Creating a More Tolerant, Informed, and Democratic Society through Open Knowledge
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1) Wikimedia UK works to promote open knowledge through Wikipedia and supports initiatives like Wikimedians in Residence which place editors in cultural institutions. 2) A Wikimedian in Residence at the National Library of Scotland helped increase understanding of open knowledge within the library and drove its adoption of open practices. 3) Wikimedia initiatives in universities help improve access to knowledge and teach students skills like understanding sources and copyright through experiences like editing Wikipedia.
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Creating a More Tolerant, Informed, and Democratic Society through Open Knowledge
- 2. Luca Baggio / CC0 1.0 Creating a more tolerant, informed and democratic society through open knowledge
- 3. A world in which every single human being can share in the sum of all knowledge. CC BY SA 2.0, NASA's Earth Observatory
- 4. CC by SA Vicky Francis/DfID
- 5. NASA Earth Observatory, Public Domain A global movement for open knowledge.
- 6. CC0 1.0 Bflores (WMF)
- 8. Public domain Knowledge as a service
- 9. Knowledge equity CC by SA 3.0, Jorge Royan
- 10. The national chapter for the global Wikimedia movement
- 12. Photo by Diliff, CC BY SA 4.0 “Wikipedia is where the light is, so it makes sense to put the collection there.” Mahendra Mahey, Head of British Library Labs
- 13. CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported, Victor Grigas National Library of Scotland
- 14. CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported, Victor Grigas “Having the resident hugely increased understanding within the organisation of the Library’s role in the open knowledge movement…(and) drove its thinking about openness across the organisations. That’s been extremely long lasting and is continuing as we move towards embracing public domain.” Andrew McDougall, National Library of Scotland
- 15. Scottish Libraries and Information Council (SLIC)
- 16. public domain
- 17. Facts Matter CC by SA 3.0, Jacek Halicki
- 18. Digital literacy CC by SA 4.0, Zachary McCune
- 19. “The work in Edinburgh has improved the quality and quantity of open knowledge and embedded information literacy skills in the curriculum...(editing Wikipedia) enables students to understand sources and copyright and also leads into discussions about the privilege and geography of knowledge.” Melissa Highton Director of Learning, Teaching and Web University of Edinburgh CC by SA 4.0, Defacto
- 20. CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported, Victor Grigas WiciMôn
- 21. CC by SA 2.0, Ian Capper
- 22. Martin Grandjean / CC BY-SA 4.0
- 23. Gender Gap CC by SA Henry Iddon/BBC
- 25. Art+Feminism CC by SA 4.0, Zachary McCune
- 26. Tim Tregenza / CC BY-SA 3.0 Decolonisation
- 30. CC by SA 3.0, Halfblue THANK YOU!
Editor's Notes
- Hello I’m Lucy Crompton-Reid, Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK. I feel really privileged to be speaking today to such an amazing group of delegates, particularly having attended a day full of inspiring, stimulating and in some cases provocative sessions about what it means to work in and with libraries, in all their guises, in 2019. I would particularly like to thank Sean at CILIP Scotland for inviting me, and also for waiting for me to give a keynote for a year, as I was on maternity leave this time last year, and couldn’t quite make it work. I also want to apologise in advance for having to leave immediately after my talk, as I need to get home to Newbury in Berkshire tonight. Connection to today’s speakers – Sue John from Glasgow Women’s Library, Erwin James, Yvonne Manning - BEN OKRI ANECDOTE!
- To help orientate myself, as well as all of you, I’m going to talk about five key things today. I know you’re supposed to talk about three things, but I’ve got five so sorry about that! Firstly, I’m going to give the broader context of the work that we do at Wikimedia UK in terms of the wider world of Wikimedia, which is of course an international movement. Then I’m going to talk about Wikimedia UK, and some of our work with libraries. I’m going to touch on our growing work in education, where we’re developing digital and information literacy projects. I’m then going to go wider again and explore some of the issues that we’re trying to address in terms of systemic bias and underrepresented content. Finally I’m going to talk about how libraries are engaging with Wikidata. I’ve got 45 minutes today and I’m hoping to finish with at least 10 minutes for your questions, so please do have a think about what you want to ask me. And I shared my twitter handle on one of the previous slides so do feel free to contact me that way, particularly if you’re not the type to ask questions in the plenary session of a conference.
- I hope that throughout my presentation, you hear things that could be relevant to your own setting, whether you’re from an academic library, a school library, a commercial library or a public library. Some of the work we’ve developed and delivered in partnership with libraries requires a considerable amount of investment from those institutions – in terms of time, in terms of money and perhaps more importantly, in terms of energy. However, there are very many ways of increasing your engagement with Wikimedia, and with the principles and practice of open knowledge more broadly, which require very little effort but could be of real benefit to your stakeholders, including staff and visitors. Access to knowledge and information is at the heart of everything that we do, and libraries are the guardians of much of the world’s knowledge - or at least that which has been written down. Wikipedia wouldn’t be what it is without the input and collaboration of thousands of libraries across the world, so thank you for your contribution to open knowledge, which is already incalculable.
- Wikimedia is a global movement for open knowledge. Wikipedia – which is the largest and best known of Wikimedia’s 14 projects - is the fifth most visited website in the world. It receives around 16 billion page views per month, and is unique in being part of the public good, and the only non profit website in the top 70 sites in the world. The encyclopedia that anyone can edit is 18 years old and exists in more than 300 languages, with just under 50 million articles in total, created by a global community of tens of thousands of volunteer editors, who we also call contributors. The projects are increasingly mainstream, with Wikipedia and the sister projects such as Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource being used extensively in education settings as well as by individual readers. ANECDOTE RE DOCTORS. Of increasing interest to many cultural and educational institutions is Wikidata, an open, connected, structured database that can be edited by humans and machines. I’m assuming that all of you will be more or less familiar with Wikipedia, and are probably aware of the media repository Wikimedia Commons, but I’m going to talk a bit more about Wikidata later in this presentation.
- I feel very lucky to work for Wikimedia and particularly at a time when the movement has been considering some really big questions as part of a long term strategy process, #Wikimedia2030, that started in 2016. At this point, Wikipedia was 15 years old and had achieved a huge amount, but it’s fair to say the movement and the organisations within it had grown organically, rather than systematically. So we needed a North star - a way to orient our work, so that we could make decisions about how to prioritise, who to support, what to change, what to build and what hard questions to ask.
- As part of this strategic planning process it was important to consult with futurists and experts on how technology will change the information ecosystem. Over the next ten years technology will continue to change dramatically. Automation (especially machine learning and translation) is changing how people produce content. Technology can also help offer more relevant, personalised and reliable content, but it needs to be developed carefully. As technology spreads through every aspect of our lives, Wikimedia's infrastructure needs to be able to communicate easily with other connected systems. Wikipedia already uses machine learning to evaluate article quality and assess gaps in content, and machine translation to help editors convert knowledge between languages globally. In future, we expect more bots and AI to work alongside volunteer editors, amplifying their work and enabling greater quality and scale. We also know that today’s browser interfaces won’t be the dominant experience of tomorrow.
- Crucially, as a movement we’re thinking about knowledge not as a static encyclopedia page, but as a service that people can continuously engage with. Many readers now expect multimedia formats beyond text and images. People want content that is real-time, visual, and that supports social sharing and conversation. So one of the two main principles of Wikimedia’s new strategic direction is knowledge as a service. This will involve: Evolving the underlying infrastructure Becoming a platform to serve open knowledge Building tools for ourselves, our allies and partners Enabling use of new forms of knowledge
- The populations we serve will also change. In the next 15 years, the languages that will be the most spoken are primarily those that currently lack good content and strong Wikimedia communities. The same regions often face the worst restrictions to freedom of access to information online. Similarly, population will grow the most in regions where Wikimedia currently reaches the fewest users, such as Africa and Oceania. As the global movement for open knowledge, the other driving principle of the new strategic direction of the Wikimedia movement is therefore knowledge equity, as a lack of diversity in both the content of the site and the community that creates the encyclopedia means that the information available is biased and incomplete, and perpetuates dominant forms of knowledge. As a social movement, we will focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege. We will welcome people from every background, and break down the social, political, and technical barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge.
- A focus on knowledge equity has been key to our work at Wikimedia UK for the past three and a half years, where we are working towards the long term outcome that the Wikimedia projects reflect our diverse society and are free from systemic bias. Wikimedia UK is the national chapter for the global Wikimedia movement, and an independent charity registered in England, Wales and Scotland. We believe that open access to knowledge is a fundamental right, and a driver for social, educational and economic development. We work with the Wikimedia Projects such as Wikipedia to enable people and organisations to contribute to a shared understanding of the world through the democratic creation, distribution and consumption of knowledge. Our strategic aims for 2019 - 2022 are to increase the representation of marginalised people and subjects on Wikimedia, work with the Wikimedia projects to develop digital, data and information literacy, and create changes in policy and practice that enable open knowledge to flourish.
- The Wikimedian in Residence programme is one of the main ways through which we build partnerships with major cultural institutions, including libraries. Our Wikimedians-in-Residence act as change makers, advocating for open knowledge within their host institutions and supporting and facilitating new practice. The programme is made up of individual fixed-term residencies, with the resident delivering a wide range of activities. These are developed in response to the particular needs and priorities of the host institution, but often include 1) Advocating for open knowledge internally and externally, 2) Contributing to policies, systems and processes which help to open up the institution’s collections, 3) Designing and delivering training to enable staff and volunteers to contribute their knowledge and expertise to Wikimedia projects and 4) Delivering training for staff, volunteers or visitors in advanced digital and information literacy skills.
- Past and current hosts of Wikimedians in Residence include the British Library, Natural History Museum, National Library of Scotland, Museums Galleries Scotland, Wellcome Library, National Library of Wales, Bodleian Libraries and Wellcome Library, among others. The first Wikimedian in Residence project was set up seven years ago, and our recent research into the long term impact of the programme at a number of partner institutions showed that they delivered lasting impact in terms of reach, external image, organisational culture and the ability for Wikimedia UK to effect change at scale, making an impact beyond the host institution itself.
- First WIR in Scotland, emerged out of a staff training session held in Edinburgh in 2012 led by British Library Wikimedian in Residence Andrew Gray. The partnership was launched and a resident appointed in 2013 and went on for 20 months in total. The publicity received when the project launched made the Library think about its approach to collections, and illustrated the tension between being a custodian of collections and distributing the knowledge within these collections widely and openly. As Andrew McDougall said in our research interviews, The Wikimedian in Residence, through its licence to disrupt, brought the outsiders in, and liberated the boundaries of who is a part of the organisation. These conversations are continuing!
- Feedback from the Library supports the view that the residency: Extended the reach of the National Library’s collections to new audiences Changed the internal and external image of the Library in a lasting way Sparked external collaborations, and Facilitated wider sector impact Further partnership with NLS - Gaelic residency in 2017, working to develop Uicipeid and the Gaelic Wikimedia community.
- The Wikimedian in Residence project at SLIC ran from 2017 until earlier this year, and was one of a small number of residencies that Wikimedia UK has developed in partnership with sector-level umbrella organisations, rather than individual institutions – the other being Museums Galleries Scotland. The programme directly reached 162 librarians - 75% of which were female - across 22 local authorities. Some of the highlights of the project included the Train the Trainer programme, tailored for librarians, which reached 32 librarians. The legacy of this project is therefore that librarians are organising their own training and editing events for library staff and users, enabling library stakeholders to enrich Wikipedia with their content, such as local history.
- Of course, our work with libraries doesn’t happen in a vacuum. In the same way that your own work with your collections and your communities will be deeply connected to local, regional, national and international factors, so our work with libraries and other partners is informed by our external environment. In 2019, our information ecosystem is plagued by saturation, and the blurring of boundaries between the producers and consumers of content has led to a rapid increase in misinformation and disinformation. Whilst the political manipulation of knowledge is an age-old problem, social media has proved to be the perfect blue touch paper for ‘fake news’. Despite greater and faster access to information than ever before, we are experiencing a crisis of democracy and facts, with the value of knowledge itself under threat.
- Wikimedia has an important role to play in combatting fake news, both in providing reliable, neutral and freely accessible content, and in education. Wikimedia UK is starting to collaborate with other organisations working within open, with the civil society sector more broadly, in order to combat misinformation online. Our work in developing digital and information literacy is also connected to this issue, and to the need to support the development of digital citizenship.
- Wikimedia UK believes that engaging with Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects - particularly through becoming a contributor - can enable learners to understand, navigate and critically evaluate knowledge and information. We develop digital and data literacy across the UK for children and adults, in partnership with schools, universities and community based programmes. Our evaluation of these programmes shows that participants see a significant improvement in their information literacy skills as well as in their collaboration and writing skills, data literacy, and understanding of open knowledge. Much of this work is in collaboration with a range of higher education institutions such as UCL, Middlesex, Portsmouth, Queen Mary, University London, Warwick, Exeter and others.
- We have a longstanding and very impactful partnership with the University of Edinburgh, who first appointed a Wikimedian in Residence in late 2015 and who made this post permanent earlier this year. We are also currently working with Coventry University on a Wikimedian in Residence programme, which will focus on digital literacy and decolonising the curriculum. As an aside, I think you can justifiably be proud of the fact that the Scottish Government’s engagement with information literacy is way ahead of Westminster, and already embedded into their strategies for a Digital Scotland.
- Last year, alongside our partners in Wales, we achieved a major breakthrough in our nascent schools programme, with the inclusion of Wikimedia within the Welsh Baccalaureate. I want to show a video of some of the education work in Wales, with a younger age group: https://youtu.be/rIoAVhBrFr0
- You will have noticed that the work with schools on Anglesey is all in Welsh, and in fact our entire programme in Wales has been bilingual. As the UK Chapter for Wikimedia we are increasingly working with the country’s indigenous languages, as well as other minority language speakers. Next month we will hold our third Celtic Knot conference, with last year’s event - organised by the Wikimedian at the National Library of Wales, Jason Evans – bringing together Wikimedians and partners from Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany, Catalan, the Basque country, together with representatives of the Northern Sami, to discuss ways in which Wikipedia can support minority or endangered languages.
- Technological solutions have been key to our work in supporting the development of minority language Wikipedias, helping generate new content in a scalable way and sharing existing knowledge with third parties. One example of this is the National Library of Wales’s work on a new interactive timeline for the Dictionary of Welsh Biography, to help users to visualise and explore its content. The interface is powered by Wikidata and holds narrative content from Wikipedia alongside images hosted on Wikimedia Commons. As well as providing new access points to this information, and using Wikidata to illuminate content in an exciting and meaningful way, this project also cements the Library’s commitment to making use of Wikimedia content to develop its own innovate online infrastructure. 630 million image views of the 17,000 images uploaded to Wikimedia by the NLW.
- Addressing gender inequality is another common theme of our work with libraries and other partners, as we try to combat Wikimedia’s androcentricism and diversify the movement’s content and contributors. I’m not going to go into the reason’s for the gender gap on Wikimedia today, but of course it relates to what Sue John was talking about in her keynote this morning, about the purging of women’s works from the records, and the significant and indelibly erased contribution of women. Highlights of this work in the past year include our partnership with Amnesty International’s Brave Campaign, which focused on female human rights defenders around the world and involved local Amnesty offices and Wikimedia communities around the world. The project was facilitated and led by Wikimedia UK, and draws on the international partnership with the BBC that we spearheaded a few years ago, as part of their 100 Women Season.
- The international Ada Lovelace day in October was another focal point for our gender gap activities. We harnessed the campaign to galvanise partner institutions around this theme, delivering a series of editing events focused on women in science. We partnered with Digital Science.com, GirlsCode (Liverpool and Milton Keynes) and others, and also supported a (successful) funding bid for the Electrifying Women Project led by the Science Museum and University of Leeds, which builds on the Women Engineering Society's Centenary Project.
- As part of our work on the gender gap, Wikimedia UK has participated in Art+Feminism for the past four years. A global campaign, coinciding with International Women’s Day in March, Art+Feminism is now six years old. The idea is for art galleries, museums, libraries, universities and other interested partners to hold an editathon event where people are trained in editing Wikipedia and improve content related to art and feminism. So far, hundreds of events have been held and thousands of articles on Wikipedia have been improved and created. In the UK, we’ve worked with organisations including Dulwich Picture Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, Southbank Centre, Leeds Central Library and many others on this campaign. For the past two years, half of Wikimedia UK’s lead volunteers have been women.
- Alongside our work on minority languages and the gender gap, much of our involves addressing other forms of bias. Decolonising collections and curricula is becoming an increasing important element of our work in partnership with some of the world’s leading cultural and educational institutions, many of whom are considering their own role in digital repatriation. This has been one of the strategic drivers of the residency at Bodleian Libraries, which started in 2015. 8000 images were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons from the Bodleain’s digital collection, selected because they represented hidden histories, and subjects that are generally underrepresented on Wikimedia because of its white, male, western perspective and bias. These have now been viewed over 60 million times. More recently, the resident imported a large database of chinese biographies, based on the freely accessible scholarly database hosted by Harvard University, and built a Wikidata-driven website for exploring different eras of Chinese and Japanese history, giving users an innovative way to navigate these historic items.
- I did promise earlier that I would talk about Wikidata, which for those of you who don’t know is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines and acts as central storage for the structured data of Wikipedia and the sister projects. A recent international example of a library embracing Wikidata is the Library of Congress, which has recently started linking to Wikidata from its online authority files. There are now over a million Library of Congress identifiers in Wikidata, uploaded by Wikimedians and the more recent bulk upload of 400,000 more by the library itself. As proof of concept, an interface was built using records from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, that combines these collection items with Wikidata information. The tool demonstrates the possibilities in connecting these two knowledge systems. For example, you could ask the tool to “Show some images held at LC of women who have won a Nobel Prize” or “What are some images of works by photographers born in the early 1900s available at LC?” As these linked data systems continue to develop at the Library of Congress, we will begin to see more exciting new possibilities for access and discovery. Wikidata and libraries – future engagement, Wikidata has arrived
- Earlier this year, the Association of Research Libraries – which works with libraries in North America – published a white paper, based on the work of a task force of expert Wikidata users and others involved in the library sector. This includes a series of recommendations for how librarians can use the open knowledge base in advancing global discovery of their collections, faculty, and institutions. It describes the way in which Wikidata’s rise in linked open data communities provides an opportuny for libraries to get involved in contrbiuting to modelling and data efforts on larger scale. It also includes recommendations for individual librarians, researchers and information professionals to get involved, reagrdless of instiutional-level invovlemtn. Indeed, you don’t have to be the Library of Congress to start exploring the potential for Wikidata to lead to new ways of looking at and understanding knowledge. There are a growing number of tools, created by Wikimedians, that enable anyone to find an access point. As an example, here’s a timeline that I’ve previously created on Histropedia, which took about 30 seconds.
- There are lots of other ways in which libraries, and library and information staff, can help to contribute to open knowledge. #1Lib1Ref is a global campaign in which Wikimedia asks you to imagine a world where every librarian added one more reference to Wikipedia. This project Improves the research ecosystem of Wikipedia for its readers and editors, and targets a profession that is mostly women. In an era of misinformation and disinformation, the site needs the input and contributions of subject experts, particularly those who understand referencing. There are other projects that libraries can get involved with such as Wiki Loves Libraries, Women in Red and Wiki Loves Monuments, all of which you can find out more about online. Finally, I encourage you to become a member of Wikimedia UK, for just £5 a year for an individual and £100 for institutional membership.
- Thank you!