Wikimedian in Residence

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

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Wikipedia, Student Activism and the Ivory Tower

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On April 21, 2022

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This was a talk presented at the LILAC 2022 Information Literacy Conference held at Manchester Metropolitan University on 11-13 April 2022. The slides will be uploaded shortly.

0) Intro slide: Video of Manchester Metropolitan University’s Wikipedia page being edited.

Anyone can click “Edit” on any page on Wikipedia to improve its open-licensed information with verifiable facts. E.g. I’ve added a sentence to the page for Manchester Metropolitan University about it hosting the LILAC Information Literacy conference this year.  Backed up with a citation.

Anyone can edit, yes, but you have to CITE WHAT YOU WRITE.

1) Welcome slide

Good afternoon everyone – welcome!

My name is Ewan McAndrew and I have worked since January 2016 at the University of Edinburgh as the Wikimedian in Residence.

I presented at LILAC in 2019 about our work supporting Wikipedia in the curriculum and you can read more about that work in our Booklet of Case Studies of Wikipedia in UK education at bit.ly/wikicasestudies

Jesse Ewing Glasgow

2) Scotland, Slavery and Black History slide

We’re actually updating that booklet to include 5 more case studies of work conducted during lockdown including our work with History Students to re-examine Scotland’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and a more positive examination of Black History including creating new articles about Jesse Ewing Glasgow and more.

3) History of Art UG course programme slide

Another new case study has been working with History of Art students to improve coverage of non-Western art in Wikipedia so that even if you don’t know about the visual culture of the Ummayads in Syria (of which we have a new article written by students) you will still encounter Islamic art on pages about inkwells, pitchers, bowls and more.

4) Wikipedia and Academic Libraries slide

Another great resource relevant to this audience is the new open access book on Wikipedia and Academic Libraries published last year and we’ve contributed a chapter focusing on the work of the last 5 years improving Wikipedia’s coverage about women in Scotland and changing the way stories are told.

5) Mentimeter slide

All that said, to warm you for my talk today, tell me via the power of Menti – what is your favourite Wikipedia article? Answers here.

6) News article slide

While we wait for your answers, here are some recent news article headlines I searched for in Google about Wikipedia.

7) Prospect Magazine quote slide

This last headline I like from Prospect magazine last month as it posited the question… “Who gets to define what’s true online?...

 “In practical terms, truth is what Google’s knowledge graph … can deliver to its users.

Google’s knowledge graph is descended primarily from Wikipedia and Wikidata, an open-source collection of facts derived from Wikipedia, the remarkable participatory encyclopedia that, in the past 20 years, has become a core part of our collective knowledge infrastructure.”

Which reminded me of this earlier quote from Danah Boyd in 2017’s Did Media Literacy Backfire?

“Too many students I met were being told that Wikipedia was untrustworthy and were, instead, being encouraged to do research. As a result, the message that many had taken home was to turn to Google and use whatever came up first. They heard that Google was trustworthy and Wikipedia was not.”

8) 2nd Mentimeter question

Now 2nd question – if indeed “Search is the Way We Live now” then is Wikipedia part of the Information Literacy conversation at your workplace/institution? If so, how? If not, why not do you think?

9) Video slide

While you think about that I’ll show you this video to give you food for thought, with contributions from staff, students and Academic Support Librarians at the University of Edinburgh. 

The Edinburgh Seven – our first editing event in Feb 2015

10) Edinburgh Seven slide

It’s now 7 years since our first experiment with Wikipedia, to improve topic coverage of the Edinburgh Seven on Wikipedia. The first female students matriculated at a British university when they fought for their right to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh.

The Edinburgh Seven now have their degrees, posthumously. And a blue plaque commemorating their fight for the right to study. We’ll never know how many stop to read that blue plaque but we do know how many are reading their Wikipedia page. Thousands.

11) Allison Littlejohn slide

This group editing event was evaluated by Professor Allison Littlejohn and referenced in her 2019 LILAC keynote – her research further cementing our belief that engaging with Wikipedia and in conversations over copyright, neutral point of view, open access, verifiability of sources, academic referencing, writing for a lay audience and issues of underrepresentation and invisibility online were absolutely pertinent in supporting the professional development of staff and students and helping us walk the walk when it comes to sharing knowledge outside of the Ivory Tower. Becoming knowledge activists.

12) WiR slide

Since 2016, the role of Wikimedian in Residence provides a free central service to all staff and students, working alongside other digital skills trainers, learning technologists and library colleagues and our OER Service to support the university to explore and better understand how knowledge is created, curated, and disseminated online. Beyond this, what they can get out of the learning and teaching experience from contributing to Wikipedia and understanding how the sausage is made.

13) Reframing Wikipedia slide

Our students are using Wikipedia now, today and finding it useful in a clarificatory and orientating way. We need to support them in developing good practice.

So we need to see it less as a problem of passive consumption and think instead of Wikipedia as a form of learning technology that we can actively engage with and contribute to and gain so much from in terms of core competencies and transferable graduate attributes.

14) Promoting Knowledge Equity slide

This was our starting point in many ways. Working with the Wikimedia projects affords many opportunities to support transferable graduate attributes, information and digital and data literacy, but it also promotes this idea of knowledge equity.

As part of this evolving in thinking about how we engage with Wikipedia, we wanted to push on and do more. In the pandemic, the uni had something of a hiring freeze but we still wanted to offer students the opportunities for internships for roles our CIO could see merit in as being critical for our institutional mission and help get us where we needed to be.

15) Hannah Rothmann slide

Hannah Rothmann worked a 12 week internship in lockdown 2020, creating 20 short videos for different aspects of Wikipedia editing which she embedded in a 40 page website she created. All with the purpose of providing staff and students with one-stop shop for resources they needed to understand and engage with Wikipedia, be they at our institution or anywhere else. For this work she recently won an Open Education Global award.

Wikimedia internships at the University of Edinburgh since 2019

16) More Wiki internships slide

Two more interns, Erin and Clea, improved the website in 2021 and focused on adding new sections on Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and WikiSource. Our new interns for this Summer 2022 will focus on expanding our work on the Map of Accused Witches site.

These internships were my way in to work more closely with our Careers Service and discussing trialling new ways to support students through also offering accreditation for the work they did outside the curriculum.

17) The Edinburgh Award slide

We know that many students are involved in activities alongside their studies such as volunteering, part-time work, and getting involved in the University community.

To help these activities to stand out from the crowd, our University has worked to pilot a new Award for “Digital Volunteering with Wikipedia” to sit beside other available Edinburgh Awards– the Edinburgh Award is a programme that allows students to get official recognition for their involvement in extracurricular activities and demonstrate their digital capabilities to employers.

18) Graduate Attribute slide

There are many different types of Edinburgh Award activity students can undertake but Digital Volunteering with Wikipedia focuses on developing 3 Graduate Attributes over the course of at least 50 hours of work and providing evidence of demonstrable learning, reflection and impact. The 50 hours are staggered over the December to May period punctuated by 3 main input sessions.

19) Three inputs slide

In the first, Aspiring, in December the students self -assess themselves against the Graduate Attributes and select three to develop as part of the award. They also select a topic area of Wikipedia they wish to improve and submit a 400 word action plan for how they plan to develop their chosen Graduate Attributes and how they’ll deliver impact.

20) Fortnightly Log slide

Once they have had training and researched their topic areas, the 2nd Input Session, Developing, at end of January requires them to re-assess if their Graduate Attribute ranking has changed, and submit a completed Fortnightly Log of Activities designed to evidence their work to date  and their reflections on how they are progressing towards their personal project goals.

The final Input Session, Owning, is about coming together to share their project outcomes and reflections as well as ensuring the students get the opportunity to ties all this in with their future goals and how they will communicate about their Edinburgh Award experience to their peers, academic advisors or employers. This session will take place at end of May and their final submission will be an 800 word report or 3-5 minute video presentation.

21) Course level slide

Of the 23 student pilot group – the vast majority of applicants were female. Over 80%. Bucking the 10-15% of editors on Wikipedia normally.

They also tended to come from Undergraduate courses. 60%. 

22) Course disciplines slide

Of the disciplines, History of Art and Physics backgrounds were well represented. Which I believe is owing to recent project work with these departments and a willingness of the School Secretary to alert interested student groups.

Topics suggested by students to improve online

23) Topics slide

More interestingly, are the topics the students wanted to write about. Climate change, Covid-19, LGBT History, Black History, Women artists, Women in STEM. Marginalised groups, underrepresented topics, some of the biggest and most pressing challenges in the world today. This shows me that students recognise and are intrinsically motivated by the importance of addressing knowledge gaps and improving the world around them.

24) The final 11

The initial 23 reduced to 11 by Input 3 but this was to be expected and is in line with other Edinburgh Award programmes similarly asking students to undergo 50 hours plus in extracurricular volunteering. 19,000 words have so far been added to Wikipedia and over 300 references to pages viewed almost 900,000 times. This is only a pilot of course and I have much I have to reflect on myself.

25) Reflections

Like how best to support students to ascertain what is Wikipedia missing when that task is seemingly endless, how to structure student time and support without losing elements of personalisation, choice and flexible working that they like, how best to engender a sense of a self-sustaining community and collaboration between students and between the students and hive mind expertise across the university and beyond, also how best to quantify and quality assure what counts as a significant body of work and impact on Wikipedia.

26) Conclusion

I have much I have learnt myself from this trial run and it is not over yet. But when turning on the news seems to reflect the darkest of times of late, I have found faith that students find this work meaningful and relevant for their studies, for their employability and for their personal development as both empowered online citizens and card-carrying members of the human race.

Their willingness to communicate their scholarship openly for the good of all and to be the change they want to see has real and I hope profound potential which can be enhanced and greatly expanded in future iterations. Encouraging an army of student volunteers to be ambitious, reach out, learn, collaborate, to delve deep into the libraries and archives, devouring knowledge, synthesising it, finding the gaps and the people willing and able to help fill them. Everything connects after all, or it should. We can uncover hidden histories, build on prior learning, illuminate the darkness and lift each other up.

27) Final slide

So my question for you – how can Wikimedia best support you and wiki link with your work? Because that’s what this work is all about.

Down the rabbit hole with Wikipedia – LILAC 2022

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On April 13, 2022

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Image of couple doing high five
High Five – by Bgubitz at English Wikipedia, CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

I asked LILAC Information Literacy Conference 2022 delegates what their favourite Wikipedia pages were and here’s what they answered:

  1. Boris Johnson (It’s not flattering)
  2. The Dyatlov Pass incident
  3. Dolly Parton
  4. Cellar door
  5. High five
  6. Mary Shelley
  7. Loch_Ness_Monster
  8. The Sopranos
  9. List of Manufacturing processes
  10. Disambiguation (disambiguation)
  11. List of The Simpsons guest stars
  12. Defenestrations of Prague
  13. Marxist economics
  14. List of Never Mind The Buzzcocks episodes
  15. The ABBA page
  16. Lists_of_films#By_genre
  17. Snapper (band) – the only Wikipedia entry I created as an assignment for Library qual.
  18. The one about the first women doctors in Edinburgh which only got added by Wikipedia after a protest at its absence. Edinburgh Seven.
  19. Toilet_paper_orientation
  20. Wolf Alice Band page
  21. Biographies i.e. person information pages
  22. As Slow As Possible
  23. A Cultural History of the Buttocks
  24. Narwhals
  25. Grey_Owl
  26. Cats_and_the_Internet
  27. Diggers
  28. N/a
  29. LILAC
  30. I don’t have one, sorry….
  31. Any public figure with a “controversies” section
  32. All Wikipedia

Thanks all! Have fun reading these on your way home 🙂

Further links:

Our University of Edinburgh website with lots of ‘how to’ advice.

Changing the Way Stories Are Told – Chapter 13 in Wikipedia and Academic Libraries open access book.

Is Wikipedia part of the Information & Digital Literacy conversation/strategy at your institution? If yes, how? If not, why not?

LILAC answered:

“Often discouraged to use for university assignments but acknowledged as providing good research starting points with citations.”

“Not part of the overarching strategy, but we signpost to it as a resource for fact checking/evaluating source credibility in our information literacy workshops.”

“We do talk about it and we have moved away of being wikipedia-negative to Wikipedia aware. Its a good starting point.”

“Yes, we suggest Wikipedia as a starting point of researching ideas and concepts, but stress that it can be edited by anyone, and just as we expect citations in their work, we should expect the same from Wikipedia pages.”

“Yes, we use it as a way to demonstrate how peer review works, talk page is great!”

“I tell students that they can use Wikipedia as part of the research process (eg to ground knowledge or a jumping off point) but that their final assignments should cite stronger academic sources”

“In English schools there is now an acceptance students will use Wikipedia first but then are told not to reference it but find the original source.”

“Yes – decolonising articles on arts themes. Adding artists and practitioners of colour, who represent British diaspora, international artists in UK, etc. Also resources.”

“As a student, we’re still discouraged from using wikipedia as a resource, though I still use it outside of university”.

“Part of conversation I have with students in searches. Not in strategy. Also organising a Wikipedia editathon.”

“Yes, its a perfect example of applying information literacy in real life: both in creating articles and reading them.”

“Yes. I have delivered sessions on using wikipedia specifically to identify information gaps from underrepresented voices and using research skills to fill those gaps.”

“Not really, but if a student says they can’t use wiki I say that it’s not necessarily the worse and can be a v good start to begin to understand a topic”

“No, we tend to direct students towards scholarly material. Assumption is that Google/Instagram/Wikipedia already used extensively but are unfamiliar with specific library resources”

“No – but it’s something I personally talk to students about especially when it comes to reading up on background information, looking at lists of references, finding timelines, etc.”

“Often discouraged to use for university assignments but acknowledged as providing good research starting points with citations.”

“Yes – advise that it’s a good place to start but not for use as a reference.”

“We do talk about it and we have moved away of being wikipedia-negative to Wikipedia aware. Its a good starting point.”

“Yes, its a perfect example of applying information literacy in real life: both in creating articles and reading them.”

“Yes, we use it as a way to demonstrate how peer review works, talk page is great!”

“Yes. We use it in our first year info lit courses as an example of a place to go to learn background info, instigate their curiosity, and find additional sources.”

“It’s not, because it is not viewed as a reliable source.”

“No, academics are not interested”

“I tell students that they can use Wikipedia as part of the research process (eg to ground knowledge or a jumping off point) but that their final assignments should cite stronger academic sources”

“No …
Hmm why not? That’s a good question”

“Yes – using it to teach criticality and citation by getting students to edit Wikipedia”.

“Yes.”

Wikimedia and the Diversity of Languages online – Guest post by Clea Strathmann

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On July 9, 2021

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Globally, over 7,000 languages are spoken – only around 4% of people are native English speakers. Despite this, English holds the title of the “Language of the internet”.  It dominates with Chinese almost 50% of global web traffic with the top ten languages accounting for 76.9 percent of global internet users. The majority of African and Indigenous languages are not recognised by Google’s search engine. 

When an English speaker searches for something on Google, a Wikipedia article typically appears as a top hit, often as a convenient infobox at the side of the browser. This is because English Wikipedia has over 6 million articles. Wikipedias in other languages are more limited – only two other Wikipedias (Cebuano and Swedish) have over 3 million articles, and the 20 largest Wikipedias have around 1 million entries each. Many of these articles are comparatively shorter than those in English Wikipedia. 

Percentage of Wikipedia articles in each language group – Western European language groups dominate Wikipedia.

This lack of diversity restricts a significant portion of the world from access to knowledge that is readily-available to English speakers, and disproportionately affects those who live in less-developed regions who may not speak any of the internet’s other dominant languages. Access to knowledge is vital for bridging the understanding between languages and cultures. 

Knowledge creates understanding – understanding is sorely lacking in today’s world. – Katherine Maher, Executive Director Wikimedia Foundation. 

The United Nations has, as part of their sustainable development goals, emphasised a need for equitable education and lifelong learning. To enable this, resources of knowledge must be available in all languages. But alongside access to knowledge, the lack of linguistic diversity is a pressing issue for smaller languages, including indigenous languages which are dying out at a rate of two languages per month. For speakers of these languages, their extinction may also reflect the extinction of their culture and identity. 

Watch Dr. Sara Thomas speak about Scots Wikipedia at the Arctic Knot.

The role of Wikimedia in improving linguistic diversity 

Wikipedia is attempting to increase global access to knowledge, and it is one of the aims of The Wikimedia Foundation to ensure that knowledge is diverse, inclusive, and accessible to all. When considering linguistic diversity, the aim is for the number of Wikipedia articles to be evenly distributed across languages. Theoretically, this could be done by simply translating articles from one language Wikipedia into another. 

However, translating Wikipedia would not be enough to create linguistic diversity. Take the Game of Thrones article on Welsh “Wicipedia”, for instance, which highlights the similarity of the fictional languages in the series to Welsh and emphasises its Welsh actors. This demonstrates the impact of culture on what is important, or not, to the readers of Wikipedia. The relationship between the language and culture is heavily-entangled, and makes it even more important that these are represented and preserved online. 

Watch the opening speeches by Aili Keskitalo, President of the Sámi Parliament of Norway and Guri Melby, Minister of Education Norway at the Arctic Knot 2021

One of the best ways that we can support linguistic diversity is through collaborative efforts with Wikipedia projects. In 2017, The University of Edinburgh and Wikimedia UK started the ‘Celtic Knot’ Wikipedia Language conference, which aims to bring together smaller language communities to collaborate on ideas for how to improve the Wikipedia content in these languages and to increase their linguistic presence across other language Wikipedias. The Celtic Knot also developed into the Arctic Knot conference, hosted by Wikimedia Norway this year, which aims to improve the visibility of indigenous arctic languages. These conferences allow speakers to address the importance of engaging with their language, and provide practical resources for encouraging contributions to Wikipedia. The Toolkit for language activism, for instance, supports the creation of digital skills and written language skills which can help people who speak minority languages to contribute to Wikipedia. Through such projects, people are encouraged to contribute to Wikipedia to improve both representation and usability of languages. 

Using Wikidata to build linguistic diversity online 

From the collaborative efforts of dedicated Wikimedians, communities are already seeing successes in increasing the presence of their languages. But for smaller languages, including many indigenous languages, writing entire Wikipedia articles is challenging and time-consuming. This is where Wikipedia’s sister project – Wikidata – has proven to be an important contributor to improving language diversity online.

This chart, made using Wikidata, shows the amount of Wikipedia articles about Greek citizens that are available on English Wikipedia but not on Greek Wikipedia. The majority are sports players, but it also includes a number of artists and academics.

Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base of machine-readable facts. Each data item has  a unique identifier (a ‘Q’ number). The label, description and all of the statements within each data item can be labelled in any language and, because of this, the data can be instantly transformed into any language. This means that any search can make this knowledge both discoverable and understandable in any language. Items from Wikidata are important for modern technologies such as Amazon’s Alexa and Siri, which use Wikidata’s machine-readable entries to answer questions – but, importantly, these can only provide responses in the languages it is labelled in, and the number of Wikidata language labels, beyond European languages, is scarce.

As an example, take disease and health data, which constitute vital information that needs to be easily-accessible. A search of diseases uploaded to Wikidata reveals over 13,000 diseases have been uploaded to the database, but around 5,000 of these entries are only labelled in 1 language. So whilst Wikidata is a useful tool to aid knowledge discovery, it will take the work of native language speakers from around the world to develop it into the linguistically diverse database that it has the potential to become. In growing both the number of items in Wikidata, and its language labels, technologies can become more accessible for different languages. Ultimately, this is crucial in enabling smaller languages to thrive, rather than just to survive. 

What can we do to promote linguistic diversity?

Governments have highlighted the importance of actively increasing linguistic diversity. UNESCO has produced a 10-year plan for the preservation of indigenous languages, referred to as the Decade of Indigenous Languages, which calls into action the human rights of Indigenous Peoples. A key part of the plan surrounds the use of technology to support access to Indigenous languages – this can involve the use of Wikipedia and Wikidata as impactful open platforms for building global understanding about different languages and, alongside this, different cultures. Encouraging people to contribute to Wikipedia may seem difficult, but events including the Celtic and Arctic Knot conferences, and outreach projects such as Indigenizing Wikipedia, have demonstrated how successfully Wikipedia can be used as a platform for language activism. 

By contributing to both Wikipedia and Wikidata, we can increase the use and representation of smaller languages, contributing to the preservation of the important cultures that are intertwined with them. 

Clea Strathmann, Open Data and Knowledge Equity intern

Watch the whole Arctic Knot conference on YouTube here.

Welsh Wikipedia Thinking Big – Keynote address by Jason Evans at the Celtic Knot

A state of the question – the Catalan language project – Àlex Hinojo, Executive Director, Amical Wikimedia

The Scottish Gaelic Uicipeid project – Susan Ross at the Celtic Knot

Celtic Knot – Panel discussion & closing plenary: The Politics of Language Online

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

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On June 18, 2021

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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

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On June 18, 2021

In Uncategorized

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!

Telling the history of HIV and AIDS activism in Scotland on Wikipedia

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On February 26, 2021

In Uncategorized

As LGBT History month draws to a close this month, I wanted to pay tribute to a collaboration brought about through Siobhan Claude at the University of Edinburgh’s Staff Pride Network and my colleague, Lorna Campbell, who suggested telling the history of HIV/AIDS activism and awareness in Scotland on Wikipedia.

It seemed inconceivable that Wikipedia had so little on this important history and the people who fought long and hard against prejudice and myths surrounding the virus and did so much societal good in raising awareness and campaigning for treatment. Yet the largest open education resource in human history was largely devoid of any mention of the organisations and activists so pivotal in this history of Scotland.

We contacted Henry Gray at HIV Scotland and a date for an event was set. We would bring people together to edit Wikipedia and formed a worklist of new pages to create so that the generations to come would learn and understand the story of HIV/AIDS activism in Scotland. This is only a beginning so I have created a Navigation Box template to pull all these new pages together, make them easier to discover and to highlight  the organisations and people we are still missing. This template has been added to the foot of all the new pages below. There is much more to the history of HIV/AIDS activism in Scotland (and the United Kingdom for that matter) to be told. We hope that this is only the beginning to honour and celebrate the pioneering and vitally important work that came before. Much more to do!

As a result of the HIV Scotland Wikipedia event at the end of January, we now have pages for:

Scottish AIDS Monitor

In 1983, after becoming aware of the spread of an illness affecting gay men in the United States, Derek Ogg set up Scottish AIDS Monitor in Edinburgh, along with Edward McGough, Nigel Cook and Simon Taylor, in order to inform and educate gay men about HIV and AIDS. The organisation was established before the first case of HIV was recorded in Scotland and three years before the first government AIDS awareness campaign. In addition to their original Edinburgh branch, by the late 1980s, the organisation had branches in Highland, Lothian, Tayside and Strathclyde. SAM was funded by private donations and public funding. The organisation was awarded £25,000 by the government’s Scottish Home and Health department in 1988 and also received funding from Strathclyde and Lothian Health Boards.

SAM safe sex condom packet

SAM safe sex condom packet

Initially SAM focused on raising awareness of AIDS and promoting safe sex among gay men, but the organisation expanded its activities to include all groups affected by HIV and AIDS, including homosexuals, heterosexuals, teenagers, drug users, sex workers and prison inmates. The organisation worked with the Genito Urinary Medicine unit at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in order to ensure the information they provided was accurate and up to date. SAM’s activities included advocacy, awareness raising, advisory, support and prevention services. The organisation trained AIDS counsellors and hospital visitors and set up “Buddy” and HIV support groups. They also ran AIDS information phone lines in both Glasgow and Edinburgh, worked with drug counselling agencies, promoted safe sex and distributed free condoms. In 1994 SAM set up Gay Men’s Heath, the UK’s first dedicated health initiative for gay and bisexual men. The organisation was also instrumental in setting up Body Positive Scotland, a self help group for people living with and affected by HIV and AIDS.

SAM ceased operating in the West of Scotland later in 1995, and after funding was withdrawn by Lothian Health Board in 1996, the organisation closed down.

HIV Scotland

HIV Scotland is a registered charitable organisation based in Edinburgh, Scotland, established in 1995 as Scottish Voluntary HIV & AIDS Forum, that works to make policy and advocacy changes for people living with HIV in Scotland, PrEP users, and people at risk of HIV. George Valiotis was the Chief Executive Officer of HIV Scotland between 2012 and 2019 during which a key achievement was a successful implementation strategy for a new technology called HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), for which the organisation was awarded the British Medical Association Medfash prize for making Scotland the first nation in the UK to have it listed on their national health service. Nathan Sparling was appointed chief executive on 1st November 2018, and helped lead the organisation through a strategic review which led to their new 11-year Strategic Plan – #ZEROHIV. He announced he was leaving HIV Scotland in December 2020. 

PHACE West

Project for HIV and AIDS Care and Education (PHACE) West was Scottish HIV and AIDS awareness organisation that was active in the West of Scotland between 1995 and 2006.

PHACE West was founded in November 1994 by Ken Cowan following changes in the Scottish HIV voluntary sector, and the following year attracted funding from four West of Scotland health boards. There was a widespread perception of an East Coast bias in the management of the predominant Scottish AIDS organisation Scottish AIDS Monitor, and inadequate West Coast services. A number of SAM staff joined PHACE West, including its director Maureen Moore.

The new organisation had a high-profile launch party in May 1995 at Glasgow’s Tunnel nightclub, featuring a performance by Dannii Minogue. In 2000 it expanded by opening an Aberdeen office, and becoming a national organisation, PHACE Scotland. In 2006 the organisation became part of the Terrence Higgins Trust, as its parent organisation PHACE Scotland completed a merger with the UK’s longest established HIV charity, allowing THT Scotland to provide services in Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Argyll, Ayrshire Arran, Lanarkshire, Grampian and Highland NHS Scotland board areas.

PHACE West provided a welfare rights service, Buddy Support Service and Night Owl crisis line, counselling, and condoms by post for people in rural areas. They ran the HAVEN, a drop in space at Ruchill Hospital. They also produced publications and websites on safer sex aimed at gay men, distributed condoms in LGBT venues, and ran the youth group Bi-G-Les for under-25s.

Derek Ogg

Derek Andrew Ogg QC (1954 – 1 May 2020) was a Scottish lawyer who, through the Historical Sexual Offences Pardons and Disregards Scotland Bill, campaigned for automatic pardons for gay and bisexual men with historical convictions of sexual offences that are no longer illegal in Scotland. In 1983 Ogg established the Scottish HIV and AIDS awareness charity Scottish AIDS Monitor.

Ogg’s activism started with his membership of the Scottish Minorities Group (later Outright Scotland) where in 1974, together with Ian Dunn, he organised the International Gay Rights Congress in Edinburgh, which later resulted in the establishment of the International Lesbian & Gay Association.

In 1983, after hearing about a disease affecting gay men in the United States, Derek Ogg, along with Edward McGough, Nigel Cook and Simon Taylor set up the Scottish AIDS Monitor to educate gay men about the risks of HIV and AIDS. He served on the board of Directors until 1994. In the 1980s much of his activism was around the issues of HIV and AIDS, where along with Scottish AIDS Monitor he was also involved in the establishment of Waverley Care through which the Milestone Hospice, the UK’s first purpose built hospice for HIV patients, was established in 1991.

Ogg was involved in the campaign to end the ban on gay sex in Scotland which was formally lifted in 1981 with the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 1980. He was also an activist against Section 28 (Clause 2A in Scotland) which was repealed in Scotland in 2000 and England Wales in 2003. In 2015 he was presented with a special award for Lifetime Achievement at the inaugural Scottish LGBTI Awards in recognition of his activism and legal work. He also campaigned for an apology from the Scottish Government in 2017 to gay and bisexual men who had been convicted prior to 2001, under discriminatory laws against same-sex sexual activity that had since been made legal.

Maureen Moore (activist)

Maureen Moore OBE was National Co-ordinator, then Director of Scottish AIDS Monitor from its inception in 1983.

After leaving SAM, Maureen went on to Chair the Scottish voluntary sector’s HIV and AIDS forum and the Board of Project for HIV/AIDS Care and Education (PHACE West) in Glasgow. This enabled her to continue lobbying for improved awareness of heterosexual transmission of HIV and better education and HIV prevention services for gay men.

In 1995 Maureen took over from Alison Hillhouse as Chief Executive at ASH Scotland where she supported the ban on smoking in workplaces in Scotland and the ban on tobacco sales to under 18s. 

She was awarded an OBE for services to healthcare in 2006.

Ken Cowan (activist)

Ken Cowan ( 23 February 1955 to 11 November 1995) was a Scottish AIDS activist and founder/director of PHACE West, the project for HIV and Aids education in the West of Scotland.

Cowan successfully lobbied that patients be included on the carers sub-committee at Ruchill Hospital and was instrumental in the success of the West of Scotland’s awareness strategy for highlighting HIV prevention initiatives for gay men. He was also majorly involved in the development of Body Positive, the self-help agency for those living with HIV.

Cowan was diagnosed with HIV in 1991.  He died aged 40 on 11 November 1995.

Eric Kay, in Gay Scotland‘s article on his passing, wrote that Cowan:

“was particularly skilful in fighting against the prejudice and dispelling the myths surrounding the virus. His eloquent delivery on the subject was always compelling, whether he was teaching young children or convincing politicians and Health Board funders. His determination ultimately brought about key policy changes which in turn have radically affected HIV Services in the West of Scotland.”

Scotland, Slavery and Black History… and Wikipedia

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On February 5, 2021

In Uncategorized

Wikipedia is one of the most widely used means by which people get information, but it has lots of gaps and problems. Last semester, the residency collaborated with Professor Diana Paton and Lucy Parfitt at the University of Edinburgh History Society to begin a project to make it better. Participants were invited to improve public knowledge of Scotland’s Black history, and to help make Scotland’s deep connections to Atlantic slavery better understood. The controversial politician Henry Dundas was a focal point following media coverage of the back and forth discussions on his activity in relation to slavery.

An initial information meeting was held on 18 November 2020, with talks by Lisa Williams (Edinburgh Caribbean Association) and Tom Cunningham (UncoverEd) to set a context for where improvements to articles could be made.

Subsequent workshops took place on three Wednesdays in January: researching the topics, learning how to edit, and making the edits.

As of today, almost 15,000 words have now been added to 4 new articles with 56 more being improved. These pages have now been viewed over a million times already. Some of the pages created and edited are provided below. The hope is that this is just a beginning to improve the imbalances and gaps online, reflecting a truer record of Scotland’s role in the Atlantic slave trade and presenting more positive stories of black history online.

Jesse Ewing Glasgow

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Jesse Ewing Glasgow Jr. (1837-1860) was a Philadelphian-born African American intellectual and student at the University of Edinburgh from 1858 to 1860. He authored the radical pamphlet on John Brown‘s Harper’s Ferry Raid in 1859.

Glasgow became ICY’s first graduate in 1856, and afterwards gained a place at the University of Edinburgh. Due to his reputation for intellectual prowess, managers and peers competed to pay for his transatlantic trip and tuition. At Edinburgh, Glasgow excelled in all of his classes and won several academic prizes in Greek, English, and Mathematics, graduating in 1858.

In 1859, Glasgow published a 47-page pamphlet called ‘The Harpers Ferry Insurrection: Being an Account of the Late Outbreak in Virginia, and of the Trial and Execution of Captain John Brown, Its Hero’. This was an account expressing sympathy for white abolitionist John Brown and others who led an unsuccessful raid on Harpers Ferry, a federal armoury in Virginia, in October 1859. It was published in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London.

In the pamphlet Glasgow relates his experiences of racism in Scotland to the experiences of African Americans in the United States, condemning the institution of slavery and hailing John Brown as a hero in the history of anti-slavery movements. The pamphlet also included an appeal to his Scottish readers to take up the cause of anti-slavery in the United States, using the words of Sir Walter Scott in the opening lines of the pamphlet.

On 20 December 1860 Glasgow died of tuberculosis aged 23 in his Newington home (10 Hill Place), before he had completed his studies at Edinburgh. His death was commemorated in Scottish newspapers and by the Banneker Institute. The latter not only issued statements of sorrow but also remembered Glasgow for his academic achievements which demonstrated the reality of African American intellectual equality with white people. Glasgow’s legacy was to improve the position of the African American community in the United States when contemporary racial ideology dictated black inferiority.

Jean-Baptiste Philippe

Jean-Baptiste Philip (1796 – 1829), sometimes written Phillipe, was a Trinidad-born doctor and the leader of an activist group formed in Trinidad in 1823, which fought against the racist attitudes of colonial authorities through letters and petitions. He was a complex figure as he fought against racist attitudes of colonial authorities in Trinidad while also belonging to a Black slave-owning family. His famous work Free Mulatto pointed out the racist treatment of free Black people in Trinidad, but did not request the abolition of slavery.

Between 1806 and 1810, Philip left Trinidad to study literature in England, becoming the first Trinidadian to formally study literature abroad. After completing this degree, he went on to be one of the first Black students to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland between 1812 and 1815. He graduated in 1815, and his thesis explored ‘Hysterical Moods’. After graduation he spent some time travelling in Europe, where he met and fell in love with a woman of European descent. However, following the advice of a friend, he did not marry her and returned to Trinidad alone.

Around 1815, Philip returned to Trinidad to practice medicine as one of the first black doctors to work in the Caribbean. Many doctors at this time were invested both politically and economically in the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade, and therefore many slaves did not receive proper medical treatment. Moreover, many doctors owned enslaved people, one doctor, William Wright, once wrote that the abolition of the slave trade would be ‘fatal to our commerce.’ Despite this, Philip sought to challenge the racial discrimination he faced in the medical profession in the Caribbean and critiqued the many inequalities between the Black and the white population. Between 1816 and 1825, Philip became the leader of the Civil Rights movement in Naprimas, South Trinidad. He travelled to England between 1822 and 1823 to petition the rights of free Black people in the Caribbean. This petition was later printed and became his most famous work ‘Free Mulatto.’

Free Mulatto

Philip wrote A Free Mulatto: An Address to the Right Hon. Earl Bathurst in 1823. The text was a call on the British governor of Trinidad, Bathurst to grant the “coloured population” of the island the same “civil and political privileges as their white fellow subjects.” The use of the term “coloured” in the text refers to the free Black population but excludes slaves. Philip states that the text aims to highlight the prejudices free Blacks in Trinidad face in order to inspire Bathurst to act.

Philip provides evidence of racist segregationist practises such as the prevention of marriage between Black and white Trinidadians, prejudices against Black doctors and separation in churches. He also compares the unequal severity of punishment experienced by white and free Black criminals in Trinidad to argue that “criminality is lost in the glare of whiteness.” On slavery, Philip celebrates the shift towards amelioration policies, but does not go so far as to ask for immediate abolition. He invokes the Haitian Revolution as evidence that ‘no privileges’ should be given to some which are inconsistent with the happiness and prosperity of the whole. However, he closes by asking for an end to the “sufferings of the coloured population.”  This distinction between free and unfree Blacks, reinforced differences within Trinidad’s Black population.

Henry Dundas

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Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville by Sir Thomas Lawrence. National Portrait Gallery, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, PC, FRSE (28 April 1742 – 28 May 1811) was a Scottish advocate and “independent Whig” politician. He was the trusted lieutenant of British prime minister William Pitt, and the most powerful politician in Scotland in the latter decades of the 18th century.

A few years after passage of the Slave Trade Act 1807, Wilberforce and Dundas encountered each other. Wilberforce recorded the event as follows:

“‘We did not meet for a long time and all his connexions most violently abused me. About a year before he died ... we saw one another, and at first I thought he was passing on, but he stopped and called out, ‘Ah Wilberforce, how do you do? And gave me a hearty shake by the hand. I would have given a thousand pounds for that shake. I never saw him afterwards.“

Historians of the slave trade and the abolitionist movement, including David Brion Davis, Roger Anstey, Robin Blackburn, argue that Dundas’s actions were a tactic designed to delay rather than facilitate abolition. They maintain that when Dundas inserted the word ‘gradual’ into the debate he in effect postponed the discussion on the slave trade until an unspecified date in the future, and subverted the British abolitionist movement. 

Subsequent measures were brought forward in favour of abolition at other times in the course of the 1790s which Dundas also opposed. The loss of momentum was connected to the renewal of war with France in which Britain favoured the expansion of slavery while the French, after 1794, stood for its abolition.

Other historians, including Sir Tom Devine, who focus on Scottish and British history disagree. 

Brian Young notes that in 1792, the motion for immediate cessation of the slave trade was heading for certain defeat. By inserting the word “gradual” into the motion, Young says Dundas ensured a successful vote for the ultimate abolition of the trade in slaves. 

In June 2020, the Edinburgh City Council voted to install a new brass plaque on the Melville Monument acknowledging Dundas’ role in deferring the abolition of the slave trade.

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