Supporting the University of Edinburgh's commitments to digital skills, information literacy, and sharing knowledge openly

Month: June 2021

Open Data and Knowledge Equity – my first week by student intern, Clea Strathmann

Protest against the death penalty for LGBT+ people, Milan 2008. Photo taken by Giovanni Dall’Orto, available at Wikimedia Commons under CC-BY licence. 

Before I started this internship, I was an incredibly busy third-year Psychology student studying at the University of Edinburgh. Now, I’m spending my summer before my final year as an intern for the Information Services Group at the university. During my first week, I’ve had a lot of new information thrown at me about what Wikipedia and its sister project Wikidata are, why these are important, and how to use and edit them. Mostly, though, I’ve been learning a lot about what my internship is all about. 

When I got this role, my title of “Open Data and Knowledge Equity” intern left a lot of questions to be answered. I understood a little about open access information, but very little else. Knowledge equity, it turns out, was a term that would be thrown around a lot, so I really needed to understand what it meant. With a lot of reading around on the subject and a handful of meetings, I managed to develop a pretty good idea of this.

Knowledge equity refers to how knowledge should be fully inclusive. It should be able to be created by anybody, and consumed by anybody. In the world of Wikipedia, though, around 90% of editors are male, and there is substantial racial bias in the content and creation of Wikipedia articles. Considering that Wikipedia is one of the world’s most-viewed websites, it is incredibly important that it is a representative and diverse encyclopedia. The more I read up on the lack of diversity online, as well as in academia and the curriculum, the more I understood how important my role could be in contributing to the visibility of important role models online and on Wikipedia. 

All of this has been incredibly overwhelming – I really didn’t know how much I didn’t know until I started speaking to all of these people, but I’ve managed to get some sort of a grip on it all. With all this information about knowledge equity, open knowledge and Wikipedia, I had to put some of this information to practice, so I created my first ever Wikipedia article.

Thinking about my knowledge equity role, I chose to write a new Wikipedia article on Donna Hitchens, the first elected lesbian superior court judge in the USA. I was surprised to see that she didn’t have her own page already, despite being mentioned in a number of other articles for her work on LGBT+ legal rights. But it turns out that, whilst learning how to create Wiki articles wasn’t as difficult as I had expected, it was quite challenging to find reliable, impartial secondary sources to back up the articles.

It was even more difficult to hear that articles can be nominated for deletion if other Wikipedia editors do not deem the topics or individuals to be a notable based on available citations. This is quite hard-hitting when thinking about diversity and representation online – it’s not enough to just edit Wikipedia articles, and with a lack of reliable sources discussing important topics, there is a substantial scope for notable individuals to remain unseen. This is where my work with the university comes in. 

The university has commitments to equality, diversity and inclusion, and is in a position of privilege in that it contains over 35,000 students capable of writing content that can enable notable figures to be made visible online. Over my internship, I hope to be able to encourage the university to contribute to and engage with Wikipedia as a source of outreach and activism to support diversity in education. 

By the end of my first week, I have definitely started to understand a lot more about knowledge equity and how Wikipedia is influenced by the people who produce and edit content. Over the next few weeks, I’m looking forward to learning and supporting the University of Edinburgh in creating a more diverse online, and physical, environment. 

Woman attending a Black Lives Matter protest holding a sign stating “the UK is not innocent”. Photo Author – Socialist Appeal. Available at 
https://flickr.com/photos/135433887@N02/49977691057 under Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence.
 
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode

My first week as a Wikisourceror – Guest post by student intern, Erin Boyle

View an Intro to Wikisource – the free and open digital hyper library!  (1hr)

Upload pdfs of free books to Wikipedia’s sister project  and help proofread the OCR-ed text  so readers can discover, enjoy and be inspired by songs, letters, plays, poems, novels and more  all around the world 

Hi there! My name is Erin, and I am the new Wikisourceror (Open Collections) intern. Aside from being an intern with a really fun name, I am a final year BSc Physics student with strong interests in Outreach and Engagement and Open Education, Open Data, accessibility and social responsibility. I have just finished my first week, and I feel like I have learned so much already, in what has felt like a whirlwind of information!

When I started, I wasn’t 100% sure what to expect, but this week has been really enjoyable and informative, and I have spent a lot of time familiarising myself with the different Wikimedia projects, what they host, and what they are used for. Learning more about editing on them is the next goal!

My role focuses on creating guides and workflows for uploading openly licensed content with a specific aim of helping those working within the Library and University Collections to make content available on Wikipedia’s sister projects (Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource), furthering Wikimedia’s goal of expanding their free-to-use collections of human knowledge.

My role in helping to ‘open up’ the university’s collections also seeks to support the university in upholding its commitments to the UN’s sustainable development goals Sustainable Development Goals | unfoundation.org and its key institutional commitments to: the sharing of knowledge openly; information literacy; digital skills; data skills; excellence in learning, teaching and research; equality, diversity and inclusion; and public engagement with research. One of my aims is to improve the awareness of how engaging with the Wikimedia projects can help the university to fulfil these commitments, and, improve awareness of and engagement with the Library and University Collections.

My role will also involve contributing to the University’s Wikimedian in Residence Webpage Wikimedian in Residence | The University of Edinburgh, specifically through adding new content; such as video guides on how to use Wikipedia, and Wikidata, and hopefully adding new sections to cover Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource too!

This week, I have undertaken a large variety of activities, from web-editing training, to uploading my first images on Wikimedia Commons, and publishing my first ever Wikipedia article! I decided to write about Hannah Shields, the first woman from Northern Ireland to summit Everest, as I had heard about her numerous times whilst growing up, but she didn’t have a page yet. After seeing the Women in Red project, I was astounded by the disparity between the coverage of notable women when compared with notable men; but I was also very convinced after this week’s learnings that projects like Wikipedia can be an enormous force for good when it comes to combatting inequality through representation of people, events, and movements that those in the past didn’t deem worth highlighting or celebrating.

I have been very privileged to have had lots of meetings with many interesting people this week and to have been able to learn about the work that they are involved in. I have been introduced to some interesting collections which I should hopefully get the chance to work on soon, uploading images and books to Wikisource. I am looking forward to learning more about the projects, and how I can help to engage people with the Library and University Collections (L&UC) using Wikimedia!

Figure 1: The Royal Edinburgh Botanic Gardens; my favourite place in Edinburgh!

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