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

Tag: Editathon Page 1 of 2

Happy 23rd Birthday Wikipedia!

(Wikipedia Birthday cake, Airplaneman, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

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

23 years ago, on 15th January 2001, Wikipedia was launched as an independent, online open-source encyclopaedia. In its first year it amassed 20, 000 articles appearing in 18 different languages. Since then, Wikipedia has grown to be an internationally known and respected symbol of open knowledge. Its noble pursuit to make knowledge free and accessible to all still remains central to its cause today. Wikipedia is a place where people come together to learn and share knowledge simultaneously – there really is no place like it!

At the University of Edinburgh, the importance of open-access research and accessible knowledge is showcased through its collaborations with Wikipedia, working with Wikimedia UK. It was the first UK University to employ a Wikimedian in Residence to work on a university-wide basis, Ewan McAndrew. I am Ellie, MScR History student and the most recent recruit to the Wiki team at Edinburgh as Assistant Wikimedian in Residence. This blog will discuss my honest preconceptions and prejudgements when I started, what I have learnt so far about Wikipedia, and a call to arms for participation in the 1Lib1Ref Campaign

My preconceptions and prejudgments about Wikipedia

Being a history student, Wikipedia has been a familiar, reliable life-raft in an ocean of scattered and distorted information on the internet. It has been a tool for scoping out the background knowledge needed for my studies. What was the chronology of the October Revolution? Who was Margaret Beaufort? Who was involved in the Scottish Reformation?

Wikipedia has provided answers to all these questions and more – so why did I always feel guilty for using it? Perhaps it is due to being warned that it was “unreliable” and “untrustworthy” since secondary school. Before my role, I am afraid that I was influenced by these opinions and was under the impression that Wikipedia was not to be trusted, could be edited by anyone, and did not care for reliable sourcing of information.

How wrong I was. It is this common misunderstanding of Wikipedia that stands in the way of it being utilised to its fullest extent. Wikipedia is a place of open knowledge that can be accessed for free by anyone and the largest reference work on the internet. Can anyone edit Wikipedia? Yes and no. Anyone can create a profile on Wikipedia and begin to edit, but this account and its edits are monitored.  In English Wikipedia, an account can only create a new Wikipedia article when it has achieved 10 edits or been active for 4 days. In addition to this Wikipedia’s Notability Guide states that above all, for a new page to be created, it “must be verifiable” and that “reliable, independent” sources must be used to support the article. Notability is a core principle of Wikipedia along with neutral point of view, verifiability, and using reliable sources. My preconceptions have turned around since becoming Wikimedian in Residence, allowing me to understand the true merit of Wikipedia and the checks and balances it has in place.

This brings me on to…

What I have learnt so far about Wikipedia

Since joining in December, my experience of Wikipedia has been an upwards learning curve. Coming from a humanities-based background, the initial introduction to the digital world was, admittedly, daunting. However, the user-friendly and open nature of Wikipedia has meant that I have been able to learn many skills and become confident in them in a short space of time. I came into my role with no knowledge of how to create or even edit an article, no knowledge of the many important and impressive projects Wikipedia endorses, and no concept of just how useful it could be for university students and staff alike. I have learnt this, and more, in my short time working here due to the dedication and support of Ewan [mentioned above] and the community of other friendly Wikimedians in Residence around the UK.

I have learnt how well considered each article is, with the importance of reliable referencing and quality sources being paramount.

(Samhuinn Wikipedia editathon at University of Edinburgh editathon – 31st October 2016, Mihaela Bodlovic, CC-BY-SA licence via Wikimedia Commons)

I have also been able to get a taste of the openness and inclusivity of Wikipedia. The non-profit site is maintained and curated by volunteers. This community’s passion for Wikipedia is clear and adds to the special feel of the organisation at all levels of its knowledge creation, curation, and consumption. Something which I was particularly excited to learn about was the Women in Red project. Of the 1,980,258 biographies on Wikipedia, as of 8th January 2024, only 19.72% (approximately 390,582) of these are the biographies women. This project seeks to combat this by organising targeted events to add more women onto Wikipedia. This is a fantastic project which I am particularly enthusiastic about and want to take every opportunity I can to promote it – so watch this space!

In a personal sense, my role so far has allowed me to gain more digital literacy and expand my technological abilities – much to my amazement! So far in my role, I have learnt quite a bit about Wikipedia and its projects and yet there is still so much to learn. I look forward to exploring more in the future.

(1lib1ref, Wikimedia Foundation, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

Potential for Academia

As previously discussed, Wikipedia is not being used to its full potential due to the misconceptions and judgments made about its reliability or trustworthiness. There has been great advances in the role of Wikipedia in academia, seen through the creation of Wikipedia articles being used for assignments for courses here at Edinburgh and the use of Wikidata projects to help open up and explore datasets such as Mapping the Scottish Reformation and the Survey for Scottish Witchcraft. In this role I hope to further encourage academic involvement in Wikipedia throughout the University and to dispel the myth that it should be avoided.

In particular relation to its potential for academia, and in honour of Wikipedia’s birthday I wanted to highlight the 1Lib1Ref Campaign. This campaign gives the ‘gift of knowledge’ by giving something back to Wikipedia. It encourages librarians to participate in Wikipedia by adding citations to articles that need them. You can find articles that need help by using the Citation Hunt tool (Citation Hunt is basically ‘Whack-a-mole’ for “Citation Needed” tagged text in Wikipedia).  It looks to involve information professionals, and everyone really, in the curation of Wikipedia to help improve articles’ reliability and usefulness. This campaign runs from 15th January (today!) to 5th February every year and is a great way to get involved in Wikipedia. Whilst librarians are encouraged to participate, the campaign is not exclusionary, and anyone can take 5 minutes to take part and give a little knowledge back!

Get editing today and help make fun and impactful contributions to the world of knowledge.

Written by Ellie Whitehead, Assistant Wikimedian in Residence.

You can’t be what you can’t see.

Creating new role models on Wikipedia to encourage the next generation of #ImmodestWomen

By Siobhan O’Connor, Dr. Alice White, Dr. Sara Thomas and Ewan McAndrew.

Wikipedia, the free, online, multilingual encyclopaedia is building the largest open knowledge resource in human history. Now aged eighteen years old, its English language version receives over 500 million views per month, from 1.4 billion unique devices, and has over 130,000 active users collaboratively writing and editing millions of articles online. As topics on Wikipedia become more visible on Google, they receive more press coverage and become better known amongst the public.

Yet while English Wikipedia has significant reach and influence as the go-to source of information around the world, it also has significant gaps in its coverage of topics, articles in other languages and the diversity of its editors. Less than 18 per cent of biographies on English Wikipedia are about women, while most editors on the platform are white men.

This disproportionate gap on Wikipedia silences women’s contribution to science which continues their marginalisation in public life, a vicious circle that leads to more women being lost to careers in STEM. This gender imbalance mirrors the 2017 findings of the WISE campaign with women making up just 23% of those in core STEM occupations (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in the UK and 24% of those working in core STEM industries. Only 17% of physicists worldwide are women and studies have shown that it will take approximately 258 years for equality in physics. The rate of progress is even starker for the fields of computer science (280 years) .

Recent research published earlier this year by Asst. Professor Neil C. Thompson at MIT and Asst. Professor Doug Hanley at the University of Pittsburgh has also evidenced that scientific research is actually shaped by Wikipedia; demonstrating the influence of the free encyclopedia.

“Our research shows that scientists are using Wikipedia and that it is influencing how they write about the science that they are doing… Wikipedia isn’t just a record of what’s going on in science, it’s actually helping to shape science.” – Professor Neil C. Thompson

The randomised controlled trial the researchers undertook evidenced a profound causal impact that, as one of the most accessed websites in the world, incorporating ideas into Wikipedia leads to those ideas being used more in the scientific literature.

Chemistry graduates were asked to create forty-three new Wikipedia entries about topics in chemistry, with half being posted on Wikipedia while the rest were held back. Two years later, the chemistry entries created on Wikipedia had collectively over 2 million views. Analysing the text of publications from fifty high-impact chemistry journals during this period, showed words in the publications were influenced by content from the new Wikipedia entries.

For example, the ‘History of Chemistry’ entry on Wikipedia features over 200 men but only mentions 4 women and is missing notable female chemists such as Nobel Prize winning biochemist Gerty Cori and Professor Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist and one of the pioneers of a new breakthrough genetic engineering technology called CRISPR.

Another example of the gender imbalance can be seen in the entry for ‘Benzene’ on Wikipedia. There are several paragraphs describing many male scientists who tried to discover the structure of this chemical compound in the 1800’s. However, only one single sentence in the same Wikipedia article acknowledges the female scientist, Kathleen Lonsdale, who finally confirmed the structure of benzene in 1929.

Consequently, the Wikipedia community has established numerous initiatives to address this acknowledged systemic gender bias as they are committed to diversity and inclusivity to ensure knowledge equity. One such initiative, “WikiProject Women in Red (WiR)”, aims to crowdsource turning dormant red links for biography articles that do not yet exist into clickable blue ones which do, directing readers to female biographies and works by women on the platform.

New articles recently created by Women in Red volunteer editors from around the world include: Zheng Pingru, a spy whose life inspired a film; Bridget Jones (academic), a pioneer in the field of Caribbean literature studies; and Paquita Sauquillo, a campaigner in defence of democratic freedom. Entries recently improved by Women in Red editors include: Ruth Schmidt, an award winning American geologist; and Wilma Mankiller, an activist and social worker who was the first woman elected as Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation.

As a result of targeted Wikipedia editing events, or ‘edit-a-thons’, there are also now entire series of articles for the Edinburgh Seven, the first female students to matriculate at a British university, and the nineteen pioneering women chemists who, in 1904, petitioned the Chemistry Society (later to become the Royal Society of Chemistry) for the admission of women as Fellows of the Society.

Chemistry staff and students c.1899 at the Royal Holloway College, University of London. CC-BY-SA via Wikimedia Commons from Royal Holloway, University of London – RHC PH 201/11 Archives, Royal Holloway, University of London

“These were a group of extraordinary women who had done chemistry to degree and postgraduate level at a time when you couldn’t do that… and they had extraordinary stories and they did extraordinary chemistry.” – Dr. Michael Seery, Director of Teaching at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Chemistry.

Often if articles are not missing entirely, the contributions of women in science are reduced to bit part status as an addendum on the Wikipedia articles of their husbands or male contemporaries. Marie Curie’s Wikipedia article reportedly started out shared with her husband. That was, until someone pointed out that her scientific contributions might just warrant an article of her own. There is also a new article for Scottish physical scientist, Katherine Clerk Maxwell, whose contribution to measurements of gaseous viscosity was recorded by her husband, James, and is associated with his paper “On the Dynamical Theory of Gases”, where he states that Katherine “did all the real work of the kinetic theory” and that she was now “…engaged in other researches. When she is done I will let you know her answer to your inquiry.”

Katherine Clerk Maxwell, 1869. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

The achievements of extraordinary pioneering women are recorded in various sources, however no one has chosen to write their stories on Wikipedia. Focused attention in themed editing events means more articles are being created all the time.

Surveys have indicated that only 8.5–16% of Wikipedia editors are female. One particular 2011 survey suggested that on English Wikipedia around 91% of editors were male, and typically formally educated, in white-collar jobs (or students) and living in the Global North.  The same survey found that fewer than 1% of editors self-identified as transsexual or transgender.

“if there is a typical Wikipedia editor, he has a college degree, is 30- years-old, is computer savvy but not necessarily a programmer, doesn’t actually spend much time playing games, and lives in US or Europe.”

This means that articles within Wikipedia typically reflect these gender, socioeconomic and cultural biases. Among the findings of the 2016 research article, Women through the glass ceiling: gender asymmetries in Wikipedia, were that women in Wikipedia were more notable than men; that there was linguistic gender bias manifest in family-, gender-, and relationship-related topics being more present in biographies about women; and there was also linguistic gender bias in positive terms being used more frequently in the biographies of men while negative terms appeared more frequently in the biographies of women. The authors also found structural differences in terms of the metadata and hyperlinks, which had consequences for information-seeking activities. Wikipedia is only ever as good as the diversity of editors who engage with it, with many articles reflecting the perspective of white male English speakers in the northern hemisphere, and many of the topics covered reflect the interests of this relatively small group of editors. Wikipedia therefore needs a diverse community of editors to bring a range of perspectives and interests that truly represent human knowledge.

Awareness of this systemic gender bias has prompted the development of a tool called the Concept Replacer which simply highlights the gendered nouns and pronouns in the text of an article and temporarily shows you how a biography article of a notable woman would read if it was written instead as a biography for a man (and vice versa). This easy to use tool is useful for editors and article readers alike in order to help identify instances of unconscious bias at a glance. For instance, exposing why the marital status is included in the first lines about some biographies, and not others.

 

Wikipedia is also a community that operates with certain expectations and social norms in mind. Sometimes new editors can have a less than positive experience when they are not fully aware of this. As mentioned previously, there are over 130,000 regular contributors to Wikipedia. Of these, only 3,541 are considered ‘very active. That’s the population of a small village like Pitlochry in Scotland trying to curate the world’s knowledge.

There is a need to increase both the diversity and number of Wikipedia editors. One way to do that is to run ‘edit-a-thons’ and other facilitated activities that introduces some of the norms and expectations of the online platform while at the same time learning how to technically edit Wikipedia pages and create high quality content.

Edit-a-thons have been running globally for a number of years to facilitate the creation of new profiles of women on Wikipedia. For example, the University of Edinburgh has been hosting Women in STEM Wikipedia editathons on the second Tuesday of October for the last four years to mark Ada Lovelace Day,  an international celebration of the achievements of Women in STEM. The Wellcome Library in London has also run women in science edit-a-thons to build new biographies of prominent female chemists, engineers and nurses on Wikipedia. These events have surfaced the achievements a number of notable women online including: Hilda Lyon, who invented the “Lyon Shape”, a streamlined design used for airships and submarines; structural engineer, Faith Wainwright, director of the Arup Group, who led in the structural design of multiple landmark buildings including the American Air Museum and the Tate Modern; Annie Warren Gill, a British nurse who was awarded the Royal Red Cross in recognition of her service during World War I and served as president of the Royal College of Nursing in 1927; Frances Micklethwait MBE, an English research chemist, among the first to study and seek an antidote to mustard gas during the First World War.

Despite this global campaign and investment to encourage more female editors and the creation of content related specifically to women, progress is slow. Since 2014, WikiProject Women in Red’s volunteer editors regularly help create in the region of 1000-2000 new articles every month. As a result, this has increased the proportion of biographies on women from 15% to 17.83% of the total. It has been estimated that it will take until 2050 or later until gender parity is achieved on Wikipedia.

Tackling this bias online requires collective responsibility. A number of actions at an individual, organisational and national level can be taken to bring about positive change.

“Women in STEM are under-represented and maybe the lack of role models is one reason why. Also biographies of women in STEM on Wikipedia are much fewer than they should be and maybe if we can change that, we can change the way future generations look at science and technology as a career path”

Athina Frantzana, PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Physics & Astronomy.

Firstly, those of all genders everywhere could commit time and energy to becoming dedicated Wikipedians, who regularly create female scientific biographies and other content related to women in science. Those who do so tend to benefit from a sense of reciprocity and altruism which results from the direct impact that Wikipedia has worldwide.

For instance, Dr. Jess Wade, a physicist and postdoctoral researcher in electronics at Imperial College London, attended a Wellcome Library editathon and was horrified to learn about the gender gap on Wikipedia.

Dr Jess Wade, physicist and diversity champion at Imperial College, London.

“The majority of editors are men. The majority of editors are white men. So representation of people of colour, of LGBTQ+ people is really, really bad. So many young people use [Wikipedia] as the sole source of their information. They don’t use textbooks anymore. They go to Wikipedia first when they’re looking something up. And I don’t want that to be an incredibly biased view of the world… you could be looking up some kind of new solar material, you could be looking up a cathedral in Florence [but] the people that you read about will be men. And that really frightened me… So I just thought I’d start off by doing one a day. And yeah it’s really fun.”

This experience motivated her to start creating Wikipedia entries about contemporary female scientists, with over 450 new articles published in the last twelve months. These include Isabel Ellie Knaggs, a crystallographer who worked with Kathleen Lonsdale on the crystal structure of benzil; Noël Bakhtian, director of the Center for Advanced Energy Studies at Idaho National Laboratory and described as one of the most powerful female engineers in the world by Business Insider in 2018; Katherine Mathieson, the Chief Executive of the British Science Association; Ronke Mojoyinola Olabisi, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Rutgers University working with Mae Jemison on 100 Year Starship, an interdisciplinary initiative that is exploring the possibility of human interstellar travel; and Powtawche Valerino, the first Native American woman to receive a PhD in mechanical engineering from Rice University. Valerino is a mechanical engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who worked as a navigation engineer for the Cassini mission.   Wade says the response to her work surfacing the achievements of these inspiring women on Wikipedia has been incredibly positive.

Secondly, organisations in these fields could provide training for staff at all levels via edit-a-thons to build capacity for an inclusive, global, online community. Investing in a Wikimedian, an in-house expert that is dedicated to educating and supporting an organisation to contribute to Wikipedia, would enable larger institutions to permanently embed gender equality within their organisational culture.

Institutions that currently host, or have hosted, a Wikipedian in Residence include libraries (e.g. the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, the Wellcome Library), charities, museums, archives, the Royal Society of Chemistry, heritage organisations (eg. Museums Galleries Scotland), UNESCO and universities (University of Edinburgh, University of Oxford).

At the University of Edinburgh, discussion around meeting the information literacy and digital skills needs of staff and students, and how to better meet the university’s commitment to Athena SWAN led to working with Wikimedia UK. Research by Professor Allison Littlejohn at the Open University validated that running editathons at the University contributed to the formation of networks of practice and development of social capital.

“Editathons, if run well, can develop not just technical knowledge but also workplace cultural capital and networks. These are the things women need in STEM (science, technology, mathematics and engineering) workplaces. ” – Melissa Highton, Assistant Principal at the University of Edinburgh.

Participants also saw it as an important part of their professional development and felt that editing was a form of knowledge activism which  helped generate important discussions about how knowledge is created, curated and contested online and how Wikipedia editors can positively impact on the knowledge available to people all around the world and addressing those knowledge gaps.

“It’s an emotional connection… Within, I’d say, less than 2 hours of me putting her page in place it was the top hit that came back in Google when I Googled it and I just thought that’s it, that’s impact right there!” Anita – editathon participant.

Reproductive Medicine undergraduates (CC-BY-SA)

Thirdly, national policies across education, research and workforce development could put the spotlight on the powerful impact online platforms like Wikipedia have on women in science and recommend strategies to capitalise on them. For its part the University of Edinburgh has recommended that Wikipedia Women in Red editing forms part of its new four year action plan for meeting its commitment to the Athena SWAN charter by surfacing role models in ten academic disciplines; to encourage and inspire the next generation of immodest women.

Search is the way we live now

According to 2011 figures in the book “Google and the Culture of Search”, Google processed over 91% of searches internationally. Google’s ranking algorithm also narrows the sources clicked upon 90% of the time to just the first page of results.

American feminist scholar of 18th-century British literature, and a noted Wikipedian, Adrienne Wadewitz noted the important role in addressing knowledge gaps on Wikipedia and Google could have:

“Google takes information from Wikipedia, as do many other sites, because it is licensed through a Creative Commons Share-Alike license. Those little boxes on the left-hand side of your screen when you do a Google search? From Wikipedia. The information that is on Wikipedia spreads across the internet. What is right or wrong or missing on Wikipedia affects the entire internet.”

More recently, researchers at the University of Minnesota and Northwestern University have underlined the substantial interdependence of Wikipedia and Google. The results of two deception studies, whose goal was to better demonstrate the relationship between Wikipedia and Google, demonstrated Google depends on Wikipedia and vice versa. Click through rate decreased by 80% if Wikipedia links were removed. Wikipedia was shown to depend on Google. 84.5% of visits to Wikipedia were noted to being attributable to Google.

This means that addressing knowledge gaps on Wikipedia will surface the knowledge to Google’s top results, help populate and power Google’s ‘Knowledge graph’ (presented as a box to the right of search results) and increase visibility, click through and knowledge-sharing. Wikipedia editing can be seen as a form of activism in the democratisation of access to information.

A powerful reminder of the impact Wikipedia can have can be seen among young women and girls, who often lack easily identifiable female role models to follow. Bringing female role models to the fore  beyond the world of celebrity and reality television is something that both Girlguiding UK and psychologist Penelope Lockwood noted was necessary for female students to feel that success is possible in order to broaden their future career aspirations.

Last Summer, schoolgirls from across London were invited by the Mayor of London’s office to take part in a editathon at Bloomberg for London Tech Week to redress the gender balance on Wikipedia through adding new entries on women CEOs, editors, entrepreneurs, lawyers and artists. The hope is this will kickstart further editathons across London and the UK; to further empower students up and down the country that their contributions are valued and that there are inspirational people out there achieving success in fields they just might aspire to join.

A new Open Access book on Gender Equality in higher education, EqualBite, asserts that the problem is persuading girls to consider and apply for STEM courses in the first place when they could apply for any number of courses, given that girls outperform boys at school including in STEM subjects. Recognising women’s achievements and contributions through creating and editing Wikipedia articles can encourage the next generation to take up careers in science. This could help address workforce shortages across many STEM fields and generate significant amounts of economic growth through diversifying innovation and entrepreneurship. Beyond this, we need to look at how improving the visibility of women role models in the online world can better shape our physical environments. The University of Edinburgh Student Association has recently worked on a project to improve diversity in student spaces through replacing the all-male portraits on the walls with more diverse group of portraits to encourage a greater sense of belonging. Similarly, a project in Hertford College, Oxford to mark 40 years of women at the college specially commissioned photograph portraits of women graduates, staff and students to replace the all-male portraits on the walls. By increasing awareness of female achievements online, we can create more inclusive, more diverse, more representative, more empowering physical environments to help breed confidence and undo the negative impact this lack of representation engenders.

Portraits hanging outside the Playfair Library, Old College. CC-BY_SA, Mihaela Bodlovic, http://www.aliceboreasphotography.com/

“Meanings are projected not just by the buildings themselves, but by how they are furnished and decorated. And where almost every image –portrait, photograph, statue – of academic achievement and leadership is masculine (and nearly always white middle-aged), the meaning is clear: to be a successful leader, gender and ethnicity matter.”

The benefits are clear but the scale of the challenge is massive. It has taken Women in Red editors two years to move the percentage of biographies of women on Wikipedia up by 2%. Looking to the future, Artificial Intelligence may prove one method to help address the gender gap. The software tool, Quicksilver, developed by San Francisco startup Primer has been created to help address the blind-spots on Wikipedia, with women in science a particular focus. Using machine-learning algorithms, Quicksilver searches the internet for news entries, links to sources, scientific citations and helps pull all this information together to auto-generate fully-sourced draft Wikipedia entries. This has since been tested at an editathon in New York City at the American Museum of Natural History.

“Maria Strangas, the museum researcher who organized the event, says it helped the 25 first-time editors update the pages for roughly 70 women scientists in just two hours. “It magnified the effect that event had on Wikipedia,” Strangas says.”

So far, over 40,000 summaries have been generated by the Quicksilver method. These entries then need proofread by Wikipedia editors before they can be added to Wikipedia’s livespace. Given that the number of ‘very active’ Wikipedia editors on English Wikipedia remains low at around 3,541 (the population of a small village) the importance of encouraging and empowering a diversity of editors to engage with Wikipedia editing is crucial in terms of increasing the visibility of inspirational female role models online to, in turn, encourage and empower the next generation of women in STEM whose scientific breakthroughs can continue to shape our world for the better.

If you’re feeling motivated to contribute, create a Wikipedia account today and join WikiProject Women in Red.

How to run a Wikipedia editathon – a workshop for health information professionals at the EAHIL conference

This post was authored by Ruth Jenkins, Academic Support Librarian at the University of Edinburgh.

For some time, Wikipedia has been shown to be a resource to engage with, rather than avoid. Wikipedia is heavily used for medical information by students and health professionals – and the fact that it is openly available is crucial for people finding health information, particularly in developing countries or in health crises. Good quality Wikipedia articles are an important contribution to the body of openly available information – particularly relevant for improving health information literacy. In fact, some argue that updating Wikipedia should be part of every doctor’s work, contributing to the dissemination of scientific knowledge.

Participants editing Wikipedia

With that in mind, Academic Support Librarians for Medicine Marshall Dozier, Ruth Jenkins and Donna Watson recently co-presented a workshop on How to run a Wikipedia editathon, at the European Association for Health Information and Libraries (EAHIL) Conference in Cardiff in July. Ewan McAndrew, our Wikimedian in Residence here at the University of Edinburgh, was instrumental in the planning and structuring of the workshop, giving us lots of advice and help. On the day, we were joined by Jason Evans, Wikimedian in Residence at the National Library of Wales, who spoke about his role at NLW and the Wikimedia community and helped support participants during editing.

We wanted our workshop to give participants experience of editing Wikipedia and build their confidence using Wikipedia as part of the learning experience for students and others. Our workshop was a kind of train-the-trainer editathon. An editathon is an event to bring people together at a scheduled time to create entries or edit Wikipedia on a specific topic, and they are valuable opportunities for collaborating with subject experts, and to involve students and the public.

Where a typical editathon would be a half-day event, we only had 90 minutes. As such, our workshop was themed around a “micro-editathon” – micro in scale, timing and tasks. We focused on giving participants insights into running an editathon, offered hands-on experience, and small-scale edits such as adding images and missing citations to articles.

Systematic review edit

Key stats from the EAHIl Wikipedia editathon

We also presented on the Wikipedia assignment in the Reproductive Biology Honours programme here at Edinburgh, including a clip from this video of a student’s reflections on the assignment, which sparked discussion from the attendees. Jason Evans’ talk about Wikimedia UK and Wikiproject Medicine, contextualised the participants’ edits within the wider Wikimedia community.

We are waiting on feedback from the event, but anecdotally, the main response was a wish for a longer workshop, with more time to get to know Wikipedia better! There was lots of discussion about take-home ideas, and we hope they are inspired to deliver editathon events in their own organisations and countries. We also spotted that some of our participants continued to make edits on Wikipedia in the following weeks, which is a great sign.

If you want to know more, you can visit the event website which roughly follows the structure of our workshop and includes plenty of further resources: https://thinking.is.ed.ac.uk/eahil-editathon/

Further information.

Pic of Ruth Jenkins at the Reproductive Biology Hons. Wikipedia workshop.
By Stinglehammer [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Wikipedia in the Classroom – the Edinburgh Residency

Wikimedia at the University of Edinburgh

Reasons to engage in the conversation

With about 17 billion page views every month, it’s safe to say that most of us have heard of Wikipedia and maybe even use it on a regular basis. However, most people don’t realise that Wikipedia is the tip of the iceberg. Its sister sites include a media library (Wikimedia Commons), a database (Wikidata), a library of public domain texts (Wikisource), and even a dictionary (Wiktionary) – along with many others, these form the Wikimedia websites.

While the content is all crowd-sourced, the Wikimedia Foundation in the US maintains the hardware and software the websites run on. Wikimedia UK is one of dozens of sister organisations around the globe who support the mission of the Wikimedia websites to share the world’s knowledge.

Today, Wikipedia is the number one information site in the world, visited by 500 million visitors a month; the place that students and staff consult for pre-research on a topic. And considered, according to a 2014 Yougov survey, to be trusted more than the Guardian, BBC, Telegraph and Times. Perhaps because its commitment to transparency is an implicit promise of trust to its users where everything on it can be checked, challenged and corrected.

The University of Edinburgh and Wikimedia UK – shared missions.

Wikimedia at an ancient university

The Edinburgh residency

In January 2016, the University of Edinburgh and Wikimedia UK partnered to host a Wikimedian in Residence for twelve months. This residency marks something of a paradigm shift as the first in the UK in supporting the whole university as part of its commitment to skills development and open knowledge.

Background to the residency

The University of Edinburgh held its first editathon – a workshop where people learn how to edit Wikipedia and start writing – during the university’s midterm Innovative Learning Week in February 2015. Ally Crockford (Wikimedian in Residence at the National Library of Scotland) and Sara Thomas (Wikimedian in Residence at Museums & Galleries Scotland) came to help deliver the ‘Women, Science and Scottish History’ editathon series which celebrated the Edinburgh Seven; the first group of matriculated undergraduate female students at any British university.

Timeline of the Wikimedia residencies in Scotland to date. The University of Edinburgh residency was the first residency in the UK to have a university-wide remit. Martin Poulter was Wikimedian in Residence at the Bodleian Library before beginning a 2nd residency at the University of Oxford on a university-wide remit.

 

Melissa Highton, Assistant Principal for Online Learning at the University of Edinburgh.

“The striking thing for me was how quickly colleagues within the University took to the idea and began supporting each other in developing their skills and sharing knowledge amongst a multi-professional group. This inspired me to commission some academic research to look at the connections and networking amongst the participants and to explore whether editathons were a good investment in developing workplace digital skills.”Melissa Highton – Assistant Principal for Online Learning.

This research, conducted by Professor Allison Littlejohn, found that there was clear evidence of informal & formal learning going on. Further, that “all respondents reported that the editathon had a positive influence on their professional role. They were keen to integrate what they learned into their work in some capacity and believed participation had increased their professional capabilities.”

Since successfully making case for hosting a Wikimedian in Residence, the residency’s remit has been to advocate for knowledge exchange and deliver training events & workshops across the university which further both the quantity & quality of open knowledge and the university’s commitment to embedding information literacy & digital literacy in the curriculum.

Wikimedia UK and the University of Edinburgh – shared missions

Edinburgh was the first university to be founded with a ‘civic’ mission; created not by the church but by the citizens of Edinburgh for the citizens of Edinburgh in 1583. The mission of the university of Edinburgh is “the creation, curation & dissemination of knowledge”. Founded a good deal later, Wikipedia began on January 15th 2001; the free encyclopaedia is now the largest & most popular reference work on the internet.

Wikimedia’s vision is “imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge”. It is 100% funded by donations and is the only non-profit website in the top ten most popular sites.

Wikipedia – the world’s favourite site for information.

Addressing the knowledge gap

While Wikipedia is the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, not everyone does. Of the 80,000 or so monthly contributors to Wikipedia, only around 3000 are termed very active Wikipedians; meaning the world’s knowledge is often left to be curated by a population the size of a village (roughly the size of Kinghorn in Fife… or half of North Berwick). While 5.4 million articles in English Wikipedia is the largest of the 295 active language Wikipedias, it is estimated that there would need to be at least 104 million articles on English Wikipedia alone to cover all the notable subjects in the world. That means as of last month, English Wikipedia is missing approximately 99 million articles.

Less than 15% of women edit Wikipedia and this skews the content in much the same way with only 17.1% of biographies about notable women. The University of Edinburgh has a commitment to equality and diversity and our Wikimedia residency therefore has a particular emphasis on open practice and engaging colleagues in discussing why some areas of open practice do have a clear gender imbalance. In this way many of our Wikipedia events focused on addressing the gender gap as part of the university’s commitment to Athena Swan; creating new role models for young and old alike. Role models like Janet Anne Galloway, advocate for higher education for women in Scotland, Helen Archdale (journalist and suffragette), Mary Susan McIntosh (sociologist and LGBT campaigner) among many many more.

Pages created at Women in Red meetings at the University of Edinburgh editing sessions.

That’s why it is enormously pleasing that over the whole year, 65% of attendees at our events were female.

Sharing knowledge

The residency has, at its heart, been about making connections. Both across the university’s three teaching colleges and beyond; with the city of Edinburgh itself. Demonstrating how staff, students and members of the public can most benefit from and contribute to the development of the huge open knowledge resource that are the Wikimedia projects. And we made some significant connections over the last year in all of these areas.

Inviting staff & students from all different backgrounds and disciplines to contribute their time and expertise to the creation & improvement of Wikipedia articles in a number of events has worked well and engendered opportunities for collaborations and knowledge exchange across the university, with other institutions across the UK; and across Europe in the case of colleagues from the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine working with research partner labs.

Wikipedia in the Classroom – 3 assignments in Year One. Doubled in Year Two.

Ultimately, what you wanted attendees to get from the experience was this; the idea that knowledge is most useful when it is used; engaged with; built upon. Contributing to Wikipedia can also help demonstrate research impact as there is a lot of work going on to ensure that Wikipedia citations to scholarly works use the DOI. The reason being that Wikipedia is already the fifth largest referrer of traffic through the DOI resolver and this is thought to be an underestimate of its true position.

Not just Wikipedia

Knowledge doesn’t belong in silos. The interlinking of the Wikimedia projects for Robert Louis Stevenson.

Introducing staff and students to the work of the Wikimedia Foundation and the other 11 projects has been a key part of the residency with a Wikidata & Wikisource Showcase held during Repository Fringe in August 2016 which has resulted in some out-of-copyright PhD theses being uploaded to Wikisource, and linked to from Wikipedia, just one click away.

Wikisource is a free digital library which hosts out-of-copyright texts including: novels, short stories, plays, poems, songs, letters, travel writing, non-fiction texts, speeches, news articles, constitutional documents, court rulings, obituaries, and much more besides. The result is an online text library which is free to anyone to read with the added benefits that the text is quality assured, searchable and downloadable.

Sharing content to Wikisource, the free digital library, and linking to Wikipedia one click away.

Wikidata is our most exciting project with many predicting it will overtake Wikipedia in years to come as the dominant project. A free linked database of machine-readable knowledge, Wikidata acts as central storage for the structured data of all 295 different language Wikipedias and all the other Wikimedia sister projects.

Timeline of Female alumni of the University of Edinburgh generated from structured linked open data stored in Wikidata.

 “How can you trust Wikipedia when anyone can edit it?”

This is the main charge levelled against involvement with Wikipedia and the residency has been making the case for re-evaluating Wikipedia and for engendering a greater critical information literacy in staff & students. And that’s the thing. Wikipedia doesn’t want you to cite it. It is a tertiary source; an aggregator of articles built on citations from reliable published secondary sources. In this way it is reframing itself as the ‘front matter to all research.’

Wikipedia has clear policy guidelines to help ensure its integrity.

Verifiability – every single statement on Wikipedia needs to be backed up with a citation from a reliable published secondary source. So an implicit promise is made to our users that you can go on there and check, challenge and correct the verifiability of any statement made on Wikipedia.

 

No original research – while knowledge is created everyday, until it is published by a reliable secondary source, it should not be on Wikipedia. The presence of editorial oversight is a key consideration in source evaluation therefore, however well-researched, someone’s personal interpretation is not to be included.

 

Neutral point of view – many subjects on Wikipedia are controversial so can we find common truth in fact? The rule of thumb is you can cover controversy but don’t engage in it. Wikipedians therefore present the facts as they exist.

Automated programmes (bots) patrol Wikipedia and can revert unhelpful edits & copyright violations within minutes. The edit history of a page is detailed such that it is very easy to revert a page to its last good state and block IP addresses of users who break the rules.

What underlies Wikipedia, at its very heart, is this fundamental idea that more people want to good than harm, more people want to create knowledge than destroy, more people want to share than contain. At its core Wikipedia is about human generosity.” – Katherine Maher, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation in December 2016.

This idea that more people want to good than harm has also been borne out by researchers who found that only seven percent of edits could be considered vandalism.

 

 

Wikipedia in the Classroom

Developing information literacy, online citizenship and digital research skills.

The residency has met with a great many course leaders across the entire university and the interactions have all been extremely fruitful in terms of understanding what each side needs to ensure a successful assignment and lowering the threshold for engagement.

Translation Studies MSc students have completed the translation of a Wikipedia article of at least 4000 words into a different language Wikipedia last semester and are to repeat the assignment this semester. This time asking students to translate in the reverse direction from last semester so that the knowledge shared is truly a two-way exchange.

 

The Translation MSc assignment

World Christianity MSc students undertook an 11-week Wikipedia assignment as part of the ‘Selected Themes in the Study of World Christianity’ class. This core course offers candidates the opportunity to study in depth Christian history, thought and practice in and from Africa, Asia and Latin America. The assignment comprised of writing a new article, following a literature review, on a World Christianity term hitherto unrepresented on Wikipedia.

When you hand in an essay the only people that generally read it are you and your lecturer. And then once they both read it, it kind of disappears and you don’t look at it again. No one really benefits from it. With a Wikipedia assignment, other people contribute to it, you put it out there for everyone to read, you can keep coming back to it, keep adding to it, other people can do as well. It becomes more of a community project that everyone can read and access. I really enjoyed it.”Nuam Hatzaw, World Christianity MSc student.

The World Christianity MSc assignment.

Reproductive Biology Honours students in September 2015 researched, synthesised and developed a first-rate Wikipedia entry of a previously unpublished reproductive medicine term: neuroangiogenesis. The following September, the next iteration was more ambitious. All thirty-eight students were trained to edit Wikipedia and worked collaboratively in groups to research and produce the finished written articles. The assignment developed the students’ research skills, information literacy, digital literacy, collaborative working, academic writing & referencing.

One particular deadly form of ovarian cancer, High grade serous carcinoma, was unrepresented on Wikipedia and Reproductive Biology student Áine Kavanagh took great care to thoroughly research and write the article to address this; even developing her own openly-licensed diagrams to help illustrate the article. Her scholarship has now been viewed over sixteen thousand times adding an important source of health information to the global Open Knowledge community.

It was a really good exercise in scientific writing and writing for a lay audience. As a student it’s a really good opportunity. It’s a really motivating thing to be able to do; to relay the knowledge you’ve learnt in lectures and exams, which hasn’t really been relevant outside of lectures and exams, but to see how it’s relevant to the real world and to see how you can contribute.” –Áine Kavanagh.

The Reproductive Biology Hons. assignment.

Following a successful multidisciplinary approach, including students and staff all collaborating in the co-creation & sharing of knowledge, the residency has been extended into a third year until January 2019. Twenty members of staff have also now been trained to provide Wikipedia training and advice to colleagues to help with the sustainability of the partnership in tandem with support from Wikimedia UK.

While also ensuring Wikipedia editing is both embedded in regular digital skills workshops, demystifying how to begin editing Wikipedia has been a core focus of the residency, utilising Wikipedia’s new easy-to-use Visual Editor interface. Over two hundred videos and video tutorials, lesson plans, case studies, booklets and handouts have been created & curated in order to lower the threshold for staff and students to be able to engage with the Wikimedia projects in the years ahead.

The way ahead

Ten years after Wikipedia first launched, the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article by the vice president of Oxford University of Press acclaiming that ‘Wikipedia had come of age’ and that it was time Wikipedia played a vital role in formal education settings. Since that article, the advent of ‘Fake News’ has engendered discussions around how best to equip students with a critical information literacy. For Wikipedia editors this is nothing new as they have been combatting fake news for years and source evaluation is one of the Wikipedian’s core skills.

In fact, there is increasing synchronicity in that the skills and experiences that universities and PISA are articulating they want to see students endowed with are ones that Wikipedia assignments help develop. The assignments we have run this year have all demonstrated this and are to be repeated as a result. The case for Wikipedia playing a vital role in formal education settings has never been stronger.

Is now the time for Wikipedia to come of age?

If not now, then when?

Course leaders at Edinburgh University

Postscript: All three assignments from 2016/2017 are continuing in 2017/2018 because of the positive feedback from staff and students alike.

These are being augmented with collaborations with:

  • two student societies; the History Society for Black History Month and the Translation Society on a Wikipedia project to give their student members much-needed published translation practice.
  • Library and University Collections to add source metadata from 27,000 records in the Edinburgh Research Archive to Wikidata and 20+ digitised theses to Wikisource
  • a further three in-curriculum collaborations in Digital Sociology MSc, Global Health and Anthropology MSc and Data Science for Design MSc.
  • the Fruitmarket Gallery and the university’s Centre for Design Informatics for a Scottish Contemporary Artists editathon.
  • A Litlong editathon as part of the AHRC ‘Being Human’ festival.
  • The School of Chemistry for Ada Lovelace Day to celebrate women in STEM.
  • the University Chaplaincy to mark the International Storytelling Festival.
  • Teeside University to run a ‘Regeneration’ themed editathon.

As we have shown, there are huge areas of convergence between the Wikimedia projects and higher education. The Edinburgh residency has demonstrated that collaborations between universities and Wikimedia are mutually beneficial and that Wikipedia plays a vitally important role in the development of information literacy, digital research skills and the dissemination of academic knowledge for the common good.

That all begins with engaging in the conversation. Building an informed understanding of the Wikimedia projects and the huge opportunities that working together create.

Planting the seed and watching it grow.

Reasons to engage in the conversation

Desperately Seeking Ada

Booking for Ada Lovelace Day 2016 is now live – please feel free to pass on details to people you feel maybe interested in coming along.

ada_lovelace_in_1852

Ada Lovelace, “The Enchantress of Numbers”, in 1852.

 

Who was Ada Lovelace?

Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), the only legitimate child of the poet George, Lord Byron and his wife Anne Isabella Milbanke, was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage‘s early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. As a result, she is often regarded as the first computer programmer with her work a major influence on Alan Turing & inspiring countless others. There’s now a graphic novel of her short but brilliant life and you can read more about her life here and an ‘interview’ with her in New Scientist here.

On Tuesday 11th October 2016, in Room 1.12 of the University Main Library, we will again be running a Wikipedia edit-a-thon to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day 2016, an international celebration day of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).

Beginning at 10am with a range of guest speakers in the morning, this will be followed by fun technology activities from 11am to 1pm (Metadata games, BBC Microbit, Sonic Pi, Lego calculators/adders).

Full Wikipedia editing training will be given at 1-2pm. Thereafter the afternoon’s editathon from 2-5pm will focus on improving the quality of Wikipedia articles related to Women in STEM!

The event page can be accessed here: http://bit.ly/2cGapkn

For booking purposes, the day is split in two parts: talks & technology activities in the morning and the Women in STEM Wikipedia editathon in the afternoon.

You can attend both morning and afternoon sessions or just one.

Time for lunch? The fun technology activities from 11am to 1pm can be dropped in and out of and there is the Library Cafe downstairs where you can get refreshments and a bite to eat.

Not a student or staff member of the university? You can book tickets through Eventbrite.

Suggestions for notable Women in STEM who could & should be represented on Wikipedia?

Feel free to suggest name of notable women we could include as part of this day of celebration. Email me at ewan.mcandrew@ed.ac.uk

Hope to see you there!

COMING SOON: Edinburgh Gothic editathon: Sat 12th November

By Count Girolamo Nerli (Italian, 1863 - 1926) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Robert Louis Stevenson     By Count Girolamo Nerli (Italian, 1863 – 1926) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

 

On Saturday 12th November 2016, the University’s Information Services team are partnering with the National Library of Scotland to run a Wikipedia edit-a-thon to celebrate Robert Louis Stevenson Day 2016. Full Wikipedia editing training will be given in the morning before a break for lunch. Thereafter the afternoon’s editathon will focus on improving the quality of articles about all things gothic.

Working together with liaison librarians, archivists & academic colleagues we will provide training on how to edit and participate in an open knowledge community. Participants will be supported to develop articles covering areas which could stand to be improved; gothic art, gothic architecture, gothic literature, gothic film, gothic music, gothic history etc.

We also invite participants from around the world with an interest in all things Gothic to join in & contribute remotely; either through supplying ideas for our hitlist of Wikipedia articles to create/improve prior to the event or through remote editing during the event or even arranging your own simultaneous editathon events.

Details to follow but keep the date and come along to learn about how Wikipedia works and contribute a greater understanding of Gothic history!

The event page is here.

COMING SOON: Ada Lovelace Day – 11th October 2016

Ada Lovelace Alfred Edward Chalon [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Ada Lovelace
Alfred Edward Chalon [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

This is just a gentle reminder that Ada Lovelace Day 2016 will be coming up on Tuesday 11th October 2016 and we will be looking to reconvene a working group to prepare for an Ada Lovelace day of events; incorporating a Wikipedia editathon celebrating the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).

 

http://findingada.com/

Ada Lovelace Day | Celebrating the achievements of women …

findingada.com

Ada Lovelace Day is an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). Ada Lovelace Day in 2016 will be …

At this moment in time, I am looking for expressions of interest in being involved in this event once more and Wikipedia pages we should look to create and improve related to Women in STEM.

 

NB: The focus might shift a little this year to female mentors given that Mary Somerville is to grace the £10 note this year so with an extra focus on women in maths too.

 

If you know of someone who would like to be involved then please feel free to forward on the event details and let them know I’d love to hear from them.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:University_of_Edinburgh/Events_and_Workshops/Ada_Lovelace_Day_2016

I’ve created the Wikipedia event page accordingly so that we can populate it over the next few months with some notable women in STEM.

 

Other projects are in development too. If you would like to be involved in them then email me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:University_of_Edinburgh#Projects_in_Development

 

Whisky (and Projects) Galore!

The residency so far

The residency so far

As the dust settled after the hectic days of Spy Week 2016 and OER16 came to a close and the university exam period came and went, I was left thinking… what’s next?

Projects in development (from the University of Edinburgh Wikimedia residency page)

  • History of Veterinary Medicine edit-a-thon – Event for Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies staff to research & create articles relating to the history of veterinary medicine. 4th July 2016
  • Euro Stem Cell Editathon at Centre for Regenerative Medicine, Edinburgh. Editathon for UoE staff and Eurostemcell partner labs in Europe & at the Wellcome Library.
  • Wikidata (& WikiSource) Showcase (with Pauline Ward & Histropedia’s Navino Evans) at the John McIntyre Conference Centre JMCC – 1st & 2nd August 2016
  • Reproductive Medicine Edit-a-thon (with Dr. Chris Harlow) – 21 September and 28 September. Partnering with West Virginia University.
  • Vet School Wikipedia research session – Edit-a-thon event for Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies students to research & create new Wikipedia articles on Veterinary Medicine. Proposed for October 5th 2016.
  • International Alumni project – Celebrating the international students who studied at Edinburgh University and gone on to have a huge impact abroad (including simultaneous editathons, hopefully, in Singapore & Hong Kong to create a global edit-a-thon). Mooted for early October 2016 for Black History Month.
  • Ada Lovelace Day – Tuesday 11th October 2016 – celebrating the achievements of Women in STEM with a particular focus on female mentors given that Mary Somerville will grace the new £10 note. Truly noteworthy.
  • Day of the Dead editathon – Monday 31st October 2016 – using the obituaries from Scottish & UK newspapers to recognise & celebrate the lives of those sadly passed away.
  • Edinburgh Gothic (agreed a partnership with the National Library of Scotland) – Saturday 12th November. Marking the day before Robert Louis Stevenson Day, the National Library of Scotland will join us to celebrate the best of Edinburgh Gothic, releasing Robert Louis Stevenson images into the public domain to Wikicommons (wherever possible) and any additional material not yet transcribed onto Wikisource. Looking to see if we can combine efforts in gothic art, gothic history, gothic costume design, gothic music, gothic film, gothic literature etc. to fill any gaps on Wikipedia… in the most macabre way.
  • The Kelvin Hall relaunch (in Glasgow) – mooted for late November / early December 2016 (again in collaboration with the National Library of Scotland). The idea is to create an edit-a-thon based on the Moving Image Archive by showing participants short films from the archive on the Video Wall there, creating Wikipedia articles for the films & filmmakers, and showing a longer film afterwards at the Hunterian cinema.
  • Translate-a-thon – Reaching out to bilingual and multi-lingual students to translate articles from English Wikipedia to their own native language Wikipedia (& vice versa) using Wikipedia’s new Content Translation tool.
  • Festival of Architecture 2016 – An architecture-themed editathon to celebrate the achievements of architects for the Festival of Architecture 2016.
Whisky Galore

Whisky Galore

And the whisky? It seems my less than unsubtle hints following my trip to Skye in April resulted in my getting a fair few bottles for my birthday.

Projects and whisky galore. Lots to be excited about and lots to get on with!

 

A river runs through it – Wikimedia at OER16

Edinburgh Castle on April 19th 2016

Edinburgh Castle on April 19th 2016

Co-chair, Lorna Campbell, welcoming attendees to Edinburgh for OER16. By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Co-chair, Lorna Campbell, welcoming attendees to Edinburgh for OER16.
By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia at OER16

Wikimedia at OER16

“A river runs through it” 

Apologies for the naming of this blog article BUT it did seem that there was a common (Wikimedia) thread running through a great many of the sessions at the 7th Open Education Resources Conference this year.

View the Storify of Wikimedia at OER16 in pics & tweets

Hosted by the University of Edinburgh, we were blessed with some surprisingly good weather (not a cloud in the sky) and some stellar keynote speakers; all progressing the case for OER and examining what it means to be ‘open’.

Jim Groom at OER16

Jim Groom at OER16

 

  • Jim Groom, Reclaim Hosting – an independent web hosting company focused on the higher education community.

Can we imagine tech Infrastructure as an Open Educational Resource? Or, Clouds, Containers, and APIs, Oh My!

Watch Jim Groom’s presentation on Media Hopper.

IMG_5667

 

  • Catherine Cronin – An educator and researcher at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Catherine has worked as an open educator for many years.

“If ‘open’ is the answer, what is the question?”

Watch Catherine Cronin’s keynote presentation on Media Hopper

Emma Smith at OER16 By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Emma Smith at OER16 By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

  • Emma Smith –At the University of Oxford, Dr Emma Smith’s research combines a range of approaches to Shakespeare and early modern drama. She is a fellow of Hertford College and a Professor of Shakespeare studies. She was also one of the first academic colleagues to  champion the use and creation of OER at University of Oxford through her involvement in the Jisc funded Open Spires and Great Writers Inspire projects. Her OER licensed lectures reach an international audience and she continues to produce, publish and share cultural resources online.

Free Willy: Shakespeare and OER”

Watch Emma Smith’s keynote presentation on Media Hopper.

IMG_20160419_170142176_HDR

  • John Scally – National Library for Scotland. John started his library career in 1993 when he was appointed as a curator in the British Antiquarian Division at the National Library. He joined the University of Edinburgh 10 years later as Director of University Collections and Deputy Director of Library, Museums and Galleries.

Postcards from the Open Road

Watch John Scally’s keynote presentation on Media Hopper

Conference co-chair, Melissa Highton, welcomes attendees to Edinburgh at the 7th Open Education Resources conference.

Conference co-chair, Melissa Highton, welcomes attendees to Edinburgh at the 7th Open Education Resources conference.

 

  • Melissa Highton. University of Edinburgh. Melissa leads the University of Edinburgh’s strategic priorities for open educational resources, digital and distance learning on global platforms, MOOCs, blended learning, virtual learning environments, technology enhanced learning spaces, digital skills  and use of the web for outreach and engagement.

Open with care” – Watch Melissa Highton’s keynote presentation on Media Hopper

IMG_5678

Unexpected outcomes

  • Emma Smith very kindly attended the Wikipedia editing training session I ran at lunchtime that first day of the conference (also my birthday so a double boon) and suggested she may like to collaborate with the Wikimedian at the Bodleian Library, Martin Poulter, upon her return.
  • John Scally referenced the sterling work undertaken by the first Wikimedian in Residence in Scotland, Ally Crockford, during her 17 months at the National Library of Scotland in releasing a considerable amount of the National Library of Scotland’s collections on open licenses to Wikimedia Commons.
  • Melissa Highton both presented a session on the research undertaken following the ‘Women in Science & Scottish History’ Wikipedia edit-a-thon  and then later closed the conference with her ‘Open with Care‘ keynote which eloquently expressed how to give those holding the purse strings at an institutional level something they can say ‘Yes‘ to  when it comes to the move towards openness where ‘not being open is a risk and not being open costs us money‘.
  • Jim Groom summing up Wikipedia as: The single greatest Open Education Resource the world has ever seen“.

My Wikimedia colleague, Martin Poulter, turned to me at this point, conspiratorially, to say that previous OER conferences had not had this level of Wikimedia involvement throughout so there had definitely been a shift in emphasis & in thinking over the years.

Given Wikimedia’s added focus on education this year, it just felt that Wikimedia and Open Education was an idea whose time had come.

Wikimedia at OER16

In addition to our keynote speakers, we ran a number of other Wikimedia sessions for OER delegates to attend.

Wikimedia at OER16

Wikimedia at OER16

Beyond this we had a number of Wikimedia related speakers taking part in OER16.

  • Martin Poulter – Wikimedian in Residence at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University.

IMG_5692

Martin Poulter, Wikimedian in Residence at the Bodleian Library. By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Watch Martin Poulter on Media Hopper (from 21 minutes on)

Martin’s presentation was a critical look inside some of Wikipedia’s sister projects: “Wikibooks as a platform and community for creating open textbooks, Wikidata as a source of open data for educational resources and Wikisource as a way to add educational value to historic texts. All these sites have “Edit” buttons and depend on users to build, evaluate, and repurpose open content.”

  • Lucy Crompton-Reid: CEO Wikimedia UK

Lucy Crompton-Reid, CEO Wikimedia UK. By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Lucy Crompton-Reid, CEO Wikimedia UK. By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Lucy’s presentation focused on the ways in which Wikimedia UK is working with libraries, archives and museums to ensure greater access to educational content online, with a particular focus on the Wales collaboration but drawing on experience in other settings.

Watch Lucy Crompton-Reid’s presentation on Media Hopper.

  • Sara Thomas – Wikimedian in Residence at Museums & Galleries Scotland.

Sara Thomas at OER16 By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Sara Thomas at OER16
By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

In contrast to most residencies, where the resident is embedded with just one institution, Sara was tasked with working with the entire Scottish museums sector, with the aim of increasing open knowledge capacity and beginning to effect culture change with regard to open knowledge in a cultural context. Her presentation reflected on what can (and can’t) be achieved in a year, offers provocations with regard to the challenges faced by the museums sector, and suggestions as to the best direction for future activity.

Watch Sara’s presentation on Media Hopper

  • Subhashish Panigrahi – Cultural Institution aka GLAM for more OER

Subhashish Panigrahi at OER16. By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Subhashish Panigrahi at OER16.
By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

GLAM is a global initiative for making cultural data open targeting galleries, libraries, archives and museums in particular. Subhashish’s presentation was around the best practices of several GLAM initiatives and how these projects could lead to create useful OERs.

Watch Subhashish’s presentation on Media Hopper

  • Antoni Meseguer-Artola – Open University of Catalonia

Learning Effectiveness and Perceived Value of Wikipedia as a Primary Course Resource at OER16. By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Learning Effectiveness and Perceived Value of Wikipedia as a Primary Course Resource at OER16.
By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Melissa Highton introducing Antoni Meseguer-Artola at OER16. By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Melissa Highton introducing Antoni Meseguer-Artola at OER16.
By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Antoni’s presentation examines a case study where Wikipedia was used as a primary learning resource, and it was appropriately integrated with the existing learning materials.

Results support the idea that the student’s perceptions about Wikipedia change across knowledge areas, and also depend on the student’s academic profile. Added to this, we have found evidence confirming the hypotheses that Wikipedia has a positive effect on the student’s academic performance, and that the magnitude of this influence ranges from one course to another.”

Watch Antoni Meseguer-Artola’s presentation here.

  • Allison Littlejohn and Melissa Highton – Learning to Develop Open Knowledge
Melissa Highton - Learning to Develop Open Knowledge

Melissa Highton – Learning to Develop Open Knowledge

An editathon is “an event where people develop open knowledge around a specific topic” (Cress & Kimmerle, 2008; Kosonen & Kianto, 2009). Melissa & Allison’s presentation explores learning in an editathon.

All respondents reported that the editathon had a positive influence on their professional role. They were keen to integrate what they learned into their work in some capacity and believed participation had increased their professional capabilities… Overall, the editathon provided opportunity for professional learning, enabling people to learn a range of different types of knowledge useful for work.

Watch Melissa and Allison’s presentation here.

In addition, Martin Poulter ran a successful lunchtime session illustrating how to engage with Wikisource, Wikimedia’s free content library.

Martin Poulter delivering a Wikisource demonstration at OER16. By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Martin Poulter delivering a Wikisource demonstration at OER16.
By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Wikisource demonstration at OER16. By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Wikisource demonstration at OER16.
By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Wikisource demonstration at OER16. By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Wikisource demonstration at OER16.
By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Finally, given that Josie Fraser, Wikimedia trustee and educationalist, has accepted the baton and agreed to co-host OER17 (themed on the ‘Politics of Openness’) next year, the future looks extremely bright.
Who knows which ‘waterbody type‘ Wikimedia might end up being compared to next time….
Wikimedia's Josie Fraser at OER16. By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia’s Josie Fraser at OER16.
By Stinglehammer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

 

 

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