Friends' Newsletter/2017/Issue 01
Introduction
Welcome to our first newsletter of 2017. The world may be weathering some stormy political seas at the moment, but we are ploughing on with our important work to democratise information and allow the world to educate itself for free.
At the end of 2016, we were delighted to partner with the BBC for #100wikiwomen. Women make up fewer than 17% of biographies on Wikipedia and our partnership with the BBC’s 100 Women series aimed to raise awareness of the gender gap, encourage more people to edit and improve coverage of women. You can read our Chief Executive’s blog post about this project here.
Whilst we continue our drive to tackle the gender gap on the English Wikipedia - with our first editathon of the year at Senate House with the Women’s Classical Committee - Wicipedia Cymraeg, The Welsh Wikipedia, recently passed a very significant landmark. For the first time its biographies are now roughly evenly split between men and women, which is a fantastic achievement.
We are pleased to announce the appointment of our new Membership, Fundraising and Operations Assistant, Nicola Furness, as well as the first ever Scottish Gaelic Wikimedian, which you can read more about below. we are looking forward to an important year ahead for the Wikimedia community, as we gear up for the Education Summit at Middlesex University, the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin, and of course Wikimania 2017.
Wikimedia movement strategy to 2030
By Lucy Crompton-Reid
For 16 years, Wikimedians have worked together to build the largest free knowledge resource in human history, growing from a small group of editors to a diverse network of editors, developers, affiliates, readers, donors, and partners. Today, Wikimedia is more than a group of websites but a movement rooted in values and a powerful vision.
This year the Wikimedia Foundation is facilitating the development of a new long term strategy for the global Wikimedia movement. Fifteen years from now, when we look back, what will we have achieved? What role do we want to play in the world? Who will have joined our movement? What work lies ahead of us? These are questions we can answer together.
The Wikimedia Foundation is currently recruiting for a number of paid, part-time posts for existing members of the Wikimedia community to support the strategy development process. These are advertised here under Community Engagement.
As part of the global steering committee shaping the design of the community strategy consultation, I’m excited about the discussions that will be taking place this year to inform a new strategic direction for the Wikimedia movement. There will be multiple ways to participate including on-wiki, in private spaces, and in-person meetings, with an online consultation scheduled to be launched in March. I will be highlighting key dates via the UK mailing list but you may also want to watch the movement strategy page. In the meantime, many thanks to those of you who responded to my request for input into the process last autumn, which I fed back to the Foundation and which has informed their thinking. I look forward to further rich conversations with people both within and outside of the Wikimedia movement in the UK over the next few months.
Women in Classics editathon with the Women’s Classical Committee
On Monday 23rd of January we held an editathon at Senate House, London, in partnership with the Women’s Classical Committee. Founded in 2015, the Committee aims to support women in Classics and promote feminist approaches to classical studies.
The event was organised after following an earlier event organised by Claire Millington of King’s College London with the Institute of Classical Studies in 2014. Last year, Claire was invited to talk about the initiative to the newly formed Women's Classical Committee as a way to improve awareness of women in classics. The WCC was excited by the idea of working with Wikimedia projects and a group of them decided to get the ball rolling.
You can check out the project page here to see some of the new articles that were created on the day. We also made a short video so you can see what our editathons are like.
Working with a group of academics who know their subject and are experienced researchers made for a very successful event, and we managed to significantly increase the percentage of biographies of classicists of women.
“For me the most valuable part of the day was seeing academics enthusiastically and rapidly gaining confidence in editing the encyclopedia, and how this translates into improving one of the worlds most widely-used reference sources", said Claire Millington, a doctoral student at KCL.
"As academics we're keenly aware of the need to evaluate the sources we and our students use. Getting involved in Wikipedia editing is a great way of ensuring that the most publicly accessible material about our disciplines is factually correct, well referenced, and represents our subjects in an up to date and reliable way. It's also a lot of fun."
The Women’s Classical Committee now plans to take their editing further: "We're holding monthly editing sessions online - add Women’s Classical Committee to your watchlist for details!"
Asking librarians to edit Wikipedia: #1Lib1Ref
Wikipedia uses references to make sure the information on its pages is verifiable. Want to know more about something or double check for yourself? You can click on the footnote for more details. But not everything on Wikipedia has a reference, so in January and February we have been asking librarians to take 5 minutes to edit Wikipedia.
The #1Lib1Ref campaign kicked off on 15th January (Wikipedia’s 16th birthday). Since then librarians including that at the universities of Oxford, Edinburgh, and Leeds have helped improve Wikipedia. The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, the Scottish Library and Information Council, and Research Libraries UK have all shared the campaign on social media. Once someone makes an edit, they then share it on social media.
#1Lib1Ref is an international project and runs until the end of 3rd February. So far 800 people have made more than 4,000 edits across 15 languages. That’s an incredible effort!
Wondering what all the fuss is about? The University of Edinburgh’s Wikimedian in Residence prepared this video showing how to take part.
Why copyright is not made for non-profit charities
By John Lubbock and Stuart Prior
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A few months ago I was introduced to one of the managers of the Rio Cinema in Dalston, one of London’s few remaining independent and socially conscious cinemas.
The cinema has a collection of around 10,000 colour slides of photos taken by local Hackney school children between about 1980 and the early 1990s. These slides have sat unused in their filing cabinets since then collecting dust.
Of course, as an independent cinema they never considered the commercial implications of copyright, and never asked the children to sign release forms, assuming that the cinema would be able to use them however they liked.
When we started talking to the Rio about the possibility of digitising this archive and uploading it to Commons, it quickly became clear that copyright would be an issue.
I emailed with a contact at the Intellectual Property Office, who advised me to make an orphan works application. To apply for an Orphan Work license costs £20 for one item, and £80 for 30 items. I didn’t think that making 10,000 Orphan Works applications would be cost effective.
So here we are, an archive of important historical documents taken by children over 25 years ago cannot be used in the public interest because we cannot find the original authors and we cannot apply for 10,000 orphan works licenses.
Copyright law in its current form works for large rightsholders organisations, but doesn’t work for individual creators and users of creative works.
Orphan works are an area where potential financial interests are strongly protected. However there is little or no evidence showing that this remunerates the creators or acts as an incentive for them to create at all.
Our natural desire to share images, for no other reason than their potential interest to others, like we all do online on a daily basis, is often at odds with a law that hasn’t caught up with the public’s expectations.
So there isn’t a question over the Rio’s right to display a collection of images that have been sitting, forgotten in a cardboard box for decades, if they genuinely can’t find the authors. But the arbitrary costs associated with doing so mean that it is impossible to do, and keeps valuable social history about an area from its own residents.
We obviously have a lot of work to do to mainstream the idea of Open Licenses and to show their potential social value. Unfortunately, this value is hard to quantify monetarily, and it remains difficult to get a hearing for our ideas in a world dominated by large corporations.
Adding a Stone to the Cairn - Building Wikipedia in Scottish Gaelic
This month I started the newly-created post of Scottish Gaelic Wikipedian at the National Library of Scotland, following in the footsteps of the Wikimedian-in-Residence post based here in 2013. Having been a Wikipedian editor for several years, the possibilities for growing participation and content on Uicipeid, the Scottish Gaelic language Wikipedia, are hugely exciting.
Back in 2010, I was doing a reading class for students who’d recently started learning Scottish Gaelic. Searching for some simple biographies that the students could work with, I first came across Gaelic wikipedia. Starting on the page for the Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis, I fell down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole familiar to many. That lead to other questions: which people had Gaelic Wiki entries? Who didn’t? Why not? The answer being, of course, to be bold and start editing.
In fact, Uicipeid, the Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia had been slowly taking shape for six years prior to that, with editors around the world contributing system translations, structure and content. I’ve contributed over 2,000 edits since I first dipped my toe in, often related to my PhD studies and covering Gaelic authors and texts, with the occasional digressions into birdlife or Yugoslavian writers. Each time I contribute content, I get an instant gratification hit that I have put another clach air a’ chàrn, another stone on the cairn. It also allows me to exercise my writing skills in Gaelic when other opportunities come and go; particularly when trying to cover topics outwith my everyday Gaelic situations.
Now in the post of Uicipeidiche or Gaelic Wikipedian, I hope to encourage many others to find the same satisfaction of creating, curating and sharing content in Gaelic - whether they wish to share knowledge about Gaelic heritage and culture, or about science, politics or literature of the world through the medium of Gaelic. There are other Gaelic-language resources out there, but knowing they exist or finding them isn’t always easy and there is huge potential for Uicipeid to be a hub and a gateway to connect them. Although my ‘home’ will be at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, with funding from the National Library, Wikimedia UK, and Bòrd na Gàidhlig (the agency responsible for promoting Gaelic language throughout Scotland), I will be working with Gaelic speakers all over Scotland and the rest of the world (at least virtually!).
Uicipeid has faced a number of challenges familiar to other small-language wikis. There has been great dedication and effort on the part of the small band of editors and admins to not only generate over 14,000 pages of content but also deal with all the system translations, updates, mentoring new editors, and keeping the content organised. However, there is still a lot to do and in this role I can support development which means editors can have more time to do what most of them love to do - add more articles.
I expect my first few weeks to be busy working with the Uicipeid community to set out the precise project goals and agreeing on what can be achieved with a part-time, year-long project. Then I expect to be developing training materials, updating editing guidance on the wiki itself, and agreeing and planning themes and projects for edit-a-thons. Then there will be the exciting stage of getting out and about, showing off our little wiki and hopefully signing up new recruits from the 38,000 or so people with Gaelic writing skills in Scotland! There’s a lot of room for growth and the possibilities are endless.
Dr Susan Ross Wikipedia: Susan.nls
How does Wikipedia stay reliable?
The satirical site Clickhole, which parodies websites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy, recently reported on a fictional man who ‘has edited over 50,000 Wikipedia articles to end with the phrase “And them’s the facts!”’
Looking at the articles they mention as having been edited, the malicious edits in question appear to have been done mostly from anonymous IP addresses, with the edits reverted within a few minutes.
The silly nature of the story aside, it does bring up some important issues about how vandalism is reduced and how bad edits are peer reviewed.
Wikipedia has a variety of defenses against vandalism, including:
- Bots: ClueBot NG etc.
- Edit filters
- Patrollers, esp. semi-auto. patrolling via e.g. Huggle
And finally, your everyday Wikipedian watching an article or stumbling across it
The fact that most of these edits were done from anonymous IP addresses suggests that the automated processes which Wikipedia has for preventing malicious editing are quite effective at preventing deliberate vandalism.
The idea that ‘anyone can edit anything’ is a naive phrase which probably wouldn’t be used without qualification by anybody who has experience of editing the Wikimedia projects. Systematic vandalism by unregistered IP addresses is likely to result in a ban for that entire IP address, which makes life hard even for very organised groups seeking to introduce bias into Wikipedia.
Clickhole and similar websites make money from not taking things seriously. However, many of us who edit the Wikimedia projects do take them seriously. Wikipedia is probably the biggest collaborative project humanity has undertaken in terms of man hours, and it has an immeasurable benefit on the educational potential of millions of people around the world. That’s why it’s important to keep it non-commercial and to police vandalism and biased editing as much as possible.
So articles like those in Clickhole and the endless stream of lazy journalism along the lines of ‘The 50 most outrageous Wikipedia hacks’ are frustrating because they send the message that Wikipedia is unreliable and shouldn’t be trusted. They are a barrier to people properly understanding and using Wikimedia projects.
These articles never explain that Wikipedia has strict rules that must be adhered to and that edits which do not follow them will be quickly reverted. There is simply no way that anybody could maliciously edit 50,000 articles to include the phrase ‘And them’s the facts’, because their account or IP would be blocked, and an edit filter would be introduced to flag and delete that phrase for not being in ‘encyclopedic’ language.
We take pride in the reliability of Wikipedia, and the ingenious ways our community has developed to police that reliability, such as the various bots who continuously monitor important IP ranges (i.e. Parliament, House of Commons, US Senate) as well as our lovely vandalism bot on Twitter - which have stamped out many attempts at underhanded government PR.
In extreme cases, pages that receive too much vandalism are protected from editing by anybody without a certain level of privileges within the community. You are welcome to try to edit the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict article, but you won’t get very far.
So please, clickbait journalists, it’s not clever to edit silly things into Wikipedia articles so you can write about how someone’s page got ‘hacked’. That’s not even journalism, it’s just reporting your own vandalism of reliable information as news.
We take this seriously because we know that Wikipedia benefits millions of people in developing countries who can’t afford textbooks, because medical professionals rely on our services, and because we are one of the best places to find good information on breaking news stories. Get involved and find out how the site works, but try not to frustrate the thousands of editors who give up their free time to try to improve the world’s access to free, unbiased knowledge.
Volunteering with Wikimedia UK
Wikimedia UK has recently purchased some new volunteer equipment including:
- Samyang 10mm f/2.8 ED AS NCS CS Lens for Canon
- 70-300mm f/5.6 Canon lens
- SD cards (and card holders)
- MicroSD cards (and card holders)
- Camera shoulder rig
We also have a Canon 60D and a Sony Handicam available to lend to members of Wikimedia UK for your projects. You can find a full list of our equipment here.
We encourage our members to talk to us about their ideas for Wikimedia related projects and discuss making an application for a small project grant to support them. Please see the project grants page for more details.
We have also recently started to update our volunteer information on the Volunteer Portal, and have published a video with some of our community suggesting ways to get involved.