloud seeding, is the real cause of the high rainfall in the UAE and across the Persian Gulf. However, the Wikipedia article heavily implied a link between flooding and cloud seeding activities, citing sources that did not state such a link. Tatjana spotted this and was able to remove the misinformation and add a paragraph about climate change’s reported role in the floods. When possible bad faith editors attempted to delete the new information, she engaged the Wikipedia editor community to build consensus on the most factual information and prevent its removal. The Cloud seeding in the United Arab Emirates article now correctly attributes the April 2024 floods to climate change, providing correct information to hundreds of thousands of people.
The Khalili Foundation
An article on a touring exhibition incorporating items from the Khalili Collections was promoted to Featured Article status. This is the culmination of a lot of work, and the article will eventually appear on Wikipedia’s front page (the queue is quite long, but it will happen). Resident at the Khalili Foundation, Martin Poulter, is responsible for some of Wikipedia’s best content on Islamic art.
Wiki Loves Monuments
Wiki Loves Monuments is back for 2024! The annual international photography contest and crowdsourcing event will run throughout September, with participants photographing and uploading images of historic monuments to Wikimedia Commons. These images are then available for free use on Wikipedia and beyond. Everyone is welcome to get involved, whether as a participant (photographer), organisational volunteer, or both. There is no requirement for participants or volunteers to be from the UK.
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews has several strands of student activity. We support Junior and Senior Honours students there to design and deliver Wikimedia projects of their interest. A Senior Honours student scraped, formatted and uploaded data from the Scottish Brick History website (which we’ve done small pieces of work on for a couple of years now) to Wikidata, and created this site. This is a significant data visualisation of an important part of Scottish industrial history, which up until now has only existed on a manually-updated Wordpress site, and something we had wanted to set up for a number of years now.
Other senior honours students worked with the Mapping Memorials to Women in Scotland dataset (a project of Women’s History Scotland and the Glasgow Women’s Library, again with which we’ve done some work in the past), again uploading that information to Wikidata. In both cases we were able to partner the student with a real-life dataset and a real-life partner organisation.
Another student worked with Wiki Loves Monuments data, visualising the data of images uploaded over the last few years of the contest in the UK. Key reflections from that include areas of the UK in which we have not had significant coverage – Northern Ireland in particular.
Overall, Senior Honours projects involved around 2k new items added to Wikidata.
Junior Honours students chose topic areas and pulled data from Wikidata to visualise. This was an interesting data re-use project, which saw the entire year of Computing Science students working in groups to create websites based on real-life data, and also partnering with Skyscanner to add a “twist” to the challenge around designing for accessibility. The challenge has received positive feedback from tutors and course leaders, and we hope to return to Wikidata as a course challenge on a regular basis, every 2-3 years. The students spent over 24k hours on this project.
Following on from data gaps identified by the Junior Honours students, Dr Kirsty Ross has set up another STEP (Summer work experience student work programme) project to look at filling some of the gaps identified.
Join us
Find us on social media Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Mastodon, and LinkedIn. 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, which will allow you to vote on our board elections at the 2024 AGM on the 21st September. You can also support our projects through a donation, or volunteer on some of the projects above. Our blog has more details on some of the activities mentioned in the newsletter.