{"id":864,"date":"2018-09-05T10:28:06","date_gmt":"2018-09-05T10:28:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thinking.is.ed.ac.uk\/wir\/?p=864"},"modified":"2018-09-05T10:30:12","modified_gmt":"2018-09-05T10:30:12","slug":"how-to-run-a-wikipedia-editathon-a-workshop-for-health-information-professionals-at-the-eahil-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thinking.is.ed.ac.uk\/wir\/how-to-run-a-wikipedia-editathon-a-workshop-for-health-information-professionals-at-the-eahil-conference\/","title":{"rendered":"How to run a Wikipedia editathon – a workshop for health information professionals at the EAHIL conference"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post was authored by Ruth Jenkins, Academic Support Librarian at the University of Edinburgh. <\/strong><\/p>\n

For some time, Wikipedia has been shown to be a resource to engage with,\u00a0rather than avoid.\u00a0Wikipedia is heavily used for medical information by students and health professionals\u00a0–\u00a0and the fact that it is openly available\u00a0is crucial for people finding health information, particularly in developing countries or in health crises.\u00a0Good quality Wikipedia articles are an important contribution to the body of openly available information \u2013 particularly relevant for improving health information literacy. In fact, some argue that updating Wikipedia should be part of every doctor\u2019s work<\/a>, contributing to the dissemination of scientific knowledge.<\/p>\n

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Participants editing Wikipedia<\/p><\/div>\n

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,<\/em> at the European Association for Health Information and Libraries (EAHIL) Conference in Cardiff in July. Ewan McAndrew<\/a>, 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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

We wanted our workshop to give participants experience of editing Wikipedia and\u00a0build\u00a0their 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.<\/p>\n

Where a typical editathon would be a half-day event, we only had 90 minutes. As such, our workshop was themed around a \u201cmicro-editathon\u201d \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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Systematic review edit<\/p><\/div>\n

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Key stats from the EAHIl Wikipedia editathon<\/p><\/div>\n

We also presented on the Wikipedia assignment in the Reproductive Biology Honours programme<\/a> here at Edinburgh, including a clip from this video of a student\u2019s reflections on the assignment<\/a>, which sparked discussion from the attendees. Jason Evans\u2019 talk about Wikimedia UK and Wikiproject Medicine<\/a>, contextualised the participants\u2019 edits within the wider Wikimedia community.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Further information.<\/h3>\n