Wikimedian in Residence

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

Tag: Gender gap Page 2 of 3

Wikipedia in the Classroom – the Edinburgh Residency

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On September 21, 2017

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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

Wikipedia's front page 11 May 2017

Did you know – Mary Susan McIntosh

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On May 12, 2017

In Uncategorized

Did you know that that sociologist, feminist, and campaigner for lesbian and gay rights Mary Susan McIntosh was deported from the U.S. in 1960 for speaking out against the House Un-American Activities Committee?

Mary Susan McIntosh (1936–2013) sociologist, feminist, political activist and campaigner for lesbian and gay rights in the UK. A 1974 colour photograph from her time as a Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. CC-BY-SA

Mary Susan McIntosh (1936–2013) sociologist, feminist, political activist and campaigner for lesbian and gay rights in the UK. A 1974 colour photograph from her time as a Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. CC-BY-SA

Yesterday this ‘Did You Know‘ fact was on Wikipedia’s front page. The front page is viewed, on average, 25 million times a day.

Mary’s page was only written in March during our International Women’s Day event here at the University of Edinburgh by one of our attendees, Lorna Campbell (read Lorna’s blog article on Mary here).

While her page has only been live on Wikipedia for two months, Mary’s page has now been viewed in excess of 7000 times because a) editors were motivated to address Wikipedia’s gender gap problem where less than 15% of editors are female and less than 17% of biographies are of notable women and b) we felt Mary’s story was important enough that it should be shared on Wikipedia’s front page and introduced to an audience of up to 25 million.

Did you know you could do that? Nominate a page newly created in the last seven days, or significantly expanded on, to be included on Wikipedia’s front page in this way?

View the guidelines for Did You Know here.

The Wikimedia residency at the University of Edinburgh has been as much about demystifying the largest reference work on the internet as anything else so here are some other things I feel are worth knowing in the spirit of ‘did you know‘?:

 

  • Did you know that Wikipedia works with Turnitin to address issues of plagiarism and copyright violation using the Copyvio tool and that the Dashboard for managing assignments now offers Authorship Highlighting of students’ edits thereby making it easier to visualize and evaluate student work.
  • Did you know that Wikipedia does not want you to cite it? It is a tertiary source; an aggregator of articles with facts backed up from reliable published secondary sources. You can’t cite Wikipedia but you can cite the references it uses. In this way it is reframed as the digital gateway to further research sources.
  • Did you know that Wikipedia editing teaches source evaluation as a core skill hence Wikipedia education assignments help students combat fake news?
  • Did you know that Dr. Alex Chow at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Divinity has developed a script to help assess the word count of Wikipedia articles for use with student assignments?
  • Did you know that only 7% of edits to Wikipedia areconsidered vandalism and that research has found that, unlike other parts of the internet, Wikipedia editing actually de-radicalises its editors of partisan political leanings?
  • Did you know you can learn:
  • Did you know that you can upload openly-licensed longer texts to Wikisource (the free content library) which are transcribed into 100% searchable HTML so that works such as Thomas Jehu’s digitised PhD thesis can be linked to, one click away, from his Wikipedia article or out-of-copyright texts such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s book on ‘Edinburgh’ (1914) can be enjoyed by new audiences?
  • Did you know that Wikidata, Wikimedia’s repository of structured open data, now has 3 million linked citations added to it which can be queried using the new Scholia tool – a tool to handle scientific bibliographic information? (The Scholia Web service creates on-the-fly scholarly profiles for researchers, organizations, journals, publishers, individual scholarly works, and for research topics. To collect the data, it queries the SPARQL-based Wikidata Query Service).
  • Did you know that you can now add automatically generated citations to millions of books on Wikipedia? Wikipedia editors can now draw on WorldCat, the world’s largest database of books, to generate citations on Wikipedia thanks to a collaboration between OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) and the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia Library program.
  • Did you know that the latest estimates by Crossref show that Wikipedia has risen from the 8th most prolific referrer to DOIs to the 5th. And this is thought to be a gross underestimate of its actual position?
  • Did you know that Altmetric include Wikipedia citations in their impact metrics and that Altmetric automatically picks up on citations through Wikipedia’s citation generator?
  • Did you know that Wikimedia has received a $3 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to make a ‘Structured Commons’ to make freely-licensed images accessible and reusable across the web?
  • Did you know that releasing images through Wikimedia Commons can result in a huge increase in views with detailed metrics about the number of views these images are accruing? E.g. Images released by the Bodleian Library have accrued 218,460,571 views to date.
  • Did you know about the WikiCite initiative? Tidying up the citations on Wikipedia to make a consistent, queryable bibliographic repository enhancing the visibility and impact of research.
  • Did you know that thanks to the new I4OC initiative (April 2017) there exists a collaboration between scholarly publishers, researchers, and other interested parties to promote the unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data? Before I4OC started, publishers releasing references in the open accounted for just 1% of citation metadata collected annually by Crossref. Following discussions over the past months, several subscription-access and open-access publishers have recently made the decision to release reference list metadata publicly. These include: American Geophysical Union, Association for Computing Machinery, BMJ, Cambridge University Press, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, EMBO Press, Royal Society of Chemistry, SAGE Publishing, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley. These publishers join other publishers who have been opening their references through Crossref for some time.
  • Did you know that thanks to Wikidata you can now query, analyse & visualise the largest reference work on the internet? You can also add your research data to combine datasets on Wikidata.
  • Did you know that the University of Portsmouth have been running a Wikipedia assignment called Human Geography for the last five years where each student is assigned a different short stub article for a village in England and Wales, and asked to expand it to provide a rounded description of the place and, in particular, an account of its historical development?
  • Did you know that, so far, they have left Scotland untouched and so there will be many villages and towns in Scotland ripe to have articles created and improved?
  • Did you know that Wikivoyage is Wikipedia’s sister project and a Lonely Planet-esque travel guide? Students can write articles about their hometown area with bullet-pointed sections on ‘Things to do’, ‘Things to See’, ‘Things to Buy’, ‘Places to stay’ with Open Street Maps included and images added from Wikimedia Commons.
  • Did you know how students and staff at the University of Edinburgh have reacted to the Wikipedia in the Classroom assignments we have run this year? You can view a compilation of their feedback in this video.
  • Did you know that students can create entire textbooks, chapters of textbooks, on Wikipedia’s sister project, Wikibooks?
  • Did you know that every September the world’s largest photography competition takes place, Wiki Loves Monuments? Participants are encouraged to photograph and upload images of listed buildings and monuments to document our cultural heritage.
  • Did you know that the WikiShootme tool helps identify notable buildings in your area that require an image uploading?
  • Did you know that taking part in Wikimedia activities does not always require a heavy time component and that short, fun activities can also help: adding a citation through the Citation Hunt tool (“Whack-a-mole for citations”), playing the Wikidata game, adding images through WikiShootMe and FIST; taking part in fun Wiki Races (6 degrees of separation for Wiki links between articles).
  • Did you know that you can become a Wikipedia trainer with our new lesson plan and slide deck (available on Tes.com)?
  • Did you know that you can learn how to edit at our 90 minute training sessions and how to become a trainer at our 3 hour Train the Trainer events?
  • Did you know that I can deliver presentations and training as you require; be it on Wikisource (the free content library), Wikidata (the free and open respository of structured data), Wikimedia Commons (the free media respository), the Wikicite initiative, WikiVoyage (the free travel guide), writing articles for Wikipedia, adding your research to Wikipedia or something else entirely?

If you would like to find out more then feel free to contact me at ewan.mcandrew@ed.ac.uk

 

  • Want to become a Wikipedia editor?
  • Want to become a Wikipedia trainer?
  • Want to run a Wikipedia course assignment?
  • Want to contribute images to Wikimedia Commons?
  • Want to learn more about Wikisource?
  • Want to contribute your research to Wikipedia?
  • Want to contribute your research data to Wikidata?

Wikipedia in Education: If not now then when? #OER17

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On April 12, 2017

In Uncategorized

Last week I attended the eighth Open Educational Resources conference (OER17) at Resource for London. Themed on ‘the Politics of Open‘. Little did we know when these themes were announced this time last year just how timely this conference would be.

I presented 4 sessions at the conference:

This last presentation outlined the work the Wikimedia residency at the University of Edinburgh over the last fifteen months; the lessons learnt and the recommendations.

It was not recorded so here’s what I said:

Lo and Behold: Reveries of a Connected Campus

The Wikimedia residency at the University of Edinburgh began in January 2016 so I am about to write my 15th month report this week. An infographic for the first 12 months is available to view at tinyurl.com/WikiResidency.

I should say that the reason for the title of the talk, Lo and Behold, is because I am massive fan of Werner Herzog and the film that bears the name. Potentially the subtitle for this talk could have been ‘a year of chaos, hostility and murder’. Thankfully, the reverse was true.

A year of chaos, hostility and murder? Au contraire…

But the residency has also, 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.

 

But first some context as to how this came to be. In 1583 the University of Edinburgh came to be then a short time later in 2001 Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia was established.

Today, Wikipedia is the number one information site in the world with 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 unlike the secret algorithms of Google and Facebook, on Wikipedia everything is out in the open. Its commitment to transparency is an implicit promise of trust to its users where everything on it can be checked, challenged and corrected.

In 2011, 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“.

A timeline of Wikimedia residencies in Scotland (and Martin Poulter’s work at the University of Oxford).

 

In 2013, two years after this article was published, Scotland got its first ever Wikimedian in Residence at the National Library of Scotland, Ally Crockford. Melissa Highton, Director of Learning, Teaching & Web Services at the University of Edinburgh, invited both Ally Crockford and the newly installed Wikimedian in Residence at the Museums and Galleries Scotland, Sara Thomas, to hold an editathon during the university’s February 2015 term break. This editathon, themed on Women, Science and Scottish History was to help recognise and celebrate the achievements of the Edinburgh 7, the first female medical students in Britain, with new and improved Wikipedia pages. At the event, Melissa Highton invited Professor Allison Littlejohn to conduct some research to see if there was actually some formal and informal learning going on at these Wikipedia editing events. This research was then shared later that year at the Wikipedia Science Conference organised by the Wikimedian in Residence at the Bodleian Library, Martin Poulter.

Happily the research bore out that there was real merit in having a Wikimedian in an education setting because there was indeed informal and formal learning going on at editathon events. Up until this point all the residencies had tended to be GLAM oriented (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) so Melissa was quite bold in arguing for a Wikimedian on a university-wide remit. And I’m pleased to say that calculated risk worked out.

The University of Edinburgh residency began in January 2016 and its remit was threefold:

  • To raise awareness of Wikipedia and its sister projects
  • To design and deliver digital skills engagement events such as editathons (groups of staff & student editors coming together to edit Wikipedia pages on a focused theme – both inside and outside the curriculum)
  • To work with colleagues all across the institution to find ways in which the University – as a knowledge creation organisation – can most benefit and contribute to the development of this huge open knowledge resource.

But how to go about serving the university as their newest resource? Wikipedia in education is well established elsewhere but we were in slightly uncharted territory at the university so I could have been sat twiddling my thumbs for the year; waiting for take-up that may never have come (although I don’t think for a moment this would have happened). I could also have been treated as a snake oil salesman peddling the educational equivalent of fast food.

If I had been I would have been given short shrift. Thankfully, this ancient university is a thoroughly innovative modern one and among its 36,000 students and 13,000 staff there are a great many proponents of Open Knowledge.

I have never been busier.

Shared missions

 

The trick, if there was one, was to get colleagues to see there was a link between the Wikimedia projects and the work they were doing; to see there was a shared mission; to recognise that both were knowledge producers and, for want of a better word, ‘ideas factories’. And that collaborations between the university and Wikimedia could be fruitful for both sides. More than the sum of their parts. That involved engaging people in the conversation. Getting in the room. Because once in the room, colleagues could see the connections and did start to look at Wikipedia differently.

The Visual Editor interface

 

One of the biggest factors in the residency’s success was the new WYSIWYG Visual Editor interface, making editing so much easier and more akin to using WordPress and Ms Word through its drop-down menus.

But we had to get people in the room first of all to give it a go.  That’s why the ‘edit-a-thon’ model proved particularly successful. Hosting an event on a particular theme for editors to come together and create or improve Wikipedia articles on that theme.

The Edinburgh editathons

 

So we’d fit in with other events already happening in the academic calendar and stage our own when people were likely to be able to attend. Be it a Women in Espionage themed editathon for Spy Week; a Festival of Samhuinn event for Halloween to improve articles about those passed away; or Ada Lovelace Day to celebrate Women in STEM; inviting colleagues from STEM subjects, English, History, Scottish Studies and more to come take part in these events.

We’d also draw in other institutions like the National Library of Scotland and the University of Sheffield’s Centre for the Gothic in our Robert Louis Stevenson Day event themed on Gothic writers.

Edinburgh Gothic – Pic my Mihaela Bodlovic (CC-BY-SA)

And in our third year of running the History of Medicine we have colleagues sharing Open Knowledge from across the university and beyond including the Royal College of Physicians (Edinburgh), the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons (Glasgow), the Surgeons’ Hall Museums, the Lothian Health Service Archives and more.

So once people were engaged and their curiosity piqued then we could begin to show how the other Wikimedia projects link with Wikipedia and how information literacy is improved through engagement with Wikipedia.

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.

The University of Edinburgh and Wikimedia UK – shared missions.

 

And that housing knowledge in silos, of any kind, be they Wikimedia projects or university repositories, is missing a trick when that knowledge could be engaged with and built upon.

RLS and the Web of Knowledge

That’s why in the Wikimedia universe, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Wikipedia article has a link to his out-of-copyright longer works on Wikisource, the free content library. It also links to images related to RLS hosted on Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository. And it has a link to the Wikidata page on RLS where all the machine-readable structured linked data about RLS is kept.

And, in terms of raising awareness of these sister projects, we have had a showcase about Wikisource, the free content library, which has resulted in some digitised PhD theses being uploaded and linked to from Wikipedia, just one click away. Sharing open knowledge.

Thomas Jehu’s PhD thesis is now digitised and transcribed to Wikisource, one click away from his Wikipedia page.

 

We have also had a number of Wikidata showcase events as Wikidata represents the bright future of the Wikimedia projects. Machine-readable, language independent, this central hub acts as a repository of linked structured data for all the Wikimedia projects and the wider internet beyond. This means the data from the largest reference work on the internet can be queried, analysed & visualised as never before.

Further, by tidying up and putting citation data in Wikidata, as 2 million plus citations now are, it means we can also have a central bibliographic repository of linked citation data allowing the data to be queried in any number of ways.

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 secondary sources. In this way it is reframing itself as the front matter to all research. And should be understood as such.

The Front Matter to All Research

Another important factor is the work Wikipedia is doing with Altmetric and Crossref to ensure more permanent DOIs are used as citations which can then be tracked for impact. Wikipedia is now the number 5 most prolific DOI referrer according to Crossref… and even that is thought to be a gross underestimate of its actual standing.

The new Content Translation tool, developed in the last two years, has made a big impact as it allows one Wikipedia article to be translated, using machine translation to take all the formatting across paragraph by paragraph to create a new article in a different language Wikipedia. Thereby building understanding.

And this is something our Translation Studies MSc students were motivated to address as they could see exactly how knowledge was unevenly spread throughout the different language Wikipedias.

The uneven spread of knowledge between the 295 different language Wikipedias

Similarly, one really important factor was this idea of taking ownership to help redress areas of under-representation and systemic bias on Wikipedia. In this way many of our Wikipedia events focused on addressing the gender gap.

Redressing the Gender Gap

Less than 15% of women edit Wikipedia and this skews the content in much the same way with only 16.85% of biographies about notable women. Given that the gender gap is real and that a lot of institutions will be undertaking initiatives as part of  their commitment to Athena Swan, the creating of new role models for young and old alike goes a long way to engage people in helping to address this issue.

Role models like Janet Anne Galloway, advocate for higher education for women in Scotland, Helen Archdale (suffragette), sociologist and LGBT campaigner Mary Susan McIntosh among many many more.

Changing the way stories are told

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

Over the course of this same year, Fake News has come to the fore. For Wikipedia editors this is nothing new as they have been combatting Fake news for years. Evaluating sources is core skill for a Wikipedia editor.

The skills Wikipedia assignments help develop

 In fact, all the skills and experiences that universities and PISA are articulating they want to see students imbued with at this moment in time are ones that Wikipedia assignments help develop. And that’s not just hot air. The assignments we have run this year actually have delivered on these.

As a result of colleagues seeing connections with, and benefits of, a Wikipedia assignment we have run three Wikipedia in the Classroom assignments and three online assignments.

Anyone can teach Wikipedia in the Classroom.

Teaching with Wikipedia is even easier with the new WYSIWYG Visual Editor interface

We have case studies for the World Christianity MSc Wikipedia literature review assignment; balancing up a hitherto Western-oriented field with new articles from perspectives in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia and more.

Reproductive Medicine undergraduates – September 2016 (CC-BY-SA)

We have a case study of students in Reproductive Biology Hons. researching and writing new articles about reproductive health such as High-Grade Serous Carcinoma and thereby improving their research & communication skills and contributing their knowledge to the global Open Knowledge community. This is set to run for its third year this September.

We have a case study of students on the Translation Studies MSc course translating 4000 words from one language Wikipedia to another using the Content Translation tool  as part of their Independent Study module; thereby getting much-needed published practice in translation. This has been such a success that we have continued for a second semester and Edinburgh University Translation Society are also publishing their own Wikipedia translations now too.

The approach taken

Translation has been a massive part of the residency; communicating how both sides can benefit massively from one another. My approach has been based on my background. Teaching in the Far East helped me see how to engage learners through stimulating, engaging & accessible activities; graded to their needs. In this way, my approach with translating Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines into a way that educators can engage with has been to:

  • Making learning engaging and accessible.
  • Building on prior knowledge.
  • Sharing good practice.

What’s next?

We have a number of big events planned including a Celtic and Indigenous Languages Wikipedia Conference and a Swahili translate-a-thon to look forward to.

But my main task is to finish the residency in January 2018 leaving behind a sustainable way for involvement with Wikimedia to continue.

That, for me, is a mixture of People and Process. Identifying the people who are going to take this on and work with them to support others but also preparing enough materials so that the process of involvement is easy enough for anyone to pick it up and get started.

Making the residency sustainable

That’s why I’m working to embed this in our Digital Skills programme and have already trained 12 Wikimedia ambassadors to support the Wikimedia activities in their area of the university. That’s why I have created and curated 110 videos and video tutorials on the university’s Media Hopper channel. That’s why I’ve written up case studies and shared a reusable lesson plan on TES so anyone can teach Wikipedia editing. There is nothing worse than people struggling on their own to edit Wikipedia and becoming frustrated when they get told they are doing it the wrong way. Well, by sharing the right way and by showing how easy it now is I believe we can make this sustainable across Edinburgh and beyond.

Key learning points

  • Sharing good practice & working collaboratively is crucially important.
  • Creating a variety of stimulating events where practitioners from different backgrounds participate in an open knowledge community has proved to be a successful approach.
  • Wikipedia & its sister projects offer a great deal to Higher Education and can be successfully integrated to enhance the learning & teaching within the curriculum.
  • Areas of under-representation and systemic bias have proven to be extremely important motivators for participants.
  • Demystifying Wikipedia through presentations, workshops & scaffolded resources has yielded positive reactions & an increased understanding of Wikipedia’s important role in academia.

Reasons why other universities should also look into hosting a Wikimedian as part of their digital skills team.

Wikipedia comes of Age

 

  1. The new Visual Editor is super easy to learn, fun and addictive.
  2. Anyone can edit Wikipedia BUT there are checks and balances to help revert unhelpful edits in minutes. (Only 7% of edits are considered vandalism).
  3. Wikidata – query, analyse & visualise the largest reference work on the internet. Add your research data to combine datasets on Wikidata.
  4. WikiCite – tidying up the citations on Wikipedia to make a consistent, queryable bibliographic repository enhancing the visibility and impact of research.
  5. Wikisource – Quotations and images from long ago can still touch and inspire. Out of copyright texts such as digitised PhD theses can be uploaded & linked to from Wikipedia.
  6. Content Translation – The new tool allows Translation Students to get much-needed published translation practice and help share knowledge globally; correcting areas of under-representation and building understanding.
  7. The gender gap is real and working with Wikipedia helps address this as part of Athena Swan initiatives; creating new roles models for young & old alike.
  8. Develop students’ information literacy, digital literacy & research skills.
  9. Share your research & library collections’ material to Wikipedia the right way and open it up to a global Open Knowledge community of millions demonstrating impact with detailed metrics.
  10. Fake news is prevalent. Engaging with Wikipedia helps develop a critical information literate approach to its usage and to other online sources of information.

Wikipedia vs. Fake News

So there’s your summary of why you too should engage with Wikimedia. 10 good solid reasons why the cost of a Wikimedian, as just one more digital skills trainer among all your others, is peanuts compared to what the university as a whole can benefit out of the experience. Indeed, staff and students are already consulting Wikipedia for pre-research purposes so why not ensure gaps in representation and inaccuracies are addressed? Because if not you then who?

In conclusion

I began by saying the Chronicle of Higher Education acclaimed “Wikipedia had Come of Age” way back in 2011. With Wikipedia now 16 (going on 17) and this being the Politics of Open, I’ll leave you with one final thought, has Wikipedia now come of age? Is now the time for Wikipedia in Education?

And, to paraphrase our First Minister, if not now then when?

Wikipedia in Education: if not now then when?

Postscript

But don’t just take my word for it, here are the staff and students who have taken part in Wikipedia in the Classroom assignments at the University of Edinburgh this year.

Reflections on the Wikipedia assignments (video).

The feedback from the assignments this year has been really positive – from both staff and students.

She Persisted – Outcomes of ‘Bragging Writes’ Wikipedia event for International Women’s Day 2017

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On March 15, 2017

In Uncategorized

by Lafayette (Lafayette Ltd), half-plate film negative, 3 February 1928

Suffragist and journalist Helen Alexander Archdale. Pic by Lafayette (Lafayette Ltd), half-plate film negative, 3 February 1928

As part of Gather Festival 2017 and to mark International Women’s Day, on Wednesday 8th March 2017, the University’s Information Services team ran a Wikipedia edit-a-thon at the School of Informatics. Full Wikipedia editing training was given to attendees before the afternoon’s editathon focused on creating new articles about the many inspiring women missing from Wikipedia.

In November 2014, just over 15% of the English Wikipedia’s biographies were about women. Founded in July 2015, WikiProject Women in Red has brought the figure up to 16.83%, as of 29 January 2017. But that means, according to WHGI, only 242,601 of our 1,441,879 biographies are about women. Not impressed? “Content gender gap” is a form of systemic bias, and Women in Red events take place across the globe in order to address it in a positive way.

Screengrab of latest WHGI stats.

Screengrab of latest WHGI stats.

 

Mary Susan McIntosh (1936–2013) sociologist, feminist, political activist and campaigner for lesbian and gay rights in the UK.

Mary Susan McIntosh (1936–2013) sociologist, feminist, political activist and campaigner for lesbian and gay rights in the UK.

Outcomes – New pages created

  • Helen Alexander Archdale – (1876–1949) was a feminist, activist, and journalist. Helen took part in a WSPU demonstration in Edinburgh on the 9th of October 1909. Later that month she was arrested with Adela Pankhurst and Maud Joachim in Dundee and convicted of a breach of the peace after interrupting a meeting being held by the local MP, Winston Churchill. Following this on 20th October all three women went on hunger strike. All three were released after four days of imprisonment. In December 1911 Helen received a sentence of two months’ imprisonment for window-breaking at Whitehall.  Her daughter, Betty Archdale (1907-2000) remembered collecting stones for her mother to use, and visiting her in Holloway Prison. Helen was the secretary, and later international secretary, for the Six Point Group founded by Margaret Rhondda. The group’s specific aims were: (1) Satisfactory legislation on child assault; (2) Satisfactory legislation for the widowed mother; (3) Satisfactory legislation for the unmarried mother and her child; (4) Equal rights of guardianship for married parents; (5) Equal pay for teachers; (6) Equal opportunities for men and women in the civil service. In 1926 Helen and Margaret founded the Open Door Council with Chrystal Macmillan and Elizabeth Abbott in order to focus on economic emancipation. In 1927 Helen became active in international feminist activism, and began working in Geneva lobbying for an Equal Rights Treaty at the League of Nations in the early 1930s. She became secretary of the Liaison Committee of Women’s International Organisations, a coalition to promote equal rights, disarmament and women’s representation at the League. From 1929 to 1934 she chaired Equal Rights International, founded at The Hague ,an organisation dedicated to promoting campaigning for equality of women with men in law and in the workplace. Helen was also active in Open Door International, also founded in 1929, and a leading advocate of the equalitarian feminism.
  • Agnes Syme Macdonald (1882 – 1996) was a Scottish suffragette who served as the secretary of the Edinburgh branch of the WSPU before setting up the Edinburgh Women Citizens Association (WCA) in 1918[1]. She was WCA’s fist and longest-serving secretary. She campaigned on various social issues and was active in the Quaker relief work for European refugees (Society of Friends); the Barns School for delinquent city boys and the Edinburgh Old People’s Welfare Council.
  • Catherine Isabella Barmby – (1816/17 – 26 December 1853) was an utopian socialist and writer on women’s emancipation. She was the daughter of Bridstock Watkins and belonged to the lower-middle class. Little is known of her early life or education, however, her instruction allowed her to become a writer and lecturer. She wrote several articles for the Owenite socialist newspaper New Moral World on feminist demands and her Millennialist beliefs.
  • Ketaki Kushari Dyson – (nee Ketaki Kushari) is a Bengali-born poet, novelist, playwright, translator and critic, diaspora writer and scholar. Born (26 June 1940) and educated in Calcutta (Kolkata), she has lived most of her adult life near Oxford, U.K. She writes in Bengali and English, on topics as wide-ranging as Bengal, England, the various Diaspora, feminism and women’s issues, cultural assimilation, multiculturalism, gastronomy, social and political topics.
  • Mary Susan McIntosh (1936–2013) sociologist, feminist, political activist and campaigner for lesbian and gay rights in the UK. In 1960 Mary was deported from the USA for speaking out against the House Un-American Activities Committee. On her return to the UK Mary worked as a researcher for the Home Office from 1961 to 1963 before taking up the post of lecturer in Sociology at the University of Leicester from 1963 to 1968. Mary joined the University of Essex in 1975 as a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, she later became the first female head of the department and remained at the University until she retired in 1996. Throughout her career Mary taught a wide range of courses covering criminology, theory, sociology, social policy, the family, gender studies, feminism and Marxism.
  • Mira Hamermesh (15 July 1923 – 19 February 2012) was an independent Polish filmmaker and artist who made documentaries for British television. She was a student of painting at the Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem and later moved to London to study at the Slade School of Art. Mira returned to Poland in 1960 to study at the polish film school where she began documenting her personal experience of fleeing Nazi occupied Germany as a Jewish teenager.
  • Mary Elizabeth Phillips (suffragette) (15 July 1880 – 21 June 1969) was a suffragette, feminist and socialist. Mary was the longest serving suffragette prisoner.
  • Mona Wilson (author) (29 May 1872 – 26 October 1954) was a British civil servant and author. After being appointed to the National Insurance Commission in 1911, she received a yearly salary of £1000, making her the highest-paid woman civil servant of the time and one of the first women to receive equal pay. She wrote several scholarly works after her retirement from the civil service in 1919, including The Life of William Blake (1927), which went through several reprintings and remained popular for several decades.
  • Maggie Keswick Jencks (10 October 1941- 8 July 1995[1]) was a writer, artist, garden designer and co-founder of Maggie’s Centres.
  • Kathleen Molyneux Mander (29th September 1915 − 2013) was a documentary film-maker. During the 1930s she joined the Communist Party and attended Left Book Club meetings. Her political leanings would later influence her filmmaking. In 1937 she was the first woman to join the film industry’s union, the Association of Cinematographic Technicians (ACT) (now BECTU). She had a column in the ACT journal, The Cine-Technician, until the 1950s, where she wrote union issues such as the need for equal pay and post-war job security. After the end of WW2 her membership of the Communist party made it more difficult for her to find work.
  • Emilia Vosnesenskaya – Vosnesenskaya taught Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists. She became a naturalised British citizen on January 1st 1957 at which point she was an Assistant University Lecturer. She moved to the University of Edinburgh in 1956 and taught there until her retirement. She contributed to the BBC series Keep Up Your Russian, and associated grammar booklet, in 1960.
  • Kay Carmichael (née Rankin) born Shettleston, Glasgow on 22 November 1925. She was an influential character in Scottish politics and activist against nuclear submarines in Scotland. Studying at Edinburgh University she went on to hold the post of Senior Lecturer at Glasgow University. At the age of 20 she joined the Independent Labour Party in Scotland. Her activism included ‘guerrilla raids’ into Faslane Naval Base to plants flowers for which she was sentenced to two weeks in prison.
  • Şükûfe Nihal Başar – (1896 – 24 September 1973) was a Turkish educator, poet and activist who took part in the earliest women’s liberation movements during Turkey’s nation building process. Having graduated from the Geography department of the Literature Faculty of İstanbul Darülfünün in 1919, she holds the title of “the first woman graduate of Darülfünun”. Whilst she worked as a literature tutor for many years in Istanbul High School for girls, she took active role in various women’s associations and wrote columns in journals and newspapers about women’s rights. In her short stories and novels, she highligts the female female characters, trying to be the voice for “the new woman” of the early republican era.
  • Elizabeth Burns (poet) – (1957-2015) was a poet and creative writing teacher. She was born on 17 December 1957, in Wisbech, Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire. Her mother Muriel (Hayward) was from Bristol and her father, David Grieve Burns from Kirkcaldy.
  • Lucrezia Buti (Florence, 1435 – sixteenth century) was an Italian nun, and later the lover of the painter Fra Filippo Lippi. She is believed to be the model for several of Lippi’s madonnas.
Women in Red - articles that are red-linked on Wikipedia are ones awaiting creation. Only 16.85% of biographies on Wikipedia are about notable women.

Women in Red – articles that are red-linked on Wikipedia are ones awaiting creation. Only 16.85% of biographies on Wikipedia are about notable women.

We Can Edit

We Can Edit

A Storify of the day can be found here.

Desperately Seeking Ada

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On September 16, 2016

In Uncategorized

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: Day of the Dead editathon – 31st October 2016

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On June 10, 2016

In Uncategorized

Day of the Dead Wikipedia editathon

Day of the Dead Wikipedia editathon – 31st October 2016

Dario Taraborelli, head of research at Wikimedia, passed a link to http://passingon.natematias.com/ to my colleague, Melissa Highton, Assistant Vice Principal of Online Learning and Director of Learning, Teaching & Web Services at the University of Edinburgh, as the University ran two Wikipedia editathons last year on ‘Women in Science & Scottish History’ and ‘Ada Lovelace Day – celebrating Women in STEM’.

We are endeavouring to keep the momentum going this year and have already run events on Women in Art for International Women’s Day and Women in Espionage for ‘Spy Week 2016’. All of these events are mentioned on my project page.

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

So the plan is to run an event, or a series of events, in the Autumn which would make use of the brilliant application which scrapes data from the annotated corpus of 25 years’ worth of New York Times articles to help identify missing Wikipedia articles about notable women; utilising these obituary records to help celebrate the lives of those recently passed on and changing Wikipedia’s representation of notable females in the process.

The tricky part will be whether the application could incorporate Scotland/UK based news obituaries e.g. scraped from the Scotsman newspaper or the Guardian newspaper for example.

Some investigating to be done…

 

Reflections on March’s editathons: Art & Feminism & International Women’s Day

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On April 12, 2016

In Uncategorized

Stall in main Library for promoting Art+Feminism editathon

Stall in main Library for promoting Art+Feminism editathon

I went on holiday to Skye at the end of March so forgive my tardiness in relating how March’s Art & Feminism Wikipedia editathons went.

March saw Wikipedia editathon events for Women’s History Month which coincided with a number of other International Women’s Day events in Edinburgh & around the world as part of Wikipedia’s Women in Red project on Saturday 5th March and International Women’s Day on the 8th of March.

WikiProject Women in Red’s objective is to turn “redlinks” into blue ones within the project scope. The project scope includes women -real and fictional- their biographies and their works, broadly construed. From their webpage:

“Did you know that only 16.08% of the English Wikipedia’s biographies are about women? Not impressed? “Content gender gap” is a form of systemic bias, and Women in Red addresses it in a positive way. We do this by hosting edit-a-thons on various topics, and socializing the scope and objective via social media. We invite you to participate whenever you wish. There is no requirement to participate in everything we do, or to even sign up. If the objective and scope of our project interest you, please join in the discussion on our talkpage or jump in and create articles. You might like to start by participating in this April’s editathon on Women Writers. We warmly welcome you.”

However, the focus of Wikiproject Women in Red for March was Women in Art as part of a worldwide series of events themed on Art & Feminism. Happily, out of the 45 female artists featured in the National Galleries of Scotland’s Modern Scottish Women exhibition (which is on until June and well worth a visit) almost all are now recognised with a Wikipedia article (which certainly wasn’t the case when the exhibition opened in January) through the efforts of Sara Thomas and the Wiki editors who attended the three editathons we staged on this theme. The final six articles were worked on by our editors in the library and remotely on International Women’s Day itself with just one still awaiting completion.*

As mentioned earlier, if you would like to learn more about working with Wikipedia and find out how easy it is to edit using the new Visual Editor interface (which makes it more akin to utilising Microsoft Word or WordPress blogs these days) then I am running training sessions at the Main Library and the Edinburgh College of Art on 26th and 28th April (bookable through Event Booking).

You can also keep up with the residency at the Wikipedia Project Page:

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

Or via Twitter: @emcandre

Sara Thomas - Wikimedian at Museums & Galleries Scotland leading the Art & Feminism event at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

Sara Thomas – Wikimedian at Museums & Galleries Scotland leading the Art & Feminism event at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

 

Art & Feminism Editathon at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery – 5th March 2016

Editors hard at work for the Art & Feminism editathon at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery on 5th March 2016

Content created

6 new articles created:

  1. Stansmore Dean Stevenson
  2. Anne Finlay
  3. Helen Biggar
  4. Gwynneth Holt
  5. Bet Low
  6. Josephine Haswell Miller

8 articles improved:

  1. Isabel Brodie Babianska
  2. Mary Nicol Neill Armour
  3. Pat Douthwaite
  4. Cecile Walton
  5. Helen Paxton Brown
  6. Philip Connard
  7. Glasgow School
  8. Académie Colarossi

International Women’s Day Editathon at the University Library – 8th March 2016

IMG_20160308_142522373_HDR

Wiki editors hard at work for the International Women’s Day editathon on 8th March 2016.

Outcomes

Articles created

Articles improved

Other outcomes

Two new users trained in how to edit Wikipedia. Only one red-linked women artist remains from the 45 artists identified in the ongoing collaboration with the National Galleries of Scotland for the exhibition ‘Modern Scottish Women’: Ivy Gardner Proudfoot.  Increased links with other Art+Feminism editathon organisers including the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Wikimedian in Residence for Gender Equity at West Virginia University, Kelly Doyle.

The report on the successful editathon at the University of Pittsburgh, 4 months in the planning resulting in collaborations with Google Women and a full house of 80 participants, is included here: Report on Art & Feminism editathon at Pitt.

Art+Feminism Wikipedia editathon – Saturday 5th March

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On March 3, 2016

In Uncategorized

In a 2011 survey, the Wikimedia Foundation found that less than 10% of its contributors identify as female while only 15% of the English Wikipedia’s biographies are about women. As a result, content is skewed by the lack of female participation.

About our next event

Following the successful editathon held at Modern One to mark the opening of the exhibition Modern Scottish Women, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is holding a follow-up Wikipedia Edit-a-thon during Women’s History Month as part of the Art+Feminism series. This event will coincide with other International Women’s Day events happening elsewhere in Edinburgh that day and will carry on where the last Modern Scottish Women editathon left off; creating and improving articles relating to those women featured in the exhibition.

Modern Scottish Women is an exhibition of work by Scottish women artists and concentrates on painters and sculptors. It covers the period from 1885, when Fra Newbery became Director of Glasgow School of Art, until 1965, the year of Anne Redpath’s death.

All you need to bring is a laptop as wifi will be provided. But you can also have a look at the notable artists listed below to see if there is someone there you may wish to work on:

Hit list of articles to be created or improved

Articles to be created

Articles to be improved

** The work of those artists marked with a double asterisk has now passed into the public domain.

Come along if you can make it, the more the merrier. New editors are very welcome and full training will be given. With Visual Editor, it really is now as easy as using MS Word or WordPress.

The event signup is here: Art&Feminism Wikipedia editathon

Hopefully see you there!

We Can Edit

We Can Edit

Reflecting on the History of Medicine editathon – The Outcome

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On March 2, 2016

In Uncategorized

After 5 Wikipedia editing sessions over 3 days with some terrific guest speakers, our Wiki editors helped to upload over 500 images, created 12 brand new Wiki pages and improved 63 articles with 249 edits.

Anatomical gingerbread

Anatomical gingerbread

I would encourage everyone to have a look over the work that was created last week (Creating an Open Body of Knowledge editathon) as there are now some astonishingly interesting additions to Wikipedia which just simply weren’t there before….

Including:

  • A new article on Norman Dott – the first holder of the Chair of Neurological Surgery at the University of Edinburgh.
  • Our digital curator’s one man ‘Citation Hunt’ crusade to plug those pesky ‘citation needed’ labels in articles.
  • Improved article on Robert Battey – an American physician who is known for pioneering a surgical procedure then called Battey’s Operation and now termed radical oophorectomy (or removal of a woman’s ovaries)
  • Noteworthy work (because she’s on a banknote) doubling (if not trebling) the article on Mary Fairfax Somerville – a Scottish science writer and polymath, at a time when women’s participation in science was discouraged. As well as editing articles on Isabel Thorne, Matilda Chaplin Ayrton and the Scottish Blood Transfusion Service.
  • A new ‘Controversy’ section added on the intriguing case of James Miranda Barry.
  • A really helpful mapping tool of the buildings to be photographed: https://mapalist.com/map/573668
  • Our historian of medicine worked on The Brunonian system of medicine article – a theory of medicine which regards and treats disorders as caused by defective or excessive excitation.
  • A brand new article on Leith Hospital – illustrated with pictures the new editor took themselves and uploaded to Wikicommons.
  • Articles on Frances Helen Simson (a Scottish suffragist) and The Edinburgh Royal Maternity and Simpson Maternity Hospital Pavilion. Ably added to by work on Lady Tweedale.
  • Work on Emily Bovell’s article and a brand new article on the New Zealand Army Nursing Service page which came into being in early 1915, when the Army Council in London accepted the New Zealand government’s offer of nurses to help in the war effort during the First World War.
  • Improved articles on ‘Fabry disease’ – a rare genetic lysosomal storage disease – and on ‘Alport Syndrome’ – a genetic disorder affecting around 1 in 5,000 children, characterized by glomerulonephritis, end-stage kidney disease, and hearing loss
  • Improvement work on Frances Hoggan – the first British woman to receive a doctorate in medicine from a university in Europe, and the first female doctor to be registered in Wales.
  • And much much more besides…. including work expanding on The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh’s page on Chinese Wikipedia!
Burke and Hare myths debunked

Burke and Hare myths debunked at the History of Medicine editathon.

The fully illustrated (pics & tweets) story of the History of Medicine editathon can be found on our Storify page so please feel free to take a look: The History of Medicine editathon for ILW 2016

Happily, our editors’ efforts have now been rewarded with a nomination at the Innovative Learning Week 2016 awards. Out of nearly 300 ILW events, the award category we are shortlisted in states:

“Best Impact – Innovation doesn’t just happen in a week and these event organisers know it.  They used the festival to support an idea which will have a great deal of impact outside of the classroom and for months – maybe even years! – to come.”

Our next Wikipedia editathon event will be for Women’s History Month and will coincide with a number of other International Women’s Day events in Edinburgh on Saturday 5th March. Feel free to sign up as new editors are very welcome and full training will be given. The event details are here: Art+Feminism Wikipedia Editathon for Women’s History Month

Thanks so much to everyone involved our last one for the History of Medicine for being a part of it.  If you’ve still got something lurking in your sandbox, go on & be bold and publish it!

History of Medicine Wikipedia editathon 16-18th February

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On February 15, 2016

In Uncategorized

Following the successful editathon session on ‘Women, Science and Scottish History‘  that the University of Edinburgh ran with the assistance of the National Library of Scotland’s Wikimedian in Residence, Ally Crockford, during Innovative Learning Week in 2015, the UoE is running a brand new one for Innovative Learning Week 2016 on Tuesday 16th February to Thursday 18th February which Sara Thomas (WiR at Museums & Galleries Scotland) and I are hosting at room LG.07 in the David Hume Tower Building, George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9JX.

I Want You For Wiki CC-BY-SA

I Want You For Wiki
CC-BY-SA

 

Feedback from attendees at last year’s editathon event:
“Fantastic week, one of the geeky best. Had a great time at the #ILW2015 #ILWeditathon, researching the #Edinburgh7”
 “Shared delight in learning new things about the period & these people”
 “Day 3 of #ILWeditathon and I’m getting hooked!”

 

The topic is on the History of Medicine on this occasion. It covers medical terms not currently covered on Wikipedia as well as historic Edinburgh locations which have played a large role in the history of medicine. It also broadens out to cover notable personages in the history of medicine such as the infamous Burke & Hare grave-robbers as well as the intriguing case of James Miranda Barry and continuing our work on those female pioneers of the medical profession such as ‘the Edinburgh 7’ whose stories continue to be under-represented on Wikipedia.

"A complete delineation of the entire anatomy engraved on copper" - Thomas Geminus

“A complete delineation of the entire anatomy engraved on copper” – Thomas Geminus CC-0

Here’s the event described in brief:

Unravel myths, discover truths and re-write the Wikipedia pages of Edinburgh’s infamous medical figures including gruesome body-snatcher William Burke and intriguing alumni Dr. James Miranda Barry. Come join us for all the fun and gain digital skills, learn how to edit Wikipedia, explore our history and harness the power of the web for public engagement.

 

There will be refreshments (inc. free lunch if you wish to edit in the morning and afternoon sessions), guest speakers, online materials to work with, physical materials to work with including, hopefully, the letter written in William Burke’s own blood. We’re also looking for some buildings associated with Edinburgh’s role in the history of medicine to be photographed and uploaded to Wikicommons.

You can attend one day or multiple days (or just half a day) if you so desire. Either in person or remotely joining in.

by the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh. UofE Innovative Learning Week 2015 editathon UofE Innovative Learning Week 2015 editathon CC-BY-SA

University of Edinburgh Innovative Learning Week 2015 editathon CC-BY-SA

It’s open to all: new and experienced editors; UoE staff & students; members of the public. You’d be very welcome. Training will be provided in each session.

Full details on how to register for the event are on the event page here:

https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Creating_an_Open_Body_of_Knowledge_editathon_series

I have also now setup the Wikipedia Project Page for the University of Edinburgh residency with details of what it involves & what I’ll be up to including upcoming & past Wiki editathon events. The link to the Project Page is here:

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

If you have any questions regarding the event, the residency or about collaborating on any projects then feel free to get in touch.

Hopefully see you there!

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