Friends' Newsletter/2018/Issue 02

Celtic Knot 2018

This year's Celtic Knot at the National Library of Wales (NLW) in Aberystwyth was a great success. The conference was spearheaded by Jason Evans, the National Wikimedian at the NLW.

Delphine Dallison, Wikimedian in Residence at the Scottish Libraries and Information Council (SLIC(, has already published blogposts about the conference on the SLIC blog and on the WMUK blog, which you should check out if you want to understand some of the useful things that came out of the event.

International Wikimedia events roundup

At the end of May, the annual Hackathon was held in Barcelona, while Wikimania 2018 was held during July in Cape Town, South Africa.

EU Copyright Directive voted down will be reconsidered in September

On July 5, the EU Parliament rejected a new Copyright law that contained provisions requiring automatic filtering of content on internet platforms and a 'link tax' that would see companies like Google and Facebook having to pay to link to press articles.

Copyright holding bodies such as music industry representatives and news organisations like AFP were backing the proposals as they seek to turn around business models which have seen their profits slump as the internet makes it easier for people to consume content in new ways. Wikimedia charities came out strongly against the proposals, with Wikipedia going dark in countries like Italy and Estonia. On the English Wikipedia, banner advertising ran for a few days prior to the vote, warning users about the potential problems the new law could cause for Wikipedia and its sister sites.

Copyright-holding groups were not particularly pleased about Wikimedia joining the fight against the law, with some trying to claim that opposition to the law was part of an orchestrated campaign by Google, who already have copyright filtering systems on sites like YouTube. One music industry representative in discussion with Jimmy Wales on BBC Radio even called for the nationalisation of Wikipedia. No, we don't know how that would work either.

While the law specifically included a caveat stating that 'non-commercial' platforms like 'internet encyclopaedias' would not be covered by the law, the Wikimedia charities did not feel that a specific exception for Wikipedia was good enough. Another problem is that the content on Wikimedia projects, while published on Creative Commons licenses, is not 'non-commercial' because it can all be used for commercial purposes. So content would not be covered while on Wikipedia, but could be removed by copyright filters the moment it was uploaded to a different platform.

In the end, the law was rejected by 318 to 275 votes. It will go back to the drawing board and will be reconsidered in September, hopefully with changes that protect the legitimate sharing of content online. In the meantime, Wikimedia UK has been involved in outreach to MEPs to try to help them understand how the bill can be modified so that it doesn't pose a threat to a free and open internet.

Scotland Update

Ewan McAndrew continues to beaver away at the University of Edinburgh, helping run events at the Portobello Library and presenting at other events like the UoE’s Informatics Forum,

Ewan attended events like the Amnesty International Still Marching event in Glasgow on May 19, a meetup of open educators at the University of Coventry on April 17, and delivered 3 presentations at the annual Open Educational Resources conference in Bristol on 18-19 April, and delivered Wikipedia training to Teesside University students, staff and members of the public on 27-28 April. Scotland Manager Sara Thomas and Ewan did a joint presentation on Wikimedia collaborations at the Edinburgh Local Showcase event at St Cecilia's Museum.

Ewan also delivered a webinar presentation to Queen's University Belfast on 3rd May, describing the work of the Wikimedia residency at the University of Edinburgh, and some of the ways that Wikipedia and its sister projects are used to help students develop information literacy, data literacy and digital research skills. See a video here.

A video presentation about Wikimedia work in Scotland by Ammienoot from the 2018 Open Educational Resources conference in Bristol on 19 April was also added to the Edinburgh media hopper. Lots of other videos of staff and student feedback about the work of the residency and its assessment by participating students can be found on the UoE media hopper too.

Ewan helped create lots of data and upload images to improve coverage of Women Human Rights Defenders, Suffragettes and Middlesborough, 27 new images of the murals by noted artist Phoebe Anna Traquair were added to Wikimedia Commons. Part-time Wikimedian in Residence and MA student at the University of Sterling, Lucy Rodgers (User:LMRodger) has also helped create a new article on Stirling District Lunatic Asylum and linked it to 23 other psychiatric hospitals in Scotland through the creation of a new Psychiatric hospital navbox by Ewan.

Ewan also Met with Law undergraduate Jemima John and course leaders, Rachael Craufurd-Smith and Hector MacQueen, on 7 June 2018 to discuss how a Wikipedia in the Classroom assignment could be implemented in the School of Law curriculum for postgraduate students, undergraduate students or both.

Ewan has discussed the Wikimedia residency at the University of Edinburgh and offered guidance to those exploring collaborations with Wikimedia at the American University in Cairo, Teesside University, Coventry University, Queen's University Belfast and other institutions. He also supported Academic Support Librarians Marshall Dozier, Ruth Jenkins and Donna Watson to help prepare for their first editathon at the EAHIL Conference in July. Support was also given to Anne-Marie Scott to co-lead the EdTech editathon at the OER18 Conference making use of a resource to demonstrate how anyone can run an editathon quite simply; see the OER18 EdTech editathon SPLOT resource.

You can find links to more of Ewan’s work on his two recent quarterly reports for 2018, Quarter 1 and Quarter 2.

Meanwhile, Sara Thomas, our Scotland Manager has been meeting with Stirling University and Library about developing a partnership and Inverclyde Libraries to talk about changing their licensing policy. Sara attended meetings and gave talks at the newly launched Life in Data project, spearheaded by University of Stirling, around data literacy, Scottish Higher Education Libraries’ AGM, CILIPS Summer Conference and the Edinburgh Local Showcase and Forum,

Scottish Libraries and Information Council Wikimedian in Residence Delphine Dallison has talked to GSA Library about moving books held on Internet Archive to Wikisource/Commons. The National Library of Scotland has also agreed to move a large number of images from CC-BY to CC0/PD.

The handover between Sara and Delphine of the role of SLIC Wikimedian in Residence is now complete and Delphine has started to organise editathons with library workers across Scotland, such as this one at Dunfermline Carnegie Library.

Updates from Wales

Robin Owain, our Wales manager has been working with Welsh-language broadcaster S4C, who have started to change their licensing policy on some videos on their YouTube channel. Preparations have also begun for Wiki Loves Monuments 2018 in Wales, and Robin has held discussions with a number of possible grant funding bodies, including the Welsh Government. Robin has also secured the release of Eisteddfod’s archive of biographiess for at least the last 10 years (around 240 biographies)

A new Wikiediting group, ‘Wici Pontardawe’ has been organised for 11 July 2018 in conjunction with Tŷ'r Gwrhyd Welsh Centre at Swansea University. Robin gave a talk at Maynooth University’s Academia and Wikipedia Conference in Dublin, and with Aaron Morris (WiR at Wici Mon), was involved in the organising of the Celtic Knot conference.

Meanwhile, Jason Evans, the National Wikimedian at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth has uploaded 4891 portrait images to Commons. These are pre 1880 portraits, mainly of British interest. The collection contains prints, engravings, paintings, photographs and more. You can explore the collection here. Following on from this, 5200 Wikidata items were created; one for each portrait on Commons plus a number of items for sitters and artists in the collection.

40,000 statements were also added to Wikidata for Welsh Portraits and 350,000 Welsh bibliographical records (The sum of all Welsh literature) have been passed to Wikidata visiting Scholar Simon Cobb and are being prepared for upload to Wikidata. The Wikidata Visiting Scholar has created Wikidata for many Welsh newspapers and Journals using data provided by NLW. He will now begin to explore creating Wikidata for ALL Welsh books with associated printers, publishers and authors. You can find out more about Simon's work here.

Jason was interviewed by Radio Cymru discussing Wikipedia and the Celtic Knot conference.