Friends' Newsletter/2019/Issue 02

Welcome to the Summer Newsletter!

Welcome to the Summer newsletter!

Celtic Knot 2019

Celtic Knot 2019 video.

That's three years of Celtic Knot conferences which Wikimedia UK has organised now. Next year we are planning to take the conference to Ireland in partnership with Wikimedia Ireland. This year's conference was a great success and hopefully will encourage the Cornish language community to get more involved in improving the Cornish Wikipedia. Participants at the conference came from Norway, Finland, Catalunya, Spain, Brittany, France and Morocco. You can watch all the sessions on this playlist on our YouTube channel. We also made a general video about the conference, which you can see on the right here.

Wikimedia UK has supported people working to increase the diversity of the content and contributors to Wikimedia projects for some time, and this conference is one of the main events we organise to promote our work in this area. Wikipedia can be an incredibly useful platform for smaller language communities, and the success of the Welsh community in creating its own Wikipedia (now more than 100,000 articles strong) and integrating Wikipedia learning into the Welsh Baccalaureate, shows what can be achieved. Different language communities have unique problems, so it's vital that these communities can get together to discuss their projects and best practice, and we hope that the conference will go from strength to strength in the coming years.

You can find images from this year's conference here.

Wikimedia UK holds AGM in Bristol

Brandi Guerkink speaking at the Wikimedia UK 2019 AGM

It was a busy start to July for the Wikimedia UK staff, as the weekend after #CelticKnot2019 we all went to Bristol for our annual AGM, where we elected new trustees to the board, had a talk by Brandi Guerkink of Mozilla, discussed how to make the community more welcoming to new people and went on a photo walk of Bristol. We also awarded prizes for Wikimedian of the Year and Partnership of the Year, which were won by Dr Jess Wade and Amnesty International respectively. Andrew Gray and the Dumfries Stonecarving Project were given Honourable Mentions for their work over the year.

The following people were elected to the Wikimedia UK board:

• Sangeet Bhullar
• Lorna Campbell
• Andrea Chandler
• Josie Fraser
• Rod Ward

You can also see our video recordings on YouTube of all the sessions before the AGM.

Adidas Women's World Cup event

We were contacted by an agency working for Adidas about a month before the start of the Women's Football World Cup, asking if we would be interested in organising an event sponsored by Adidas to improve coverage of women footballers on Wikipedia. Despite the short notice, we jumped at the chance to work with an organisation with a big reach to help spread awareness of our work to close the Gender Gap on Wikipedia. Only around 3.5% of biographies of football players on Wikipedia are for women, and the event aimed to raise awareness of this and help correct it. Partnering with a big company with a large social media reach resulted in some good press for the event, which was covered by Refinery29, Metro, Stylist, globalcitizen and Bustle.

Scotland

Young Academy of Scotland Women in Science editathon, 5 June 2019.

Scotland Manager Sara Thomas has helped release some images by Art UK of Scotland under Open Licenses, spoke at the Heritage Dot and CILIP conferences. You can hear the recording of Sara's Heritage Dot presentation here. She ran a number of editathons in June and July, on subjects like Scottish Lawyers, film in Aberdeen, Women in Science

A forthcoming booklet on the use of Wikimedia projects in education at the University of Edinburgh is due for release soon.

Work with Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities - Sara was successful in applying to have an intern placed with us in Scotland.

At the University of Edinburgh, Ewan McAndrew has been continuing to run regular events with Women in Red to reduce the Gender Gap, and held an editathon with the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission in May. He also organised events concentrating on Scotland's connections with Spain. He published a blog on the University of Edinburgh site about how staff and students at the university are engaging with Wikipedia and attended the university's Learning and Teaching conference, #uoeltconf19, where he gave a talk about his work.

The Scottish Witchcraft Survey project has been ongoing, with an intern appointed to work on the data on Wikidata. Emma Carroll, the 'Witchfinder General' intern, has been blogging about her work on the University of Edinburgh's site, and you can read all about her progress here. Ewan gave a presentation at the university entitled 'WikiWicca: Teaching data literacy with the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft and enabling Open Science and Open Scholarship with Wikidata'.

Very excitingly, the University of Edinburgh won the Award for Innovative use of Technology at the 2019 Herald Higher Education Awards.The university's nomination "focused on the development of digital literacy skills at University of Edinburgh through our partnership with Wikimedia UK. Project achievements have gone far beyond what might have been expected and has shown impact and reach which is unique and well worth celebrating." Ewan attended the event and celebrated with University of Edinburgh staff, who Wikimedia UK warmly congratulates for their win! You can see a video of the award win via Ewan's Twitter account here.

Wales

Jason Evans speaking at the Celtic Knot conference.

Robin Owain helped to release a Welsh database on liverwort mosses as part of the Llen Natur project, which will help create 300 new articles about plants in Welsh. Robin also started a WikiProject in participation with Arabic-language Wikimedians to add articles about the Middle East to Welsh Wikipedia, and has so far created 43 articles in Welsh. He also met the government's Welsh language Commissioner to discuss releasing content in Welsh on Open Licenses.

Robin wrote about Education in Wales for our blog and presented at the Celtic Knot languages conference. You can see his presentation here. Jason Evans also attended the conference, and his presentation is shown opposite.

Arron Morris Wici Mon project continued to train school children in Anglesey to edit Wikipedia.

Aberystwyth from Constitution Hill

The National Library of Wales (NLW) shared over 600 oil paintings on Wikimedia Commons on Open Licenses.You can see the category on Commons here. In June, National Wikimedian Jason Evans (based at the NLW) created 581 Wikidata items for the medieval Peniarth Manuscripts from the NLW and added 189 images of the manuscripts to Commons. These manuscripts have recently received UNESCO Memory of the World status. Jason Evans has also been working with Wikidata for Welsh publishers in preparation for a Welsh Literature project - and successfully created a NLW catalogue ID Wikidata property.

An impact report has been published for the WiciPobl project which aimed to add biographies to the Welsh Wikipedia. Jason also submitted a grant application to the Welsh Government outlining a plan for an education pilot project in Wales, aimed at improving resources for school children on Welsh Wikipedia.

Oxford and Coventry

Andy Mabbett at Coventry University.

Martin Poulter at the Bodleian Libraries Oxford and Andy Mabbett, newly appointed Wikimedian in Residence at Coventry University's Disruptive Media Learning Lab have both written about their work for This Month in GLAM. Martin has been improving the software for the Astrolabe Explorer, Collection Explorer and Sibthorp-Bauer Expedition projects, and has written a script "to find pages on Wikipedia and Commons that relate to specific collection items". This work aims at using Wikidata and other Wikimedia projects to create linked data that can stitch together the collections of various museumd and allow people to explore them in new ways.

Andy Mabbett has started his two year residency at Coventry University where he will be working with the university's staff and librarians on campaigns like 1 Librarian, 1 Reference and WikiCite, opening up collections and helping teachers integrate Wikimedia projects in their courses. Andy has written an introductory blog about his work here, and you can follow the Wikipedia project page for the residency here.

Working with the music industry

Fontaines DC performing at Glastonbury 2019

Communications Coordinator John has been working with the Association of Independent Music (AIM) and helping to send Wikimedians to festivals to take photos of artists. We started reaching out to AIM last year, who were quite interested in working with us to raise awareness of how Wikipedia works and how music organisations can engage with it in their sector. Most music promoters do not understand issues around notability and conflict of interest, and so they often engage with Wikipedia in the wrong way. We have been trying to signpost the music sector to engage with Wikipedia positively, by understanding the rules of the site, and by releasing content on their artists. We ran a workshop at Newspeak House in London for AIM members from independent music labels, where we made some good contacts with labels who promote diverse artists across the UK. We wrote a blog about what we are doing which you can read here.

This year we sent a couple of photographers to Glastonbury Festival, and you can see the Commons category for the images here. These photos have helped to illustrate dozens of Wikipedia pages which previously had no media in them. I also received a photography pass to Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona, which I was attending anyway, and took some good photos of smaller artists there. You can see those images here.

Other Stuff

Conway Hall

Wikidata Workshops.