Friends' Newsletter/2019/Issue 01

Welcome to the Spring Newsletter!

Welcome to the Spring newsletter! The weather is improving and we have lots of important new projects to tell you all about. We have one new part-time Wikimedian in Residence who has started working with the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and another in the process of being hired at Coventry University’s Disruptive Media Learning Lab. We have appointed three new board members, and have lots of plans in the works for the Celtic Knot conference in July (submissions are open if you want to run a session). We have also said goodbye to Delphine Dallison, who has finished her residency at the Scottish Libraries and Information Council. We wish her congratulations on becoming a new mum!

We have lots of events filling up the calendar for summer, all across the UK. So please take a look at our events list and we hope to see you at one of them soon.

Scotland

Delphine has finished her residency at SLIC. Delphine trained 162 librarians across 23 Scottish local authorities. The gender ratio of the participants was 75.31% female. A total of 32 librarians from 9 local authorities participated in a Train the Trainer programme to become Wikipedia trainers who can give workshops. A total of 10 editathons were held, with 7 more in development by other trainers. 45 library users were trained to edit Wikipedia in the workshops held so far, and participants created 55 new Wikipedia pages during the sessions. This was the first time a residency changed hands, with Sara Thomas becoming Scotland Manager in 2018 and handing over the SLIC residency to Delphine. Emphasis upon key role this has played in developing our network in Scotland Maybe a nod to the GSA design student project, using wikidata Huge thanks to Delphine for all the work she did

Ewan Scottish Suffragettes timeline with Nav Evans http://histropedia.com/histropediajs/projects/vote100-edinburgh-uni/ 35/36th month report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:University_of_Edinburgh/35th_and_36th_Month_Report Gender and Equality Archives PhD intern, Francesca Vavotici, was trained and started creating new articles. Recruiting a Data and Visualisation intern to work on improving data on Scottish witch trials. Created templates for University of Edinburgh Centre for Research Collections and National Records of Scotland which link to IIIF versions and the original collections. Edinburgh Gothic Robert Louis Stevenson event, Student Wellbeing Week editathon, Women in Red monthly workshop. Submitted proposals for presentations to 2019 LILAC Conference and UCISA Leadership Conference 2019 Met with Leeds University Library staff to discuss how they could use Wikimedia projects. Ewan was nominated for the LILAC Information Literacy Award. Continued to work with Translation Studies, Global Health, and other courses and parts of the university. Ewan was shortlisted for the Information Literacy Awards by LILAC. Co-authored an article on Wikipedia Gender Gap work for the New Statesman.

The annual Open Education Resources conference was held in Galway on the 10th & 11th April, with a number of members of the UK Wikimedia community in attendance, including Dr Sara Thomas and Dr Martin Poulter. Sara performed a storytelling session in the alt-formats section of the conference, with a piece called Once Upon An Open, drawing on work that’s been done in Scotland over the past year to add women’s biographies to Wikpedia, in this case, Marie Lamont and Lady Catherine Bruce of Clackmannan. A version of the story is available to listen again, through the FemEdTech OpenSpace site: http://femedtech.net/published/once-upon-an-open

Lots of work in Aberdeen, connecting with the open data community up there, datafest fringe event Dumfries Stonecarving - be nice to link to that video? Held another ScotWiki partners meeting in February Art + Feminism event at St Andrews ScotWiki mailing list started Sara was interviewed by Sunny Govan radio.

Wales

We have just finished the Wicipobl project here in Wales, so i thought it might be nice to include a short report in the newsletter? Here are the basics:

The Wicipobl (Wiki People) project was funded by the Welsh Government and managed by the National Library of Wales' National Wikimedia in partnership with Menter Iaith Món. The aim of the project was to share NLW collections openly in order to help improve the quality of information about Welsh people on the Welsh langauge Wikipedia. The whole project was structured using Europeana's impact playbook in order to better monitor the impacts of this GLAM-Wiki collaboration. A full impact report will be published soon, but here are key outcomes of the project.

• NLW shared nearly 5000 portraits to Commons on a CC-0 licence.
• Metadata for each portrait was released as Wikidata with Welsh labels added for 100% of the data.
• 25% of the artworks are already in use on Wikipedia in 55 langauges.
• 4 edit-a-thons were held in schools, producing 50 new Welsh articles.
• A History Hackathon was held in Cardiff to make use of NLW open data.
• A report was produced by Wici Món on the benefits of Wikipedia based learning.
• A Translate-a-thon was held at the National Library.
• A total of 1444 articles were created, many were partly constructed using data released by NLW.

And the project seems to have had a positive effect on Welsh Wikipedia Statistics;

• More edits made in January than in any other month in its history.
• More active editors were recorded in January than any other month since 2013
• The number of page views was at its highest level in 4 years.

Jason’s December report:

- 600 framed works nearly ready for upload to Commons and Wikidata. - WiciPobl (Wiki people) project has started. - 200 photographs of soldiers by D.C. Harries have been added to Commons. - Meeting with Aaron (Wicimon) to plan events in schools as part of WiciPobl project, to discuss how Wicipedia and education.

Jason has published his latest report covering January:

- Planning a Welsh language Wikidata Hackathon. - 4 editathons in schools produced 50 new articles as part of WiicPobl project. - 8000 Wikidata edits - mainly adding Welsh language labels (WiciPobl). - Presentation at Technology and Language conference (Bangor University). - Agreed to CILIP webinar on open library data. - Radio interview for Radio Cymru about importance of Welsh Wicipedia. - Secured meeting with Welsh Government education department to discuss funding for a project to target improvement of content relevant to the school syllabus, and perhaps package this as a Wikipedia for children. - Meeting with Aaron - Wikimon to plan events in schools as part of WiciPobl project, to discuss how Wikidata could be used to teach coding and to discuss potential future projects with the Welsh Wicipedia and education.

Martin Poulter - Oxford Oxford GLAMs Martin Poulter has been working on a short animated video to explain the benefit of Wikidata for the University of Oxford's GLAMs. The first draft has been circulated and reviewed, and the latest version ought to be ready in January. Martin took part in a meeting with various Oxford museum staff and Simon Julier, a researcher specialising in virtual environments, to discuss possible projects using virtual reality and augmented reality. The University have paid a temporary worker to extract data from a written catalogue of astrolabes, and most of this data set has now been reconciled to prepare it for import to Wikidata. "Detailed depictions with IIIF, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons" is a blog post drawing attention to Wikidata's ability to make statements about specific areas of artworks. It identifies works in the Bodleian Library that could benefit from these rich descriptions.

https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/December_2018/Contents/UK_report

Martin has published what he worked on last February:

Oxford At the moment at Oxford we are looking for opportunities for collaborative work with other institutions. There is a group interested in further developing the Astrolabe Explorer application, who proposed a project that wasn't funded, but we are looking for other funding options. SPARQL as a Foreign Language On 28 February I gave a "SPARQL as a Foreign Language" workshop to 13 library staff. The idea was to get people using the Wikidata Query Service without discussing namespaces, LOD, RDF or any technical jargon. It was fun! One participant made a map and sent it to her colleagues during the session, and got the response "WHAT IS THIS SORCERY?"

You can read some more here: https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/February_2019/Contents/UK_report