Wikipedia:University of Edinburgh/12 Month Review
Introduction[edit]
The Wikipedian in Residence[edit]
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:
Background to the project[edit]
The University of Edinburgh residency is a result of a long-term engagement. The lead for the partnership at University of Edinburgh is Melissa Highton, Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services at University of Edinburgh. There had not yet been any Wikipedia editathons at Edinburgh so Melissa brought her teams to the 2014 EduWiki conference to find out more. Ally Crockford (Wikimedian in Residence at the National Library of Scotland) spoke at the event and she highlighted Wikimedia UK's 'Wikimedian in Residence' scheme. Melissa met with Gill Hamilton (Digital Access Manager at the National Library of Scotland) to learn about the job descriptions, support and work plans which would be successful for a WiR partnership.
Edinburgh University runs an annual Innovative Learning Week designed to enable staff and students to attend day-long, or week-long events outside of normal timetabling patterns. The first Edinburgh editathon ran during ILW 2015. Ally Crockford and Sara Thomas (Wikimedian in Residence at Museums & Galleries Scotland) came to help deliver the: Women, Science and Scottish History editathon series. The success of the event and the knowledge exchange it engendered inspired Melissa 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. This research on the Edinburgh editathon, conducted by Professor Allison Littlejohn, was presented by Melissa at Martin Poulter's Wikipedia Science Conference which then in turn underpinned the business case for establishing a Wikimedian in Residence at University of Edinburgh with a focus on skills development as part of the University’s commitment to open knowledge.
Key aims of residency[edit]
| # | Strategic goals |
|---|---|
| 1 | 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. |
Summary of Activities and outcomes[edit]
Below is an overview of key activities and outcomes which would likely not have happened without the direction of a Wikipedian in Residence.
Events[edit]
Several events were held in collaboration with partners across a range of disciplines (Veterinary Medicine, Reproductive Medicine, English Literature, Scottish Studies, the School of Divinity, Mathematics, the School of Engineering, MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine) and external partners including the National Library of Scotland, BBC Scotland, National Galleries of Scotland, Surgeons' Hall Museum, Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh and the Royal College of Physicians & Surgeons (Glasgow). From the outset, it was felt that the editathon model would allow staff & students to come together to share knowledge & develop their digital & information skills as part of an open knowledge community.
- 34 Training sessions delivered in total.
- 4 Wikipedia Social meets held.
- 3 Wikipedia in the Classroom assignments completed.
- 3 Wikipedia components for Online Education courses facilitated.
- 12 Editathon events.
- 467 attendees
- 237 new Wikipedia accounts
- 65% of attendees were female (on average).
- 71.8% of the total number of attendees were female.
- 998 new/improved articles
- 157 new articles
- 841 improved articles
- 2963 Edits to Wikipedia Mainspace
- 1.46 million bytes added to Wikipedia's mainspace.
Sharing digital content[edit]
Early in the residency the importance of producing outcomes which demonstrated the value of the collaboration to the institution was highlighted. 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.
- 55 images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons from the Library & University Collections.
- 7,101,013 views accrued from these uploaded images between January and December 2016.
Proposals have been drafted for Library & University Collections staff to receive Wikimedia training in order to facilitate uploads from the Centre for Research Collections. In particular the 11,000 openly-licensed CC-BY images on the university's Image Collections site. The university have also recently been digitising PhD theses as part of a two-year project and a pilot case of uploading PhD theses to Wikipedia's sister project, Wikisource (the free content library) is to take place in February 2017 to see if others can be uploaded and linked to relevant biography pages on Wikipedia. In addition, the university have a collection of Open Books which are being discussed as potentially being uploaded to Wikisource.
Advocacy[edit]
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 and the OEPS website.
- 2640 Tweets.
- 602,300 Twitter impressions.
- 40 Blog posts by the resident.
- 2 blog posts by students.
- 4 Wikipedia in the Classroom case studies and 4 video interviews recorded.
- 93 videos curated on the Wikimedian in Residence Media Hopper channel.
- 30 videos created; hosted on the Youtube channel and the Media Hopper channel.
- 1 video in particular has accrued 1,588 views - The Wikidata Sparql Query Tutorial.
- 1 interview article by OEPS.
- 1 Television appearance on STV for Ada Lovelace Day 2016.
- 1 lesson plan created for staff to run their own Wikipedia training sessions (with accompanying slide deck).
At an individual level Library staff have been involved in Wiki training, edit-a-thons and have attended ‘Introduction to Wikipedia’ sessions.
- 12 members of staff attended ‘Train the Trainer’ session organised by WIR to create Wikimedia Ambassadors at the University to support an ongoing relationship with Wikimedia
- Case for further open access / image release of CC-BY images being developed.
- Commitment to develop materials & process workflows to make uploading content to Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource & Wikidata as easy to follow as possible.
Reflections[edit]
Positives[edit]
There are many positives to take from the first 12 months of the residency at the University of Edinburgh. With academic courses often planned out long in advance and the academic calendar so packed, the year could have ended with little Wikipedia in the Classroom assignments taking place. Yet, we have had engagement with all three teaching colleges, across a range of disciplines and have produced three very different case studies in the Reproductive Medicine (Hons.) course assignment, the World Christianity MSc literature review assignment and the Translation Studies MSc Independent Study module assignment. These three courses were received overwhelmingly positively by staff & students and further iterations of the assignment are planned for the next academic year in all three disciplines. As a result we will be sharing the course leaders' good practice with colleagues at the university at a Wiki Education meeting on 1st March 2017 and further showcasing the work of the residency at the Wiki Education summit at Middlesex University on February 20th and at OER17 on 5&6 April. Beyond this, there was also impact further afield as the Eurostemcell Editathon event we ran with the university of Edinburgh's MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine led to further editathons with their European research partner labs, including:
- At the HumEn consortium meeting in Copenhagen, Ole Palnatoke Andersen palnatoke@gmail.com presented a 90 minute workshop about Wikimedia to the consortia’s PhD and post docs (29/11/2016)
- The next day Ole ran a Wikipedia editathon on material as per our workshop in April with 8 scientists from Danstem and BRIC, Copenhagen university (30/11/2016)
Wikipedia has a gender gap problem in that less than 15% of its editors are female which, in turn, skews the content of Wikipedia so that only 16.83% of biographies on Wikipedia are about women. Hence, the focus on redressing this imbalance has proved to be a successful approach with females accounting for 65% of our attendees this year. Another problem of coverage on Wikipedia has been the representation of different language Wikipedias with English Wikipedia the largest of all the 295 different language Wikipedias by a considerable margin. Hence, it has been especially pleasing that Translation Studies MSc students and Edinburgh University Translation Society have embraced the need to redress the imbalance by translating content from one language Wikipedia to another.
A large proportion of the residency has been about introducing staff & students to thinking about Wikipedia differently and to share open knowledge in a communal Wikipedia editing environment. Giving the editathons an engaging theme and inviting a number of excellent guest speakers has motivated many staff & students to come along to experience a Wikipedia edit-a-thon. Thereafter, further collaborations have resulted because of their positive reactions to the editathon model. Encouragingly, collaborations suggested by students are now coming forward as much as staff collaborations.
Overall, the residency has benefited from a number of important factors which have made its integration into the life of the university easier. Namely: the ease of use of Wikipedia's new Visual Editor interface; the new Content Translation tool facilitating articles to be translated simply from one language Wikipedia to another language Wikipedia; and the emergence of two exciting projects in Wikisource and Wikidata in particular. Further, the residency has also benefitted from current trends highlighting an increased need & importance for developing digital literacy & a critical information literacy; tapping also into a re-evaluating of Wikipedia's pivotal role in the global dissemination of knowledge & in the formal research process (with new initiatives such as WikiCite & WikiProject Signalling OA-ness particularly relevant).
Social media, particularly Twitter, has also been of huge value in advocating open knowledge, critical information literacy and developments in the residency. As a result, we have also seen other Higher Education and cultural institutions looking to become more involved with Wikimedia since the residency began which is enormously encouraging.
Recommendations[edit]
Time and motivation were identified at the residency's outset as the two key challenges to overcome. There are undoubted challenges for staff & students to engage with new initiatives during the busy academic calendar so flexibility on the part of the Wikimedian has proved to be a necessary part of the residency. Couching engaging with Wikimedia as not something that is additional to academic staff's already time-poor schedule but instead rather as something that can be a tool in their arsenal which:
- enhances learning & teaching in the curriculum
- helps develop & share knowledge in their subject discipline
- raises the visibility & impact of research in their particular field.
In this way, practitioners can swap out existing components of their practice in favour of Wikimedia learning activities which develop:
- A critical information literacy
- Digital literacy
- Academic writing & referencing
- Critical thinking
- Literature review
- Writing for different audiences
- Research skills
- Community building
- Online citizenship
- Collaboration
Building relationships & investing in seeing projects through so that they happen over time has also been key. It would be difficult to imagine a shorter residency working in this regard but this was recognised at the outset.
Demystifying Wikipedia & its sister projects[edit]
While Wikipedia is completely open & transparent, it is evident that there is work to be done in making it more immediately accessible for new contributors in terms of distilling all the information from its Help pages into something more digestible for beginners; especially with more online education courses & MOOCs offering a range of possibilities. Hence, developing a lesson plan for would be Wikipedia educators and creating short video tutorials and 1-2 page handouts which boil down a lot of the information on Wikipedia help pages to something easily understood has been important. Thankfully, staff & students have reacted positively upon being introduced to Wikipedia's policies & guidelines and working with the new Visual Editor interface has prompted many enthusiastic responses as to how easy Wikipedia editing has now become. Introducing the sister projects to a new audience has prompted some enthusiastic responses esp. in terms of Wikisource (the free content library of longer out-of-copyright texts) and Wikidata (the free & open knowledgbase of structured data).
Sharing best practice[edit]
I would echo the thoughts of previous Wikimedians in Residence by advocating for increased knowledge sharing between Wikimedians in Residence. A core part of teaching & learning is building on prior knowledge. Hence, if each residency is to kick on from the last residency then there should be a 'buddy' system in place at the beginning of the residency. It has also been acknowledged that getting Wikimedians in Residence together semi-regularly to impart knowledge & the latest goings-on in their field has been extremely useful for all concerned and helped fuel ideas for the residency going forward. Showcasing these different residencies and offering skills-training workshops at conferences has reaped dividends too in terms of raising the visibility of the residency, learning new skills & making new connections. Sharing good practice applies to the Wikimedia projects and to Wikipedia course leaders. While there is undoubted good work going on throughout the UK and abroad, too often this work occurs in isolation with little awareness of help or support. Finding ways in which resources & best practice can be shared will be key to supporting Wikipedia in Higher Education in the long term.
Working collaboratively[edit]
I have encountered positive reactions to Wikipedia at every turn and Edinburgh University, as an ancient university but also a modern 21st-century university, has largely embraced the residency. For while I have encountered some misconceptions & preconceived (historic) ideas about Wikipedia, these have been countered with presenting the current position of Wikipedia and its important role in the disseminating the world's knowledge. As such, its role as the front matter to all research has been understood & accepted. That being said establishing a core Wikipedia working group of staff has been crucial to the success of the residency. With the leadership of Melissa Highton and Anne-Marie Scott, and the assistance of key colleagues from Open Education (Lorna Campbell, Stuart Nicol & Charlie Farley), Academic Support Librarians and Digital Curators (Marshall Dozier and Gavin Willshaw) the work of the residency has been successful. These relationships and the will to work with Wikipedia has made the difference in my view; and has led to collaboration after collaboration with each one building on the last.
Key learning points[edit]
- 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.
Looking forward[edit]
The University of Edinburgh residency has been extended by mutual consent until 11 January 2018. 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 with approaches being taken to help combat the current issues of fake news and assisting students navigating both infoglut and unreliable sources. The resident will also continue to investigate ways that the institution can collaborate with Wikimedia on projects other than Wikipedia, such as WikiSource, Wikimedia Commons, Histropedia and Wikidata.
Case studies[edit]
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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
Lesson plan[edit]
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How to conduct Wikipedia Editing Training (lesson plan) -
Exemplar training ppt -
Wikipedia and Academic Research
Videos[edit]
- The Wikimedian in Residence channel on Media Hopper now has 109 videos. 16 more have newly been uploaded.
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Wikipedia in the Classroom - Interview with Dr. Alex Chow (World Christianity MTh/MSc programme)
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Wikipedia in the Classroom - Interview with Áine Kavanagh (Reproductive Biology Hons. student)
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Wikipedia in the Classroom - Interview with Edinburgh University's Translation Studies MSc students (excerpt)
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Wikipedia in the Classroom - Interview with World Christianity MSc students
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Wikipedia in the Classroom - Interview with Edinburgh University's Translation Studies MSc students
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Teaching with Wikipedia - Dr. Chris Harlow (Reproductive Biology research session at the University of Edinburgh)
- The Wikimedian in Residence channel on Youtube now has accrued 7764 views of its 32 videos with 44 subscribers (4 more than last month).