Category: Uncategorized Page 1 of 13

Dervla Craig standing looking at the Scottish witch trials exhibit at the National Museum of Scotland.

This post is the second written by LLB student Dervla Craig who has worked as our Information and Data Literacy intern this Summer researching and preparing a National Lottery Heritage Fund bid to preserve, and raise public engagement with, the accused witches of Scotland as an important part of Scotland’s heritage.

As I sit to write this blog post, my twelve-week internship is rapidly drawing to a close. How the time has flown! I have learned and achieved so much this summer, and it seems only appropriate that I reflect on and share what this experience has taught me through another blog post.

Since my first blog (Preserving Scottish Heritage: The Accused Witches of Scotland), my research and bid-writing have taken me down many different avenues. The more familiar I became with the past, however, the more questions arose about the present. Why is there still no appropriate memorial to the accused in Edinburgh? Does stigma still exist surrounding these persecuted individuals? How can we at the University best preserve and promote the individual stories of the accused and make sure they are not forgotten to history? Exploring these questions was extremely important for me in ensuring that I understood the context in which the bid lives and the landscape we would be entering with this project.

In my search for answers to these questions, two main areas stuck out to me as requiring more work and attention to make sure the real, human stories of those accused of witchcraft are protected and valued now and into the future: increasing awareness, education, and understanding of the Scottish witch trials, and appropriately memorialising the victims who were accused, tortured and executed.

Information board about “Witches and Witchcraft” at the National Museum of Scotland. Pic by Ewan McAndrew, CC-BY-SA

Education on the Scottish Witch Trials

My line manager, Ewan McAndrew, and I have spent the last few weeks consulting with various organisations in an effort to realise the full potential of our bid. One area we explored was how we at the University, as a teaching and learning institution, could help facilitate education on the Scottish witch trials and use our accused witches’ dataset to combat negative perceptions of the accused exacerbated by entertainment-driven media portrayals. I researched the Curriculum in Scotland for secondary schools and was surprised to find that whilst adjacent topics such as King James VI and the Protestant Reformation are covered in detail, the witch trials themselves are largely overlooked. We also spoke with Jo Spiller and Judy Robertson from the University about their work on data education in schools and how our dataset could be a valuable resource.

A huge opportunity for progress in this area came in week eight, when we visited the National Museum of Scotland to meet with Anna Groundwater, the Principal Curator of Renaissance and Early Modern History, Scottish History and Archaeology. She showed us the current witchcraft exhibit, which has remained unchanged for the twenty-seven years it has been on display, and discussed what updates could be made to accurately reflect the research that has taken place in the years since and modern attitudes towards the study of witchcraft and the witch trials. We also had a great conversation about promoting education on this dark period of Scottish history and how we can engage a wider audience with this heritage. This was my first professional meeting, and I am happy to report that it went very well.

Inscription plaque at the Witches Well memorial on Castlehill, Edinburgh. Pic by (Lila), CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The issue of memorialisation

For centuries after the Scottish witch trials, sympathy for the accused was often seen as sympathy for the Devil and as such, there was not much research into the lives of those who were charged with the crime of witchcraft. Whilst modern attitudes have shifted to a more empathetic approach, the issue of memorialisation is still one of great controversy. The only memorial which stands in Scotland’s capital city of Edinburgh is the Witches’ Well on Castle Hill, which is hidden away and has a problematic inscription that has been criticised for its historical inaccuracy and contention that while ‘some used their exceptional knowledge for evil purposes while others were misunderstood and wished their kind nothing but good‘. This assumption that those accused did indeed have supernatural abilities and that the brutality of the Scottish witch hunts was in any way justifiable is extremely harmful to the memory of the innocent people (85% of whom were women) that possessed no such powers but who were tortured and executed for being ‘witches’.

The Witches of Scotland campaign group have long been advocating for a national memorial to the accused which would honour the victims in an appropriate way, and have even created a new, highly symbolic Tartan pattern to honour the victims and act as a living memorial to them. (They also released a Book called How to Kill a Witch: A Guide to the Patriarchy which is a brilliant read and mentions the University’s The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft – I highly recommend putting it at the top of your reading list). In our consultations with various organisations, the issue of appropriately memorialising the accused was one which was met with much interest and enthusiasm, and it seems that a place to go and pay our solemn respects to those whose lives were unjustly taken is something that would largely be supported and welcomed in Edinburgh.

Final Thoughts

Although there is much more work to be done in ensuring that the stories of the individuals who were accused of witchcraft are understood and remembered with accuracy and empathy, an appetite undoubtably exists for promoting these stories and memorialising these individuals in an appropriate and meaningful way. It is within this context that we will be submitting our bid to the National Lottery Heritage Fund with the aim of establishing an open license, publicly accessible resource containing all known information on Scotland’s accused witches that can be used by researchers, historians, authors, artists, teachers, students and so many other groups to support work in and beyond the education and heritage sectors. Alongside this, we plan to run a programme of public engagement events to facilitate the public’s active participation with the data and stories of the accused. Further than simply historical education, we will encourage cultural reflection on themes such as women’s rights and the scapegoating of marginalised groups that permeate not just our past, but also our present.

There is much we as a society can learn from this dark period of Scottish history, and I am hopeful that our bid, if successful, will support future research and work on the Scottish witch trials and bring awareness to the real stories behind the 3837 Scottish people, mostly women, who were accused of and in many cases executed for crimes they simply did not commit. I have been greatly moved by not just the deaths, but the lives of these individuals and am so grateful to have played a role this summer in preserving their memory for generations to come.

Woodcut from the Newes of Scotland pamphlet depicting suspected witches from North Berwick as they are threatened with a beating as they appear before two Scottish magistrates.

Woodcut on display at the National Museum of Scotland from the Newes of Scotland pamphlet depicting suspected witches from North Berwick as they are threatened with a beating as they appear before two Scottish magistrates. Pic by Ewan McAndrew, CC-BY-SA

NB: Dervla has done so well over the last twelve weeks that she is continuing in post (part-time) during her studies this year.

Ps. You can catch the Edinburgh Book festival talk, Women not Witches, by Claire and Zoe of the Witches of Scotland at the Book Festival website.

A graphic depicting the face and shoulders of Ada Lovelace and a booking link detailing all the events on 14th of October to celebrate Women in STEM that day

Ten years of Ada Lovelace Day at the University of Edinburgh

By Ewan McAndrew

On October 1, 2025

In Uncategorized

Ada Lovelace day is the 14th of October this year and this will be our 10th year of celebrating that day!

We are planning events and activities with a climate and earth sciences theme, running in the afternoon and early evening of that date. The day time events will be in the Main Library and the panel will be in G.03 in 50 George Sq.

uCreate takeover! 11.00-16.00 (First Floor, Main Library)

Have your chroma-key photo taken with women in STEM and explore some of the tech resources uCreate has to offer, like programming, sensors, virtual reality (VR) experiences, 3D scanners, 3D printers and more.

No need to book, just come along!

Lunch and Lightning talks 12.00-1.45 (Main Library, Room 1.07)

Lunch will be served 12pm to 12.30pm. Come say hello and meet fellow Ada Lovelace Day participants!

This session is a chance for some networking with some lightning talks from a range fascinating projects, initiatives and student societies.

Building Equity: the Molly Ferguson Initiative for Women in Engineering – Dr. Rhiannon Grant (Chancellor’s Fellow at School of Engineering) will provide an introduction to the initiative and what they have running at the moment, and a welcome for any input from others.
Digging for dinosaurs: how to be a woman in the field – Women face unique challenges when conducting field research, especially in remote locations. Milly Mead (PhD researcher, the Paleontology Society) discusses how she’s approached some of these challenges while digging up dinosaurs in the Badlands of Montana.
Building AdaHack – Bessie from the Edinburgh Hoppers Society on how they brought their hackathon to life and the benefits and opportunities presented to women and gender minorities through it.
The Mindset to Global Stages: How Resilience Powers Extraordinary Success – Anna Petrusenko (CompSoc Vice President). From fleeing a war-torn home to sharing a stage with President Bill Clinton, Anna’s journey taught her one truth: the mindset that helps you survive the unimaginable is the same one that fuels extraordinary success. This talk explores how resilience and determination can transform any challenge into possibility
Reflections on how my experiences have shaped my career – Ariadna Sanchez Cervera (PhD student) will share her 10+ years of experience in STEM which ranges from a career in the tech industry to academia at different stages (BSc,MSc and PhD). From these she will summarise a few insights that she has found key along the way which guides how she works today.
The Hidden Voices project: Unearthing the impact of women in Scottish archaeology – Lucia Michelin and Rebecca Jones (Society of Scottish Antiquaries). Many female Scottish antiquarians of the 19th and 20th centuries have made a significant contribution to Scottish archaeology, although often not given due credit for their work. This presentation will review the Hidden Voices project, where a few current Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland are collaborating to raise the profile of these women, increasing visibility of their work and contributions for archaeology.

Book for lunch and lightning talks

Wikipedia Women in STEM edit-a-thon – 1.45-5 (Main Library, Room 1.07)

Wikipedia Edit-a-thon – help add the brilliant lives & contributions of Women in STEM to improve discoverability and representation online. Learn how to edit in 1hr… and how IMPACTFUL and FUN it is to share knowledge openly.
You’ll learn important 21st century digital research skills and have done something amazing with a tangible published outcome by the end of the afternoon!
All we need is 50-100+ words (cite what you write!) to publish brand new pages about all the inspiring lives, projects and research taking place all over the world currently missing from our search results.
This year’s event will focus on Women in Archaeology, Paleontology, Earth Science and Geoscience but all are welcome to take part and contribute knowledge about all the brilliant work by Women in STEM.
No experience necessary, full training will be given and tea, coffee & cakes will help fuel your editing efforts.

Book for editathon

Games and Crafts – 1.45-5 (Main Library, Room 1.07)

Make badges
Colour-in
Play our Women in STEM interactive game

Book for games and crafts

Celebrating Women in Climate & Earth Sciences – 5-7 (G.03, 50 George Square)

Join us for an inspiring panel discussion that shines a spotlight on the remarkable contributions of women in climate and earth sciences. We bring together four leading voices who are breaking new ground in research, policy and public engagement. The panel will start at 5.15pm.

Chair: Dr Melissa Highton (Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services and Assistant Principal Online Learning)

Panelists:

Elva Bannon –Research and Engineering Manager at Wave Energy Scotland. Elva heads the WES Research and Engineering team, where she utilises her solid background in Mechatronic Engineering (BEng) and Advanced Engineering (MEng) to drive the development of novel wave energy technologies. Elva is the Chair of the UK National Committee for TC114 developing international standards for the wave and tidal energy sector. She also sits on the industrial advisory board for Supergen ORE Hub and is a member of the Scientific Committee for EIMR, all roles for which she received a ‘Top 50 Women in Engineering Award 2024’ from the Women’s Engineering Society.
Dr Hermione Cockburn OBE – Science communicator with a career spanning television, radio, teaching and writing. Until recently, Hermione was the Scientific Director of Dynamic Earth and is currently a trustee at National Museums Scotland and an Honorary Fellow at the School of Geosciences.
Professor Gabi Hegerl – Award-winning climatolagist and Royal Society Fellow whose pioneering work on detection and attribution has deepened our understanding of the causes of climate change.
Dr Encarni Medina-Lopez – A Senior Lecturer and leads the ‘Coastal and Environmental Remote Sensing Group’ in the School of Engineering of the University of Edinburgh. Encarni is the Director of the Failure Modes of Engineering project (FeME) focusing on engineering solutions for climate change and biodiversity loss, and their impact on women, children and other underrepresented groups globally.

Book for Panel session within University (students and staff)

Public booking link

Digital Volunteering with Wikipedia – open for 2025/2026 student participation

By Ewan McAndrew

On September 16, 2025

In Uncategorized

Digital Volunteering with Wikipedia

The fourth year of the Edinburgh Award for Digital Volunteering with Wikipedia concluded on 31^st March 2025.

Seven students (and one staff volunteer) completed this extracurricular digital research project amassing both the requisite 55-80 hours of volunteering time AND the significant & demonstrable impact in improving the topic coverage of their chosen project area on the free and open encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Their projects covered a wide range of topics which often complemented their studies (and at times provided a respite/holiday from their studies) as well as, importantly, enhancing & evidencing their graduate capabilities and digital research skills in such diverse project areas as:

By the award’s completion, our 2025 Edinburgh Award achievers had contributed over 80,000 words and 1200 references to the largest reference work on the internet, and their work had amassed over 1 million pageviews from interested readers all around the world.

The student achievers were then presented with their certificate of completion, and record of their achievement added on their Higher Education Achievement Report, at a celebration event evening for all Edinburgh Award achievers at the University’s Playfair Library during Reading Week in April.

Watch the 2024/2025 short video presentations on Media Hopper and consider volunteering for this year’s award commencing with a workshop on 21 October 2025 where you can meet other participants and formally enroll.

And we look forward to working with you and toasting your Award success!

Here’s an example ‘end of award’ presentation by one of our 2023 achievers, Ana Aldazabal (pictured above on left), on her project on Latin American literature (suggested by Professor Fiona Mackintosh).

NB: If you are a member of staff at the University then you can also get involved by suggesting topic areas and/or resources (like course reading lists) that would be helpful and of interest to the students for project idea inspiration as to where they could so some good improving topic coverage on Wikipedia.

This adds to the fascinating work of our past award achievers who have helped improve global understanding on other underrepresented topics such as:

Find out more on our website.

Preserving Scottish Heritage: The Accused Witches of Scotland

By Ewan McAndrew

On July 11, 2025

In Uncategorized

This post was written by LLB student Dervla Craig on her first month as Information and Data Literacy intern this Summer.

My name is Dervla and I am going into my second year of the Graduate LLB at the University of Edinburgh. This summer I am doing a 12-week internship with the University’s Information Services Group (ISG) on one of the most fascinating projects I have ever had the opportunity to be a part of: the Accused Witches of Scotland project.

I am one of a long line of interns who has been involved in this project each year since 2019, which aims to commemorate and spread awareness about those who were persecuted as witches in Scotland during the 16th to 18th centuries. While previous interns have primarily been focused on processing and importing data from the University’s landmark The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database (2003) into Wikidata and created our witches website with new map and timeline visualisations, this year my role looks a bit different.

My remit for the 12 weeks is to prepare a bid to the National Lottery Heritage Fund to secure funding for what we hope can be the next phase of the project. Our goal is to preserve the accused witches’ data in the long-term and ensure that people can connect with and participate in this heritage now and in the future. As it has come to the end of my first month, I wanted to join the tradition of blogging about my internship experience so far.

Getting to know the individual stories of the accused

My first week was spent diving down the rabbit hole to explore all there is to learn about the Scottish witch trials. If you had asked me to describe an accused witch before this week, I would’ve told you they wore a pointy hat and flew around on a broomstick. I couldn’t have been more wrong! Now when I picture these women, they look like my mother, or my grandmother, or me. They were ordinary people who suffered an egregious injustice, and I was extremely moved when learning about their stories.

: Josep Garcia-Reyero (2022)

: Maggie Lin (2022)

: Claire Panella (2023)

: Ellie Whitehead (2024)

: Prof Julian Goodare and Ruby Imrie (2023-2024)

: Geography undergraduate student, Emma Carroll, our first ‘Witchfinder General’ intern in Summer 2019.

Some of the most valuable tools for my research included The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, created by Julian Goodare, a history professor at the University of Edinburgh, and his team in the late 90’s, and the interactive witches map resource created by Emma Carroll, a geography student and our former Data Visualisation intern, and our late developer colleague Richard Lawson in September 2019. The Survey made use of the historic records of all the accused witches in Scotland between 1563 – 1736 and organised the details into a MS Access 1997 database, and our new 2019 map brings this data to life in a new and engaging way through importing the data into Wikipedia’s sister project, Wikidata, as linked open machine-readable data.

Learning about the great work that has been done previously definitely made me realise I have a lot to live up to but also motivated me to give it my all in the next twelve weeks and hopefully produce an end result that meets the standards of my predecessors.

Writing a National Lottery Heritage Fund bid

The next thing to familiarise myself with before I could dive into my writing was the bid itself. I spent a few days combing through the NLHF website to understand what it is they are looking for and how our project fits those needs. By getting to know my audience, I could ensure that my writing was intriguing, evidence-based and persuasive. I quickly found out that before submitting the 10,000-word application, I must submit a 1000-word ‘Expression of Interest’. This EoI asks questions about the heritage of the project, what our project aims to achieve, and why it is needed now. At this point, I felt I could write a dissertation for each of these questions, so the tight word count was my biggest enemy. I had lots of help from some lovely colleagues who offered their feedback and advice, including the Project Director of the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, Professor Julian Goodare. After many tweaks and a few redrafts, I am happy to say at the end of week four that the EoI is pretty much ready to go.

Exploring avenues for community engagement

Alongside writing, writing and more writing, I have also been brainstorming ideas for the community engagement side of our project. There have been so many great ideas by the team which have led to interesting and helpful discussions with different people and organisations, including the National Museum of Scotland, Reforesting Scotland, and some really talented artists. Excitingly, most of the responses we have received have been positive and enthusiastic. In the upcoming weeks, I hope to visit some of these places and see firsthand the primary sources from the witch trials.

Workshops and all-staff events

Another educational and fun aspect of my experience so far, outside of my bid writing role, has been the plethora of events hosted by ISG. In the past month I have taken part in ‘intern welcome’ socials, Wikipedia writing workshops and even a workshop on an introduction to blogging! Alongside these, I have also attended two all-staff events, one for all Information Services Group (ISG) staff and one for the Learning, Teaching and Web (LTW) division. Not only have I learned so much about the behind-the-scenes and the people who have made my studies possible for the past five years, but these events have also been an opportunity to get to know more of my colleagues and socialise with other interns. At ISG there is a strong emphasis on having a healthy work-life balance and making sure that you and those around you have what you need to produce your best work.

View of Edinburgh Castle from Floor K, Argyle House. CC-BY-SA by Dervla Craig.

In conclusion, I have had an amazing first month as an intern with the University of Edinburgh. I have learned a lot, met new people, and pushed myself outside of my comfort zone. Plus the amazing view of Edinburgh Castle from Floor K has been a real motivator to work from the office and not from home! I am nothing but hopeful that the next eight weeks will be even more exciting and productive, and that I can blog again soon with positive updates!

P.S. If you haven’t already, definitely visit The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft and the Map of Accused Witches in Scotland websites! They are both amazing (and important) educational resources that I could browse for hours (and have).

Computer Keyboard with an AI button lit up

Wikipedia at 24: Wikipedia and Artificial Intelligence

By Ewan McAndrew

On January 17, 2025

In Uncategorized

Wikipedia at 24

“With more than 250 million views each day, Wikipedia is an invaluable educational resource”.^[1]

In light of Wikipedia turning 24 years this (January 15th), and the Wikimedia residency at the University of Edinburgh turning 9 years old this week too, this post is to examine where we are with Wikipedia today in light of artificial intelligence and the ‘existential threat’ it poses to our knowledge ecosystem. Or not. We’ll see.

NB: This post is especially timely given also Keir Starmer’s focus on “unleashing Artificial Intelligence across the UK” on Monday^[2]^[3] and our Principal’s championing of the University of Edinburgh as “a global centre for artificial intelligence excellence, with an emphasis on using AI for public good” this week.

Before we begin in earnest

Wikipedia has been, for some time, preferentialised in the top search results of Google, the number one search engine. And “search is the way we live now” (Darnton in Hillis, Petit & Jarrett, 2013, p.5)…. whether that stays the same remains to be seen with the emergence of chat-bots and ‘AI summary’ services. So it is incumbent on knowledge-generating academic institutions to support staff and students in navigating a robust information literacy when it comes to navigating the 21st century digital research skills necessary in the world today and understanding how knowledge is created, curated and disseminated online.

Engaging with Wikipedia in teaching & learning has helped us achieve these outcomes over the last nine years and supported thousands of learners to become discerning ‘open knowledge activists‘; better able to see the gaps in our shared knowledge and motivated to address these gaps especially when it comes to under-represented groups, topics, languages, histories. Better able also to discern reliable sources from unreliable sources, biased accounts from neutral point of view, copyrighted works from open access. Imbued with the critical thinking, academic referencing skills and graduate competencies any academic institution and employer would hope to see attained.

Point 1: Wikipedia is already making use of machine learning

ORES

The Wikimedia Foundation has been using machine learning for years (since November 2015). ORES is a service that helps grade the quality of Wikipedia edits and evaluate changes made. Part of its function is to flag potentially problematic edits and bring them to the attention of human editors. The idea is that when you have as many edits to deal with as Wikipedia does, applying some means of filtering can make it easier to handle.

“The important thing is that ORES itself does not make edits to Wikipedia, but synthesizes information and it is the human editors who decide how they act on that information” – Dr. Richard Nevell, Wikimedia UK

MinT

Rather relying entirely on external machine translation models (Google Translate, Yandex, Apertium, LingoCloud), Wikimedia also now has its own machine translation tool, MinT (Machine in Translation) (since July 2023) which is based on multiple state-of-the-art open source neural machine translation models ^[5] including (1) Meta’s NLLB-200 (2) Helsinki University’s OPUS (3) IndicTrans2 (4) Softcatalà.

The combined result of which is that more than 70 languages are now supported by MinT that are not supported by other services (including 27 languages for which there is no Wikipedia yet).^[5]

“The translation models used by MinT support over 200 languages, including many underserved languages that are getting machine translation for the first time”.^[6]

Machine translation is one application of AI or more accurately large language models that many readers may be familiar with. This aids with the translation of knowledge from one language to another, to build understanding between different languages and cultures. The English Wikipedia doesn’t allow for unsupervised machine translations to be added into its pages, but human editors are welcome to use these tools and add content. The key component is human supervision, with no unedited or unaltered machine translation permitted to be published on Wikipedia. We made use of the Content Translation tool on the Translation Studies MSc for the last eight years to give our students meaningful, practical published translation experience ahead of the world of work.

Point 2: Recent study finds artificial intelligence can aid Wikipedia’s verifiability

“It might seem ironic to use AI to help with citations, given how ChatGPT notoriously botches and hallucinates citations. But it’s important to remember that there’s a lot more to AI language models than chatbots….”^[7]

SIDE – a potential use case

A study published in Nature Machine Intelligence in October 2023 demonstrated that the use of SIDE, a neural network based machine intelligence, could aid the verifiability of the references used in Wikipedia’s articles.^[8] SIDE was trained using the references in existing ‘Featured Articles‘ on Wikipedia (the 8,000+ best quality articles on Wikipedia) to help flag citations where the citation was unlikely to support the statement or claim being made. Then SIDE would search the web for better alternative citations which would be better placed to support the claim being made in the article.

The paper’s authors observed that for the top 10% of citations tagged as most likely to be unverifiable‘ by SIDE, human editors preferred the system’s suggested alternatives compared with the originally cited reference 70% of the time‘.^[8]

What does this mean?

“Wikipedia lives and dies by its references, the links to sources that back up information in the online encyclopaedia. But sometimes, those references are flawed — pointing to broken websites, erroneous information or non-reputable sources.” ^[7]

This use case could, theoretically, save time for editors in checking the accuracy and verifiability of citations in articles BUT computational scientist at the University of Zurich, Aleksandra Urman, warns that this would only be if the system was deployed correctly and “what the Wikipedia community would find most useful”.^[8]

Indeed, practical implementation and actual usefulness remains to be seen BUT the potential there is acknowledged by some within the Wikimedia and open education space:

“This is a powerful example of machine learning tools that can help scale the work of volunteers by efficiently recommending citations and accurate sources. Improving these processes will allow us to attract new editors to Wikipedia and provide better, more reliable information to billions of people around the world.” – Dr. Shani Everstein Sigalov, educator and Free Knowledge advocate.

One final note is that Urman pointed out that Wikipedia users testing the SIDE system were TWICE as likely to prefer neither of the references as they were to prefer the ones suggested by SIDE. So the human editor would still have to go searching for the relevant citation online in such instances.

Laptop on desk displaying webpage about ChatGPT

Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash

Point 3: ChatGPT and Wikipedia

Do people trust ChatGPT more than Google Search and Wikipedia?

No, thankfully. A focus group and interview study published in 2024 revealed that not all users trust ChatGPT-generated information as much as Google Search and Wikipedia.^[9]

Has the emergence and use of ChatGPT affected engagement with Wikipedia?

In November 2022, ChatGPT was released to the public and quickly became a popular source of information, serving as an effective question-answering resource. Early indications have suggested that it may be drawing users away from traditional question answering services.

A 2024 paper examined Wikipedia page visits, visitor numbers, number of edits and editor numbers in twelve Wikipedia languages. These metrics were compared with the numbers before and after the 30th of November 2022 when ChatGPT released. The paper’s authors also developed a panel regression model to better understand and quantify any differences. The paper concludes that while ChatGPT negatively impacted engagement in question-answering services such as StackOverflow, the same could not be said, as of yet, to Wikipedia. Indeed, there was little evidence of any impact on edits and editor numbers and any impact seems to have been extremely limited.^[10]

Wikimedia CEO Maryana Iskander states,

“We have not yet seen a drop in page views on the Wikipedia platform since ChatGPT launched. We’re on it. we’re paying close attention, and we’re engaging, but also not freaking out, I would say.”^[11]

Do Wikipedia editors think ChatGPT or other AI generators should be used for article creation?

“AI generators are useful for writing believable, human-like text, they are also prone to including erroneous information, and even citing sources and academic papers which don’t exist. This often results in text summaries which seem accurate, but on closer inspection are revealed to be completely fabricated.”^[12]

Author of Should You Believe Wikipedia?: Online Communities and the Construction of Knowledge, Regents Professor Amy Bruckman states large language models are only as good as their ability to distinguish fact from fiction… so, in her view, they [LLMs] can be used to write content for Wikipedia BUT only ever as a first draft which can only be made useful if it is then edited by humans and the sources cited checked by humans also.^[12]

“Unreviewed AI generated content is a form of vandalism, and we can use the same techniques that we use for vandalism fighting on Wikipedia, to fight garbage coming from AI.” stated Bruckman.^[12]

Wikimedia CEO Maryana Iskander agrees,

“There are ways bad actors can find their way in. People vandalize pages, but we’ve kind of cracked the code on that, and often bots can be disseminated to revert vandalism, usually within seconds. At the foundation, we’ve built a disinformation team that works with volunteers to track and monitor.“^[11]

For the Wikipedia community’s part, a draft policy setting out the limits of usage of artificial intelligence on Wikipedia in article generation has been written to help editors avoid any copyright violations being posted on a open-licensed Wikipedia page or anything that might open Wikipedia volunteers up to libel suits. While at the same time the Wikimedia Foundation’s developers are creating tools to aid Wikipedia editors to better identify content online that has been written by AI bots. Part of this is also the greater worry that it is the digital news media, more than Wikipedia, that may be more prone to AI-generated content and it is these hitherto reliable news sources that Wikipedia editors would like to cite normally.

“I don’t think we can tell people ‘don’t use it’ because it’s just not going to happen. I mean, I would put the genie back in the bottle, if you let me. But given that that’s not possible, all we can do is to check it.”^[12]

Garbage in, Garbage out?

Portrait of Charles II of Spain, of the Habsburg dynasty

Portrait of King Charles II, the last monarch from the House of Habsburg by Juan Carreño de Miranda, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

As what is right or wrong or missing on Wikipedia spreads across the internet then the need to ensure there are enough checks and balances and human supervision to avoid AI-generated garbage being replicated on Wikipedia and then spreading to other news sources and other AI services means we might be in a continuous ‘garbage-in-garbage-out’ spiral to the bottom that Wikimedia Sweden‘s John Cummings termed the Habsburg AI Effect (i.e. a degenerative ‘inbreeding’ of knowledge, consuming each other in a death loop, getting progressively and demonstrably worse and more ill each time) at the annual Wikimedia conference in August 2024. Despite Wikipedia and Google’s interdependence, the Wikipedia community itself is unsure it wants to enter any kind of unchecked feedback loop with ChatGPT whereby OpenAI consumes Wikipedia’s free content to train its models to then feed into other commercial paywalled sites when ChatGPT’s erroneous ‘hallucinations’ might have been feeding, in turn, into Wikipedia articles.

It is true to say that while Jimmy Wales has expressed his reluctance to see ChatGPT used as yet (“It has a tendency to just make stuff up out of thin air which is just really bad for Wikipedia — that’s just not OK. We’ve got to be really careful about that.”)^[13] other Wikipedia editors have expressed their willingness to use it get past the inertia and “activation energy” of the first couple of paragraphs of a new article and, with human supervision (or humans as Wikipedia’s “special sauce”, if you will), this could actually help Wikipedia create greater numbers of quality articles to better reach its aim of becoming the ‘sum of all knowledge’.^[14]

One final suggestion posted on the Wikipedia mailing list has been the use of the BLOOM large language model which makes use of Responsible AI Licences (RAIL)^[15]

“Similar to some versions of the open Creative Commons license, the RAIL license enables flexible use of the AI model while also imposing some restrictions—for example, requiring that any derivative models clearly disclose that their outputs are AI-generated, and that anything built off them abide by the same rules.”^[12]

A Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson stated that,

“Based on feedback from volunteers, we’re looking into how these models may be able to help close knowledge gaps and increase knowledge access and participation. However, human engagement remains the most essential building block of the Wikimedia knowledge ecosystem. AI works best as an augmentation for the work that humans do on our project.”^[12]

Wikipedia page describing Wikipedia itself

Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash

Point 4: How Wikipedia can shape the future of AI

WikiAI?

In Alek Tarkowski’s 2023 thought piece he views the ‘existential challenge’ of AI models becoming the new gatekeepers of knowledge (and potentially replacing Wikipedia) as an opportunity for Wikipedia to think differently and develop its own WikiAI, “not just to protect the commons from exploitation. The goal also needs to be the development of approaches that support the commons in a new technological context, which changes how culture and knowledge are produced, shared, and used.”^[16] However, in discussion at Wikimania in August 2024, this was felt to be outwith the realms of possibility given the vast resources and financing this would require to get off the ground if tackled unilaterally by the Foundation.

Blacklisting and Attribution?

For Chris Albon, Machine Learning Director at the Wikimedia Foundation, using AI tools has been part of the work of some volunteers since 2002. ^[17] What’s new is that there may be more sites online using AI-generated content. However, Wikipedia has existing practice of blacklisting sites/sources once it has become clear they are no longer reliable. More concerning is the emerging disconnect whereby AI models can provide ‘summary’ answers to questions without linking to Wikipedia or providing attribution that the information is coming from Wikipedia.

“Without clear attribution and links to the original source from which information was obtained, AI applications risk introducing an unprecedented amount of misinformation into the world. Users will not be able to easily distinguish between accurate information and hallucinations. We have been thinking a lot about this challenge and believe that the solution is attribution.”^[17]

Gen-Z?

For Slate writer, Stephen Harrison, while a significant number of Wikipedia contributors are already gen Z (about 20% of Wikipedia editors are aged 18-24 according to a 2022 survey) there is a clear desire to increase this percentage within the Wikipedia community, not least to ensure the continuing relevance of Wikipedia within the knowledge ecosystem.^[18] I.e. if Wikipedia becomes reduced to mere ‘training data’ for AI models then who would want to continue editing Wikipedia and who would want to learn to edit to carry on the mantle when older editors dwindle away? Hence, recruiting more younger editors from generation Z and raising their awareness of how widely Wikipedia content is used across the internet and how they can derive a sense of community and a shared purpose from sharing fact-checked knowledge, plugging gaps and being part of something that feels like a world-changing endeavour.^[18]

WikiProject AI Cleanup

There is already an existing project is already clamping down on AI content on Wikipedia, according to Jiji Veronica Kim^[19] Volunteer editors on the project are making use of the help of AI detecting tools to:

Identify AI generates texts, images.
Remove any unsourced claims
Remove any posts that do not comply with Wiki policies.

“The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise….In other words, check yourself before you wreck yourself.“.^[19]

A heart displayed among 0s and 1s in binary code.

Photo by Alexander Sinn on Unsplash

Point 5: Wikipedia as a knowledge destination and the internet’s conscience

Final Reflections on my Wikipedia Journey

By ewhitehe

On October 29, 2024

In Uncategorized

At the launch event last Wednesday. Picture by me.

This week marks the end of my year-long internship as Assistant Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh. Now, at the end of my role, I can look back at all of the opportunities that this internship has given me and safely say that no other role could have offered me such an enjoyable, useful and unique experience!

Reflections on my Wikipedia experience

Within the first couple of months after starting my role, I wrote a blog reflecting on my preconceptions, experiences so far and new things I had learnt about Wikipedia. In this blog I intend to revisit this, comparing my knowledge and experiences to date with what I wrote in my first blog.

I wrote that I initially had entered the role with the misconception that Wikipedia was not to be trusted, and that the nature of it being an open and crowdsourced project was a weakness of the site. I have come to realise, however, that this element of Wikipedia is quite the opposite of a ‘weakness’. Throughout my time as Assistant Wikimedian in Residence I have encountered scepticism about the reliability of Wikipedia from friends, family, staff and students. When these doubts are expressed, I like to combat them picking from the armoury of facts I have picked up whilst in the role. For instance, explaining the role of editors watching pages and conducting the recent page patrols, the fact that this openness means that there are over 300 languages used on Wikipedia, the clear and effective policies and guidelines, and the importance of including verifiable andreliable sources in articles.

Print Wikipedia – Benjamin Busch/Import Projects, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

It has become clear to me that the open knowledge, crown sourced, open-ended and community elements of Wikipedia are the strengths of the site and are the reason why it is still the world’s 7th most visited website. It is a useful tool for both education institutions and students alike and can really illuminate the student learning experience.

“Wikipedia differs from printed references in important ways. It is continually created and updated, and encyclopedic articles on news events appear within minutes, making it more dynamic than most traditional resources. Anyone can improve Wikipedia, and more than 23 years of volunteer editors giving their time and talents to the project have made Wikipedia history’s most comprehensive encyclopedia. Its editors add quality and quantity, remove misinformation, and fix errors and vandalism. The sources they provide are used by researchers worldwide (see Researching with Wikipedia).

In summary, Wikipedia has tested the wisdom of the crowd since 2001 and has found that it succeeds.” – taken from the Wikipedia:About page.

Women in Red

Women in Red Logo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In my original blog, I noted how happy and interested I was to be learning about the Women in Red Wikiproject. When I started, articles about women made up around 19.72% of biographies on Wikipedia. That number is now 19.96%, a difference of nearly 15 000 new articles, and it feels amazing that some of the editathons that I have organised have helped to close that gap even further. Hopefully it will not be long until 20% is reached!

I have thoroughly enjoyed working on this important project and am grateful for all the knowledge that I have gained about women across the world, from 16^th century Scotland to 21^st century America. I will certainly be continuing to add to this in my own time and will make it my mission to reappear at a Women in Red editing event in the near future!

Key Events

Bessie Watson, the 9 year old Scottish suffragette from Edinburgh who had a room at the University
named after her on International Women’s
Day 2024. CC-BY-SA via Wikimedia
Commons

From this internship I have been able to run, talk at and partake in numerous wonderful events, from helping to open the new Bessie Watson Lecture Theatre, to welcoming people to a Burns Night themed editathon (fully fuelled by Irn Bru and shortbread!).

Other notable events included the International Women’s Day editathon. I organised this Wikipedia workshop in order to celebrate the lives and contributions of all the inspiring women the world, past and present, who have dedicated themselves to fighting for women’s rights, women’s education, universal suffrage and global justice by adding them onto Wikipedia. This event was ran in collaboration with the Global Justice Academy at Edinburgh Law School. Dr Kasey McCall-Smith, Lecturer in Public International Law and Programme Director for the LLM in Human Rights also spoke to us about women in justice at local, national and global levels.

Dr. Jenny Nex giving the guided tour of St Cecilia’s Hall concert room and music museum. Pic by Ellie Whitehead, CC-BY-SA

I also really enjoyed both our World Music Day and Scottish Castles and Witchlore events. Both these editathons saw me work with University of Edinburgh Collections and Heritage teams. For the World Music Day event I organised a tour of St Cecilia’s Music Hall and Museum led by its senior curator Dr Jenny Nex. The Scottish Castles and Witchlore event was a topic close to my heart, so I really wanted to make it as interactive as possible. To help with this, I organised a small exhibition of collections relating to witchcraft and castles with the University Special Collections team. Seeing university archives related to our topic was a big hit, and really brought the content to life.

Map of Scottish Witchcraft, Memorials and Curious Edinburgh tour launch

Map of Scottish Witchcraft, Map of Memorials and Curious Edinburgh walking tour launch.

In this blog I also wanted to reflect on the fantastic launch event that took place on the afternoon of last Wednesday, 23^rd October. This event saw the launch of the new version of the Map of Scottish Witchcraft, the new Map of Memorials and new Curious Edinburgh ‘History of Witchcraft’ walking tour of Edinburgh. We celebrated the launch with talks and a Q&A from me, Witchfinder General Intern Ruby Imrie, and Professor Emeritus in Scottish History Julian Goodare, complimented by refreshments of tea, coffee, cake and wine!

I have been lucky enough to work on all three of these projects, which has easily been the highlight of my experience as Assistant

Giving my presentation on the Curious Edinburgh History of Witchcraft tour at the launch event. Picture by me.

Wikimedian in Residence. It has been a fantastic opportunity, which saw me apply my knowledge of the history of early modern Scottish witchcraft. An opportunity that does not come up very often! I researched sites for memorials and wrote their descriptions, wrote introductions and glossaries to add more context to the Map of Scottish Witchcraft, researched and developed a tour of Edinburgh’s witchy locations, learnt how to film and edit videos and ultimately helped to improve the accurate understanding of the history of Scottish witchcraft. It feels amazing to have these projects launched and to see my (and many others!) hard work available to be viewed, shared and enjoyed by everyone.

Overall, I will be sorry to leave this role behind as I have really enjoyed it and got more out of it than I could have ever imagined! I have many thanks to extend to Ewan, who taught me the ropes and encouraged me to dive head-first into all things Wikipedia and beyond. Though finishing my role, I hope to be back editing Wikipedia in my own time as soon as I can!

This blog was written by Ellie Whitehead, Assistant Wikimedian in Residence.

Witch Lore and Scottish Castles September Editathon

By ewhitehe

On October 10, 2024

In Uncategorized

Witch Lore and Scottish Castles: a Wikipedia Editathon

Eilean Donan Castle, by Diliff [CC BY-SA 3.0] via Wikimedia Commons

On Friday 27^th September we were joined by castle buffs and witchcraft enthusiasts to help us improve the representation of Scottish witchcraft and heritage on Wikipedia. Our Witch Lore and Scottish Castles editathon event saw people coming together in the Digital Scholarship Centre of the Main Library to add ‘Witchlore’, stories and information relating to early modern witchcraft, to pages about Scottish castles and heritage locations.

A page created during our September editathon, CC-BY-SA by Ellie Whitehead

A number of Wikipedia pages about castles in Scotland neglected to mention their place in the stories of Scotland’s accused witches. The event looked to remedy this, adding some stories about witchcraft and accused witches to pages such as, Craigmillar Castle, Dirleton Castle, St Magnus Cathedral and Falkland Palace.

We also saw some brand-new pages about Scottish castles and heritage locations created! These include, Bass Castle, Logie House and Steading, and Poldrate Mill. Yet, despite our team’s valiant efforts – as ever – there is still more work to be done. See our worklist to take a look at a list of pages that we didn’t get around to improving and creating and have ago yourself! Some special mentions here would be to improve the mention of folklore in the Forvie Nature Reserve, Crichton Castle and Culross.

A diary from the University of Edinburgh Special Collections, CC-BY-SA by Ellie Whitehead

As part of this event, we also hosted an exhibition of material about Scottish castles and witchcraft that the university special collections hold. It was a great addition to the event to be able to get our hands on these items and see some archival material that linked directly to what we were editing.

We got to see hand-painted watercolours and sketches of castles, hand-written legends from the Outer Hebridies about witches living in Kisimul Castle on Barra. We were able to leaf through architectural plans and drawings of Scotland’s Castles and seventeenth-century demonological books, such as George Sinclair’s Satans Invisible World Discovered.

An exhibition of material relating to witchcraft and castles from the University of Edinburgh Special Collections, CC-BY-SA by Ellie Whitehead

Keeping true to our heritage theme, Ruby Imrie also gave us a presentation on the Wikipedia photography project and competition Wiki Loves Monuments! This is an annual international competition that takes place in September which encourages people to go out and take photographs of heritage locations around them and upload them to Wikipedia. Take a look at some of the 1,645 images that were uploaded this September in Scotland in celebration of cultural heritage!

Overall, at this event saw 16 editors create 4 articles and edit 114! A grand total of 236 edits were made and 6000 words were added. Articles created or edited at this event have been viewed over 5500 times! See our dashboard for a more detailed insight into what we added.

This was a great event, which added some fantastic information about Scotland’s supernatural history and heritage onto Wikipedia. Thank you to all those who attended. Our next major event that we would like to highlight is the launch of our BRAND NEW Map of Scottish Witchcraft, Map of Memorials and Curious Edinburgh Walking Tour. Join us on the 23rd October between 3-4.30pm at Lecture Theatre 2.35 at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Hope to see you there!

Written by Ellie Whitehead, Assistant Wikimedian in Residence

Celtic Knot Wikipedia Language Conference – “Strength in Unity”

By Ewan McAndrew

On October 7, 2024

In Uncategorized

“We are not minority languages, we are minoritised. And we are the global majority” – Tura Arutura, Social Justice activist, creative artist and dancer.

At the end of September, I had the great good fortune to be invited to the Celtic Knot conference in Waterford, Ireland hosted by Wikimedia Ireland and Wikimedia UK. This conference focuses on the minority language Wikipedias (not all of the 345 language Wikipedias are as well supported or well developed as English Wikipedia, see the list of Wikipedias here) and allows a Venn diagram of participants from all kinds of backgrounds, ages and experiences to come together as a community of ‘language activists’ to showcase, discuss and advocate for how best to support minoritised languages around the world.

We held the first ever Celtic Knot conference at the University of Edinburgh back in July 2017 as a way to demonstrate our support for the Scots Gaelic Wikipedia residency at the National Library of Scotland (watch the video presentation here) and to see where we could add some significant value by helping shine a light on some incredibly worthwhile language projects that could do with the space and time to outline the particular challenges (and opportunities) that regional and minority languages face whether technical, socio-economic or political. Initially, the conference focused on bringing the Celtic languages together (Scots Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Breton, Cornish, Manx) to help form a strong bond or ‘Celtic knot’ through working together and sharing experiences but we quickly realised that there was much to be gained from expanding to include Basque, Catalan, Saami, the Romance languages and more. I hosted the first event at the University as a one day experiment with 50-60 attendees to see if there was value to such knowledge and cultural exchange and I was ecstatic to see in Waterford that the need and desire for the conference had not diminished. Indeed, despite the upheaval of the past few years from Brexit, Covid, the Ukraine War, war in the Middle East, the cost of living crisis and more since I last was able to attend the conference in 2018, the Celtic Knot under the auspices of Wikimedia UK had expanded to a three day event and included more minoritised languages from around the world than ever before including Dagbani, Indonesian, Amazigh and Tashelhit from Morocco and many more who had wanted to attend & present but were unfortunately denied visas owing to some bureaucratic red tape. It is heartening to see that the ‘strength in unity’ between the Celtic language participants and our original conference participants was still there and stronger than ever and that there were welcoming arms extended both by the conference organisers, and importantly, by the Wikimedia Foundation to exploring a larger more inclusive conference to support minoritised languages across the globe. It was also heartening to see attendees from the Wikimedia Research team attend and present on efforts to make the process of creating a new language Wikipedia much easier to move from incubation to graduation in much less than the c. 9-18 years it has historically taken, until now.

It was fitting also that the conference was held in Waterford, Ireland’s oldest city, and a place that was described to me as somewhere that had perhaps lost its way and/or fallen upon hard times in the latter part of the 20^th century/early 21st as a rather depressed port area ignored by industry, retail and tourism and needing some love and support. But also now in recent times that its city officials had successfully rebranded and rejuvenated the city through embracing its rich Viking and medieval history and Waterford’s treasures. It also was not lost on me that Scotland-based Irish artist, Aoife Cawley, had created a special linoprint design depicting the marriage of Aoife MacMurrough (c. 1145 – 1188), a Princess of Leinster, being forced (against Irish law and tradition) in marriage to the English lord ‘Strongbow’, earl of Pembroke, in Christchurch Cathedral in Waterford as part of a pact between Strongbow (also known as Richard fitz Gilbert and Richard de Clare) and the King of Leinster, Dermot MacMurrough (c. 1110 – 1171), to help him reclaim his lands. This marriage on 25 August 1170 marked the first significant arrival of the English people (and the English language) becoming involved in Irish politics, history and culture with all that has ensued since.

Jason Evans, Wikimedian and Open Data Manager at the National Library of Wales on using AI summaries to help write Welsh Wicipedia articles, CC-BY-SA by Ewan McAndrew

Jason Evans, National Library of Wales Wikimedian and Open Data Manager was the conference’s opening keynote address and expounded on generating Welsh Wicipedia articles using AI generated summaries (checked by two humans for grammar and factual accuracy) to help create more knowledge shared in the Welsh language online. He outlined his work in public outreach at the National Library of Wales, and work with schools and universities in particular where he found translation tasks were exceedingly popular with students – they felt very motivated to share knowledge and address knowledge gaps online. Maristella Gatto further reinforced the motivation of students for translation work in a presentation sharing details on a University of Bari translation project where students chose their words carefully when translating articles about Irish historical events, such as Bloody Sunday, into Italian by using computational analysis of the vocabulary. They implicitly realised AI tools make use of Wikipedia so this can replicate problems in representation of topics if language and vocabulary used in articles was not chosen correctly. Words have meaning and they matter. Representation matters.

“Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile” translates as “One beetle recognises another”.

This Irish saying (above) is a nod to the notion of comradeship, community and solidarity between people(s). I believe this is certainly true of conference participants who recognised, despite their different languages, that there was true commonality in their shared language activism. Activism that could sometimes lead to becoming political prisoners in the case of Martial Menard, namechecked in the talk by Dr. Tristan Loarer, Opening Sources in the Breton language: Offering the ‘Minoritised’ Language to the Majority”.

“We must take what we are entitled to, not hold out our hands.” – Breton activist and political prisoner Martial Menard (1951-2016)

Dr. Tristan Loarer at the Celtic Knot, CC-BY-SA by Ewan McAndrew

Loarer discussed the availability (or lack thereof) of pragmatic tools for the Breton language and the need for feeding the A.I. ‘beast’ with quality assured Breton text whether from Breton transcriptions in Wikisource, the free and open wiki hyper library, or from the creation of the new DEVRI tool, offering free access to a dichroic dictionary of the Breton language.

Two particularly affecting sessions, for me, were on the Irish language. Nóirín Ní Bhraoin, a psychologist from Dublin, noted that when she walked the streets of Dublin she hardly ever heard Gaeilge, which she thought was astounding for the Republic of Ireland’s capital city. She wanted to see if the problem was down to “one Irish speaker not being able to recognise another” so wore a badge that said “Speak Irish to me” and invited shop staff at ten Dublin shops to wear these badges and record how often customers spoke to them in Irish each day. The results showed that on average 3.6 people spoke Gaeilge to the staff each day across the ten stores. This encouraged Nóirín Ní Bhraoin to work with a developer to create a mobile app called “Gaelgoer” (Gael as in Irish Gaeilge speaker and ‘go-er’ as in the English for someone to get up and go!) which would allow app users to view (1) upcoming Irish events happening near them or all around the world (2) businesses that had speakers happy to speak Irish to you, and (3) even geolocate Irish speakers on the map so you could start an online/sms chat with them, if both were happy to do so. NB: an extra ‘Tinder’ style dating function was considered and requested by surveyed Irish speakers but Nóirín Ní Bhraoin and her developer shelved that idea for now.

Nóirín Ní Bhraoin (GaelGoer app), CC-BY-SA by Ewan McAndrew

“This project underscores a powerful truth: knowledge belongs to everyone” Joe Kelly, Mayor of Waterford, speaking on the Wiki Women Erasmus+ Project.

The key event of the Conference was the Wiki Women Erasmus+ panel introduced by the Mayor of Waterford, Joe Kelly, who spoke of how genuinely impressed he had been by the initiative and the potential it had for expansion. He was followed by four impressive high school Irish students who took turns to present (both in Irish and with an English translation) on their experiences on the Wiki Women Erasmus project where this EU funded scheme allowed the students to attend the Basque country as part of a cross cultural language exchange with Basque and Friesland students and teachers with the ultimate goal to highlight the gender gap in content online and empower students in minority language communities (Gaeltacht regions, Basque, Friesland) to write Wikipedia articles about underrepresented women in their languages. Another goal of the project has been to produce a ‘teacher’s toolkit’ that could be translated and used in any language to support further work in other regional and minoritised languages.

Mayor of Waterford, Joe Kelly, introducing the Wiki Women Erasmus+ project, CC-BY-SA by Ewan McAndrew

“While working on this project, we also learned a lot about the history of women from our own country […] by the end we had a wealth of information […] we improved lots of skills during this project” – a student who participated in the Wiki Women Erasmus+ Project

Keynote speaker, and Irish Gaeilge Wikipedia editor, Dr. Kevin Scannell is a leading mind in tech for under-resourced languages and has revolutionised how Gaelic languages interact with modern tech. Scannell outlined some of the very real problems in the use of AI and the difference in distribution of knowledge (and power) between hegemonic languages like English and minoritised languages like Irish. If every word in Irish was committed to paper or computer and fed into a large language model, this would equate to 1 billion words or less. This equates to a knowledgebase 30,000 times smaller than Llama 3.1 LLM. Further, Irish data included in standard LLMs is of low quality with Wikipedias used as standard to train LLMS but minoritised language Wikipedias varying wildly in quality and other sources, such as CommonCrawl, heavily polluted with machine translation. The problem, Scannell asserted, was that big tech companies with non Irish-speaking researchers don’t care about the training data being ‘garbage in’ and thereby don’t care that this produces ‘garbage out’ so Scannell has started an Irish language corpus building project called Fiontar at Dublin City University where the 150 million words in it are being quality assured.

Further talks by Dresden University student researchers, Hannah Yule Heetmann and Joanna Dieckmann, on Unpacking Power Dynamics in Language Policy showed again how words and intentions matter through the analysis they had conducted of the language used in Irish Government’s 20-Year Strategy for the Irish language. Their fascinating findings highlighted how the words “going to” were entirely absent from the policy document, that timescales were almost never included, and that there was also a lack of specific actions and specific labelling of which government or non-government actors were actually to undertake those actions. They concluded with a series of recommendations to combat this for use in future policy documents so that any future Irish language strategy is truly fit for purpose, actionable, accountable and with specific tasks and timescales detailed.

When a language stops having the vocabulary to be able to speak about modern politics, socio-economics and technologies that affect and influence our daily lives then that language ceases to be useful and risks dying out so watching talks showing a range of initiatives, open education resources & toolkits, new ways of thinking about language activism (combining your passions to write about forensic science in Scots Gaelic for instance) and even ensuring that the word for a Wikipedia ‘edit-a-thon’ is now in Irish Gaeilge, gave me great hope that breathing new life into languages is possible and that new safe, open spaces (following the demise of Twitter) can be made to work to support language communities.

This pragmatic and inspiring ‘can do’ spirit, and the strength of feeling behind it coupled with the sheer pride being taken in every speaker’s linguistic heritage and its potential for the future in a global digital world, was the thing that impressed me most during the conference. The recognition that government policies can be advocated for and shaped, and that A.I. and other digital tools and initiatives can be harnessed and made to work to help and massively support languages, cultures, and histories being shared for the betterment of knowledge & cultural exchange and understanding across the world. As Nóirín Ní Bhraoin concluded (and I’m paraphrasing here) it’s about caring, and getting up off your backside to actual do something if you do care about your language, to say “Here we are”.

And if I may add, in a nod to the future of the Celtic Knot, “and here we remain.”

Onwards and upwards… and outwards! And here’s to a bigger, more inclusive Wikipedia language conference next time!

Thanks and Sláinte to Amy and Sophie, our wonderful Wikimedia Ireland hosts, and conference co-organisers, Lea, Richard and Daria, from Wikimedia UK. Thanks also to Tura for a wonderful display of traditional Irish dance.

Ardvreck Castle, near Lairg, on a misty day in July 2024

Scotland loves Monuments 2024

By Ewan McAndrew

On September 2, 2024

In Uncategorized

Get involved in Wiki Loves Monuments!

*Glasgow City Chambers stairwell, by Stinglehammer CC-BY-SA 4.0 and past Wiki Loves Monuments upload stats*

Wiki Loves Monuments is an international photo competition which takes part throughout the month of September every year, and is supported by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation.

You can see historic locations near you that are missing an image using our handy interactive map (red pins are locations without an open image).

The aim is to crowdsource as many high quality, openly licensed photos as possible of scheduled monuments and listed buildings throughout the world. Why? Because documenting our cultural heritage today is so important.

In the UK, there will be prizes for the best photos of a site in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales as well as prizes for the best UK photos overall. The latter will then be put forward for international prizes and there are some phenomenal pics from last year’s competition worldwide like this one of St Andrew’s Church (1747 — 1762) at dawn, Kyiv, Ukraine by Maksym Popelnyukh:

St Andrew's Church (1747 — 1762) at dawn, Kyiv, Ukraine by Maksym Popelnyukh — *St Andrew’s Church (1747 — 1762) at dawn, Kyiv, Ukraine by Maksym Popelnyukh*

Why take part?

Portobello and Wikipedia – Great 8 min podcast featuring University of Edinburgh Digital Curator Gavin Willshaw and Dr Margaret Munro of the Portobello Heritage Society discussing the importance of surfacing local heritage online.

Wikimedia Commons is a free repository of photographs, audio and video content that anyone can use, re-use or distribute. Images on Commons can also be used to illustrate Wikipedia articles – which can then be seen by a global audience. But not all of our rich heritage is represented – there are a number of gaps when it comes to the coverage of Scotland – and this year, we’d like to do what we can to change that. Especially when this is something fun and impactful we can all do.

Is your organisation or group looking for activities? Wiki Loves Monuments can be a great activity for local social or volunteer groups, not just those those concerned with photography or history. Why not organise a heritage walk to take pictures of listed buildings in the local area, and visit the local museum or library at the same time?

Collage of Wiki Loves Monuments pics by Stinglehammer, CC-BY-SA 4.0, taken during Glasgow Doors Open Day.

How do you take part?

Register for an account on Wikimedia Commons. (Individuals only, no organisational accounts.) NB: If you already have a Wikipedia account, no need to register for a new account on Wikimedia Commons, you can use the same account for Wikimedia Commons. To enter the competition you must make sure that your account has a valid email address and that your email is activated.

To check that, once you have logged in, look for “My preferences” tab at the top right of the page. Click on it, and then select “enable email from other users.” This will allow the competition organisers and other registered users on Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons to contact you but will not make your email address publicly available.

Here’s a short 2 min video explainer by Classics student, Hannah Rothmann – you can use this new tool to view places to photo near you.

What should you photograph? How do you upload it?

In Scotland, the subjects eligible to be entered in Wiki Loves Monuments are those designated by Historic Environment Scotland references for Listed Buildings and Scheduled Monuments. If you’re not sure what buildings or monuments are classed as listed, don’t worry! We’ve got a great tool for you to use to upload your photos which includes an interactive map.

Green pins on the map indicate monuments which already have a photo on Wikimedia Commons, whereas red pins indicate where they are missing. Select your town or city then wander around your local area and look for buildings or monuments with red pins. You can take photos on smartphones, tablets or cameras and then upload them by selecting the appropriate pin on the map and clicking upload. Make sure that you are logged into your Wikimedia Commons account and follow the basic instructions. Every photo uploaded via the interactive map will be entered into the Wiki Loves Monuments.

You can take more than one photo of a building or monument. Preferably one should be a photo of the building or monument as a whole, but also use your photographic flair to add photos of key features, inside views or behind the scenes features that the public doesn’t normally get to see. Doors Open Day runs throughout September and is a great opportunity to organise a photography tour of a building or a tour of the local listed monuments in your town.

I’ve had the pleasure of visiting and snapping pictures of the Glasgow City Chambers, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Anchor Line bar, Garnethill Synagogue and the Arlington Baths among many other locations as part of Glasgow Doors Open Days.

Other tips:

Not sure that your photo skills are up to the competition? Don’t worry about it, the important thing is to take part. The more photos we can crowdsource, the more we can improve the coverage of listed buildings and monuments in Scotland, which is our ultimate goal. You can also check the Wiki Loves Monuments blog for tips on how to best take architectural photos.
Wiki Loves Monuments is aimed at everyone! You don’t have to be an expert photographer, or have prior experience with any of the Wikimedia projects.
The competition runs through the whole of September from the 1^st till the 30^th and any entries uploaded during that time will be part of the competition. Photos don’t have to have been taken during September though, so you can add old photos, as long as they’ve not been previously uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Doors Open Day is a great opportunity to tie in with Wiki Loves Monuments, so if you know local DOD venues or if you work with a local heritage officer, please advertise it with them too.

How can you take part?

Do you work in or near a listed building? Add a picture!
Organise a heritage tour of your area – see here for inspiration!
Encourage a local history or photography group to take part
If you do take part, please tweet about it! @WikiLovesUK #ScotWiki
If you’ve got any questions, just email ewan.mcandrew@ed.ac.uk and we have a Scotland Programme Manager for Wikimedia UK sara.thomas@wikimedia.org.uk / scotland@wikimedia.org.uk

National Museum of Brazil, by Paulo R C M Jr. [CC BY-SA 3.0] via Wikimedia Commons

The grief that comes from lost buildings

Scotland was voted the most beautiful country in the world in a Rough Guide readers’ poll.

There’s nowhere quite like it.

Yet, we can take it for granted that our beautiful locations, listed buildings and monuments will always be there… something that can never be fully guaranteed. Political and economic tides change and forces of nature can have devastating effects as we have seen with the destruction of Palmyra in Syria, the devastation in Ukraine, the fires at the National Museum of Brazil, Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris and, more closer to home, the Mackintosh building fire at the Glasgow School of Art, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s masterwork.

There is a grief that comes from these lost buildings, their histories and what they had come to represent & symbolise. Recognising that there can be a profound regret and sadness at the cultural losses and a significant connection with the past means we can act today to look around us and appreciate the cultural heritage all around us. Many of us have access to a camera or camera phone and may even walk past these buildings every day. All it takes is looking up, taking a snap and uploading it in seconds and you’ve done something amazing to help document our cultural heritage for all time.

That’s why it’s so important that we take the opportunity to document our cultural heritage now for future generations before it is too late. Share your high quality pics of listed buildings and monuments to Wikimedia Commons and help preserve our cultural heritage online. After days out, weekend breaks and holidays at home & abroad, there will be gigabytes of pics taken in recent months and years. These could remain on your memory card or be shared to Commons and help illustrate Wikipedia for the benefit of all.

Aside from being great fun, Wiki Loves Monuments is a way of capturing a snapshot of our nation’s cultural heritage for future generations and documenting our country’s most important historic sites. Don’t wait till it’s too late, do your bit today! Click here to view a map of your local area to get started.

You just take a quick look at the map, take a pic and upload. It takes seconds and is the easiest way to take part in this year’s competition.

If each one of us took just 1 pic, we’d have this sewn up in a few short weeks. Which is when Wiki Loves Monuments closes – end of 30 September 2024. But if you can do more then great.

#ScotWiki #WikiLovesMonuments

ps. If nothing else, let’s give our counterparts in Ireland, England and Wales a run for their money in terms of how many images we can upload. A little friendly rivalry never hurts, right?

Let’s smash it again this September! Let’s see if we can get pics from ALL over Scotland this year. Everyone is welcome to take part and every picture helps.

You can check out the images uploaded so far for Wiki Loves Monuments in Scotland here.

Wikipedia editing for World Music Day 2024!

By Ewan McAndrew

On July 3, 2024

In Uncategorized

Dr. Jenny Nex giving the guided tour of St Cecilia’s Hall concert room and music museum. Pic by Ellie Whitehead, CC-BY-SA

This post was written by Assistant Wikimedian in Residence, Ellie Whitehead.

Our most recent event saw us editing Wikipedia to add more women composers and instrument makers onto the world’s go-to site for information. The event took place on Friday, 21^st June 2024 to mark World Music Day.

Our World Music Day celebrations took place at the historic St Cecilia’s Hall Concert Room and Music Museum. St Cecilia’s Hall dates from 1763 and is Scotland’s oldest purpose-built concert hall and also houses the University of Edinburgh’s musical instrument collection.

Attendees on the guided tour of St Cecilia’s Hall concert room and music museum. Pic by Ellie Whitehead, CC-BY-SA

Our event kicked off with a bang, as St Cecilia’s Hall curator, Dr. Jenny Nex, provided a guided tour of the museum’s collection. Jenny gave us a tailored tour, based upon her archival research, focusing upon the “Hidden Women of St Cecilia’s”. We saw instruments that were made by women, such as flutes and violins, and heard stories about historic women’s places in music which have only just been uncovered.

After the tour, our guests were provided with lunch. This time gave people the opportunity to get to know each other and start thinking about what they might want to edit as the afternoon went on. As always, we made sure that the tea and coffee was flowing and that we had a good supply of snacks to keep our fantastic team of volunteer editors going!

Tea and coffee to keep us all going! Pic by Ellie Whitehead, CC-BY-SA

After lunch, we were welcomed back by a fantastic talk by Luke Whitlock. Luke is a current MScR student in Music at the University, researching women instrument makers, and a producer for BBC Radio 3. Luke gave some insight into his experience of writing about women composers and instrument makers on Wikipedia, referring to two pages he had previously created on Ethel Parker and Margaret Purcell.

Luke Whitlock, BBC Radio 3 producer at MScR researcher, giving a talk on his research into hidden women composers in the music archives. Pic by Ellie Whitehead, CC-BY-SA

Luke gave us some wise words of wisdom, particularly emphasising that much of the information about these women is hidden. He encouraged us to ‘think outside of the box’, looking at newspapers and sources that talk about people these women were linked with in order to build a bigger picture of the women themselves.

After this editing training began and I, with the help of Ewan, got to teach the attendees how they can add to and edit Wikipedia. Once the training was out of the way the researching and editing began. People began scouring books, biographies, encyclopaedias, and the internet to find all the information they could about women composers and instrument makers. Overall, we created and edited 24 articles and added almost 10,000 words to Wikipedia. A few of the articles created include:

The afternoon finished with everyone being able to publish what they had been working on. It was a fantastic afternoon with a great group of attendees who were eager to learn and add some fantastic pages onto to Wikipedia. We are very grateful to our colleagues at St Cecilia’s Hall for hosting us in such a lovely venue, making for a thoroughly enjoyable event.

Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence, instructing attendees how to publish their new articles on Wikipedia at St Cecilia’s Hall concert room and music museum. Pic by Luke Whitlock, CC-BY-SA

Category: Uncategorized Page 1 of 13

Education on the Scottish Witch Trials

The issue of memorialisation

uCreate takeover! 11.00-16.00 (First Floor, Main Library)

Lunch and Lightning talks 12.00-1.45 (Main Library, Room 1.07)

Wikipedia Women in STEM edit-a-thon – 1.45-5 (Main Library, Room 1.07)

Games and Crafts – 1.45-5 (Main Library, Room 1.07)

Celebrating Women in Climate & Earth Sciences – 5-7 (G.03, 50 George Square)

Digital Volunteering with Wikipedia

Getting to know the individual stories of the accused

Writing a National Lottery Heritage Fund bid

Exploring avenues for community engagement

Workshops and all-staff events

Wikipedia at 24

Before we begin in earnest

Further reading

Point 1: Wikipedia is already making use of machine learning

ORES

MinT

Point 2: Recent study finds artificial intelligence can aid Wikipedia’s verifiability

SIDE – a potential use case

What does this mean?

Point 3: ChatGPT and Wikipedia

Do people trust ChatGPT more than Google Search and Wikipedia?

Has the emergence and use of ChatGPT affected engagement with Wikipedia?

Do Wikipedia editors think ChatGPT or other AI generators should be used for article creation?

Garbage in, Garbage out?

Point 4: How Wikipedia can shape the future of AI

WikiAI?

Blacklisting and Attribution?

Gen-Z?

WikiProject AI Cleanup

Point 5: Wikipedia as a knowledge destination and the internet’s conscience

Get involved in Wiki Loves Monuments!

Why take part?

How do you take part?

What should you photograph? How do you upload it?

Other tips:

How can you take part?

The grief that comes from lost buildings