Witch Lore and Scottish Castles: a Wikipedia Editathon
Eilean Donan Castle, by Diliff [CC BY-SA 3.0] via Wikimedia Commons
On Friday 27th September we were joined by castle buffs and witchcraft enthusiasts to help us improve the representation of Scottish witchcraft and heritage on Wikipedia. Our Witch Lore and Scottish Castles editathon event saw people coming together in the Digital Scholarship Centre of the Main Library to add ‘Witchlore’, stories and information relating to early modern witchcraft, to pages about Scottish castles and heritage locations.
A page created during our September editathon, CC-BY-SA by Ellie Whitehead
A number of Wikipedia pages about castles in Scotland neglected to mention their place in the stories of Scotland’s accused witches. The event looked to remedy this, adding some stories about witchcraft and accused witches to pages such as, Craigmillar Castle, Dirleton Castle, St Magnus Cathedral and Falkland Palace.
We also saw some brand-newpages about Scottish castles and heritage locations created! These include, Bass Castle, Logie House and Steading, and Poldrate Mill. Yet, despite our team’s valiant efforts – as ever – there is still more work to be done. See our worklist to take a look at a list of pages that we didn’t get around to improving and creating and have ago yourself! Some special mentions here would be to improve the mention of folklore in the Forvie Nature Reserve, Crichton Castle and Culross.
A diary from the University of Edinburgh Special Collections, CC-BY-SA by Ellie Whitehead
As part of this event, we also hosted an exhibitionof material about Scottish castles and witchcraft that the university special collections hold. It was a great addition to the event to be able to get our hands on these items and see some archival material that linked directly to what we were editing.
We got to see hand-painted watercolours and sketches of castles, hand-written legends from the Outer Hebridies about witches living in Kisimul Castle on Barra. We were able to leaf through architectural plans and drawings of Scotland’s Castles and seventeenth-century demonological books, such as George Sinclair’s Satans Invisible World Discovered.
An exhibition of material relating to witchcraft and castles from the University of Edinburgh Special Collections, CC-BY-SA by Ellie Whitehead
Keeping true to our heritage theme, Ruby Imrie also gave us a presentation on the Wikipedia photography project and competition Wiki Loves Monuments! This is an annual international competition that takes place in September which encourages people to go out and take photographs of heritage locations around them and upload them to Wikipedia. Take a look at some of the 1,645 images that were uploaded this September in Scotland in celebration of cultural heritage!
Overall, at this event saw 16 editors create 4 articles and edit 114! A grand total of 236 edits were made and 6000 words were added. Articles created or edited at this event have been viewed over 5500 times! See our dashboard for a more detailed insight into what we added.
This was a great event, which added some fantastic information about Scotland’s supernatural history and heritage onto Wikipedia. Thank you to all those who attended. Our next major event that we would like to highlight is the launch of our BRAND NEW Map of Scottish Witchcraft, Map of Memorials and Curious Edinburgh Walking Tour. Join us on the 23rd October between 3-4.30pm at Lecture Theatre 2.35 at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Hope to see you there!
Written by Ellie Whitehead, Assistant Wikimedian in Residence
“We are not minority languages, we are minoritised. And we are the global majority” – Tura Arutura, Social Justice activist, creative artist and dancer.
At the end of September, I had the great good fortune to be invited to the Celtic Knot conference in Waterford, Ireland hosted by Wikimedia Ireland and Wikimedia UK. This conference focuses on the minoritylanguage Wikipedias (not all of the 345 language Wikipedias are as well supported or well developed as English Wikipedia, see the list of Wikipedias here) and allows a Venn diagram of participants from all kinds of backgrounds, ages and experiences to come together as a community of ‘language activists’ to showcase, discuss and advocate for how best to support minoritised languages around the world.
We held the first ever Celtic Knot conference at the University of Edinburgh back in July 2017 as a way to demonstrate our support for the Scots Gaelic Wikipedia residency at the National Library of Scotland (watch the video presentation here) and to see where we could add some significant value by helping shine a light on some incredibly worthwhile language projects that could do with the space and time to outline the particular challenges (and opportunities) that regional and minority languages face whether technical, socio-economic or political. Initially, the conference focused on bringing the Celtic languages together (Scots Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Breton, Cornish, Manx) to help form a strong bond or ‘Celtic knot’ through working together and sharing experiences but we quickly realised that there was much to be gained from expanding to include Basque, Catalan, Saami, the Romance languages and more. I hosted the first event at the University as a one day experiment with 50-60 attendees to see if there was value to such knowledge and cultural exchange and I was ecstatic to see in Waterford that the need and desire for the conference had not diminished. Indeed, despite the upheaval of the past few years from Brexit, Covid, the Ukraine War, war in the Middle East, the cost of living crisis and more since I last was able to attend the conference in 2018, the Celtic Knot under the auspices of Wikimedia UK had expanded to a three day event and included more minoritised languages from around the world than ever before including Dagbani, Indonesian, Amazigh and Tashelhit from Morocco and many more who had wanted to attend & present but were unfortunately denied visas owing to some bureaucratic red tape. It is heartening to see that the ‘strength in unity’ between the Celtic language participants and our original conference participants was still there and stronger than ever and that there were welcoming arms extended both by the conference organisers, and importantly, by the Wikimedia Foundation to exploring a larger more inclusive conference to support minoritised languages across the globe. It was also heartening to see attendees from the Wikimedia Research team attend and present on efforts to make the process of creating a new language Wikipedia much easier to move from incubation to graduation in much less than the c. 9-18 years it has historically taken, until now.
It was fitting also that the conference was held in Waterford, Ireland’s oldest city, and a place that was described to me as somewhere that had perhaps lost its way and/or fallen upon hard times in the latter part of the 20th century/early 21st as a rather depressed port area ignored by industry, retail and tourism and needing some love and support. But also now in recent times that its city officials had successfully rebranded and rejuvenated the city through embracing its rich Viking and medieval history and Waterford’s treasures. It also was not lost on me that Scotland-based Irish artist, Aoife Cawley, had created a special linoprint design depicting the marriage of Aoife MacMurrough (c. 1145 – 1188), a Princess of Leinster, being forced (against Irish law and tradition) in marriage to the English lord ‘Strongbow’, earl of Pembroke, in Christchurch Cathedral in Waterford as part of a pact between Strongbow (also known as Richard fitz Gilbert and Richard de Clare) and the King of Leinster, Dermot MacMurrough (c. 1110 – 1171), to help him reclaim his lands. This marriage on 25 August 1170 marked the first significant arrival of the English people (and the English language) becoming involved in Irish politics, history and culture with all that has ensued since.
Jason Evans, Wikimedian and Open Data Manager at the National Library of Wales on using AI summaries to help write Welsh Wicipedia articles, CC-BY-SA by Ewan McAndrew
Jason Evans, National Library of Wales Wikimedian and Open Data Manager was the conference’s opening keynote address and expounded on generating Welsh Wicipedia articles using AI generated summaries (checked by two humans for grammar and factual accuracy) to help create more knowledge shared in the Welsh language online. He outlined his work in public outreach at the National Library of Wales, and work with schools and universities in particular where he found translation tasks were exceedingly popular with students – they felt very motivated to share knowledge and address knowledge gaps online. Maristella Gatto further reinforced the motivation of students for translation work in a presentation sharing details on a University of Bari translation project where students chose their words carefully when translating articles about Irish historical events, such as Bloody Sunday, into Italian by using computational analysis of the vocabulary. They implicitly realised AI tools make use of Wikipedia so this can replicate problems in representation of topics if language and vocabulary used in articles was not chosen correctly. Words have meaning and they matter. Representation matters.
“Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile” translates as “One beetle recognises another”.
This Irish saying (above) is a nod to the notion of comradeship, community and solidarity between people(s). I believe this is certainly true of conference participants who recognised, despite their different languages, that there was true commonality in their shared language activism. Activism that could sometimes lead to becoming political prisoners in the case of Martial Menard, namechecked in the talk by Dr. Tristan Loarer, Opening Sources in the Breton language: Offering the ‘Minoritised’ Language to the Majority”.
“We must take what we are entitled to, not hold out our hands.” – Breton activist and political prisoner Martial Menard (1951-2016)
Dr. Tristan Loarer at the Celtic Knot, CC-BY-SA by Ewan McAndrew
Loarer discussed the availability (or lack thereof) of pragmatic tools for the Breton language and the need for feeding the A.I. ‘beast’ with quality assured Breton text whether from Breton transcriptions in Wikisource, the free and open wiki hyper library, or from the creation of the new DEVRI tool, offering free access to a dichroic dictionary of the Breton language.
Two particularly affecting sessions, for me, were on the Irish language. Nóirín Ní Bhraoin, a psychologist from Dublin, noted that when she walked the streets of Dublin she hardly ever heard Gaeilge, which she thought was astounding for the Republic of Ireland’s capital city. She wanted to see if the problem was down to “one Irish speaker not being able to recognise another” so wore a badge that said “Speak Irish to me” and invited shop staff at ten Dublin shops to wear these badges and record how often customers spoke to them in Irish each day. The results showed that on average 3.6 people spoke Gaeilge to the staff each day across the ten stores. This encouraged Nóirín Ní Bhraoin to work with a developer to create a mobile app called “Gaelgoer” (Gael as in Irish Gaeilge speaker and ‘go-er’ as in the English for someone to get up and go!) which would allow app users to view (1) upcoming Irish events happening near them or all around the world (2) businesses that had speakers happy to speak Irish to you, and (3) even geolocate Irish speakers on the map so you could start an online/sms chat with them, if both were happy to do so. NB: an extra ‘Tinder’ style dating function was considered and requested by surveyed Irish speakers but Nóirín Ní Bhraoin and her developer shelved that idea for now.
Nóirín Ní Bhraoin (GaelGoer app), CC-BY-SA by Ewan McAndrew
“This project underscores a powerful truth: knowledge belongs to everyone” Joe Kelly, Mayor of Waterford, speaking on the Wiki Women Erasmus+ Project.
The key event of the Conference was the Wiki Women Erasmus+ panel introduced by the Mayor of Waterford, Joe Kelly, who spoke of how genuinely impressed he had been by the initiative and the potential it had for expansion. He was followed by four impressive high school Irish students who took turns to present (both in Irish and with an English translation) on their experiences on the Wiki Women Erasmus project where this EU funded scheme allowed the students to attend the Basque country as part of a cross cultural language exchange with Basque and Friesland students and teachers with the ultimate goal to highlight the gender gap in content online and empower students in minority language communities (Gaeltacht regions, Basque, Friesland) to write Wikipedia articles about underrepresented women in their languages. Another goal of the project has been to produce a ‘teacher’s toolkit’ that could be translated and used in any language to support further work in other regional and minoritised languages.
Mayor of Waterford, Joe Kelly, introducing the Wiki Women Erasmus+ project, CC-BY-SA by Ewan McAndrew
“While working on this project, we also learned a lot about the history of women from our own country […] by the end we had a wealth of information […] we improved lots of skills during this project” – a student who participated in the Wiki Women Erasmus+ Project
Keynote speaker, and Irish Gaeilge Wikipedia editor, Dr. Kevin Scannell is a leading mind in tech for under-resourced languages and has revolutionised how Gaelic languages interact with modern tech. Scannell outlined some of the very real problems in the use of AI and the difference in distribution of knowledge (and power) between hegemonic languages like English and minoritised languages like Irish. If every word in Irish was committed to paper or computer and fed into a large language model, this would equate to 1 billion words or less. This equates to a knowledgebase 30,000 times smaller than Llama 3.1 LLM. Further, Irish data included in standard LLMs is of low quality with Wikipedias used as standard to train LLMS but minoritised language Wikipedias varying wildly in quality and other sources, such as CommonCrawl, heavily polluted with machine translation. The problem, Scannell asserted, was that big tech companies with non Irish-speaking researchers don’t care about the training data being ‘garbage in’ and thereby don’t care that this produces ‘garbage out’ so Scannell has started an Irish language corpus building project called Fiontar at Dublin City University where the 150 million words in it are being quality assured.
Further talks by Dresden University student researchers, Hannah Yule Heetmann and Joanna Dieckmann, on Unpacking Power Dynamics in Language Policy showed again how words and intentions matter through the analysis they had conducted of the language used in Irish Government’s 20-Year Strategy for the Irish language. Their fascinating findings highlighted how the words “going to” were entirely absent from the policy document, that timescales were almost never included, and that there was also a lack of specific actions and specific labelling of which government or non-government actors were actually to undertake those actions. They concluded with a series of recommendations to combat this for use in future policy documents so that any future Irish language strategy is truly fit for purpose, actionable, accountable and with specific tasks and timescales detailed.
When a language stops having the vocabulary to be able to speak about modern politics, socio-economics and technologies that affect and influence our daily lives then that language ceases to be useful and risks dying out so watching talks showing a range of initiatives, open education resources & toolkits, new ways of thinking about language activism (combining your passions to write about forensic science in Scots Gaelic for instance) and even ensuring that the word for a Wikipedia ‘edit-a-thon’ is now in Irish Gaeilge, gave me great hope that breathing new life into languages is possible and that new safe, open spaces (following the demise of Twitter) can be made to work to support language communities.
This pragmatic and inspiring ‘can do’ spirit, and the strength of feeling behind it coupled with the sheer pride being taken in every speaker’s linguistic heritage and its potential for the future in a global digital world, was the thing that impressed me most during the conference. The recognition that government policies can be advocated for and shaped, and that A.I. and other digital tools and initiatives can be harnessed and made to work to help and massively support languages, cultures, and histories being shared for the betterment of knowledge & cultural exchange and understanding across the world. As Nóirín Ní Bhraoin concluded (and I’m paraphrasing here) it’s about caring, and getting up off your backside to actual do something if you do care about your language, to say “Here we are”.
And if I may add, in a nod to the future of the Celtic Knot, “and here we remain.”
Onwards and upwards… and outwards! And here’s to a bigger, more inclusive Wikipedia language conference next time!
Thanks and Sláinte to Amy and Sophie, our wonderful Wikimedia Ireland hosts, and conference co-organisers, Lea, Richard and Daria, from Wikimedia UK. Thanks also to Tura for a wonderful display of traditional Irish dance.
Our World Music Day celebrations took place at the historic St Cecilia’s Hall Concert Room and Music Museum. St Cecilia’s Hall dates from 1763 and is Scotland’s oldest purpose-built concert hall and also houses the University of Edinburgh’s musical instrument collection.
Attendees on the guided tour of St Cecilia’s Hall concert room and music museum. Pic by Ellie Whitehead, CC-BY-SA
Our event kicked off with a bang, as St Cecilia’s Hall curator, Dr. Jenny Nex, provided a guided tour of the museum’s collection. Jenny gave us a tailored tour, based upon her archival research, focusing upon the “Hidden Women of St Cecilia’s”. We saw instruments that were made by women, such as flutes and violins, and heard stories about historic women’s places in music which have only just been uncovered.
After the tour, our guests were provided with lunch. This time gave people the opportunity to get to know each other and start thinking about what they might want to edit as the afternoon went on. As always, we made sure that the tea and coffee was flowing and that we had a good supply of snacks to keep our fantastic team of volunteer editors going!
Tea and coffee to keep us all going! Pic by Ellie Whitehead, CC-BY-SA
After lunch, we were welcomed back by a fantastic talk by Luke Whitlock. Luke is a current MScR student in Music at the University, researching women instrument makers, and a producer for BBC Radio 3. Luke gave some insight into his experience of writing about women composers and instrument makers on Wikipedia, referring to two pages he had previously created on Ethel Parker and Margaret Purcell.
Luke Whitlock, BBC Radio 3 producer at MScR researcher, giving a talk on his research into hidden women composers in the music archives. Pic by Ellie Whitehead, CC-BY-SA
Luke gave us some wise words of wisdom, particularly emphasising that much of the information about these women is hidden. He encouraged us to ‘think outside of the box’, looking at newspapers and sources that talk about people these women were linked with in order to build a bigger picture of the women themselves.
After this editing training began and I, with the help of Ewan, got to teach the attendees how they can add to and edit Wikipedia. Once the training was out of the way the researching and editing began. People began scouring books, biographies, encyclopaedias, and the internet to find all the information they could about women composers and instrument makers. Overall, we created and edited 24 articles and added almost 10,000 words to Wikipedia. A few of the articles created include:
The afternoon finished with everyone being able to publish what they had been working on. It was a fantastic afternoon with a great group of attendees who were eager to learn and add some fantastic pages onto to Wikipedia. We are very grateful to our colleagues at St Cecilia’s Hall for hosting us in such a lovely venue, making for a thoroughly enjoyable event.
Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence, instructing attendees how to publish their new articles on Wikipedia at St Cecilia’s Hall concert room and music museum. Pic by Luke Whitlock, CC-BY-SA
Glasgow City Chambers stairwell, by Stinglehammer CC-BY-SA 4.0 and past Wiki Loves Monuments upload stats
Wiki Loves Monuments is an international photo competition which takes part throughout the month of September every year, and is supported by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation.
You can see historic locations near you that are missing an image using our handy interactive map (red pins are locations without an open image).
The aim is to crowdsource as many high quality, openly licensed photos as possible of scheduled monuments and listed buildings throughout the world. Why? Because documenting our cultural heritage today is so important.
In the UK, there will be prizes for the best photos of a site in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales as well as prizes for the best UK photos overall. The latter will then be put forward for international prizes and there are some phenomenal pics from last year’s competition worldwide like this one of St Andrew’s Church (1747 — 1762) at dawn, Kyiv, Ukraine by Maksym Popelnyukh:
St Andrew’s Church (1747 — 1762) at dawn, Kyiv, Ukraine by Maksym Popelnyukh
Wikimedia Commons is a free repository of photographs, audio and video content that anyone can use, re-use or distribute. Images on Commons can also be used to illustrate Wikipedia articles – which can then be seen by a global audience. But not all of our rich heritage is represented – there are a number of gaps when it comes to the coverage of Scotland – and this year, we’d like to do what we can to change that. Especially when this is something fun and impactful we can all do.
Is your organisation or group looking for activities? Wiki Loves Monuments can be a great activity for local social or volunteer groups, not just those those concerned with photography or history. Why not organise a heritage walk to take pictures of listed buildings in the local area, and visit the local museum or library at the same time?
Collage of Wiki Loves Monuments pics by Stinglehammer, CC-BY-SA 4.0, taken during Glasgow Doors Open Day.
How do you take part?
Register for an accounton Wikimedia Commons. (Individuals only, no organisational accounts.) NB: If you already have a Wikipedia account, no need to register for a new account on Wikimedia Commons, you can use the same account for Wikimedia Commons. To enter the competition you must make sure that your account has a valid email address and that your email is activated.
To check that, once you have logged in, look for “My preferences” tab at the top right of the page. Click on it, and then select “enable email from other users.” This will allow the competition organisers and other registered users on Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons to contact you but will not make your email address publicly available.
Here’s a short 2 min video explainer by Classics student, Hannah Rothmann – you can use this new tool to view places to photo near you.
What should you photograph? How do you upload it?
In Scotland, the subjects eligible to be entered in Wiki Loves Monuments are those designated by Historic Environment Scotland references for Listed Buildings and Scheduled Monuments. If you’re not sure what buildings or monuments are classed as listed, don’t worry! We’ve got a great tool for you to use to upload your photos which includes an interactive map.
Green pins on the map indicate monuments which already have a photo on Wikimedia Commons, whereas red pins indicate where they are missing. Select your town or city then wander around your local area and look for buildings or monuments with red pins. You can take photos on smartphones, tablets or cameras and then upload them by selecting the appropriate pin on the map and clicking upload. Make sure that you are logged into your Wikimedia Commons account and follow the basic instructions. Every photo uploaded via the interactive map will be entered into the Wiki Loves Monuments.
You can take more than one photo of a building or monument. Preferably one should be a photo of the building or monument as a whole, but also use your photographic flair to add photos of key features, inside views or behind the scenes features that the public doesn’t normally get to see. Doors Open Day runs throughout September and is a great opportunity to organise a photography tour of a building or a tour of the local listed monuments in your town.
I’ve had the pleasure of visiting and snapping pictures of the Glasgow City Chambers, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Anchor Line bar, Garnethill Synagogue and the Arlington Baths among many other locations as part of Glasgow Doors Open Days.
Other tips:
Not sure that your photo skills are up to the competition? Don’t worry about it, the important thing is to take part. The more photos we can crowdsource, the more we can improve the coverage of listed buildings and monuments in Scotland, which is our ultimate goal. You can also check the Wiki Loves Monuments blog for tips on how to best take architectural photos.
Wiki Loves Monuments is aimed at everyone! You don’t have to be an expert photographer, or have prior experience with any of the Wikimedia projects.
The competition runs through the whole of September from the 1st till the 30th and any entries uploaded during that time will be part of the competition. Photos don’t have to have been taken during September though, so you can add old photos, as long as they’ve not been previously uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Doors Open Day is a great opportunity to tie in with Wiki Loves Monuments, so if you know local DOD venues or if you work with a local heritage officer, please advertise it with them too.
How can you take part?
Do you work in or near a listed building? Add a picture!
Yet, we can take it for granted that our beautiful locations, listed buildings and monuments will always be there… something that can never be fully guaranteed. Political and economic tides change and forces of nature can have devastating effects as we have seen with the destruction of Palmyra in Syria, the devastation in Ukraine, the fires at the National Museum of Brazil, Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris and, more closer to home, the Mackintosh building fire at the Glasgow School of Art, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s masterwork.
There is a grief that comes from these lost buildings, their histories and what they had come to represent & symbolise. Recognising that there can be a profound regret and sadness at the cultural losses and a significant connection with the past means we can act today to look around us and appreciate the cultural heritage all around us. Many of us have access to a camera or camera phone and may even walk past these buildings every day. All it takes is looking up, taking a snap and uploading it in seconds and you’ve done something amazing to help document our cultural heritage for all time.
That’s why it’s so important that we take the opportunity to document our cultural heritage now for future generations before it is too late. Share your high quality pics of listed buildings and monuments to Wikimedia Commons and help preserve our cultural heritage online. After days out, weekend breaks and holidays at home & abroad, there will be gigabytes of pics taken in recent months and years. These could remain on your memory card or be shared to Commons and help illustrate Wikipedia for the benefit of all.
Aside from being great fun, Wiki Loves Monuments is a way of capturing a snapshot of our nation’s cultural heritage for future generations and documenting our country’s most important historic sites. Don’t wait till it’s too late, do your bit today! Click here to view a map of your local area to get started.
You just take a quick look at the map, take a pic and upload. It takes seconds and is the easiest way to take part in this year’s competition.
If each one of us took just 1 pic, we’d have this sewn up in a few short weeks. Which is when Wiki Loves Monuments closes – end of 30 September 2024. But if you can do more then great.
#ScotWiki #WikiLovesMonuments
ps. If nothing else, let’s give our counterparts in Ireland, England and Wales a run for their money in terms of how many images we can upload. A little friendly rivalry never hurts, right?
Let’s smash it again this September! Let’s see if we can get pics from ALL over Scotland this year. Everyone is welcome to take part and every picture helps.
Our Digital Humanities award-winning interactive map (witches.is.ed.ac.uk) caught the public’s attention when it launched in September 2019 and has helped to change the way the stories of these women and men were being told with a campaign group, Witches of Scotland, successfully lobbying the Scottish Government into issuing a formal apology from the former First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, for the grave wrong done to these persecuted women.(BBC News, 2022)
The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft
The map is built upon the landmark Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database project. Led by Professor Julian Goodare the database collates historical records about Scotland’s accused witches (1563-1736) in one place. This fabulous resource began life in the 1990s before being realised in 2001-2003. It’s a dataset that has the power to fascinate.
However, since 2003, the Survey data has remained static in an MS Access database so I invited groups of students on the University of Edinburgh’s Design Informatics MFA/MA to consider at the course’s annual “Data Fair” in October 2017 what could be done if the data were exported into Wikipedia’s sister project, Wikidata, as machine-readable linked open data? Beyond this, what new insights & visualisations could be achieved if groups of students worked with this real-world dataset and myself as their mentor over a 6-7 week project?
Design Informatics students at the Suffer the Witch symposium at the Patrick Geddes centre displaying the laser-cut 3d map of accused witches in Scotland. CC-BY-SA, Ewan McAndrew
The implementation of Wikidata in the curriculum presents a huge opportunity for students, educators, researchers and data scientists alike. Especially when there is a pressing need for universities to meet the demands of our digital economy for a data literate workforce.
“A common critique of data science classes is that examples are static and student group work is embedded in an ‘artificial’ and ‘academic’ context. We look at how we can make teaching data science classes more relevant to real-world problems. Student engagement with real problems…has the potential to stimulate learning, exchange, and serendipity on all sides.” (Corneli, Murray-Rust and Bach, 2018)
The ‘success of the Data Fair’ model, year on year, prompted questions as to what more could be done over an even more extended project. So I lobbied senior managers for a new internship dedicated to geographically locating the places recorded in the database as linked open data as the next logical step.
Recruiting the ‘Witchfinder General’
Geography student Emma Carroll worked closely under my mentorship and supervision for three months in Summer 2019 with her detective work geolocating historic placenames involving colleagues from the National Library of Scotland, the Scottish Studies Archive, the Scottish Place-Name Society. The website creation itself involved my working with the creativity and expertise of the university’s e-learning developers.
Geography undergraduate student, Emma Carroll, our first ‘Witchfinder General’ intern in Summer 2019.
Since the map’s launch, this project has gained media coverage across Scotland and the world in allowing users to explore, for the first time, where these accused women resided, local to them, and learn all about their stories in a tremendously powerful way. It also shows the potential of engaging with linked open data to help the teaching of data science and to fuel discovery through exploring the direct and indirect relationships at play in this semantic web of knowledge, enabling new insights. There is always more to do and we have since worked with another four student interns on this project since 2022.
Our latest, Ruby Imrie, will be returning following her exams and a Summer break on 15th July to continue her work quality-assuring the vast amount of Scottish witchcraft data in Wikidata and creating new features, new visualisations, fixing any bugs and generally making our Map of Accused Witches in Scotland website as useful, as engaging and as user-friendly as possible so that when it is ready for relaunch in Autumn/Winter 2024 we have something that truly does justice in respecting all the work that has gone before and all the individual women and men persecuted during the Scottish witch trials.
Ruby Imrie and Professor Julian Goodare, Project Director of the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft at University of Edinburgh Library 23 August 2023
Almost five years on – the legacy of the project
The legacy of the project is that our students, year-on-year, are highly engaged and motivated to learn important histories from Scotland’s dark past AND the important data skills required for Scotland’s future digital economy. Many of our colleagues at the University (and beyond) also seek our advice on how to meet research grant stipulations that they make their research outcomes openboth in terms of producing open access papers and releasing their data as open data. Lukas Engelmann, History of Medicine, is using Wikidata to document the history of 20th century epidemiology. Dr. Chris Langley and Asst. Prof. Mikki Brock have worked with myself to create a similar website, Mapping the Scottish Reformation, (as a proof-of-concept Project B to our Project A) and have shared their experiences with other similar projects such as: the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Military Museum in Stirling; Faversham Local History Group, Places of Worship in Scotland database team and more.
Old College on the evening of the Edinburgh Award celebration event.
This year I had my first experience helping with the Edinburgh Award Wikipedia project. The Edinburgh Award is a scheme which encourages students to volunteer in various projects that are happening around the University whilst undertaking their studies, with the ultimate aim of improving employability and graduate outcomes. Having undertaken an Edinburgh Award, myself during my undergraduate degree, it was a rewarding and full-circle experience to be part of it from the other side.
The Wikipedia project for the Edinburgh Award sees students identify an area of Wikipedia which is in need of improvement or is non-existent. Students are encouraged to pursue projects to do with their own interests and hobbies, these by no means need to be linked with their academic studies. This is what I find particularly fun about choosing a Wikipedia project to help to complete the Edinburgh Award, you can spend time delving into your interests which are independent to your studies.
This year, four fantastic students saw the project to completion. Their projects were diverse, covering a wide range of topics, and culminated in a substantial addition to knowledge on Wikipedia. The projects included:
Mental Health in China
Islamic History and Culture in addition to contributions to Population Genetics
Latin American Literature and Publishing Houses
Terms in Neuroscience
Our Fab Four finishers at their celebration evening in the Playfair Library.
At the beginning, our students told it was a challenge to narrow down a topic when there are so many available to you. After a few weeks of trial and error and exploring different avenues they each settled on their chosen topic. They became really interested in researching their topic, spending lots of time fine tuning their project proposals. We encouraged the students to keep fortnightly logs so that we could keep a track of their progress. Students also identified three key graduate skills as areas for improvement. These included communication and interpersonal skills, organisational skills, problem solving, and digital literacy.
To help with this, throughout the project, we put on fortnightly drop-in input sessions so that students could attend and get any support that they might need achieving these goals and working on their projects. It also provided them with the opportunity to work together in the same space, exchanging knowledge and Wikipedia editing experiences. During these sessions, we were also often provided with lovely treats from Creme Eggs to sesame biscuits brought from Kuwait. This face-to-face contact was enjoyed by everyone. It was nice for students to be able to ask us questions and to see each other. A nice community feel was formed, and we could see the fantastic progress being made on projects week by week.
The final assessment saw the students’ update their improvement on their three graduate skills that they had identified at the start of the year. It was great to see that every student felt as if they had improved on each of their identified skills. In terms of employability, these experiences and personal progressions are invaluable. This assessment also needed the students to present their work to their peers and to us. These presentations were fantastic and really showcased the finale of all their hard work. Each student had achieved more than 50 hours of digital Wikipedia volunteering to have completed their projects, and this hard work and dedication was clear in their presentations. There was personal growth in each student, and it was a fantastic opportunity for them to show off all their hard work.
Inside of the lovely Playfair Library.
As a final celebration, to applaud all of the hard work done by each student on the Edinburgh Award they were invited to Edinburgh’s Playfair Library for a drink’s reception with staff, students and employers. This awards evening also featured a talk from the university’s own Peter Sawkins, who won the Great British Bake Off in 2020, who had himself previously completed an Edinburgh Award and even attributed part of his success in the competition to the process of completing the award! It was a great chance for all students to meet a stranger and get networking. It really was the cherry on top of the whole experience.
Overall, some amazing work was completed, with around 51, 000 words being added to English, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic Wikipedia’s. Between them, the group created 18 new articles and improved an impressive 53. Their contributions have amassed a whopping 699, 000 article views. The articles created, translated, and improved include:
We are really proud of our ‘Fab Four’ students who completed the project. They did an amazing job, and we are looking forward to seeing what new, exciting projects will be brought forward to us next year!
This blog was written by Ellie Whitehead, Assistant Wikimedian in Residence.
International Women’s Day at the University of Edinburgh. CC-BY-SA by Ewan McAndrew
Since January 2016, I have worked as Wikimedian in Residence with the University of Edinburgh’s course teams to quickly generate real examples of technology-enhanced learning activities appropriate to the curriculum. As a result, students from diverse learning communities and a variety of disciplines benefit from learning new digital and information literacy skills appropriate for the modern graduate. The published outputs of their learning have an immediate public impact in addressing the diversity of editors and diversity of content shared online. For example, World Christianity MSc students wrote new pages about women in religion and on topics such as Asian Feminist Theology.
Many of the training workshops and in-curriculum assignments I have lead and facilitated focused on addressing under-representation of topics on Wikipedia and encouraging more women to become editors. Over the course of the last eight years, I have designed and lead edit-a-thon events focused on such topics as Women in STEM, LGBTQ+ History Month, Black History Month, Mental Health Week, and Edinburgh’s global alumni.
Through my work within the DLAM (Digital Learning Applications and Media) and and Digital Skills departments within Information Services, I have worked with, taught on and helped design learning activities on over 15-20 course programmes as the University’s Wikimedian in Residence. I have also created and shared hundreds of learning resources (video tutorials, webpages, blogs, pdfs, powerpoints, word docs), organised and hosted conferences & seminars, facilitated and lead over 360 training workshops along
and 150 edit-a-thon events celebrating: International Women’s Day; Ada Lovelace Day; Gothic Writers; Feminist Writers; Women Architects; Contemporary Scottish Artists, Scottish women authors; Women in Anthropology, Women in Chemistry, Women in Law and Global Health; Women in Engineering; and Women in Espionage. Over two thousand students and 660 staff have now been trained to edit Wikipedia, with a (conservatively) estimated ~16,000 articles created and improved. Stories that may not have been shared otherwise are now discoverable and being read, added to and improved, as OERs shared with the world for the benefit of all.
Editathon attendees, CC-BY-SA via Ewan McAndrew
Wikipedia has a gender problem. In considering the diversity of editors and content, “the “overwhelming majority of contributors are male” and the vast majority of biographies (81 percent on English Wikipedia) are about men (Ford & Wajcman, 2017). This means there is clear gender bias in terms of the stories being disseminated online, the choices being made in their creation and curation and who is writing these stories (Allen, 2020).
Yet, 69 percent of participating editors at the University of Edinburgh have been women, demonstrating that Wikipedia editing does not have to be the preserve of “white, college-educated males” (Wikimedia, 2011). Addressing systemic bias and under-representation online has consistently been a key motivator for staff and students at the University—working toward building a fairer, more inclusive internet and society.
Changing the “pale, male,stale” nature of our physical spaces at the University with more diverse heroes on display like Brenda Moon, our 1st female Chief Librarian. CC-BY-SA via Ewan McAndrew
The residency has facilitated monthly “Wikipedia Women in Red” workshops for the last eight years and created a supportive setting where students and staff can come together to learn a new digital skill. As a result of the success of this approach, the residency now sits on the Gender@Ed Steering Committee and the Wikipedia Women in Red edit-a-thons are included in the University’s Athena Scientific Women’s Academic Network (SWAN) charter plan to highlight female achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to encourage and inspire new STEM careers and help encourage new role models by changing the online and physical world around them by surfacing the brilliant lives and contributions of women to be where they can be visible and help inspire.
Imagine a gender equal world, IWD2024 event poster by E. McAndrew, all images CC-BY-SA
Global Activism and Women’s Rights- International Women’s Day 2024
International Women’s Day 2024. CC-BY-SA via the Global Justice Academy
Our most recent Wikipedia editathon event took place on the 8th March, between 13:00-16:30 in the Digital Scholarship Centre of the Main Library and was in collaboration with the University’s Global Justice Academy. It was lead by Assistant Wikimedian in Residence Ellie Whitehead for International Women’s Day 2024. It celebrated the lives and contributions of all the inspiring women the world, past and present, who have dedicated themselves to fighting for women’s rights and global justice, by adding those missing from Wikipedia – the world’s go-to site for information.
Dr. Kasey McCall-Smith, Senior Lecturer in Public International Law at the International Women’s Day 2024 event. CC-BY-SA via the Global Justice Academy
The session began by welcoming Dr Kasey McCall-Smith from the Global Justice Academy and Senior Lecturer in Public International Law who spoke to us about women in justice at local, national, and global levels. Dr McCall-Smith spoke about some incredible things being done by female colleagues in the field and helped to set the supportive and inclusive tone of the event.
Together, the attendees created some amazing new pages, including:
Helen Robertson – a Scottish-born Australian tailor and trade unionist. She was involved with creating Australia’s first union for women and she led the union’s first strike.
I also liaised with Navino Evans to update the Histropedia timeline of Women’s Suffrage in Scotland with all the new pages written in the last 5-6 years since the Vote100 events in 2018. Our editing events celebrated the Scottish suffragettes with newly written pages about them on Wikipedia and marked 100 years since the 1918 Representation of the People Act when all men over 21 and some women over 30 were granted the vote for the first time.
Overall, it was a brilliant event which encouraged some great discussions and added some great pages onto Wikipedia!
#inspireinclusion #IWD2024
Bessie Watson, the 9 year old Scottish suffragette from Edinburgh who now has a page and an image on Wikipedia and who now has a room at the University named after her on International Women’s Day 2024. CC-BY-SA via Wikimedia Commons (gratefully shared by Capital Collections from the Central Libraries, Edinburgh).
References
1. Allen, R. (2020, April 11). Wikipedia is a world built by and for men. Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight is changing that. The Lily. www.thelily.com/wikipedia-is-a-world-built-by-and-for-men-rosie-stephenson-goodnight-is-changing-that/?.
2. Ford, H. and Wajcman, J., 2017. ‘Anyone can edit’, not everyone does: Wikipedia’s infrastructure and the gender gap – Heather Ford, Judy Wajcman, 2017. [online] SAGE Journals. Available at: <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0306312717692172> [Accessed 24 March 2021].
3. Wikimedia. (2011, April). Wikipedia editors study. Wikimedia Commons. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Editor_Survey_Report_-_April_2011.pdf.
Translation Studies MSc students at the University of Edinburgh, CC-BY-SA via Wikimedia Commons
A Wikipedia assignment has been part of Translation Studies MSc since 2016 when I first met with Dr. Charlotte Bosseaux and convinced her to try a new approach to a pedagogical problem they had; getting the students to have meaningful, published translation practice that they would be motivated to complete. Course leaders were keen to motivate students to complete this translation practice as it was a core objective of the Masters programme.
I work closely with each of the three (rotating) Programme Directors to reflect on the changing needs of the student cohort, the changing makeup of tutors and the course itself so that I can plan ahead to ensure I provide a quality educational experience each time.
Between 2016/2017 and 2018/2019, 20-30 students registered annually in the Translation Studies MSc, which supports a wide variety of languages (Arabic, Chinese, Danish, French, German, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish in 2018/2019). This has since doubled, sometimes trebled, to 50-75 students in recent years and became a remote only offering in 2020-2021 (during lockdown) and a hybrid assignment during 2021-2022 before returning to on campus delivery.
The assignment I designed and lead trains students to select a high quality article and publish a 2,500 word translation in a different language Wikipedia by the end of the semester. The change to make the project an elective one was important to respond to as it came following feedback from some students (during the first iteration) who felt that their “digital labour” ought to be remunerated. Therefore, I now speak at the introductory session to such concerns and of the key benefits by providing context about the charitable Wikimedia Foundation and how the assignment aligns with their core course requirements and course organisers desire for published translation practice.
Responding to the students’ desire for feedback, I co-designed the peer assessment process and I also assess the students’ work in terms of the suitability, quality and level of challenge of the article they choose to translate and, later on, the readiness of their translation for final publication.
The work I have undertaken with course leaders and students to refine, assess and quality assure the published translations over the last seven years further evidences how “introducing collaborative projects with genuine outcomes, we can allow students to coherently develop the competences required for professional translators” (Al-Shehari, 2017, p. 371).
I emailed a survey to students to complete anonymously. The seven questions consisted of a mix of Likert scale responses and free text.
Feedback from students indicated that:
they were engaged and enthusiastic about Wikimedia’s mission to share knowledge globally;
they were selecting texts they were interested in;
they were getting much-needed published translation practice which they could use when getting
a job;
they were learning new skills and developing information and digital literacy; and
they were enjoying the assignment.
Participating lecturers were pleased that the students were:
getting the necessary practical experience they needed;
engaging in problem solving and critical thinking;
engaging with how knowledge is shared around the world;
writing neutrally for a Wikipedia audience;
considering the verifiability of the information they were presented with;
evaluating to what extent the translator should ever intervene; and
learning academic research and writing skills which should stand them in good stead for their
dissertation.
Conclusion
Translating between different language Wikipedias is a really impactful and inclusive way to help build understanding between language communities and helps students:
understand how knowledge is created, curated, and contested online.
create a new open educational resource that lasts.
achieve much-needed and meaningful published translation practice ahead of entering the world
of work.
Our work with MSc Translation Studies students in the 2023/24 academic year has added more than 100, 000 words onto Wikipedia. It has shown these students how to effectively use Wikipedia’s built in Content Translation Tool. In particular, the Isle of Skye (斯凯岛 ) page has been worked on extensively over on Chinese Wikipedia and is a much fuller and better article because of the work that students have undertaken and we also now have a wonderful new article on English Wikipedia about the Origins of the Sami people, translated from Swedish Wikipedia.
References consulted
Al-Shehari, K. (2017). Collaborative learning: trainee translators tasked to translate Wikipedia
entries from English into Arabic. The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 11(4), 357-372.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1750399x.2017.1359755
Martínez Carrasco, R. (2018). Using Wikipedia as a classroom tool — a translation experience.
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd’18).
https://doi.org/10.4995/head18.2018.8112 McAndrew, E. (2017, May 10).
Word Count tool – counting the prose text in a Wikipedia article. [Online Video]. 10 May 2017.
https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/1_kfx9b4q5.
Selwyn, N., & Gorard, S. (2016). Students’ use of Wikipedia as an academic resource — patterns of
use and perceptions of usefulness. The Internet and Higher Education, 28, 8-34.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2015.08.004
The University of Edinburgh. (2019a). Degree finder [online]. https://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/
postgraduate/degrees/index.php?r=site/view&edition=2019&id=251
The University of Edinburgh. (2019b). Vision and mission. [online]. https://www.ed.ac.uk/ governance-strategic-planning/content-to-be-reused/vision-and-mission
Wales, J. (2016). Wikimania conference, Esino Lario, Italy. https://wikimania2016.wikimedia.
org/wiki/Main_Page
This post is written by new Assistant Wikimedian in Residence, Ellie Whitehead.
On Burns Night, 25th January, I ran my first Wikipedia Editathon event. The event looked to add more Scottish traditions, information about Robert Burns, and Scottish women in literature onto Wikipedia. Together we made 557 total edits, added 15.5k words, created 7 new articles and 9 new images being uploaded onto Wikipedia. Altogether this has amassed 298k article views!
(Casts of Robert Burns’ skull held at the Anatomical Museum in the University of Edinburgh, Malcolm MacCullum, Anatomical Museum in Edinburgh, Scotland, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Take a look at some of the articles created and improved:
Excitingly, we added pictures of – along with an article about – Robert Burns’ skull to Wikipedia. A cast of the skull is held within the collections of Edinburgh University’s Anatomical Museum, who kindly provided us with the images to be added onto Wikipedia.
Other images added, including updating the images of Burns Supper and Haggis to make them look more appetising, such as the photograph of Macsween’s Whisky Cream Sauce, added by Melissa Highton, and added images of a Scottish Ceilidh to the Ceilidh Wikipedia page.
(Macsween whiskey cream sauce added to the Macsween (Butcher) article, Melissa Highton, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)
With this new event, I had my first experience of providing training on how to edit Wikipedia. People attending the event had varying levels of experience, which made for a very supportive atmosphere and an engaging audience. It is always nice to have both an in person and online presence, with those online being equally as supported as those in the room.
(Bessie Watson, Scottish Suffragette, aged 9, unknown author, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Everyone managed to publish at least one article, there was a great sense of satisfaction in the room which certainly felt very rewarding…however, this satisfaction may have had something to do with the great Scottish snacks we had on offer (Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers, Irn Bru and Haggis flavoured crisps)!
With this experience under my belt, I am now turning my head to look at the next Women in Red Editathon event that I am running along with Ewan on the 8th March, International Women’s Day. This event will be in collaboration with the Global Justice Academy (GJA) and will see Dr Kasey McCall-Smith, Lecturer in Public International Law and Programme Director for the LLM in Human Rights from the GJA speak to us about women in justice at local, national and global levels. We will celebrate the lives and contributions of all the inspiring women the world, past and present, who have dedicated themselves to fighting for women’s rights, women’s education, universal suffrage and global justice by adding them onto Wikipedia.
If you would like to join us at this exciting event, please follow this link to our Eventbrite page and get your ticket!
Imagine a gender equal world, IWD2024 event poster by E. McAndrew, all images CC-BY-SA
(Wikipedia Birthday cake, Airplaneman, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
This post is written by new Assistant Wikimedian in Residence, Ellie Whitehead.
23 years ago, on 15th January 2001, Wikipedia was launched as an independent, online open-source encyclopaedia. In its first year it amassed 20, 000 articles appearing in 18 different languages. Since then, Wikipedia has grown to be an internationally known and respected symbol of open knowledge. Its noble pursuit to make knowledge free and accessible to all still remains central to its cause today. Wikipedia is a place where people come together to learn and share knowledge simultaneously – there really is no place like it!
At the University of Edinburgh, the importance of open-access research and accessible knowledge is showcased through its collaborations with Wikipedia, working with Wikimedia UK. It was the first UK University to employ a Wikimedian in Residence to work on a university-wide basis, Ewan McAndrew. I am Ellie, MScR History student and the most recent recruit to the Wiki team at Edinburgh as Assistant Wikimedian in Residence. This blog will discuss my honest preconceptions and prejudgements when I started, what I have learnt so far about Wikipedia, and a call to arms for participation in the 1Lib1Ref Campaign…
My preconceptions and prejudgments about Wikipedia
Being a history student, Wikipedia has been a familiar, reliable life-raft in an ocean of scattered and distorted information on the internet. It has been a tool for scoping out the background knowledge needed for my studies. What was the chronology of the October Revolution? Who was Margaret Beaufort? Who was involved in the Scottish Reformation?
Wikipedia has provided answers to all these questions and more – so why did I always feel guilty for using it? Perhaps it is due to being warned that it was “unreliable” and “untrustworthy” since secondary school. Before my role, I am afraid that I was influenced by these opinions and was under the impression that Wikipedia was not to be trusted, could be edited by anyone, and did not care for reliable sourcing of information.
How wrong I was. It is this common misunderstanding of Wikipedia that stands in the way of it being utilised to its fullest extent. Wikipedia is a place of open knowledge that can be accessed for free by anyone and the largest reference work on the internet. Can anyone edit Wikipedia? Yes and no. Anyone can create a profile on Wikipedia and begin to edit, but this account and its edits are monitored. In English Wikipedia, an account can only create a new Wikipedia article when it has achieved 10 edits or been active for 4 days. In addition to this Wikipedia’s Notability Guide states that above all, for a new page to be created, it “must be verifiable” and that “reliable, independent” sources must be used to support the article. Notability is a core principle of Wikipedia along with neutral point of view, verifiability, and using reliable sources. My preconceptions have turned around since becoming Wikimedian in Residence, allowing me to understand the true merit of Wikipedia and the checks and balances it has in place.
This brings me on to…
What I have learnt so far about Wikipedia
Since joining in December, my experience of Wikipedia has been an upwards learning curve. Coming from a humanities-based background, the initial introduction to the digital world was, admittedly, daunting. However, the user-friendly and open nature of Wikipedia has meant that I have been able to learn many skills and become confident in them in a short space of time. I came into my role with no knowledge of how to create or even edit an article, no knowledge of the many important and impressive projects Wikipedia endorses, and no concept of just how useful it could be for university students and staff alike. I have learnt this, and more, in my short time working here due to the dedication and support of Ewan [mentioned above] and the community of other friendly Wikimedians in Residence around the UK.
I have learnt how well considered each article is, with the importance of reliable referencing and quality sources being paramount.
(Samhuinn Wikipedia editathon at University of Edinburgh editathon – 31st October 2016, Mihaela Bodlovic, CC-BY-SA licence via Wikimedia Commons)
I have also been able to get a taste of the openness and inclusivity of Wikipedia. The non-profit site is maintained and curated by volunteers. This community’s passion for Wikipedia is clear and adds to the special feel of the organisation at all levels of its knowledge creation, curation, and consumption. Something which I was particularly excited to learn about was the Women in Red project. Of the 1,980,258 biographies on Wikipedia, as of 8th January 2024, only 19.72% (approximately 390,582) of these are the biographies women. This project seeks to combat this by organising targeted events to add more women onto Wikipedia. This is a fantastic project which I am particularly enthusiastic about and want to take every opportunity I can to promote it – so watch this space!
In a personal sense, my role so far has allowed me to gain more digital literacy and expand my technological abilities – much to my amazement! So far in my role, I have learnt quite a bit about Wikipedia and its projects and yet there is still so much to learn. I look forward to exploring more in the future.
(1lib1ref, Wikimedia Foundation, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Potential for Academia
As previously discussed, Wikipedia is not being used to its full potential due to the misconceptions and judgments made about its reliability or trustworthiness. There has been great advances in the role of Wikipedia in academia, seen through the creation of Wikipedia articles being used for assignments for courses here at Edinburgh and the use of Wikidata projects to help open up and explore datasets such as Mapping the Scottish Reformation and the Survey for Scottish Witchcraft. In this role I hope to further encourage academic involvement in Wikipedia throughout the University and to dispel the myth that it should be avoided.
In particular relation to its potential for academia, and in honour of Wikipedia’s birthday I wanted to highlight the 1Lib1Ref Campaign. This campaign gives the ‘gift of knowledge’ by giving something back to Wikipedia. It encourages librarians to participate in Wikipedia by adding citations to articles that need them. You can find articles that need help by using the Citation Hunt tool (Citation Hunt is basically ‘Whack-a-mole’ for “Citation Needed” tagged text in Wikipedia). It looks to involve information professionals, and everyone really, in the curation of Wikipedia to help improve articles’ reliability and usefulness. This campaign runs from 15th January (today!) to 5th February every year and is a great way to get involved in Wikipedia. Whilst librarians are encouraged to participate, the campaign is not exclusionary, and anyone can take 5 minutes to take part and give a little knowledge back!
Get editing today and help make fun and impactful contributions to the world of knowledge.
Written by Ellie Whitehead, Assistant Wikimedian in Residence.
