This review covers the third year of the Wikimedian in Residence project at the University of Edinburgh (12 January 2018 to 11 January 2019) and looks at the first eight months since the role was made an open-ended position.
A Wikimedian (or Wikipedian) in Residence (WiR) is a Wikimedian who dedicates time to working in-house at an organization. The role is fundamentally about enabling the host organisation and its members to continue a productive relationship with the encyclopaedia and its community after the residency is finished.
The University of Edinburgh residency aims to facilitate a sustainable relationship between the University and Wikimedia UK to the mutual benefit of both communities through improving knowledge exchange. The Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh is to advocate for Open Knowledge and promote understanding of Wikimedia projects amongst students and staff. This involves delivering skills training workshops and events both inside & outside the curriculum in order to develop the university's commitment to digital & information literacy. As such it is the first Wikimedia residency in the UK to have a whole university remit.
For general information about the Wikimedian-in-Residence programme, the following articles may be of interest:
The first Wikipedia 'edit-a-thon' in Scotland was held at the University of Edinburgh and focused on Women in Science and Scottish History in February 2015. This event helped make the case for the residency and research arising from that event has newly been published by Professor Allison Littlejohn and Dr. Nina Hood:
Increase the quality and quantity of coverage of subjects that are currently underrepresented on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects, with a particular focus on cultural content.
2
Support the development of open knowledge in the UK, by increasing the understanding and recognition of the value of open knowledge and advocating for change at an organisational, sectoral and public policy level.
3
To support the use of the Wikimedia projects as important tools for education and learning in the UK.
Melissa Highton, Assistant Principal for Online Learning at the University of Edinburgh on the long term impact of the Wikimedian residency (video)
Running total of staff & student engagement at end of year 3 (11 January 2019)
Below is an overview of key activities and outcomes which would likely not have happened without the direction of a Wikimedian in Residence.
Following the 2017 award for the UK's Wikimedian of the Year, the University of Edinburgh was awarded Partnership of the Year in 2018.
Sara Thomas was appointed Scotland Programme Co-ordinator for Wikimedia UK, a new role reflecting the growth of Open Knowledge work in Scotland following the successes of the National Library of Scotland residency (Ally Crockford), Museums and Galleries Scotland residency (Sara Thomas) and the University of Edinburgh residency (Ewan McAndrew). The first ScotWiki Partners Meeting was held at the University of Edinburgh in June 2018.
The Wikimedian in Residence project was recognised as an asset in the University of Edinburgh's 2018 annual report.
Ewan McAndrew was shortlisted for the LILAC 2019 Conference's Information Literacy award in April 2019.
The Wikipedia in the Curriculum work at the University of Edinburgh was awarded a Herald Higher Education Award in the Innovative Use of Technology category in June 2018.
Wikipedia Women in Red editing has been made part of the University of Edinburgh's formal Athena SWAN plan for the next four years.
Wikimedia work has been written into the Edinburgh University Library's Digitisation Strategy.
The Wikimedian in Residence is now working with ten course programmes in the upcoming 2019/2020 academic year to embed Wikimedia in the curriculum. This is up from three in year 1 (2016/2017).
The Wikimedian in Residence is supporting a Culture to Commons workshop in October 2019 to demonstrate a reusable workflow for the University of Edinburgh Library & Collections and National Library of Scotland to utilise in order to support bulk uploads of images to Wikimedia Commons and associated rich metadata to Wikidata.
The Wikimedian in Residence is finalising the publication of the UK's first booklet of case studies demonstrating how Wikimedia is being used in the curriculum at institutions up and down the country.
The university's Media Hopper channel has 255 videos and video tutorials available for staff, students and members of the public to make use of in order to learn about Wikipedia and its sister projects.
The Wikimedian in Residence has supported the world's first Wikidata intern, Emma Carroll, to import geographical and temporal data from the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database into structured linked open data in Wikidata. This three month Equate Scotland internship to support female students in STEM subjects has accrued over 36,000 edits to Wikidata and created an incredible new website mapping Scotland's accused witches in order to help shed light on this little understood period of Scottish history.
Worked with Navino Evans at Histropedia and helped facilitate the creation of a new Women's Suffrage in Scotland timeline in a new collaboration between Learning, Teaching Services and the Library & University Collections team. The timeline brings together information from new Wikipedia articles written in the last year by Wiki Women in Red editors, open images on Wikimedia Commons and structured data in Wikidata.
Several events were held in collaboration with partners across a range of disciplines (the School of Law, Digital Sociology, Global Health, the Centre for Design Informatics etc.) and external partners including the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Teesside University among others. The editathon model has been proved to be an effective way of bringing staff & students to come together to share knowledge & develop their digital & information skills as part of an open knowledge community and is now well established and understood at the university.
? Training sessions delivered in total.
1 'ScotWiki' Wiki meetup.
5 Wikipedia in the Classroom assignments completed. 10 planned for next academic year (2019/2020).
1 Wikipedia component for Online Education courses facilitated.
Translation Studies MSc course started in September 2017 - 21 students trained to translate 2000 words from one high quality article into a different language Wikipedia. Repeated in Semester Two.
Reproductive Biology Hons. course started in September 2017 - 51 students trained to work in groups to create articles missing from the field of Reproductive Biomedicine (6 new articles and 1 improved with 26.3K words added and 618,000 article views to date).
World Christianity MSc course began in September 2017 - 8 students trained to create articles missing from the field of World Christianity.
Data Science for Design MSc - Wikidata in the Classroom project in Semester One.
Global Health MSc - postponed due to Felix Stein's research leave. First iteration confirmed instead for 2018/2019.
Workshop in Digital Sociology MSc - First iteration in November 2017.
Intellectual Humility (MOOC) - online tutorial.
Further collaborations
Also presented a talk on Wikipedia as the Front Matter to All Research to colleagues at the School of Astronomy's Blackford Hill site.
Met with Dr. S. Orestis Palermos to discuss his research on Wikipedia as Social Machine and put him in contact with Wikimedian Ed Saperia to further collaborate on this research.
"I use Wikipedia a lot, so it was good to be able to understand exactly what goes into editing it. The assignment also helped me understand where to find valuable references in places I
would not have known to look.
Reproductive Biology Hons. student
"I had the opportunity to translate a small part of Milton's poems, and it was a great translation practice. I became more informed about how Wikipedia works and how to create
and edit an entry."
Translation Studies MSc student
"It is nice to see my work published and online, and the content translation tool meant that I didn't have to spend much time worrying about formatting"
Translation Studies MSc student
"It demystified creation of online resources especially in this context, Wikipedia. I believe we had all the help and resources necessary for a successful article. Thank you for this
wonderful exposure, enabling in us the "I can" spirit."
World Christianity MSc student
"It surprised me that editing a Wiki article would be such fun."
History of Medicine at the Surgeons' Hall Museum. This was a collaboration with the University of Edinburgh's History of Medicine, the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh, The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow and the Surgeons' hall Museum.
Wiki Women in Red editathon at the University of EdinburghPeriodic Table cupcakes at Ada Lovelace Day 2017 - King's Buildings, University of Edinburgh
We held events for International Women's Day 2018 (Suffragettes); International Women's Day 2019 (Women on Edinburgh), Ada Lovelace Day 2018 (Contemporary Women in STEM); Feminist Writers (July 2019), LGBT History Month, Black History Month, Vote100. All these events had a strong focus to address the gender gap on Wikipedia and create new role models for young and old alike.
Ada Lovelace Day has now grown in the last three years to now having participation from the School of Informatics, the School of Engineering, the School of Chemistry and student societies such as The Chemistry Society, the Physics Society, the Women in STEM Society, the Wellcomm Kings Societ, the Edinburgh Hoppers and more.
Wikipedia Women in Red editathons are also held every month at the university to allow Wikipedia editors a place to come and gain further practice and advice in a supportive environment but also to focus on the creation of pages about notable women missing from Wikipedia to help address the content gender gap where only 17.8% of biography articles are about women. We have now held twenty-eight such editing events and are discussing hiring an student intern to support running these workshops.
Caroline Wallace, HR Senior Partner (Equality and Diversity) has confirmed that Wikipedia Women in Red editing is part of their new 4 year Athena SWAN action plan at the university with a focus on improving the visibility of female role models in ten academic disciplines.
The Celtic Knot: Wikipedia Language Conference 2017 to 2020
The first ever Celtic Knot: Wikipedia Language Conference 2017 was hosted by the University of Edinburgh's Learning, Teaching and Web Division on partnership with Wikimedia UK at the University of Edinburgh Business School on 6 July 2017. It has now been successfully hosted in 2018 at the National Library of Wales and in 2019 at the University of Exeter's Penrhyn Campus in Cornwall. The fourth conference is due to take place in 2020 in Limerick, Republic of Ireland.
The Celtic Knot 2017 had 53 attendees with representatives from Wikimedia UK, Greek Wikipedia, Basque Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia & partners at Llên Natur, Wikimedia Nederland, Scots Gaelic Wikipedia, Wikimedia Norway, Wikimedia Ireland, Wikimedia Switzerland, Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikimedia Estonia, Catalan Wikipedia, the Cornish Council, the Gaelic Language Team at the Scottish Government, the University of Glasgow, Queen's University Belfast, Edinburgh College, the Welsh Language Team at the Welsh Government, staff from the Language Technology Unit at Bangor University, staff from the University of Edinburgh's School for Literatures, Languages and Cultures, researchers from Dublin City University, Edinburgh University Library, Leeds University Library, the National Library of Wales and the National Library or Scotland.
The main objective of ‘Celtic Knot’ was to showcase innovative approaches throughout Wikimedia Projects that facilitate cooperation between language community practitioners and enable access to open content to facilitate the growth of these communities. Participants exchanged ideas, solutions, problems and visions concerning collaboration-building, policymaking, best practice and advocacy on open access, community support and public engagement. The conference programme offered insights into technological novelties, such as the new Content Translation tool, plans for text-to-speech and speech recognition technologies for Welsh Wikipedia. Recent research findings on bilingualism and minority languages by Prof. Antonella Sorace (University of Edinburgh) and on identifying opportunities and challenges of sharing free knowledge in Latin-American native languages through Wikipedia by Eddie Agila (Rising Voices) were shared, as well as the work of UNESCO in bridging Wikidata and the ‘UNESCO Atlas of World Languages in Danger’. Small language community engagement techniques were of key interest during the event and tips and progress were shared enthusiastically by Basque, Catalan, Estonian, Rhaeto-Romance and Welsh professionals. A collaborative workshop was dedicated to assisting the Norwegian partners in their specific problem of revitalising the Sami communities on Wikipedia and resulted in sharing useful practices to institutional partnership building and a wide range of potential activities. Innovative approaches, such as the strategy of Welsh Wicipedia in supporting the Welsh government to reach 1 million Welsh speakers by 2050, further inspired the attendees. The conference was delivered just as Wikimedia UK’s Celtic languages work started to solidify and become ready for knowledge-sharing across languages. It also coincided with the global Wikimedia movement strategy development, which puts an unprecedented focus on minority languages and knowledge diversity. For this reason, the conference attracted a significant amount of social media interest. The conference inspired participants to follow up the developments in minority languages throughout Wikimedia Projects on a yearly basis. The Welsh attendees volunteered to host the event in 2018.
Detailed metrics are available via the Baglama2 tool to measure the impact of University of Edinburgh images shared on an open licence via Wikimedia Commons.
The Library and University Collections division (L&UC) has included Wikimedia work in its new digitisation strategy "to establish a programme for enriching Wikipedia / Wikimedia with collection images, to support teaching and public engagement”.
New Library and University Collections digitisation strategy
The Wiki Library’s campaign takes place every January to mark Wikipedia's birthday and asks librarians to add references to help improve Wikipedia's verifiability as a birthday present to Wikipedia.
Increase in University of Edinburgh adding citations to Wikipedia every year:
2016: 32 citations added.
2017: 63 citations added.
2018: 184 citations added.
2019: citations added.
There has been a move from asking 1Lib1Ref attendees to add references in a “free for all” to using the Citation Hunt Tool to managed microtasks (e.g. adding citations for pages on individuals held in the thesis collection). As a result of moving to managed microtasks, there has been a large increase in staff involvement from the Library and University Collections division (L&UC) which sets the scene for planned future editathons.
In order to promote the benefits of open access, and of engaging with Wikipedia projects, a Twitter account was setup so news about the project could be shared. Regular blog posts were also used to report on aspects of the project. The residency has also attracted interest from other Higher Education and Open Education institutions and the resident has been interviewed for STV television, a BBC Technology podcast and the OEPS website.
These year one learning points remain true for year two:
Sharing good practice & working collaboratively is crucially important.
Creating a variety of stimulating events where practitioners from different backgrounds can be motivated to attend to 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.
Demystifying Wikipedia through presentations, workshops & scaffolded resources has yielded positive reactions & an increased understanding of Wikipedia's important role in academia.
In addition, I would add:
Once colleagues attend workshops, they see how to better use and evaluate Wikipedia. The academic calendar and the current time pressures for academic colleagues do not often allow for deep explorations however so developing resources that further explain simply how and why to engage with Wikipedia is an area for development. Resources can always be improved for further and piggybacking on other events that colleagues are already likely to attend may be the way forward.
The University of Edinburgh residency has been extended and made open-ended by mutual consent. The resident will continue to support Wikipedia in the Classroom assignments and facilitate staff members to continue their collaboration with Wikimedia after the residency. In addition, the resident will continue to advocate for the sharing of open knowledge and deliver sessions which increase digital literacy & information literacy both inside & outside the curriculum. Now that the editathon model is well established at the university, the resident will support others to lead editathon sessions with a view to building greater sustainability and also focus increasingly on ways that the institution can collaborate with Wikipedia's sister projects such as WikiSource, Wikimedia Commons, Histropedia and Wikidata in particular.
Short Reproductive Biology interview - Aine Kavanagh and Chris Harlow
Reflections from all 3 assignments - staff and students
Citation Needed- Digital Provenance in the era of Post-Truth Politics at OER17.
Building Bridges Not Walls- Wikipedia's Content Translation Tool
Video interview with Ruth Jenkins, Academic Support Librarian at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, speaking about the Reproductive Biology Honours students creating new pages on reproductive medicine terms not represented on Wikipedia as part of their course of studies.
University of Edinburgh's Melissa Highton and Ewan McAndrew discuss how WIRs can create value for educational institutions.
Wikipedia in the Classroom - Reproductive Medicine case study
Wikipedia in the Classroom - Translation Studies MSc case study
Wikipedia in the Classroom - World Christianity MSc case study
How to conduct Wikipedia Editing Training (lesson plan)
Exemplar training ppt
Wikipedia and Academic Research