Is Wikipedia Relevant to University Web Managers?

Areas Apparently Not Being Addressed By Web Managers

Yesterday in a post entitled “Pondering the Online Legacy of my Work” I described how two recent Facebook messages highlighted areas which appear not to be being addressed widely across the web management community

Yesterday’s post looked at how web content may be deleted after content creators leave the institution, meaning that the content creators, who are likely to care about the resource, are unable to exploit the resources unless they have migrated the resources before leaving.

Today’s post was inspired by a Facebook update from Rod Ward who alerted my to a workshop on use of Wikipedia which he helped facilitate at the University of Exeter.

Wikimedia Workshop for University Web and Communication Staff

Rod’s Facebook post provided a link to the entry on the Wikimedia UK Web site about the workshop which was held at Exeter University  on 15 July. As shown in the screenshot the event was aimed at web and communication staff from universities in the south west of England.

I’ve a long-standing interest in Wikipedia, and last year published posts on “Librarians and Wikipedia: an Ideal Match?“, “#1amconf, Altmetrics and Raising the Visibility of One’s Research“, “Top Wikipedia Tips for Librarians: Why You Should Contribute and How You Can Support Your Users” and “Supporting Use of Wikipedia in the UK Higher Education and Library Sectors“.

As suggested by the title of these posts my main target audience for the posts were librarians and researchers. Members of university web and marketing teams would not be likely, I felt, to have responsibilities for managing Wikipedia articles. However from seeing the details of the recent workshop it seems that I was mistaken, with several of the participants working for university marketing teams.

But should people who work for marketing teams update Wikipedia articles about their institutions? In a post on “Wikipedia, Librarians and CILIP” I flagged the dangers of this:

[In a talk to librarians] I pointed out the Wikipedia neutral point of view (NPOV) principle which means “representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic“.

One way of minimising risks of sub-conscious biases in articles is to ensure that content is provided by those who do not have direct involvement with the subject area of an article. For an article about an organisation it would therefore be appropriate for an article about CILIP should be updated by editors who are not employed by the organisation.

Rod Ward, one of the facilitators at the recent workshop, proposed one mechanism for addressing this tension: he asked participants at the workshop to include the text on their Wikipedia user profile page:

I am username. I work for organisation as job title. Part of my role is to improve the Wikipedia articles about academics of my employer. I have attended a workshop where policies about the Neutral point of view, Biographies of Living People, Conflict of Interest and Paid Editing were discussed. I am aware of potential conflicts in this area. If you see any issues with my editing please contact me via my talk page.

This seems to me to be a sensible approach to addressing the NPOV principle: there may be factual aspects of Wikipedia articles which would be improved in a timely fashion if updated by staff working for the institution. For example, looking at the updates made two days ago to the University of Exeter article we can see that the updates are factual updates to the Medical School. These updates were made by user SallUEMS whose user profile states that the user “work[s] for the University of Exeter as a Web Marketing officer“.

Developing an Ethical Approach to Managing Wikipedia Content

I’d be interested to hear if other institutions are taking a pro-active approach in managing Wikipedia articles about their institutions, such as those which featured in the recent workshop: the List of University of Exeter people and the List of University of Bristol people as well as the collections of articles on Academics of Bath Spa University, Academics of the University of Bath, Academics of the University of Bristol, Academics of the University of Exeter, Academics of the University of Plymouth, Academics of the University of the West of England, People associated with Cardiff University, People associated with Falmouth University and People associated with the University of St Mark & St John.

There will be a need to ensure that updates to Wikipedia articles are made in an ethical fashion, to avoid updates being reverted and to avoid the risks which politicians, political researchers and PR staff in Westminster have experienced as described in an article on “15 Embarrassing can you buy antibiotics in egypt Edits Made To Politicians’ Wikipedia Pages By People In Parliament“.

In September I will give a talk on “Developing an Ethical Approach to Using Wikipedia as the Front Matter to all Research” at the Wikipedia Science 2015 conference. I’d be interested in hearing if any institutions have developed guidelines on updating Wikipedia articles related to activities carried out in the institution. It does seem to me that marketing staff would benefit from having policies and guidelines which they can use. There may be temptations (and pressures from senior managers) to remove embarrassing content – and yes, there are negative comments abiut vice-chancellors which have been published in national newspapers which could be cited!

The higher education sector should avoid the risks of seeing headlines such as “Wikipedia Pages of Star Clients Altered by P.R. Firm” in which a founder of the PR company Sunshine “acknowledged that several staff members had violated the terms of use by failing to disclose their association with the firm. Mr. Sunshine said a key employee in his web operation was not aware of Wikipedia’s new terms“. Interestingly, after being caught for “play[ing] loose with Wikipedia’s standards and violat[ing] the site’s updated terms of use agreement, by employing paid editors who fail to disclose their conflict of interest on the website” the PR company now requires “all employees who edit on Wikipedia have now disclosed their affiliation with Sunshine“.

This approach is aligned with the suggestions made at the recent Wikipedia workshop at the University of Exeter: if you do update articles in which there may be a conflict of interest ensure that you are open about possible conflicts of interest and invite feedback from those with concerns.

However there is a need to go beyond this simple approach. And I wonder if the higher education sector could learn from the approaches taken in the PR sector. In a post on Links From Wikipedia to Russell Group University Repositories I highlighted challenges for universities which may be tempted to seek to exploit the SEO benefits which links from Wikipedia to institutional web pages may provide. In the blog post I cited an article from the PR community who had recognised the dangers that PR companies can be easily tempted to provide links to clients’ web sites for similar reasons. In response to concerns raised by the Wikipedia community Top PR Firms Promise[d] They Won’t Edit Clients’ Wikipedia Entries on the Sly. The article, which is hosted on Wikipedia, describes the Statement on Wikipedia from participating communications firms which was published in 10 June 2014:

On behalf of our firms, we recognize Wikipedia’s unique and important role as a public knowledge resource. We also acknowledge that the prior actions of some in our industry have led to a challenging relationship with the community of Wikipedia editors. Our firms believe that it is in the best interest of our industry, and Wikipedia users at large, that Wikipedia fulfill its mission of developing an accurate and objective online encyclopedia. Therefore, it is wise for communications professionals to follow Wikipedia policies as part of ethical engagement practices. We therefore publicly state and commit, on behalf of our respective firms, to the best of our ability, to abide by the following principles:

• To seek to better understand the fundamental principles guiding Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
• To act in accordance with Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines, particularly those related to “conflict of interest.”
• To abide by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Terms of Use.
• To the extent we become aware of potential violations of Wikipedia policies by our respective firms, to investigate the matter and seek corrective action, as appropriate and consistent with our policies.
• Beyond our own firms, to take steps to publicize our views and counsel our clients and peers to conduct themselves accordingly.

We also seek opportunities for a productive and transparent dialogue with Wikipedia editors, inasmuch as we can provide accurate, up-to-date, and verifiable information that helps Wikipedia better achieve its goals.

A significant improvement in relations between our two communities may not occur quickly or easily, but it is our intention to do what we can to create a long-term positive change and contribute toward Wikipedia’s continued success.

 

Might universities find it useful to embrace similar principles?

In order to help identify early institutional adopters of guidelines and policies for updating Wikipedia content where there may be a conflict of interest you are invited to complete the following surveys. The first survey covers policies/guidelines on updating Wikipedia content and the second asks about responsibilities for updating Wikipedia articles.

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Librarians and Wikipedia: an Ideal Match?

Characteristics of Librarians

Image illustrating librarians’ characteristics from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_library

What are the key characteristics of librarians? According to LibraryScienceList.com the basic personal traits and skills which librarians typically share include:

• A love of knowledge and learning
• A desire to work around people
• Love of books
• Broad overall knowledge of life and the world
• Strong organizational skills
• Good with numbers
• Friendly
• Ethical
• Personable
• Basic affinity for working with large volumes of information
• Computer skills

How might these skills and traits relate to Wikipedia?

Wikipedia’s Purpose and Key Principles

Wikipedia’s purpose is “to benefit readers by acting as an encyclopedia, a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge“. As described by Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.”

Wikipedia seeks to achieve its goal by its five pillars:

1. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia: Wikipedia is not, for example, a soapbox, an advertising platform, a vanity press, an indiscriminate collection of information, or a web directory.
2. Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view: Wikipedia strives for articles that document and explain the major points of view, giving due weight with respect to their prominence in an impartial tone. It avoids advocacy and we characterize information and issues rather than debate them.
3. Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute: Since all editors freely licence their work to the public, no editor owns an article and any contributions can and will be freely edited and redistributed.
4. Editors should treat each other with respect and civility: Contributors are expected to respect fellow Wikipedians, even when you disagree. Apply Wikipedia etiquette, and don’t engage in personal attacks.
5. Wikipedia has no firm rules: Wikipedia has policies and guidelines, but they are not carved in stone; their content and interpretation can evolve over time. Their principles and spirit matter more than their literal wording, and sometimes improving Wikipedia requires making an exception.

How well do the characteristics of librarians relate to Wikipedia’s goals and principles?

How Well Are The Two Communities Aligned?

The following table suggests how these characteristics of librarians relate to Wikipedia’s goals and principles and other information about Wikipedia.

	Librarian Traits / Characteristics	Relevance to Wikipedia
1	A love of knowledge and learning	Aligned with Wikipedia’s goal of “a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge“.
2	A desire to work around people	There is a strong Wikipedia community: in October 2013 there were 31,000 active editors with about half of the active editors spending at least one hour a day editing, and a fifth spend more than three hours
3	Love of books	–
4	Broad overall knowledge of life and the world	Wikipedia provides access to broad knowledge of life and the world. In addition Wikipedia provides an environment in which librarians can share their knowledge and support their users who may also wish to share their knowledge.
5	Strong organizational skills	There are currently 4,616,531 articles in the English-language version of Wikipedia. In order to help manage such a large number of articles there will be a need to have good organisation skills (e.g. in making use of metadata such as Wikipedia categories) to help manage the service.
6	Good with numbers	As described in a post on Analytics Events: For Learning and For Research, the 1:AM conference Wikipedia provides a wide range of metrics, which may be of relevance  to those with interests in altmetrics.
7	Friendly	Aligned with Wikipedia principle that Editors should treat each other with respect and civility
8	Ethical	Aligned with Wikipedia principle that Editors should treat each other with respect and civility
9	Personable	Aligned with Wikipedia principle that Editors should treat each other with respect and civility
10	Basic affinity for working with large volumes of information	This is of direct relevance to Wikipedia.
11	Computer skills	This is of direct relevance to Wikipedia.

Perhaps the librarian trait which does not initially appear to be aligned with interests in Wikipedia is a love of books. However the Wikibooks service which, along with Wikipedia, is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation does provide access to an open-content collection of text books that anyone can edit which currently hosts 2,722 books with 49,758 pages. In addition librarians with a love of books may well find that the Wikipedia summary of  lists of books that have articles on Wikipedia, organised by various criteria may provide a useful starting point for sharing their expertise!

Of course the library traits of friendliness and being personable will traditionally have been relevant to the real world environment and visitors to the physical library. Nowadays if would be appropriate to relate these traits to the online environment, just as they would also apply to engagement with patrons on the telephone.

Librarians and Wikipedia: an Ideal Match!

I would argue that there are a number of other important key characteristics shared by dedicated professional librarians who are comfortable working in today’s online environment which are relevant to an environment in which Wikipedia provide a resource which is widely used.

In a talk on “Wikipedia in the library – the elephant in the (reading) room?” given at the LILAC 2014 conference Nancy Graham and Andrew Gray pointed out the flaws in the view that: “We have a problem. The kids these days are reading too many encyclopedias“. As can be seen from their slides they argued that considerations of the relevance of Wikipedia in education provides an ideal teaching moment for thinking critically about online material,  differentiating the good from the bad and even engaging with the means of production.

Beyond digital literacy, librarians are also perceived as belonging to a trusted profession. Although expertise in use of online tools is now essential for librarians, not all online tools will necessarily respect users’ privacy concerns – indeed as Phil Bradley recently pointed out Google is tracking your every move.  Other popular online services, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. will also track your online activities and display ads based on the resources you visit.

Although such tools will be used by librarians, they will find that Wikipedia provides a more ethical online environment, with visitors to the Web site not having to worry out intrusive adverts or their browsing patterns and online profile being sold to advertisers.

Librarians and Wikipedia: surely an ideal match! Wouldn’t you agree? If you do agree I’d be interested to hear how you are using Wikipedia in your library. If, however, you don’t agree feel free to give your reasons why you feel librarians should not actively engage with Wikipedia.

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About the author

Brian Kelly is the Innovation Advocate at Cetis, University of Bolton. He has responsibilities for promoting use of innovative technologies and practices in higher and further education. Brian has given talks on the importance of Wikipedia for librarians including “Editing Wikipedia: Why You Should and How You Can Support Your Users” at the CILIP Wales 2014 conference and “Why and How Librarians Should Engage With Wikipedia” at the CILIPS Autumn Gathering 2014. Brian has also written a number of blog posts about Wikipedia including Top Wikipedia Tips for Librarians: Why You Should Contribute and How You Can Support Your Users and Wikipedia, Librarians and CILIP.

About this post

This post was submitted to the CILIP Blogger Challenge, a competition which provides bloggers the opportunity to talk about important library, knowledge and information issues. Posts must be between 500-1,500 words long and must be submitted by Friday 7 November. Submissions will be judged on the following criteria: 1) be short and focussed on one issue; 2) have a short, meaningful and descriptive title; 3) be relevant; 4) be bold and encourage debates; 5) be original and 6) make complex concepts and ideas accessible to non-experts.

However since criteria 5 requires that submissions be original (i.e. “should provide a new and original perspective and should not have been published anywhere else previously, including on your own blog”) this post is being published after the CILIP Blogger Competition judges have selected the winning blog posts.

The post did not win the challenge. The winning post of the CILIP Blogger Challenge was entitled “Is digitisation the answer or is digital preservation the question?” and was written by Jenny O’Neill. The 4 “highly commended” blog posts  are:

1. Managing agricultural indigenous knowledge in my rural library by Eric Nelson Haumba
2. Architecture, memory and metaphor in the digital domain by Nadia Holmes
3. Libraries and archives could teach gamers a thing or two by Ros Malone
4. Sharing stories: how libraries can help new parents live happily ever after by Katy Loudon

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“Proud to be a Librarian” – Reflections on #CILIPSAG14

CILIP Scotland Autumn Gathering

The CILIP Scotland Autumn Gathering event took place in Edinburgh on Thursday 30 October 2014. Although the CILIP Scotland Web site provides information about the event, a more comprehensive set of resources can be found on the Lanyrd entry for the event, including links to speakers’ slides (where available), additional speaker information, links to archives of event tweets, etc.

“Proud to be a Librarian”

The highlight of the day’s event for me and other participants was the opening plenary talk on “Full Disclosure: Hillsborough and the human side of information work” given by Jan Perry, the CILIP Vice President (and President in the new year).

In the presentation Jan  described her work with the Hillsborough Independent Panel. This was a very moving presentation, especially for someone, like me, from Liverpool -and although I’m from the blue half of Liverpool hearing about Jan’s involvement with the independent panel for the Hillsborough disaster brought back particular strong memories as my dad died around that time.

As I commented during the talk:

Listening to talk about Hillsborough, The Sun, etc at #CILIPSAG14 is making me feel angry. Memories of 80s: miners strike, Thatcherism.

Others also shared their thoughts on the presentation, including @AminaTShah who began by commenting that:

#CILIPSAG14 Jan Parry describing her role in the Hillsborough enquiry and proving information really is power.

and went on to report how:

Liverpool libraries helped families who lost loved ones in the Hillsborough disaster search for information online #CILIPSAG14

and @bainofmylife who tweeted:

#CILIPSAG14 the small decisions, personal and political, documented and less so behind Hillsborough – sobering

But the comment which summarised the positive aspects of Jan’s talk was made by @libraries4us who concluded on a positive note:

Proud to be a Librarian today after hearing about their contribution to the Hillsborough Independent Panel #CILIPSAG14

Unfortunately there was no time for questions but over the coffee break I was able to thank Jan for her talk; she told me that I was not alone in my emotional response to the talk.

“[The] current attack on libraries is part of a wider movement against people without money”

The final plenary talk at the event was also full of passion.  Alan Bissett, author and playwright, provided the final keynote talk and was passionate about his belief in the importance of public libraries. Alan’s talk was more overtly political than Jan Perry’s but resonated with many in the audience, with @Miss_Horan7 commenting:

Thought provoking and powerful stuff at today’s #CILIPSAG14 How do we distill @alanbissett to share him round Scottish librarians?

and @JLMacfadyen concluding:

Final thought from Alan Bissett: current attack on libraries is part of a wider movement against people without money … #CILIPSAG14

The Role of Library Professionals  in Light of Such Political Considerations

As I have described the CILIPS Autumn Gathering began and concluded with plenary talks which had political connotations for information professionals. The third plenary talk, on “Be Informed: Recent changes to Copyright Law“, also had interesting implications for information professionals with Jason Miles-Campbell, manager of the JISC Legal service, pointing out that “the fact that our system of communication, teaching and entertainment does not grind to a standstill is in large part due to the fact that in most cases infringement of copyright has, historically, been ignored.”

The reminder of the CILIPS Autumn Gathering consisted of parallel sessions. As I mentioned previously I had been invited to facilitate a session on “Why and How Librarians Should Engage With Wikipedia”.

The day before the event began a tweet from @CILIPScotland explained:

We’d like to see our organisation documented on #Wikipedia. Can @briankelly inspire you to help? #CILIPSAG14

During the session I gave reasons why librarians should engage actively with Wikipedia, not only understanding some of the hidden secrets behind the service but also  why they should be willing to update Wikipedia articles and even create new articles.

The suggestion that there should be a Wikipedia article provided an opportunity to address issues of neutrality and the Wikipedia principal regarding a Neutral Point of View (NPOV).  As described on the Wikipedia Web site:

Editing from a neutral point of view (NPOV) means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic. All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view. NPOV is a fundamental principle of Wikipedia and of other Wikimedia projects. This policy is nonnegotiable and all editors and articles must follow it.

Prior to discussing the creation of an article, I updated the Wikipedia article for CILIP to include details of the membership numbers since CILIP was founded in 2002.  As can be seen from the figures shown below there has been a drop in the membership numbers every year since CILIP was founded (note where possible the figures have been taken from CILIP annual reports but not all annual reports are available).

	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014
CILIP members nos.	~23,000	22,689	N.A.	(20,373)	N.A.	19,206	18,490	17,634	17,192	15,705	14,555	13,974	13,470

The decline in CILIP membership numbers has been a bone of contention over recent years. It would probably therefore be inappropriate for a Wikipedia user who is employed by CILIP to comment on the membership trends, as this would conflict with the neutral point of view principle. I would, however, suggest that if a CILIP employee has access to membership numbers for 2002 and 2004-2006 these could be added to the table,  ideally with a comment on the talk page declared a vested interest.

I used this example when I address the suggestions that there should be a Wikipedia article for CILIPS.

Initially I asked whether CILIPS, the CILIP in Scotland organisation should be regarded as sufficiently notable to have its own Wikipedia article. As described in Wikipedia:

On Wikipedia, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article. Information on Wikipedia must be verifiable; if no reliable third-party sources can be found on a topic, then it should not have a separate article. Wikipedia’s concept of notability applies this basic standard to avoid indiscriminate inclusion of topics. Article and list topics must be notable, or “worthy of notice”. Determining notability does not necessarily depend on things such as fame, importance, or popularity—although those may enhance the acceptability of a subject that meets the guidelines explained below.

However in discussions I discovered that CILIPS has its own governance, its own web site and as involved in consultations with the Scottish Parliament for the development of the National Library of Scotland Bill 2011. This would seem to make it appropriate for there to be a Wikipedia article for CILIPS.

We then discussed the need for content to be provided by contributors who have a neutral point of view. I suggested that the talk page for the CILIP article could provide a forum for discussions about the creation and evolution of a CILIPS article.

However as I concluded the session I was informed that a CILIPS article already exists! The Wikipedia article, entitled Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland, is shown. Looking at the history for the page we can see that it was created on 5 November 2013. However on 9 August 2014 it was proposed that the article should be deleted. In response one user “added a reference to a Scottish Parliament document. I believe this organization is sufficiently notable to remain given that they were consulted in writing a national library bill.” It would appear that this information provide sufficient evidence of the notability of the organisation.

Conclusions: The Importance of Librarians’ Trustworthiness

I began this post by describing two plenary talks which described organisations (the police force and the Labour party in Scotland) whose reputations have been undermined through a loss of trust. We are not in that position with libraries. And yet librarians and information professional should not rest on their laurels. In my talk (the slides are available on Slideshare and embedded below) I spoke about the close parallels between librarians and Wikipedia, both of which aim to provide neutral and unbiased access to information. Wikipedia had documented its core principles which aim to ensure that Wikipedia provides a neutral source of information.

A while ago I came across an article entitled “So who’s editing the SNHU Wikipedia page?” which described how analysis of editing patterns and deviations from the norm may be indicative of inappropriate Wikipedia editing strategies, such as pay-for updates to institutional Wikipedia articles.

The article  pointed out how the PR sector has responded to criticisms that PR companies have been failing to abide by the Wikimedia Foundation’s terms of use: Top PR Firms Promise They Won’t Edit Clients’ Wikipedia Entries on the Sly. The article describes the Statement on Wikipedia from participating communications firms which is hosted on Wikipedia. The following statement was issued in 10 June 2014:

On behalf of our firms, we recognize Wikipedia’s unique and important role as a public knowledge resource. We also acknowledge that the prior actions of some in our industry have led to a challenging relationship with the community of Wikipedia editors.

Our firms believe that it is in the best interest of our industry, and Wikipedia users at large, that Wikipedia fulfil its mission of developing an accurate and objective online encyclopedia. Therefore, it is wise for communications professionals to follow Wikipedia policies as part of ethical engagement practices.

We therefore publicly state and commit, on behalf of our respective firms, to the best of our ability, to abide by the following principles:

• To seek to better understand the fundamental principles guiding Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
• To act in accordance with Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines, particularly those related to “conflict of interest.”
• To abide by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Terms of Use.
• To the extent we become aware of potential violations of Wikipedia policies by our respective firms, to investigate the matter and seek corrective action, as appropriate and consistent with our policies.
• Beyond our own firms, to take steps to publicize our views and counsel our clients and peers to conduct themselves accordingly.

We also seek opportunities for a productive and transparent dialogue with Wikipedia editors, inasmuch as we can provide accurate, up-to-date, and verifiable information that helps Wikipedia better achieve its goals.

A significant improvement in relations between our two communities may not occur quickly or easily, but it is our intention to do what we can to create a long-term positive change and contribute toward Wikipedia’s continued success.

If we wish to maintain the level of trust which librarians currently possess and we wish to see librarians supporting use of Wikipedia, should there be a similar statement of neutrality for those who are members of CILIP and CILIPS?

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Forthcoming Talks on Wikipedia in Edinburgh

Yesterday was the first anniversary since I started work at Cetis. During that period  I have been involved in two main areas of work: supporting the outreach and engagement aspects of the LACE (Learning Analytics Community Exchange) project and promoting use of open educational practices and in particular, use of Wikipedia.

Later today I will be travelling to Edinburgh to give talks about Wikipedia at two conferences.

Tomorrow I’ll be explaining “Why and How Librarians Should Engage With Wikipedia” at the CILIP Scotland Autumn Gathering. I will explain how Wikipedia provides a good match for the interests of librarians and how librarians can become involved in updating Wikipedia content in order to both support their role as librarians and t develop skills and expertise which can be used in supporting their user communities.

On Friday I will give a joint presentation with Filip Maljković at the Eduwiki 2014 conference. In the talk on “Working with Wikimedia Serbia” we will summarise the Eduwiki Serbia Conference and Learning Day which I attended earlier this year,

I was pleased to observe that both events are fully subscribed, which might perhaps indicate the level of interest in open practices, such as making use of Wikipedia.

The slides for “Why and How Librarians Should Engage With Wikipedia” and “Working with Wikimedia Serbia” are available on Slideshare and embedded below. Comments on the slides are welcomed. Also note that the Twitter hashtags for the events are “#cilips1g14” and “eduwiki”14 so feel free to participate in the discussions on Twitter if you can’t make it to either of the events

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#1amconf, Altmetrics and Raising the Visibility of One’s Research

1:AM, the First Altmetrics Conference

As described in a post entitled Analytics Events: For Learning and For Research, the 1:AM conference, the first dedicated altmetrics conference took place in London last week.

This was a fascinating conference, with lively discussion taking place at the conference and on the #1amconf Twitter back channel.

The conference embraced event amplification technologies, with a number of remote speakers giving their talks using Google Hangouts and all of the plenary talks being live-streamed and made available on the conference’s YouTube channel.

With so much discussion taking place across a range of channels I created a Lanyrd entry for the conference and publicised it on the final day of the conference.

I’m pleased to say that many of the participants and event organisers used the Lanyrd page to provide access to the various reports on the sessions, access to slides used by the speakers and video recordings of the talks, photos of the event and archives of the discussions and arguments which took place on Twitter: at the time of writing links have been added to 35 separate resources.

Altmetrics as an Indicator of Quality or of Interest?

On the first morning of opening day of the conference in particular there were lively discussions on the value of altmetrics with Professor David Colquhoun (@David_Colquhoun) in particular being scathing in his criticisms:

To show that #altmetrics trivialises and corrupts science is to look at high scoring papers http://www.dcscience.net/?p=6369 #1amconf

The blog post on Why you should ignore altmetrics and other bibliometric nightmares mentioned in this tweet generated much discussion on the blog and elsewhere. For those with an interest in this area I recommend reading the post and the follow-up comments, such as this response from Euan Adie, founder of the Altmetric.com company:

Hi David. Thanks for writing the post! I founded Altmetric.com. I think you and Andrew have some fair points, but wanted to clear up the odd bit of confusion.

I think your underlying point about metrics is fair enough (I am happy to disagree quietly!). You’re conflating metrics, altmetrics and attention though.

Before anything else, to be absolutely, completely clear: I don’t believe that you can tell the quality of a paper from numbers (or tweets). The best way to determine the quality of a paper is to read it. I also happen to agree about post publication review and that too much hype harms science. 

…

Euan concluded his comment by providing a link to his post which suggested that those with interests in the impact of scientific research to Broaden your horizons: impact doesn’t need to be all about academic citations.

The consensus at the conference seemed to be that the view (perhaps based on misunderstandings)  that altmetrics would provide an alternative to citation analysis to determine the quality of research and should determine how research should be funding is no longer widely accepted; instead altmetrics are regarded as being complementary to citation data and can provide a broader picture, especially of how research is being discussed and debated.

Raising the Visibility of One’s Research: Kudos

In discussions with other participants I heard how the view that researchers (and funders of research) had responsibilities for raising the visibility of their research is becoming accepted: the view that only one’s peers need be interested in the research was felt to be no longer relevant. “We need to be seen to be able to justify funding for research“was one comment I heard.

Back in March 2012 in a post on Marketing for Scientists Martin Fenner made a similar point:

Scientists may feel uncomfortable about marketing their work, but we all are doing it already. We know that giving a presentation at a key meeting can be a boost for our career, and we know about the importance of maintaining an academic homepage listing our research interests and publications. And people reading this blog will understand that a science blog can be a powerful marketing tool.

But if researchers are now accepted the need to raise the visibility of their research, the question then is what tools can they use to support this goal?

The session on Altmetrics in the last year and what’s on the roadmap provided brief summaries about altmetrics application including talks about  Altmetric, Plum Analytics, Impactstory, PLOS, Mendeley, Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association and Kudos.

Kudos was the one tool which was new to me. A recent post which describes how Kudos Integrates Altmetric Data to Help Researchers see Online Dissemination of Articles summarised the aim of the service:

Kudos is a new service designed to help scholars and their institutions increase the impact of their published research articles. Altmetric tracks and collates mentions of research articles on social media, blogs, news outlets and other online sources. This integration means mentions are now incorporated on the Kudos metrics pages for individual authors, and accompanied by a short summary which further details the number of mentions per source. Each article is assigned a score based on the amount of attention it has received to date, and authors are able to click through to see a sample of the original mentions of their article.

I have created an account on Kudos. I was able to quickly claim many of my research papers. As can be seen from the screenshot of the dashboard  a number of my papers already have an Altmetric score, which is defined as “a reflection of the amount of interest your publication has attracted across news outlets and social media“.

My paper on Accessibility 2.0: Next Steps for Web Accessibility, for example, has an Altmetrics score of 6. If I wanted to raise the visibility and impact of the paper the Kudos tool allows me to:

Explain: Explain your work and tell readers what it’s about and why it’s important.

Enrich: Enrich your publication by adding links to related materials.

Share: Share a link to your publication by email and social media.

Measure: Measure the impact on your publication performance.

Raising the Visibility of One’s Research: Wikipedia

In a recent post entitled Wikimedia and Metrics: A Poster for the 1:AM Altmetrics Conference I described the metrics for Wikipedia articles which may provide indications of the effectiveness of the outreach of the article. The post summarised a poster which was displayed at the conference and which is shown in this post.

As may be shown by usage metrics, Wikipedia can provide a mechanism for raising the visibility of topics described in Wikipedia articles, which can include articles based on research work.

It would appear that Kudos and Wikipedia both provide mechanisms for enhancing interest in research work. But these two tools provide contrasting approaches to the way they support such dissemination work.

With Kudos, authors of research papers are expected to provide summaries of their work. by (a) adding a short title to the publication to help make it easier to find and can help increase citations; (b) adding a simple, non-technical explanation of your publication will make it easier to find, and more accessible to a broader audience and (c) adding an explanation of what is most unique and/or timely about your work, and the difference it might make, will help increase readership.

In contrast, content added to Wikipedia should be provided based on the fundamental principles of Wikipedia , known as the five pillars. In brief:

1. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia: It combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. Wikipedia is not a soapbox, an advertising platform, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, or a web directory.
2. Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view: We strive for articles that document and explain the major points of view, giving due weight with respect to their prominence in an impartial tone. We avoid advocacy and we characterize information and issues rather than debate them.
3. Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute: Since all editors freely license their work to the public, no editor owns an article and any contributions can and will be mercilessly edited and redistributed. Respect copyright laws, and never plagiarize from sources.
4. Editors should treat each other with respect and civility: Respect your fellow Wikipedians, even when you disagree. Apply Wikipedia etiquette, and don’t engage in personal attacks. Seek consensus, avoid edit wars, and never disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point.
5. Wikipedia has no firm rules: Wikipedia has policies and guidelines, but they are not carved in stone; their content and interpretation can evolve over time. Their principles and spirit matter more than their literal wording, and sometimes improving Wikipedia requires making an exception.

The second of these principles,  which expects Wikipedia articles to be written from a neutral point of view, will be the most challenging for researchers who would like to use Wikipedia to raise the visibility of their research to a wider audience. One of three core content policies for Wikipedia articles is that, content should be provided from a neutral point of view – and it will be difficult to do this if you wish to publish or cite content based on one’s own research. Another challenge for researchers is a second core content policy  which states that Wikipedia articles must not contain original research.

What Is To Be Done?

Perhaps a simple approach which could be made by open researchers who are willing to share their experiences openly would be ensure that initial desktop research  which typically may be used as a literature review is used to support existing articles.

However the bigger challenge is to address the tensions between the funders’ requirement to ensure that research they fund is widely disseminated and exploited by others and Wikipedia’s requirement for neutrality.

In a recent post on Links From Wikipedia to Russell Group University Repositories I highlighted similar challenges for universities which may be tempted to seek to exploit the SEO benefits which links from Wikipedia to institutional web pages may provide.

In the blog post I cited an article from the PR community who had recognised the dangers that PR companies can be easily tempted to provide links to clients’ web sites for similar reasons. In response to concerns raised by the Wikipedia community Top PR Firms Promise[d] They Won’t Edit Clients’ Wikipedia Entries on the Sly. The article,which is hosted on Wikipedia, describes the Statement on Wikipedia from participating communications firms . The following statement was issued in 10 June 2014:

On behalf of our firms, we recognize Wikipedia’s unique and important role as a public knowledge resource. We also acknowledge thattheprior actions of some in our industry have led to a challenging relationshipwiththe community of Wikipedia editors.Our firms believe that it is in the best interest of our industry, and Wikipedia users at large, that Wikipedia fulfill its mission of developing anaccurate andobjective online encyclopedia. Therefore, it is wise for communications professionals to follow Wikipedia policies as part of ethical engagement practices.We therefore publicly state and commit, on behalf of our respective firms, to the best of our ability, to abide by the following principles:

• To seek to better understand the fundamental principles guiding Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
• To act in accordance with Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines, particularly those related to “conflict of interest.”
• To abide by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Terms of Use.
• To the extent we become aware of potential violations of Wikipedia policies by our respective firms, to investigate the matter and seek corrective action, as appropriate and consistent with our policies.
• Beyond our own firms, to take steps to publicize our views and counsel our clients and peers to conduct themselves accordingly.

We also seek opportunities for a productive and transparent dialogue with Wikipedia editors, inasmuch as we can provide accurate, up-to-date, and verifiable information that helps Wikipedia better achieve its goals.

A significant improvement in relations between our two communities may not occur quickly or easily, but it is our intention to do what we can to create a long-term positive change and contribute toward Wikipedia’s continued success.

Might research councils and other funders of research find it useful to embrace similar principles? And is there a role for research librarians and others with responsibilities for supporting members of the research community in developing similar guidelines which will help ensure that researchers make use of Wikipedia in a way which supports the Wikipedia principles which have helped to ensure that the encyclopedia is regarded as a valuable source of information?

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Wikimedia and Metrics: A Poster for the 1:AM Altmetrics Conference

1:AM – time for an altmetrics conference!

The 1:AM Altmetrics conference is being held in London today and tomorrow, 25-26^th September.

The aims of the conference are summarised on the conference web site. It particular I noted:

We will be taking a closer look at how authors, readers, funders, publishers and institutions are beginning to integrate altmetrics into their scholarly communication processes — and the challenges that they face along the way.

With a quick overview of recent developments and future plans, we will aim to better understand how and why altmetrics can be of use to the community — and draw further inspiration from those outside academia.

The conference programme is packed with interesting talks and workshop sessions running from 9am to 5/5.30 pm on both days. It is not surprising that the conference was fully booked shortly after the conference was announced.

Wikimedia and Metrics

I will be attending the conference and will present a poster designed by myself and Martin Poulter on behalf of Wikimedia UK. The poster (which is shown and is also available on Scribd) summarises metrics which are available for Wikipedia articles, including usage statistics for articles and media, information on both in-bound and outbound links to and from Wikipedia articles, statistics on the contributions made by editors of Wikipedia articles and statistics on the evolution of articles.

If you are familiar with Wikipedia metrics, if you visit a Wikipedia article you will notice a “View history” button near the top of the window, as shown below for the Global warming article.

Clicking on this button and then selecting the Revision history statistics you will see a comprehensive set of statistics about the article. At the time of writing (9 September 2014) you can see that:

• The first edit was made on 30 October 2001.
• The latest edit was made 4 days ago.
• There have been 4,776 minor edits, 3,307 anonymous edits (identified by an IP address) and 200 edits made by bots (automated edits).

In addition to information about edits to the articles indications are provided on the articles potential impact and levels of interest.  For example there are:

• 8,042 links to the article from other Wikipedia articles
• 527 links in-bound links to the article.
• 1,712 watchers (who receive notification of changes to the article).
• Over 406,000 views of the article over the past 60 days.

Next Steps

As the world’s fifth most popular web site, Wikipedia shapes public discussion of every area of theoretical and applied science. Its open data and APIs are used by to develop new evaluative tools to assess the impact of a user, set of content, or contributing organisation.

The Wikimedia community welcomes opportunities to exchange ideas on further developments with the altmetrics community. Feel free to leave any comments, questions or observations on this blog post.

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Links From Wikipedia to Russell Group University Repositories

Wikipedia as the Front Matter to all Research

A session at the recent Wikimania conference provided an opportunity for discussion on the topics: “The fount of all knowledge – wikipedia as the front matter to all research“. The abstract describes how:

This discussion focuses on how Wikipedia could become the entry or discovery point to all significant research for the general public, and for scholars who are working just outside of the topic of interest. For most people, even researchers from closely related areas, summaries and explanations of a piece of research can be a crucial means both to discover and to begin to get into a new piece of research.

Currently overviews of research topics are supported through two mechanisms: reviews and “front matter” content. A review is a systematic summary of a field, written by an expert. These go out of date quickly, particularly in rapidly moving areas of research. Front matter is “News and Views” pieces, often found at the “front” of scientific journals that explain newly published research and put it in context. This often includes a discussion of explaining how the research is an important advance and its broader societal implications.

Both of these functions could easily be provided in a more up to date and scalable manner by tapping into a global community of experts. Wikipedia articles are often the top web search result for initial queries in many research areas and these articles are a major source of traffic for scientific journals. As the first port of call for many users of research and a significant discovery route the potential for Wikipedia as a form of dynamic, expertly curated “front matter” for the whole research literature is substantial. This facilitated discussion session will focus on how this role could be enhanced, what is currently missing and what risks exist in taking this route.

Reading this I wondered about the extent to which Wikipedia articles currently link to papers hosted in institutional repositories.

In order to explore this question I made use of Wikipedia’s External links search tool to monitor the number of links to from Wikipedia pages from to institutional repositories provided by the Russell Group universities.

The survey was carried out on 28 August 2014 using the service. Note that the current finding can be obtained by following the link in the final column.

Table 1: Numbers of Links to Wikipedia from Repositories Hosted at Russell Group Universities

Ref. No.	Institutional Repository Details	Nos. of links from Wikipedia	View Results
1	Institution: University of Birmingham Repository used: eprint Repository (http://eprints.bham.ac.uk/)	2	[Link]
2	Institution: University of Bristol Repository used: ROSE (http://rose.bris.ac.uk/)	6	[Link]
3	Institution: University of Cambridge Repository used: Dspace @ Cambridge (http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/)	82	[Link]
4	Institution: Cardiff University Repository used: ORCA (http://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/)	1	[Link]
5	Institution: University of Durham Repository used: DRO (http://dro.dur.ac.uk/)	109	[Link]
6	Institution: University of Edinburgh Repository used: ERA (http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/)	55	[Link]
7	Institution: University of Exeter Repository used: ERIC (https://eric.exeter.ac.uk/repository/)	17	[Link]
8	Institution: University of Glasgow Repository used: Enlighten (http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/)	120	[Link]
9	Institution: Imperial College Repository used: Spiral (http://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/)	5	[Link]
10	Institution: King’s College London Repository used: King’s Research Portal (https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/)	45	[Link]
11	Institution: University of Leeds Repository used: White Rose Research Online (http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/)	65	[Link]
12	Institution: University of Liverpool Repository used: University of Liverpool Research Archive (http://research-archive.liv.ac.uk/)	1	[Link]
13	Institution: LSE Repository used: LSE Research Online (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/)	186	[Link]
14	Institution: University of Manchester Repository used: eScholar (https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/)	74	[Link]
15	Institution: Newcastle University Repository used: Newcastle Eprints (http://eprint.ncl.ac.uk/)	4	[Link]
16	Institution: University of Nottingham Repository used: Nottingham Eprints (http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/)	10	[Link]
17	Institution: University of Oxford Repository used: ORA (http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/)	19	[Link]
18	Institution: Queen Mary, University of London Repository used: QMRO (https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/)	15	[Link]
19	Institution: Queen’s University Belfast Repository used: QUB Research Portal (http://pure.qub.ac.uk/portal/)	3	[Link]
20	Institution: University of Sheffield Repository used: The University of Sheffield also uses the White Rose repository which is also used by Leeds and York. See the Leeds entry for the statistics.	(65)	[Link]
21	Institution: University of Southampton Repository used: eprints.soton (http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/)	134	[Link]
22	Institution: University College London Repository used: UCL Discovery (http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/)	98	[Link]
23	Institution: University of Warwick Repository used: WRAP (http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/)	57	[Link]
24	Institution: University of York Repository used: The University of York uses the White Rose repository which is also used by Leeds and Sheffield. See the Leeds entry for the statistics.	(65)	[Link]
	Total	1,108

NOTE:

• The URL of the repositories is taken from the OpenDOAR service.
• Since the universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York share a repository the figures are provided in the entry for Leeds.
• A number of institutions appear to host more than one research repository. In such cases the repository which appears to be the main research repository for the institution is used.

Discussion

The Survey Methodology

It should be noted that this initial survey does note pretend to provide an answer to the question “How many research papers hosted by institutional repositories provided by Russell group universities are cited in Wikipedia articles?” Rather the survey reflects the use of this blog as an ‘open notebook’ in which the initial steps in gathering evidence are documented openly in order to solicit feedback on the methodology. This post also documents flaws and limitations in the methodology in order that others who may wish to use similar approaches are aware of the limitations. Possible ways in which such limitations can be addressed are given and feedback is welcomed.

In particular it should be noted that the search engine used in the survey covers all public pages on the Wikipedia web site and not just Wikipedia articles. It includes Talk pages and user profile pages.

In addition the repository web sites include a variety of resources and not just research papers; for example it was observed that some user profile pages for researchers provide links to their profile on their institutional repository.

It was also noticed that some of the files linked to from Wikipedia were listed in the search results as PDFs. Since it seems likely that PDFs referenced on Wikipedia which are hosted on institutional repositories will be research papers a more accurate reflection on the number of research papers which are cited in institutional repositories may be obtained by filtering the findings to include only PDF results.

In addition if the findings from the search tool were restricted to Wikimedia articles only (and omitted Talk pages, user profile pages, etc.) we should get a better understanding of the extent to which Wikipedia is being used as the “front matter” to research hosted in Russell group university institutional repositories.

If any Wikipedia developers would be interested in talking up this challenge, this could help to provide a more meaningful benchmark which could be useful in monitoring trends.

Policy Implications of Encouraging Wikipedia to Act as the Front Matter to Research

There are risks when gathering such data that observers with vested interests will seek to make too much of the findings if they suggest a league table, particularly if there seem to be runaway leaders.

However as can be seen from the accompanying pie chart in this case no single institutional repository has more than 17% of the total number of links (and remember that these figures are flawed due to the reasons summarised above).

However there will be interesting policy implications if universities agree with the suggestion that Wikipedia can act as “the front matter to all research”, especially if links from Wikipedia to the institution’s repository results in increased traffic to the repository. Another way of characterising the proposal would be to suggest that Wikipedia can act as “the marketing tool to an institution’s research outputs”.

This could easily lead to institutions failing to abide by Wikipedia’s core principles regarding providing content updates from a neutral point of view and a failure to abide by the Wikimedia Foundation’s terms of use.

Earlier today I came across an article entitled “So who’s editing the SNHU Wikipedia page?” which described how analysis of editing patterns and deviations from the norm may be indicative of inappropriate Wikipedia editing strategies, such as pay-for updates to institutional Wikipedia articles.

The article also pointed out how the PR sector has responded to criticisms that PR companies have been failing to abide by the Wikimedia Foundation’s terms of use: Top PR Firms Promise They Won’t Edit Clients’ Wikipedia Entries on the Sly. The article describes the Statement on Wikipedia from participating communications firms which is hosted on Wikipedia. The following statement was issued in 10 June 2014:

On behalf of our firms, we recognize Wikipedia’s unique and important role as a public knowledge resource. We also acknowledge that the prior actions of some in our industry have led to a challenging relationship with the community of Wikipedia editors.

Our firms believe that it is in the best interest of our industry, and Wikipedia users at large, that Wikipedia fulfill its mission of developing an accurate and objective online encyclopedia. Therefore, it is wise for communications professionals to follow Wikipedia policies as part of ethical engagement practices.

We therefore publicly state and commit, on behalf of our respective firms, to the best of our ability, to abide by the following principles:

• To seek to better understand the fundamental principles guiding Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
• To act in accordance with Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines, particularly those related to “conflict of interest.”
• To abide by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Terms of Use.
• To the extent we become aware of potential violations of Wikipedia policies by our respective firms, to investigate the matter and seek corrective action, as appropriate and consistent with our policies.
• Beyond our own firms, to take steps to publicize our views and counsel our clients and peers to conduct themselves accordingly.

We also seek opportunities for a productive and transparent dialogue with Wikipedia editors, inasmuch as we can provide accurate, up-to-date, and verifiable information that helps Wikipedia better achieve its goals.

A significant improvement in relations between our two communities may not occur quickly or easily, but it is our intention to do what we can to create a long-term positive change and contribute toward Wikipedia’s continued success.

If we wish to see Wikipedia acting as the front matter to research provided by the university sector should we be seeking to develop a similar statement on how we will do this whilst ensuring that we act in accordance with Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines? Of course the challenge would then be to identify what the appropriate best practices should be.

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Wikipedia, Librarians and CILIP

Wikipedia and Librarians

Wikipedia is important for librarians. A month ago in a post entitled Wikipedia and Information Literacy Article in CILIP Update I reported on an article published in CILIP Update about the role Wikipedia can play in information literacy. At the time the article was only available to CILIP members. However after a short embargo period I’m pleased to announce that a copy of the article is now freely available on Google Docs.

The article describes how:

Popular, ubiquitous, if often contested, Wikipedia can highlight many aspects of information literacy and librarians can use Wikipedia-related IL activities to provide practical training sessions for users.

However it is not just librarians with responsibilities for information literacy who should have interests in Wikipedia. The recent international Wikipedia conference, Wikimania 2014, hosted several sessions on the relevance of Wikipedia and related Wikimedia projects for those working in the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) sector including sessions entitled Creative Content, Evaluation, Organisations, Sources, Partnerships, Ecosystems, Models and Local. It seems there were no fewer that 20 individual GLAM sessions which were held including one which had the intriguing title “The Future of Libraries and Wikipedia“. The abstract for this session describes how:

Theoretically and strategically, Libraries and Wikipedia are natural allies. This relationship directly impacts our core activity of research and editing. Libraries are the ‘source of sources’, and Wikipedia is only as good as its sources. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has the viewership that libraries crave to bring people to their doors to do deeper research. By connecting Libraries and Wikipedia we can complete a virtuous circle of research and dissemination.

Encouraging Librarians to Be Creators and Not Just Consumers on Wikipedia

In addition to the sessions on Wikipedia I facilitated at the LILAC 2014 conference over the past year I have given several talks about Wikipedia including an invited plenary talk on “Editing Wikipedia: Why You Should and How You Can Support Your Users” at the CILIP Wales 2014 conference – a talk which was complemented by a blog post which provided Top Wikipedia Tips for Librarians: Why You Should Contribute and How You Can Support Your Users.

During the talk I encouraged participants to make use of the WiFi network to sign up for a Wikipedia account. I was pleased that during the talk one delegate announced:

Inspired by @briankelly to create Wikipedia account!! #cilipw14

I also suggested that those who had a interest in and a desire to make updates to Wikipedia articles they could do so during my talk. I pointed out that, as shown, the CILIP article in Wikipedia included slightly dated membership details from 2012 which could usefully be updated. However I pointed out the Wikipedia neutral point of view (NPOV) principle which means “representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic“.

One way of minimising risks of sub-conscious biases in articles is to ensure that content is provided by those who do not have direct involvement with the subject area of an article. For an article about an organisation it would therefore be appropriate for an article about CILIP should be updated by editors who are not employed by the organisation.

CILIP Membership Numbers Since Its Foundation

The Importance of CILIP Membership Data

A recent blog post by Barbara Band, the CILIP President, highlighted the importance of data about CILIP’s membership numbers. In a discussion about an apparent decline in membership numbers over recent years Barbara point out that:

The problem I have is with the statement about CILIP membership being at its lowest … the person stating this has selected the year 2010 as the benchmark. Why? Why not 2007 or 2004? Why not take the year that CILIP was last the LA and use those figures?

Following a recent Twitter discussion about CILIP membership numbers that CILIP Wikipedia article was updated: the article now states that “CILIP has 13,470 members as of May 2014” and cites the CILIP “Financial and membership report 8th July 2014” report (PDF format) as the source of this figure.

However although this information comes from a reliable source and was added by a Wikipedia contributor who is not employed by CILIP this information by itself does not address the suggestion made by Barbara Band that there is a need for membership numbers since CILIP was founded (in 2002) in order to be able to have an informed discussion on trends in membership numbers.

I was told by a member of CILIP that information on membership numbers is available on the CILIP web site but is not easy to find. The information can be found in the Annual reports and accounts (note since the reports are in PDF format the information cannot be found using the CILIP web site’s search facility).

The “Year end 2013 Financial report item 13 March 2014″ (PDF format) provides, in Appendix D, the CILIP Membership Statistics as at 28th February 2014.

The appendix includes details of the monthly membership numbers from January 2010 to February 2014. A graph of the membership numbers, taken from the report, is shown.

It was interesting to note that this image contained the following interpretation of the decline in membership numbers from 17,857 in January 2010 to 13, 756 I February 2014:

Trends
Looking at the year on year graph of membership figure, 2014 continues to reflect positive trends compared with previous years, but this will become more realistic as the year progresses.

I would interpret the graph as indicating a sharp decrease in membership numbers in spring (possibly when annual subscriptions must be paid) with a much smaller increase in numbers over the rest of the year, perhaps when new members join.

Finding Further Information

Although this information is useful it does not answer the question posed by Barbara Band when she said “the person stating this has selected the year 2010 as the benchmark. Why? Why not 2007 or 2004? Why not take the year that CILIP was last the LA and use those figures?“

An intriguing question for an information profession might be “How would you find the membership numbers of an organisation which has been in existence since 2002?” My initial attempt at using annual reports on, in this case CILIP’s Web site only provided relevant information for since 2010 – I understand that the CILIP web site may have been relaunched around this time, with old content lost.

My next attempt was therefore to use the Internet Archive. I found an archived copy of the Annual Report captured on 5 December 2008 which contained links to annual reports for 2005, 2006 and 2007. However the reports themselves (which were in PDF format) were not captured :-) However from the Internet Archive I managed to find an archived copy of the CILIP Membership page captured on 2 December 2002 which stated “CILIP is the professional Membership body of choice for around 23,000 Members“. Although this isn’t an authoritative figure it does provide an indication of the size of the organisation around the time it was established.

My fourth attempt was to make use of another Web archiving service – the UK Web Archive. I was able to find an archived page of CILIP’s Annual reports and accounts captured on 7 October 2008. However the Annual Report and Account 2006 (PDF format) does not provide membership numbers. Instead the figures are hidden within the statement:

If CILIP members, consumers, e-subscribers and stakeholders are taken together, then the CILIP community encompasses over 40,000 people who give their support to CILIP.

However even this bland statement is better than the Annual Report and Account 2005 (PDF format) which simply states:

The forthcoming year will see a renewed focus on membership growth

My final attempt at finding this information isn’t based on using an advanced search engine. Rather I’m seeking to make use of the ‘wisdom of the crowds’. If you’re reading this blog post and you were a member of CILIP between 2002 and 2010 perhaps you may still have copies of official CILIP papers which may contain information on CILIP membership figures during this period. If so, I would invite you to share this information, either as a comment on this post or, preferably, by updating the CILIP article on Wikipedia or the CILIP article’s Talk page. Use of the Talk page would be particularly appropriate if you are new to Wikipedia and are unsure as to the processes for updating content and ensuring that content is provided from a neutral point of view.

Note that the talk page currently contains the following information on CILIP membership numbers [N.A. means Not Available]:

	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013
Nos. of members	~23,000	N.A.	N.A.	N.A.	N.A.	N.A.	N.A.	N.A.	17,192	15,705	14,555	13,974

As its name suggests the Talk page, which every Wikipedia article has, can be used for discussions about the Wikipedia article. In addition to the thoughts I have added on finding sources for CILIP membership numbers, I have also added a section on “Additional Information for the CILIP Wikipedia Article” which invited suggestions for further developments to the page.

In addition to including further textual information and images to the article another development to the article could be further factual information provided to the article’s ‘info box’. As illustrated this currently contains the name and abbreviation of the organisation, its logo, foundation date and URL for the CILIP web site.

Looking at the American Library Association Wikipedia article for ideas, perhaps additional information such as location (London), region covered (UK), budget, numbers of staff and names of the president and other senior figures could also be provided.

It should be noted that, unlike the content provided in the main body of Wikipedia articles, the information provided in info boxes is harvested by the DBpedia service and made available as Linked Data which enables structured queries to be carried out on the information. Librarians and information professionals, in particular, will appreciate the benefits to be gained from carrying out structured queries!

Final Reflections

I was surprised how hard it was to find information on the membership number. However the exercise has highlighted some issues which I feel should be considered by those with responsibilities for managing organisational web sites:

• It can be useful to pro-actively ensure that the content of your web site is archived by a service such as the UK Web Archive prior to any Web site redevelopment work.
• Important information can be hidden in PDF files. Although PDF is an open standard and is suitable for archival purposes, the Web-based archiving infrastructure works better with Web-native file formats (i.e. HTML). In addition content held in PDF files may be hidden from search engines.

So although finding the information is proving difficult, the exercise has been useful in identifying some best practices for web site management which I hadn’t previously considered. In addition I have discovered the value of the Internet Archive and the UK Web Archive in ding content which has vanished from live web sites.

Finally, I hope that trusting the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ will help in finding the missing information and being able to respond to Barbara Band’s request that we “take the year that CILIP was last the LA and use those figures?“. Over to you!

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Wikipedia and Information Literacy Article in CILIP Update

Wikipedia and Information Literacy

The current issue of CILIP Update (access restricted to CILIP members and subscribers) features a two-page article entitled “Wikipedia and Information Literacy“. The article, which was written by myself, Nancy Graham and Andrew Gray is based on the Wikipedia workshop sessions and talks which we gave at the LILAC 2014 conference in Sheffield in April 2014.

The article is aimed at librarians, especially those with interests in information literacy.  As we described in order to address the pressures to do more in the time available for learning information literacy:

It is a good idea to consider use of resources and methods which are: a) already in widespread use; b) with which readers already have a positive relationship; and c) which can be used to demonstrate multiple aspects of information literacy within a single context.

The article goes on to point out that:

One such resource is the ubiquitous and popular – if often contested – Wikipedia. The ways in which Wikipedia is constructed and operates allows it to highlight many aspects of information literacy, while its high profile and broad subject base mean that users are likely to have some familiarity with it. In effect, we can take the information literacy question to where our readers are already going!

Wikipedia Sessions at LILAC 2014

The sessions we facilitated at the LILAC 2014 conference began with a presentation by Nancy and Andrew on “Wikipedia: it’s not the evil elephant in the library reading room” (see the slides on Slideshare which are embedded at the bottom of this post).

We then facilitated two workshops sessions: a practical session in which participants could signup for a Wikipedia account and familiarise themelevs with basic Wikipedia markup and the Wikipedia culture followed by an edit-a-thon in which participants looked at ways in which the existing Information Literacy Wikipedia article could be updated.

What Next?

Rather than updating the existing Information Literacy article we decided to create a new page which addresses information literacy from a UK perspective.  The fledgling page is available but, as can be seen, this is a work in progress. We urge librarians with an interest in information literacy to sign up to Wikipedia and contribute to this section.

The slides on Wikipedia: it’s not the evil elephant in the library reading room are available on Slideshare and embedded below.

 

The Plenary Talk as an Opportunity for Hands-on Activities

Traditional Lecture must DIE!

The “Traditional Lecture must DIE” argued Phil Root in a (err) TEDx lecture in September 2012. In the video he cited research which suggested that students learning is more effective when active engagement techniques are provided (5 minutes into the video).

Last Thursday an article in the Guardian’s Higher Education Network gave “Ten reasons we should ditch university lectures“.

Currently there have been 367 comments made to this article. If you have an interest in the relevance of lectures in teaching you may wish to contribute to the discussions. However my interest is in the effectiveness of plenary talks at conferences. A question I’d like to address is “Can we make use of interactive techniques in large-scale lecture theatres?” including conferences used for professional development.

The Plenary Talk as an Opportunity for Hands-on Activities

At the UKSG 2013 conference I recall a plenary talk by Laurel Haak on ORCID: Connecting research and researchers. As flagged at the very start of the video recording of the talk Laurel invited those who had a mobile computer with them to register for an ORCID ID during the talk. “Here is the challenge to you” Laurel said 2 minutes 50 second into her talk “Anyone who has a computer and you don’t already have an ORCID identifier please take about 30 seconds to register for one“.

I have used this approach myself when talking about researcher IDs. Last week I spoke at the CILIP Wales 2014 conference and used this approach again, but this time to encourage participants to sign up for a Wikipedia account.

I was pleased that during the talk one delegate announced:

Inspired by @briankelly to create Wikipedia account!! #cilipw14

I had announced that the talk would provide an opportunity for a CPD activity – I was pleased to be able to see evidence that this activity was successfully completed by at least one conference delegate.

Further Approaches for Encouraging Take-up of Wikipedia

In the opening talk at the conference, John Griffith, the Minister for Culture and Sport in the Welsh Government told the audience of the importance of the importance of gathering evidence of the ways in which librarians are engaging with their communities. He also encouraged Welsh librarians to “Make yourself heard!”

Although I had planned the Wikipedia user registration activity, the inspirational opening talk made me wonder how I could adapt my presentation to relate to such political considerations. The theme of the CILIP Wales 2014 conference was “Making a difference: libraries and their communities“. In my presentation I argued that librarians who supported their users in use of Wikipedia, which included creating and updating Wikipedia articles would be a way of engaging with communities in an effective way in light of the popularity of Wikipedia. A show of hands confirmed that Wikipedia was not only popular with the users: the vast majority of the audience made use of Wikipedia with only one (brave!) lady admitting that she had never visited Wikipedia.

Gathering Evidence of Take-up of Wikipedia

But how might we gather evidence of use of Wikipedia by librarians, which might be used as evidence of how librarians are engaging in a rapidly changing information environment? In my presentation I suggested that after spending about 60 seconds in creating a Wikipedia account the next step should be to create a Wikipedia profile page and I gave examples of a simple profile and a slightly more advanced profile which might provide inspiration for a profile page for new Wikipedia editors.

Since the majority of the audience were librarians working in Wales I showed the Wikipedians in Wales page and highlighted two examples of profile pages: one in which the user is willing to share their interests and one in which the user chooses to remains anonymous. I noticed that the Wikipedians in Wales page currently contains 136 entries. Looking at the history of this page it seems that the version of the page in July 2005 also contained 136 entries. It seems that embedding the relevant [category] tag in user profile pages hasn’t taken off. If the hundred of so who were present on the first day of the CILIP Wales conference were to sign up for a Wikipedia account, create a user profile and include the following line in their profile

[[Category:Wikipedians in Wales]]

we would have significant evidence of take-up in Wikipedia in Wales.

Furthermore the Wikipedian librarians page currently contains 267 entries. If you are a librarian and have a Wikipedia account, why wouldn’t you add the following to your user profile:

[[Category:Wikipedian librarians]]

Reflections

I have created a Storify archive of tweets related to my presentation as this enables me to reflect on comments made. I particularly welcomed the comment:

#CILIPW14 absolutely agree with #BrianKelly, if so many are using #Wikipedia, it can’t be dismissed by info professionals, realise & engage

I have given a number of Wikipedia sessions for those who wish to know more about editing Wikipedia. However such sessions are likely to attract only those who are already convinced of the value of Wikipedia. Of more importance, I feel, is being able to persuade sceptics or those who have not previously considered getting a Wikipedia account and updating Wikipedia articles or the reasons why updating Wikipedia articles is of particular relevance to information professionals and then to convert that moment of inspiration into actions: investing sixty seconds in creating a Wikipedia account and even spending a few more minutes in creating a user profile.

Traditional lectures won’t die, I feel. Especially as in today’s networked environment they can provide opportunities for the audience to be active during the lecture. And, of course, you don’t need mobile devices, Twitter and a WiFi network in order to interact with large audiences. As can be seen from the accompanying image taken at the IWMW 2013 event, you can engage with your audience in more traditional ways!

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Top Wikipedia Tips for Librarians: Why You Should Contribute and How You Can Support Your Users

Making a Difference: Libraries and their Communities

On Thursday 15 May I am giving an invited talk at the CILIP Cymru Wales Library and Information Conference 2014. The theme of this year’s conference is “Making a difference: libraries and their communities“. My contribution to this theme is entitled “Editing Wikipedia: Why You Should and How You Can Support Your Users“. In the talk I’ll be explaining why librarians and information professionals, whether working in academic or public libraries, should have a good understanding of Wikipedia and be able to support their users not only in consuming Wikipedia content but also in creating and updating Wikipedia content.

Top Tips for Librarians on Editing Wikipedia: Why You Should and How You Can Support Your Users

In the talk I’ll be giving my top ten tips for librarians who wish to use Wikipedia to support their community. These are summarized below.

1: Understand why Wikipedia is important to librarians

In a talk entitled Wikipedia in the library – the elephant in the (reading) room? presented at the LILAC 2014 conference Nancy Graham and Andrew Gray pointed out a perceived problem: “The kids these days are reading too many encyclopedias“. However rather than regarding the popularity of Wikipedia as a problem librarians should welcome the opportunity this “perfect teaching moment” can provide. We can help students how to tell the good from the bad; how to think critically about online material and how they can engage with the means of production.

We should also be prepared to question what librarians and academic mean when they say “don’t”. The Wikimedia UK’s Expert Outreach page provides some example of the benefits of use of Wikipedia in education. For example in the Wikimedia UK Annual Review 2012-13 [PDF] Cameron Neylon, Public Library of Science, argued that:

If you’re serious about ensuring public engagement in your research then you need to make damn sure your work can be incorporated into Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the most important engagement channel for your research.

and in an article entitled “21st-century Scholarship and Wikipedia” published in the Ariadne ejournal Amber Thomas, a former JISC Programme Manager, described how:

Wikipedia is an illustration of the way that academic work needs to change to benefit from a more educated public, a more networked world, in an age of information abundance. 21st-century scholars should be working with it, not against it.

In light of the popularity of Wikipedia with the user community, it is suggested that librarians should gain an understanding of the value it can provide.

2: Understand how Wikipedia is being used in education

The Eduwiki (UK) 2013 conference was held in Cardiff on 1-2 December 2013. The event, the second EduWiki conference held in the UK, included case studies on use of Wikipedia in higher education and the schools sector. Two of the presentations were of particular relevance to librarians:

1. Nancy Graham and Lisa Anderson outlined work at the University of Birmingham on Safe use of Wikipedia in the transition from school to University.
2. Humphrey Southall’s talk on Introducing Students to Independent Research Through Editing Wikipedia Articles on English Villages described how “Each student on a large first year human geography course at the University of Portsmouth is assigned a different Wikipedia stub article, unedited for at least a year, about an English village. They are required to extend it “to provide a rounded description of the place and … an account of its historical development””.

In brief, librarians should seek to gain an understanding of the approaches being take to use of Wikipedia within the education sector. The

3: Gain a better understanding of the Wikipedia service

Librarians would be expected to understand advanced how search interfaces work in order to be able to support their user community. Similarly librarians should gain an understanding of the development of Wikipedia articles which can be seen from use of the View History option. The Talk page may also provide useful summary of discussions about the evolution and scope of Wikipedia articles.

4: Be willing to update Wikipedia articles

The entry for Ely in the Wikipedia article on Libraries in Cardiff states that:

Ely Library is due to undergo development Mid 2014, with plans to move into the Jasmine Centre on Cowbridge Road.

At some point during 2014 this will need updating. In addition to changes to the date this sentence doesn’t read very well – wouldn’t “Ely Library is due to undergo development by mid 2014” be an improvement? If you are a librarian or information professional should you take responsibilities for updating incorrect information and improving its readability, especially if such updates could be done in seconds?

5: Create a Wikipedia account

You can make updates to Wikipedia articles without having a Wikipedia account. But having an account and signing in when making updates has several advantages: as well as keeping a record of your contributions you need to be signed in in order to create new articles, join in discussions and have customised preferences.

6: Create a Wikipedia profile

Although you do not need to create a profile page, such pages can be used to provide a summary of your interests and your involvement with Wikipedia. Creating a user profile can also provide an opportunity to learn Wikimedia markup language.

A good approach to creating your user profile is to browse existing user profiles and make use of the markup of one’s which appeal to you. For example Msnancygraham’s profile is a good example of a simple profile whereas Lawsonstu’s profile contains more advanced markup features, as illustrated.

7: Be ethical

When showing others how to use Wikipedia it’s not a good idea to encourage them to vandalise a page in order to demonstrate how quickly such updates are removed – remember that Wikipedia volunteers may have to remove such vandalism.

8: Be prepared for your contributions to be changed (but be willing to get involved in discussions on Talk page)

The fact that anyone can edit Wikipedia articles has been regarded as a weakness of the service but it is now increasingly being acknowledged as a strength. However you should be aware that updates that you make may be removed or new articles deleted. If you are thinking about making significant changes to an article it would be advisable to use the article’s Talk page to state your intentions.

9: Understand the Wikipedia principles

The reason that updates are removed or new articles deleted is likely to be due to a failure to observe the five fundamental principles by which the Wikimedia community operates. Wikipedia:

1. is an encyclopedia
2. is written from a neutral point of view
3. is free content that anyone can edit / use/ modify / share
4. editors should respect each other
5. does not have any firm rules

In particular note that original research should not be published in Wikipedia articles. All research must come from published sources such as peer-reviewed journals and books; University-level textbooks; magazines, journals and books published by respected publishing houses; mainstream newspapers; etc. Also note that content should be provided from a neutral point of view:

• If your viewpoint is in the majority, then it should be easy to substantiate it with reference to commonly accepted reference texts;
• If your viewpoint is held by a significant minority, then it should be easy to name prominent adherents;
• If your viewpoint is held by an extremely small minority, then — whether it’s true or not, whether you can prove it or not — it doesn’t belong in Wikipedia, except perhaps in some ancillary article.

10: Support others (and feel free to reuse existing materials)

Librarians will be well-positioned to support their users in making effective use of Wikipedia. This is particularly appropriate for the CILIP Wales conference in light of this year’s theme: “Making a difference: libraries and their communities“. As might be expected, the Wikipedia community is very supportive of openness and sharing so there is no need to design your training courses from scratch.

11: Don’t forget Wicipedia!

This post has provided ten tips for librarians wishing to support use of Wikipedia. Since the talk I will be giving will take place at the CILIP Wales conference I felt it would be appropriate to provide an additional top for Welsh librarians or librarians working in Wales: Don’t forget Wicipedia!

Slideshow

Note that the slides to be used in the presentation are available on Slideshare and embedded below:

Beyond the Presentation

Each year the Cetis conference provides an opportunity for developers, learning technologists, lectures and policy makers to come together to discuss recent innovations in the domain of education technology. This year’s conference, Cetis 2014, has the theme “Building the Digital Institution: Technological Innovation in Universities and Colleges“. In one of the parallel sessions myself and my colleague Simon Grant will be facilitating a half-day session on Open Knowledge: Wikipedia and Beyond. As described in the abstract:

Wikipedia is great resource for open education, but what challenges need to be faced to make it into an even more valuable educational resource? It remains the most significant encyclopaedic reference based in user generated content which seeks to develop an “open commons” based on consensus approaches and use of Wikipedia’s “Five pillars” principles which includes content being provided from a neutral point of view.

Participants with no experience of Wikipedia editing will be invited to create a Wikipedia user profile, and to understand the basics of creating and editing Wikipedia content. Experienced Wikipedia editors will have the option of sharing a lightning talk on what they consider to be its most significant challenges.

The session will go beyond the basic of editing Wikipedia articles and provide an opportunity for participants to address:

challenges include[ing] a skewed demographic of editors, and a culture that can too easily descend into edit wars, and conflict between “inclusionists” and “deletionists”. Can we envisage changes to make Wikipedia better, or that could seed a better alternative? Could aspiring editors be required to learn and prove their understanding of the governance principles before being allowed to edit? Can consensus process be trained? And would different approaches such as those taken by GitHub, the P2P Foundation, etc. help to improve the culture?

If you’ve an interest in going beyond the basics you may wish to consider attending the Cetis 2014 conference. Note that the online registration form is open for bookings.

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Supporting Use of Wikipedia in the UK Higher Education and Library Sectors

Accredited Wikimedia Trainer

Yesterday I received a certificate which confirms that I am now an accredited Wikipedia trainer, after participating in the Training the Trainer workshop held in Cardiff on 1-2 February 2014. I am now a “Full Wikimedia Trainer” which, according to the Training the Trainers/Accreditation page, means that I am “Able to write and or deliver, Wikimedia training modules to a high standard“.

This level of accreditation covers support for ‘institutions’ which covers:

• Bringing in contributors with specific professional expertise, often via events in their own workplace. This is a broad category, covering librarians, scientists, JISC programme managers and others.
• Experienced Wikimedians with the necessary background knowledge of institutions and academic bodies
• ‘Institutions’ covers specialist experience of working in or with GLAMS, schools, commercial companies or other specific institutions
• Trainers will have specialist experience of specific strands of various ‘Institutions’
• This accreditation will normally be in addition to ‘Technical’ training
• Separate strands of ‘Institutions’ will probably evolve over time.

and ‘Wikimedia UK member development’ which covers:

• Bringing in contributors with specific professional expertise, often via events in their own workplace. This is a broad category, covering librarians, scientists, JISC programme managers and others.
• Experienced Wikimedians with the necessary background knowledge of institutions and academic bodies
• ‘Institutions’ covers specialist experience of working in or with GLAMS, schools, commercial companies or other specific institutions
• Trainers will have specialist experience of specific strands of various ‘Institutions’
• This accreditation will normally be in addition to ‘Technical’ training
• Separate strands of ‘Institutions’ will probably evolve over time.

As summarised below I am pleased that I will be able to make use of my Wikipedia knowledge and expertise in promoting its use within the higher education and library sectors over the next few months.

Forthcoming Events

Wikipedia Sessions at LILAC 2014

The LILAC 2014 conference takes place at Sheffield Hallam University next week, from 23-25 April. I will be running a session on Getting to Grips with Wikipedia: a Practical Session which will help the information literacy librarians attending the session to register for a Wikipedia account and learn about basic Wikimedia markup by creating or modifying their user profile. After this I am supporting a session on Improving the Information Literacy Entry on Wikipedia: LILAC’s First Edit-a-thon!

Talk on Wikipedia at the CILIP Wales 2014 Conference

Since I feel that librarians have an important role in encouraging use of Wikipedia and supporting users who wish to create and update Wikipedia content and not simply consume it I am pleased to have been invited to give a plenary talk on “Editing Wikipedia: Why You Should and How You Can Support Your Users” at the CILIP Cymru Wales Conference 2014 on “Making a Difference: Libraries and their Communities”.

Wikipedia Session at the Cetis 2014 Conference

Further downstream on 17-18 June 2014 at the Cetis 2014 Conference: Building the Digital Institution I will be facilitating a session on Open Knowledge: Wikipedia and Beyond. I’m particularly looking forward to this session as it will be my first tie at a Cetis conference as a Cetis employee. I’m also looking forward to work with my colleague Simon Grant for the first time. As described in the abstract for our session

The session presenters’ view of the challenges includes a skewed demographic of editors, and a culture that can too easily descend into edit wars, and conflict between “inclusionists” and “deletionists”. Can we envisage changes to make Wikipedia better, or that could seed a better alternative? Could aspiring editors be required to learn and prove their understanding of the governance principles before being allowed to edit? Can consensus process be trained? And would different approaches such as those taken by GitHub, the P2P Foundation, etc. help to improve the culture?

The session will raise awareness of the key issues with Wikipedia, and prepare participants for more effective use of Wikipedia as consumer and author, and perhaps even as reformer.

I hope these sessions will be of interest. Let me know if you’re planning on attending.

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Open Education and Wikipedia: Developments in the UK

The third annual Open Education Week (#openeducationwk) takes place from 10-15 March 2014. As described on the Open Education Week web site “its purpose is to raise awareness about the movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide“.

Cetis staff are supporting Open Education Week by publishing a series of blog posts about open education activities. Cetis have had long-standing involvement in open education and have published a range of papers which cover topics such as OERs (Open Educational Resources) and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses).

The Cetis blog provides access to the posts which describe Cetis activities concerned with a range of open education activities. My contribution to the series covers Open Education and Wikipedia: Developments in the UK.

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About This Post

As I explained in a post which asked “How Are You Using Wikipedia?” I will be giving a presentation on use of Wikipedia in the UK’s higher education sector at the Eduwiki conference to be held in Belgrade on 24 March 2014.

Since this post is published in a series on open education it seems appropriate to adopt open practices in the preparation of the talk. I am therefore ‘flipping’ my talk and have made my slides available on Slideshare (and embedded below)  in advance of the Eduwiki conference.The slides are accompanied by this blog post which summarises the key points I intend to make in the talk. I welcome comments which I may be able to incorporate in the talk when I deliver it in a few weeks time.  The availability of this blog post may also provide a complementary perspective on the slides which may be helpful in expanding on points which may not be obvious from viewing the slides in isolation.

A Wikipedia Approach to the Presentation

It seems appropriate for a talk about Wikipedia which is being hosted by a Wikimedia chapter to adopt Wikipedia principles of openness and citation of sources in the talk itself.

The slides will therefore be available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) licence. In addition the delivery of the slides will be available under the same licence, with recording or broadcasting of the talk being explicitly welcomed.

The slides themselves will be made available in advance. The slides will contain embedded links to resources mentioned in the talk or supplementary evidence or assertions made.

Slow Acceptance of the Value of Wikipedia in Higher Education

I will describe the initial resistance to  use of Wikipedia in higher education. However we are now seeing growing acceptance of its value with recent editing sessions for groups such as research scientists and librarians indicating the growing interest. Ironically the title of a talk at the LILAC 2014 conference  (“Wikipedia: it’s not the evil elephant in the library reading room“) suggests there is a need to address concerns that Wikipedia is an “evil elephant” which we may know exists but are reluctant to acknowledge. The title of an edit-a-thon session at the conference (“Improving the Information Literacy entry on Wikipedia: LILAC’s first edit-a-thon!“) again shows that this is a new area   Progress is happening, but Wikipedia, and especially updating Wikipedia articles, should not, yet, be considered a mainstream activities in higher education.

The Eduwiki 2013 Conference

The Eduwiki 2013 conference took place in Cardiff on 1-2 December 2013. This was the second such conference hosted in the UK. I have previously provided a report on the conference. In this post I will highlight two of the talks:

1. Safe Use of Wikipedia in the Transition from School to University by Lisa Anderson and Nancy Graham, University of Birmingham.
2. Introducing Students to Independent Research through Editing Wikipedia Articles on English Villages by Humphrey Southall, University of Portsmouth

These two talks addressed complementary aspects relevant to use of Wikipedia is higher education: how librarians can address information literacy by explicitly covering the strengths and weakness of Wikipedia and ways in which students can update Wikipedia articles as part of a formal assignment.

The presentation will go into more detail of the key aspects of these two talks. I should add that the slides used by Humphrey Southall in his presentation are available on Slideshare.

The Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador

The funding of a Wikimedia Ambassador for the period July 2013 – March 2014 by the Jisc was a welcome development which demonstrated how a funding body was willing to fund an initiative aimed at encouraging take-up of Wikipedia within the UK’s higher education sector. The work of the Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador has included delivering six sessions and supporting three edit-a-thons, a Jisc infoKit on Crowdsourcing: the Wiki Way of Working and a project blog as well as a series of reports on the work.

Looking to the Future

The Wikimania 2014 event will take place in London on 6-10 August 2014. As described on the event web site:

Education will be a key theme throughout the whole event, and while we will be honouring past achievements, this year Wikimania will always be looking forward to the Future of Education.

The key areas to be addressed at the event are:

• Overcoming friction: “librarians and educators are starting to teach students how they can use Wikipedia effectively. Like any other encyclopaedia, students are being shown how to use the site to find the helpful links to primary and secondary sources that are precisely the material students should be citing in their research”.
• Knowledge is produced, not consumed: “Instead of being passive receivers of information, students become the creators and curators of knowledge. Wikipedia becomes an opportunity, not a threat, to formal education, and the educators’ role becomes facilitating a shift from simply teaching answers, to teaching how to ask questions”.

These two areas reflect the topics of the talks given by  Lisa Anderson / Nancy Graham and  Humphrey Southall which I highlighted earlier in this post.

Since the Wikimania event is still inviting submissions (the closing date is 31 March 2014) I am not able to speculate on the issues which will be addressed  at the event. Instead I’ll give my thoughts on important areas which will build on existing activities:

• Promoting use of other Wikimedia projects: A poster on PastPlace: the historical gazetteer service from the people who brought you A Vision of Britain through Time highlights plans for building on the Vision of Britain work which Humphrey Southall described in his talk at Eduwiki 2013.  This project will build on data from Wikidata, “a free knowledge base that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike“.

• Promoting better understanding of relevance of Wikipedia in education: The Wikipedia article on Crowdsourcing describes how:

Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers“

The article goes on to explain how “the term “crowdsourcing” is a portmanteau of “crowd” and “outsourcing“. However the relevance of crowdsourcing is not widely appreciated in higher education, with the word “outsourcing” possibly leading to concerns due to its political  connotations. One of the significant deliverables from the Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador project was the production of a Jisc infoKit on Crowdsourcing. Resources such as this should help to provide a better understanding of the theories behind crowdsourcing and its relevance to Wikipedia.

• Promoting Wikipedia editing by ensuring there are well-trained trainers: Back in October 2013 an article entitled “The Decline of Wikipedia” argued that “The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage“. The article concluded:

But that community also constructed barriers that deter the newcomers needed to finish the job. Perhaps it was too much to expect that a crowd of Internet strangers would truly democratize knowledge. Today’s Wikipedia, even with its middling quality and poor representation of the world’s diversity, could be the best encyclopedia we will get.

Training the Trainers course, Cardiff, 1-2 February 2014. Licernsed under CC-BY-SA.

Concerns over the alleged “abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia” are being addressed. Wikimedia UK runs a Training the trainer course which aims to:

• Recognise the importance of diversity in the training context
• Respond appropriately to the needs of volunteer trainers
• Understand the impact of different learning and communication styles when designing and delivering training
• Use active listening to guide their interaction with participants
• Give effective and appropriate feedback to other participants

I should add that I attended theTrainer the Trainers course which was held in Cardiff on 1-2 February. The accompanying image (taken from the Wikimedia Commons web site) shows the participants at the course.,

• Maximising the pool of potential contributors: Last week an article in the Guardian pointed out that “It is thought that only around one in 10 of its editors are female“. In another article published the previous week in the Guardian entitled “Stop female scientists being written out of Wikipedia history Dame Athene Donald, fellow of the Royal Society & Professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge University went on to point out that “Many female scientists are either not there at all on Wikipedia or just [have] stubs.

The concerns regarding lack of female involvement in Wikipedia editing are illustrated by the photograph of the participants at the Training the Trainers course, with the only woman in the photograph being the course trainer.

However such concerns, together with concerns regarding the lack of content about noteworthy females, are being addressed. In March there are no fewer than six events which are addressing these issues: Women in Science Wikipedia Edit-a-thon; Women’s Art Practices editing event; Women Archaeologists editing event; Scottish Women in Contemporary Art Edit-a-thon and Scottish Women in Computing Edit-a-thon.

As well as the need to increase the pool of female contributors to Wikipedia there is also a need to make it easier for people with disabilities to create content in Wikipedia.  The Accessibility of the Wikimedia UK website project focus is on making Wikipedia resources more accessible for people with sight problems; hearing problems; mobility problems and cognitive impairments. However in conjunction with the WikiProject Disability project which aims to “co-ordinate the improvement and creation of articles related to Disability” we might expect to see edit-a-thons being organised which aim to provide people with disabilities with the the skills needed to contribute to Wikipedia.

Education Strategy

I’ve given a brief view of various Wikipedia developments within the UK’s higher education sector and provided suggestions on further developments which would help to take Wikipedia beyond the early mainstream adopters and become more embedded within the higher education sector.

But such issues need to be consider at a strategic level. Wikimedia UK are working on an Education strategy but, as illustrated, this is currently under development. As might be expected in a Wikipedia environment user input into the process of development of the strategy is encouraged, with the Education Strategy talk page currently having brief sections on:

• OER university model
• Primary and Secondary schools
• Language learning
• Theory of Knowledge

Would anyone like to contribute further suggestions for the development of Wikimedia UK’s education strategy?

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How Are You Using Wikipedia?

My Involvement With Wikipedia

Wikipedia logo. Used with a CC-By licence from Wikimedia Commons.

I signed up to Wikipedia in 2004 in order to create an entry for my hobby: rapper sword dancing. I saw the value of the service in providing a easy-to-use content creation tool which would benefit from crowd-sourcing content in order to maintain the content. However such ease-of-use and the crowd-sourcing model, in which anybody could edit the content, was initially not appreciated by many in the educational and library sectors. So although I created a small number of articles related to my professional interests (including Amplified conference and Microattribution) and encouraged use of Wikipedia (in blog posts such as Having An Impact Through Wikipedia, How Well-Read Are Technical Wikipedia Articles? and How Can We Assess the Impact and ROI of Contributions to Wikipedia?) I felt that such work was not appreciated as having value in promoting innovative use of technologies within the sector.

It was therefore only after having received notification of the cessation of Jisc funding for UKOLN, my host organisation, that I took advantage of our funder’s agreement that we could spend some time developing our professional skills to prepare for life after redundancy, that I became more involved with Wikipedia activities. This included joining Wikimedia UK and taken part in two Wikimedia UK events: the Queen Victoria’s Journals University of Oxford editing day which provided an initial opportunity to familiarise myself with the format of an editing workshop and participation in a Sphingonet Wiki workshop (see accompanying photograph), which provided me with initial experience in working with other Wikimedia experts.

Since leaving UKOLN I have continued by involvement with Wikipedia including taking the lead role in Facilitating a Wikipedia Editing Session at the SpotOn 2013 conference and attending the EduWiki 2013 conference. I will also be running a Wikipedia editing workshop session at the LILAC 2014 conference and supporting an edit-a-thon at the conference.

Such work is appropriate for my new role as Innovation Advocate at Cetis, since my work encourages use of innovative practices as well as innovative technologies. Interestingly the value of Wikipedia is now being appreciated by Jisc who, in conjunction with Wikimedia UK, are funding a Wikimedia Ambasssador.

I’m pleased that this post has been funded and that Jisc are helping to promote take-up of Wikipedia and related Wikimedia services across the sector. I hope this will help in seeing active use of Wikipedia move beyond the early adopters and become mainstream.

What Else Is Happening in the UK Higher / Further Education Sector?

The Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador post has been funded from July 2013 to March 2014. There will therefore be a need to ensure that sharing of approaches taken to use of Wikipedia continues to take place after the funding for the post finishes.

The Eduwiki 2013 conference held in Cardiff 0n 1-2 November 2013 provided a valuable opportunity to hear about ways n which Wikipedia is being used across the broad educational sector. I was particularly impressed by talks on Introducing Students to Independent Research Through Editing Wikipedia Articles on English Villages by Humphrey Southall and Safe use of Wikipedia in the transition from school to University by Lisa Anderson & Nancy Graham.

But what else is happening in the sector? I have to admit to a personal interest in this question as, as described on the Wikimedia UK blog, on 23 March I will be giving a talk at the EduWiki Serbia 2014 conference on educational use of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia tools in the UK. I would like to include further examples of work taking place which I am unaware of. If you are working in this area I would love to hear from you. Feel free to leave a comment on this post or get in touch. Thanks.

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Spotlight on Wikipedia: the Opportunities and the Risks

 “Spotlight on the Digital” Meeting

A post on the Spotlight on the Digital blog highlighted a ‘treasure chest’ of valuable services.

On Friday (15 November 2013) I attended a “Spotlight on the Digital” meeting at the Jisc offices in London. Spotlight on the Digital is a “collaboration between Jisc, RLUK and SCONUL to identify and disseminate fruitful approaches to make public funded digitized collections and their content items more discoverable for students and researchers (and the public more generally)“. As described in a blog post entitled Spotlight on the digital: how discoverable are your digitised collections? “The need for Spotlight emerged out of the concern that digitised collections are not as “discoverable” as they could be through the channels and devices most commonly accessed by users“.

After the introduction Martin Poulter gave the first brief presentation of the day in an agenda item titled “Infiltrating popular web destinations“. Martin, who is currently working as the Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador summarised the benefits which can be provided by Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, but began by telling us how the title of the talk was misleading: rather than talking about infiltrating popular web destinations, providing information about scholarly and cultural resources using Wikipedia should be regarded as a means of celebrating the value, importance and significance of the resources.

I was pleased to support Martin’s brief presentation. I pointed out the need across the higher education sector to both highlight the benefits of Wikipedia and to provide advice and support for those who wished to contribute content to Wikipedia and other related services such as uploading images to Wikimedia Commons. However I also pointed out that there may be risks associated with using Wikipedia. But rather than ignoring such risks, those are feel that Wikipedia has an important role to play within the sector should be pro-active in documenting the risks and associated risk minimisation strategies. There is also, as Martin pointed out, a need to appreciate the risks of using conventional tools and services.

Risk Assessment and Risk Management

Back in 2008-2009 I was involved in the development of risk management strategies to assist those who wished to make institutional use of Web 2.0 services but were concerned about  comments such as “the services would not be sustainable“, “services were ‘walled gardens’“, “services were not available as open source“, “content hosted on Web 2.0 services could infringe copyright legislation“, etc. The proposed risk management strategies were initially described at an invited conference presentation given at the Bridging Worlds conference at the National Library of Singapore and subsequently published in the Program journal with a follow-up paper entitled “Empowering Users and Institutions: A Risks and Opportunities Framework for Exploiting the Social Web” being presented at the CULTURAL HERITAGE online conference.

The risk management  framework involved documenting the following aspects of the proposed use of Social Web services:

Intended use: Rather than talking about Social Web services in an abstract context (“shall we have a Facebook page” for example) specific details of the intended use should be provided.

Perceived benefits: A summary of the perceived benefits which use of the Social Web service are expected to provide should be documented.

Perceived risks: A summary of the perceived risks which use of the Social Web service may entail should be documented.

Missed opportunities: A summary of the missed opportunities and benefits which a failure to make use of the Social Web service should be documented.

Costs: A summary of the costs and other resource implications of use of the service should be documented.

Risk minimisation: Once the risks have been identified and discussed approaches to risk minimisation should be documented.

Evidence base: Evidence which back up the assertions made in use of the framework.

It should be noted that it was pointed out that the framework could also be used with conventional tools and services which were procured and deployed locally; it would be a mistake to suggest that only Cloud services are liable to go out of business or be susceptible to changed terms and conditions.

Five years on from the initial paper there is now a much greater willingness to accept the value of Cloud services to support institutional activities, as is evident from Janet’s announcement earlier this year that “Over 18 million students and staff to benefit from faster, more secure cloud-computing” and the role that this Jisc service has in providing Cloud Services for Education Agreements which includes contracts for Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps in Education.

But this does not mean that risks have gone away. Rather, I would argue, there is a need to have a better understanding of such risks and ways of addressing the risks or even accepting some levels of risks. After all there may be risks in getting out of bed in the morning and driving to work, but we are prepared to accept such risks!

In the case of Wikipedia I would highlight the following risks, the likelihood of the risks occurring and approaches for risk minimisation (or acceptance).

Ref. No.	Risk	Likelihood	Risk minimisation
1	Wikipedia service is not sustainable.	Not able to answer.	As a global company the Wikimedia Foundation is able to seek funding from ventures around the globe. It is also successful in having a high profile.
2	Other Wikimedia services, such as Wikimedia Commons, are not sustainable.	Not able to answer.	See above.
3	Content hosted in Wikipedia changes.	Very likely, but a feature not a risk!	Wikipedia articles can be changed rapidly, which can be advantageous. Note that risks in use of conventional text books, which cannot be updated easily, such be highlighted as a risk in use of conventional teaching and research resources!
4	Content hosted in Wikipedia is deleted.	Possible in some areas.	Articles published Wikipedia can be deleted. If articles are merged with existing articles or renamed, appropriate redirects will be provided. Articles could also be deleted if they are felt not to be noteworthy. However in such cases articles are unlikely to be used in an institutional context.
5	Wikipedia user interface (UI) changes.	Very likely, but a feature not a risk!	The UI for Wikipedia services can (and does) change. However this is the norm for online services.

I’d welcome comments on this risk register. I should also add that there are associated risks in failing to make use of Wikipedia and in the risks not taking place! There are many opportunities which Wikipedia can provide, although this post focusses on the risks.

Although formal risk assessment approaches may not normally be taken for daily activities, they are relevant in areas such as companies which are to be floated on the stock market. I recall in 1995 receiving a copy of the prospectus which was published (as is legally required, I understand)  prior to the IPO of Netscape.  The prospectus highlighted several risks for potential investors, not least the fact that the main competitor for the new company would be Microsoft; Netscape’s major product would be free, as would be the product from its main competitor and business success on the Web was by no means (in 1995) guaranteed. Despite such reservations, as described in Wikipedia:

Netscape made a very successful IPO on August 9, 1995. The stock was set to be offered at $14 per share, but a last-minute decision doubled the initial offering to $28 per share. The stock’s value soared to $75 during the first day of trading, nearly a record for first-day gain. The stock closed at $58.25, which gave Netscape, an unprofitable firm, a market value of $2.9 billion. The company’s revenues doubled every quarter in 1995. Netscape’s success (which crystallized the “Netscape Moment”) landed Andreessen, barefoot, on the cover of Time Magazine.

Might it be appropriate for organisations, such as the Wikimedia Foundation, to publish a risk assessment for its projects? This would appear to be aligned with Wikimedia’s culture of openness and transparency. It would also make people more aware of the risks in using other services, such as the risks of using Google services  which subsequently became ‘sunsetted’.

Facilitating a Wikipedia Editing Session; the #solo13 Experience

The Wikipedia Editing Workshop Session at the SpotOn 2013 Conference

This has been my second extended week of conferences since I started work at Innovation Advocate at Cetis. As described in a post on my Reflections on the EduWiki 2013 Conference on Friday and Saturday, 1 and 2 November 2013, I attended the EduWiki 2013 Conference. On last Friday and Saturday, 8 and 9 November I attended SpotOn 2013, the Science, Policy, Outreach and Tools Online conference. The conference provided a further opportunity to engage with use of Wikipedia, but this time as a facilitator of an hour-long Wikipedia editing workshop session. The conference organisers had asked me to ensure that the session was a hands-on session, with participants having the opportunity to create Wikipedia resources rather than listening to speakers talk about the potential of Wikipedia. The workshop session therefore provided me with an opportunity to facilitate a Wikipedia session for the first time. Earlier this year I attended the Queen Victoria’s Journals University of Oxford editing day which provided an initial opportunity to familiarise myself with the format of an editing workshop. This was followed by participation in a Sphingonet Wiki workshop, which provided my with initial experience in working with other Wikimedia experts. This time, however, I led the workshop and developed the accompanying materials, but I was fortunate to be supported by Toni Sant, the Education Organiser for Wikimedia UK as well as the Director of Research at the University of Hull’s School of Arts and New Media in Scarborough. I have an interest in expanding the community of Wikipedia editors. There will therefore be a need to expand the community of those who can train others in using Wikipedia. Therefore in this post I will share my experiences of facilitating a workshop.

Reflections on Facilitating the Workshop

On the Friday I visited the Eliot Room, which we would use for the workshop. As can be seen from the accompanying photograph, the room layout was less than ideal for a hands-on session, in which Toni and myself would wish to mingle with the participants, helping them out with any problems they had. The layout also meant that it would be difficult for participants to share what they were doing with others. Fortunately during the lunch session when I was installing my slides on the room’s PC I met the two facilitators of the #solo13lego session on Making Research Useful: The Consequences of (Bad) Communication. The abstract for this session described how “In this workshop, we’ll be getting hands-on with Lego to explore how good and bad communication can impact on research utility and impact“. The facilitators were happy for the room layout so be changed with chairs being arranged in three circles so that the participants could more easily share what they were doing. As illustrated below. participants were able to follow the slides during the initial presentation but work collaboratively when they signed up for a Wikipedia account and created their user profile.

Photo by Toni Sant and available under a CC BY-SA licence.

As can be seen from the slides (which are available on Slideshare), only one slide provided reasons why researchers may wish to make use of Wikipedia; as Cameron Neylon had said in the “Wikimedia UK Annual Review 2012-13” (PDF format):

“If you’re serious about ensuring public engagement in your research then you need to make damn sure your work can be incorporated into Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the most important engagement channel for your research.“

After this, and the introductions for the facilitators and hearing about the level of Wikipedia expertise of the participants we then provided details of the task to be attempted during the session:

You will:

• Create a Wikipedia account (go to http://tinyurl.com/SpotOnWiki and register!)
• Create a user profile & add personal details (e.g. name, organisation, interests, …)
• Add hyperlinks to (a) external Web sites (e.g. your organisation) and (b) Wikipedia articles (e.g. areas of interest)
• Add simple formatting

We provided the following examples of user profile and suggested that participants could view the source of these profiles and copy markup of interest:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ToniSant
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ukwebfocus

After just over half an hour into the session we found that most of the participants had created their use profile. I have created a Storify summary of the session which provides links to a number of the profiles which had been created:

• Is this okay? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pixievondust#Brief_Intro … #solo13wiki
• Here is my marvellous wikipedia user page. Hurrah! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DavidFreeborn … #solo13wiki

The accompanying screenshot illustrates a user profile which a relatively new Wikipedia user can create in about 30 minutes. The use of Twitter during the session was useful in providing useful feedback on the users’ experiences. In particular @pixievondust commented that:

This is a genuinely useful hands on session, thanks @briankelly! Lets see more unis running workshops like this! #solo13wiki

with similar sentiments being echoed by @FunSizeSuze:

This session has done exactly what I hoped it would do – I now have increased confidence in getting involved in all things Wiki. #solo13wiki

After we realised that everyone who had attempted to create a user profile had successfully done so the session concluded with discussions on strategies for creating new articles, the fundamental Wikipedia principles and details of other Wikimedia projects beyond the Wikipedia service. The slides used in the session are available on Slideshare and embedded below. In addition a recording of the live stream of the session is available on YouTube and also embedded below. I hope these resources and this description of how the resources were used will be of interest to others, especially those who may wish to train others on how to contribute to Wikipedia.

YouTube video:

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Note: The Wikimedia UK web site has a page on the SpotOn London 2013 Wikipedia editing workshop which provides additional information about the workshop session. The following information has been included in this post for the sake of completeness 23 SpotOn conference delegates (10 female and 13 male) attended this session. We were also able to observe that there were 14 postgraduate students, while the rest were academics, researchers, or other non-students. The following attendees created new Wikipedia user accounts during the workshop:

• w:User:DavidFreeborn
• w:User:SuzeKundu
• w:User:pixievondust
• w:User:Martin.fenner

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Reflections on the EduWiki 2013 Conference

My First Event as Innovation Advocate at Cetis

On Friday and Saturday, 1 and 2 November 2013, I attended the EduWiki 2013 Conference. This was the second EduWiki conference organised by Wikimedia UK; EduWiki 2012 was held at the University of Leicester in September 2012.

This was also my first event in my new role as Innovation Advocate at Cetis. As I mentioned in a previous post I only started at Cetis on Monday, so I had little time to become acclimatised to my new role! It was pleasing to receive messages of congratulations st the conference from a number of people at the event who had seen the announcement either on this blog, on my Facebook page or from my LinkedIn profile (incidentally footnote provides some speculation on the metrics for the numbers of responses to the announcement) . It does seem to me that Wikipedia could be of interest to Cetis, as an emerging technological resource which appears to be relevant to teaching and learning. Did the two days I spent at the conference confirm such views?

Thoughts on the EduWiki 2013 Conference

The first day of the Wikipedia conference began with the welcome to the conference being provided by Toni Sant (Wikimedia UK’s Education Organiser) , with the opening remarks on the conference given by Martin Poulter, the Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador in a talk entitled “Where’s the Edit Button on this Textbook?“.

Welsh and Other Minority Language Wikipedia Sites

After the introductions, Robin Owain, the Wales Manager for Wikimedia UK gave a talk in Welsh with instant translation for English speakers via headsets. Robin’s talk provided the political and cultural context for the following keynote talk and made the links with Wicipedia, the Welsh language version of Wikipedia. “Wales is a small country. That’s our greatness. “Do the small things” is our motto” explained Robin, who went on to inform the audience that “Wales is the land of open content“. Such approaches to openness and doing small things, but doing them well has led to Wicipedia being the most popular web site in the Welsh language.

it was pleasing to see that many of the speakers at the conference backed up their assertions with evidence. In Robin’s case we heard about the usage statistics for Wicipedia, as illustrated.

Robin Owain’s talk focussed on Wicipedia, which is unsurprising for the Wales Manager for Wikimedia UK. A wider context was provided by Gareth Morlain (@melynmelyn), the Digital Media Specialist for the Welsh Government. in his keynote talk on “Getting More Welsh Content Online” which highlighted how a public pressure resulted in Amazon changing their policy on providing Welsh language access to Kindle ebooks.

I was fascinated to learn about use of minority languages, such as Catalan, Basque, Galician, Welsh, Breton, Irish, Gaelic and Cornish, on the Web. I was particularly interested to note that Catalan appears to be punching above its weight. Since I have professional contacts in Catalonia I sent a tweet to Miquel Duran, a professor at Girona University, about this. It seems that his son is president of @amicalwikimedia which promotes Catalan Wikipedia. This suggests that small-scale advocacy can have a significant effect on the creation of articles on minority language Wikipedia sites. Since we heard how the number of Wicipedia articles need to grow by 400% for Google to take Welsh language seriously as a search language I hope that Robin Owain and others involved in encouraging take-up of Wicipedia are successful in their advocacy work.

Wikipedia in Higher Education

Although the first morning at the conference provided me with new insights into less well-known aspects of Wikipedia, it was use of Wikipedia in higher education which was of most interest to me. This was the subject of the session after lunch. Of particular interest to me was the talk by Humphrey Southall on “Introducing Students to Independent Research Through Editing Wikipedia Articles in English Villages“. Humphrey, a Reader in Geography at the University of Portsmouth and Director of the Great Britain Historical GIS, explained the approaches taken in a first year geography course which introduces the students to editing articles on Wikipedia. Rather than focussing on the IT aspects of using Wikipedia, Humphrey explained how the course requirements addressed both the needs to enhance students’ research skills and the need to respect Wikipedia’s culture of neutrality. The abstract for the talk describes how:

Each student on a large first year human geography course at the University of Portsmouth is assigned a different Wikipedia stub article, unedited for at least a year, about an English village. They are required to extend it “to provide a rounded description of the place and … an account of its historical development”. All villages are far from Portsmouth and students are banned from visiting them, so we emphasize that this is an exercise in finding, evaluating, interpreting and citing sources created by others, mainly online. All the villages are Civil Parishes, meaning that modern census data is available for them on the government’s Neighbourhood Statistics site, and historical census data are available on our own site A Vision of Britain through Time. Marks are given for the inclusion of required systematic information (completing the infobox); effective use of sources to create a sense of place; originality in use of sources; quality of layout and illustration; quality of referencing (do hyperlinks work?); engagement with other Wikipedia users (responding to comments!); and adherence to Wikipedia guidelines.

The second day of the conference provided another two interesting talks related to use of Wikipedia in higher education: Lisa Anderson & Nancy Graham provided a librarian’s perspective in a talk on “Safe use of Wikipedia in the transition from school to University” and Darren Stephens facilitated a workshop session on “Exploring the Education Program/Courses Extension for UK HEIs“.

Lisa & Nancy’s talk provided a rebuttal of Dave White’s talk which asked “What’s left to teach now that Wikipedia has done everyone’s homework?“. In this talk, which concluded the first day, Dave White proposed a variant on the first rule of the Fight Club. The first rule of Wikipedia in education is: “You don’t talk about Wikipedia and the learning black market“. The reason for this was based on Dave’s research which showed that although students feel that their lecturers don’t approve of use of Wikipedia, in reality they do use Wikipedia and use references obtained for Wikipedia articles – although they don’t necessarily read the references. There is therefore a learning black market based on content from Wikipedia which lectures must not be made aware of!

Lisa & Nancy’s talk described how librarians at Birmingham University appreciate that students will use Wikipedia, and therefore sought to ensure that students are made aware of best practices for using Wikipedia. They ensure their students are made aware of the history pages for Wikipedia articles; how easy it is to edit articles, which includes vandalising articles or adding errors, mistakes or deliberately incorrect or misleading content but also how such changes are normally spotted by Wikipedia volunteers which can remove such content.

I found this a useful talk on how a group of librarians are understanding how their users use Web resources and respond by engaging withe such realities. But Dave White’s evidence of student belief that use of Wikipedia is frowned upon by academics and librarians shows that further work needs to be done. One tweet summarised the talk: “Librarians’ attitudes to Wikipedia are changing @msnancygraham #EduWiki”. But to what extent does this reflect the reality of how university librarians are informing their students (and staff) of the relevance of Wikipedia, I wonder? As I suggested to Nancy after her talk, perhaps gathering evidence across the sector would be useful for a paper at next year’s LILAC 2014 information literacy conference.

The final session I’ll comment on in this post is Darren Stephens workshop on “Exploring the Education Program/Courses Extension for UK HEIs“. Darren explained that the education extension installed on Wikipedia has had minimal take-up in the UK, with only two universities in England making use of it in the academic year 2012/13. The Education Program extension for MediaWiki adds features to Wikipedia to support classes of students editing articles, including structured Institution and Course pages and feeds of recent activity by students. However as we learnt during the workshop session, the extension is poorly documented and the software has a poor user interface. Comments that the software enabled staff to monitor how their students made use of Wikipedia to complete assignments also led to concerns regarding the privacy implications’ even if the software provides a dashboard which gives a window on publicly available information, there will still be issues regarding potential concerns that students have been required to make information publicly available and also that institutions may have policies which require student activities to be analysed prior to assessment.

Rod Dunican, Director of Global Education at the Wikipedia Foundation had opened the second day with a plenary talk on “Wikipedia in Education: Adventures in Learning“. I was fortunate to spend some time over lunch talking to Rod and hearing more about the Wikipedia Foundation and the Wikipedia Education Program. In my opening remarks in this posts I wondered whether the conference would confirm my feelings of the relevance of Wikipedia for the higher and further education sectors. I’m now convinced of the importance of Wikipedia in open educational practices. There will be a need to be able to provide further evidence of the value of Wikipedia (beyond the usage statistics which several speakers provided) and learn from the successes (and failures) of the early adopters.

I’ll conclude with a few tweets made during the conference.

Kate Fisher showed her enthusiasm for the conference and shared the actions she’ll be taking when she returns to work:

Thanks to @wikimedia for a great #EduWiki conference. Even more motivated to start a monthly Wiki Wednesday met up on our #Lampeter campus

but Terry McAndrew reminded us that there is still much work to do:

Very impressed with all the wikimedia available at #eduwiki but disappointed that HE makes too little use of it for developing #digilit

Finally Judith Scammell’s tweet makes me regret having to leave the conference before the final talk:

Thank you Wikimedia UK & spkrs 4 really interesting day fri. Sorry to miss today + musical ending! #eduwiki #landofsong

I hope a video of the song which concluded the conference will be published!

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Appendix: Archives of the Event

“anyone archiving #eduwiki tweets? Would that be a good idea?” asked Simon Knight on the opening day of the conference. Although the question was directed at @wikimediauk I saw the tweet and immediately created a Twubs archive of the #eduwiki tweets. “That’s the power of the crowd – fixed in two minutes flat! #eduwiki” responded @wikimediauk . I agree, one shouldn’t have to wait for employees or officers of an organisation to carry out work which interests bystanders can do. That’ after all, can be regarded as the ‘Wikipedia way’.

In addition to the Twubs archive, I also created Storify archives of the tweets posted on day 1 and day 2 of the conference.

I should add that although I normally use Storify to curate an edited summary of event tweets published in chronological order, with tweets omitted if I feel they are of little value and annotations provided, such as links to speakers slides, in this case due to lack of time I published the full set of tweets in reverse chronological order. I did this shortly after the event was over so that an archive was available in a timely fashion, especially for others who may be wishing to publish a report on the conference. I would also add that the full archive may be of value to others who may wish to create an annotated story (e.g. of talks of particular interest). Again the process of publishing something incomplete which can be enhanced can be regarded as the Wikipedia way.

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Footnote:
I was interested to see that I had received 94 ‘likes’ and 43 comments for the Facebook status update, 33 ‘likes’ and 12 comments on a LinkedIn update for my new job but only 16 comments to the original blog post.Might this suggest that Facebook and then LinkedIn are more effective than blog posts in alerting people to information such as a change of job, I wonder?

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Supporting Use of Wikimedia Across the UK Higher Education Sector

The Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador

Wikipedia logo. Used with a CC-By licence from Wikimedia Commons.

Back in April 2013 the Jisc published a call for a Jisc ‘Wikimedia Ambassador’ residency. In light of my forthcoming redundancy (my last day is two weeks today!) I have been looking for new opportunities to continue working in the sector. This call was therefore of interest, especially in light of my long-standing interest in use of Wikipedia in higher education. I therefore submitted a bid based on:

• My long-standing involvement with Wikipedia (I registered for the service in February 2004 and created my first page later that month).
• My belief that JISC should make greater use of Wikipedia, as illustrated by a post entitled What Is JISC? which I published in August 2008.
• My experiences of Having An Impact Through Wikipedia which I summarised in July 2010.
• A benchmarking post which, in July 2010, provided some answers to the question How Well-Read Are Technical Wikipedia Articles?
• A follow-up post in September 2010 which asked How Can We Assess the Impact and ROI of Contributions to Wikipedia?
• A post on Microattributions, Wikipedia and Dissemination which described how I created a Wikipedia article on Microattribution and encouraged others to help improve the quality of the stub item.
• A guest post on Librarians meet Wikipedians: collaboration not competition! which provided information on how Wikimedia UK are looking to encourage take-up of Wikimedia within the higher education sector, including participation from librarians.
• A personal commitment to open practices, as illustrated by the open sharing of my professional practices on this blog.

I was very pleased to receive several letter of support from those who recognised my pro-active approaches to openness, my strong links across the sector, my experience in running events and my knowledge of the higher education sector in general and the Jisc community in particular.

However the bid was not successful. Although the evaluation panel “noted the strength of the proposal in terms of its academic focus and a sound methodology” they felt that “the lead consultant’s track-record as a Wikipedian to be insufficiently evidenced and that the link to the Wikimedia community was not sufficiently strong“. I would not disagree with these comments; although I have created and edited Wikipedia articles over an extended period I have little experience in training others to use Wikipedia.

I subsequently learnt that the successful bid had been submitted by Martin Poulter, University of Bristol. I have known Martin for some time (probably over 10 years) and am very aware of his in-depth expertise on Wikipedia and his active involvement in the Wikimedia UK community. I’m happy to give my congratulations to Martin.

Supporting Sectoral Use of Wikimedia

One of the main constraints which I felt the Jisc call had was its limitation to providing Wikipedia articles related to Jisc-funded activities. As the second paragraph in the call document (MS Word or PDF format) states:

The purpose of the training is to disseminate skills and knowledge leading to improved coverage and accuracy of articles relating to information produced by Jisc funded programmes presented on Wikimedia projects. 

My work as UK Web Focus has been primarily focussed on supporting the higher education sector, rather than working with Jisc projects and programmes (although I was involved in work such as providing a framework for the selection of standards for Jisc programmes, as well as Jisc development activities such as the JISC e-Framework and the JISC Information Environment).

Sphingonet Wikiedia workshop held at the University of Oxford

However after submitting the proposal I realised that I would welcome the opportunity to engage more directly with the sector in encouraging greater take-up of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. I have therefore joined Wikimedia UK and taken part in two recent Wikimedia UK events: the Queen Victoria’s Journals University of Oxford editing day provided an initial opportunity to familiarise myself with the format of an editing workshop and this was followed by participation in a Sphingonet Wiki workshop (see accompanying photograph), which provided me with initial experience in working with other Wikimedia experts.

My bid for the Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador residency included strong support from a number of institutions who were looking for opportunities to embed expertise in use of Wikipedia within their institution, as well as ensure that relevant information about institutional activities is made available in Wikipedia, in ways which conform with key Wikipedia principles including the need for information to be provided from a Neutral Point of View.

During the summer I will be updating my skills in Wikipedia (and I intend to finish reading a book I purchased recently on How Wikipedia Works And How You Can Be A Part Of It. I then intend to offer a portfolio of training workshops based on the skills and expertise I have gained during my time at UKOLN, including training for a number of Social Web services including Wikipedia. If you have an interest, please get in touch.

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Guest Post: Librarians meet Wikipedians: collaboration not competition!

As part of the series of guest blog posts which describe how the higher education sector is engaging with various aspects of openness Simon Bains, the Head of Research and Learning Support and Deputy Librarian, The John Rylands University Library at University of Manchester, describes how the university library is engaging with Wikipedia.

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It isn’t really news to say that the world libraries inhabit has changed almost beyond recognition in less than 20 years. Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight it will be possible to make sense of the rapid technological change and resulting shift in behaviours which combine to challenge the collections, services and perhaps the very existence of libraries. Whilst we continue to live through this information revolution, we seek to make educated guesses at the next trend, respond as we can to the very different expectations of our user communities, and develop strategies to ensure we remain relevant and sustainable in challenging times.

Several trends in particular seem to me to have made a marked contribution to the seismic landscape disruption which has followed the invention of the Web:

1. Transition to online from print – published content, particularly journals, being made available online and becoming, fairly quickly, the dominant delivery channel.
2. Challenges to traditional models of publishing – the rise of the open access agenda, and a general trend towards widespread support for openness, not just for published material but for underlying data, with a view to fostering sharing, reuse and linking.
3. The Social Web – interaction and conversation, sharing, tagging, developing personal networks for both social and business purposes. Publication is no longer primarily about dissemination, but about sharing, reuse and conversation.
4. The development of large scale global public and commercial content hubs which have grown to dominate the ways in which information is published, discovered, and shared.

These, of course, aren’t entirely independent developments, and can instead be seen as components of an evolutionary (if not revolutionary) process which has brought us to today’s information landscape. Equally, it is clear that change continues, and recent challenges to traditional scholarly publishing models serve to underline that.

The creation of one of these ‘hubs’ is the focus of this blog post. In just a few years we have seen the very rapid ascendency of Wikipedia as the preferred starting point for the sort of reference enquiry that would once have been directed to a traditionally published encyclopaedia, or a library reference desk. Despite scepticism, it has become a hugely popular resource, with evidence to support the reliability of crowd-sourced factual information, as a result of strict editing policies and zealous, perhaps over-zealous, editors.

In 2007, whilst Digital Library Manager at the National Library of Scotland I was interested to read of a project to use it to make library collections more widely known, and this encouraged me to initiate work at to do likewise. Unfortunately, the timing was not good, as concern about the credentials of editors, and allegations about attempts to influence Wikipedia entries had resulted in very careful vetting, and an aversion to anything which even hinted at advertising, even from the cultural sector. Some forays into relevant Wikipedia entries in fact resulted in my web developer’s account being shut down, almost immediately. Somewhat discouraged, we directed our effort at the more welcoming global networks, such as Flickr and YouTube.

Since then, Wikipedia seems to have adopted a more mature stance, still managing entries very carefully, but recognising that partnership with organisations with information which enriches its entries is to be welcomed rather than resisted (although a recent verbal exchange with a Wikipedia editor makes me think that this is still somewhat dependent on the outlook of individual editors). I was very interested to see the creation of the concept of the ‘Wikipedian in Residence’ at the British Museum, although my move from the National Library back into HE required a focus on other priorities.

Advertisements for the Wikipedia Lounge in the John Rylands University Library

An interior shot of the John Rylands Library in central Manchester

My move to The John Ryland University Library at the University of Manchester coincided with contact from Wikimedia UK, who were now actively seeking partnerships with education institutions, recognising the mutual benefit of working with students, academics and libraries to foster more effective use of Wikipedia as a resource, to encourage content creation and editing by experts, and to link entries to relevant resources. As a Library at a major research intensive institution, with the additional responsibility of steward of an internationally important special collections Library, we were identified as a particularly valuable pilot partner. For our part, influenced very much by the sort of strategic thinking coming from organisations like OCLC, which encouraged libraries to collaborate with large information hubs, we were very enthusiastic about a partnership which would help us connect to a global network level hub, and also address the digital literacy agenda.

We have begun the engagement process, which we hope will develop into a substantial project which includes a ‘Wikipedian in Residence’. To date, we have hosted a ‘Wikipedia Lounge’, which saw academics and students meet Wikipedians to learn more about getting involved and creating content. This event attracted academics, students and librarians, and we have plans to repeat it. We are now in discussions with Wikimedia UK about setting up a 12 month pilot project which would see a Wikipedian in Residence based at the John Rylands Library, working with our curators, students and academics to expose our collections, encourage further research and learning, develop a network of Wikipedians at Manchester (we already have some), and place Wikipedia within our digital literacy strategy as a powerful tool which when used effectively can play an important part in University teaching and research. There are already a number of references to our collections in Wikipedia entries, e.g.in biographical pages such as that of the author Alison Uttley, which serve to demonstrate the very great untapped potential. Perhaps the best entry which focuses on a specific item on our collections is for the Rylands Library Papyrus P52, also known as the St John’s fragment (illustrated) which ranks as the earliest known fragment of the New Testament in any language.

Fragment of St John’s Gospel: recto

Of course there are concerns about Wikipedia: it may not be reliable; it can be used as an easy substitute for comprehensive research and study; it can be difficult to change erroneous content, etc. But to ignore it or dissuade students from its use reminds me of the approach that was sometimes taken in the face of the rapid rise of Google in the late 1990s. It is a battle we are unlikely to win, and so much more could be achieved by working with, not against, the new information providers, especially when so much of what we are about has synergy: open access, collaboration, no profit motive, etc.

It is early days for us in this engagement at the moment, but I have high hopes. And I’m sure that when we introduce our Wikimedia UK contacts to the wonders of the John Rylands Library, they will find it impossible not to see the obvious potential!

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Simon Bains is Head of Research and Learning Support and Deputy Librarian, The John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester. You can see his Library Website staff page or follow him on Twitter: @simonjbains

The Failure of Citizendium

Remembering Citizendium

A few days ago I read Steve Wheeler’s post on Content as Curriculum? having being alerted to it by Larry Sanger’s post on An example of educational anti-intellectualism to which Steve provided a riposte in which Steve argued the need to Play the ball, not the man.

From the blog posts I learnt that Larry Sanger is a co-founder of Wikipedia and, as described on his blog is the “‘Founding Editor-in-Chief’ of the Citizendium, the Citizens’ Compendium: a wiki encyclopedia project that is expert-guided, public participatory, and real-names-only”.

I have to admit that I had forgotten about Citizendium but the little spat caused me to revisit the Web site. While searching I came across a discussion entitled Why did Citizendium fail? and yes, it does seem that this “endeavor to achieve the highest standards of writing, reliability, and comprehensiveness through a unique collaboration between Authors and Editors” has failed. But although we often talk about success criteria, it can be more difficult to identify failures. How then, can we describe Citizendium as a failure?

Experiences With Citizendium

A few years ago I signed up for a Citizendium account. In order to register you need to provide your real name and include “a CV or resume … as well as some links to Web material that tends to support the claims made in the CV, such as conference proceedings, or a departmental home page. Both of these additional requirements may be fulfilled by a CV that is hosted on an official work Web page“.

I registered as I felt that if Citizendium became successful being an author could provide a valuable dissemination channel for those areas in which I have expertise. In particular I had an interest in helping to manage the Web accessibility entry in Citizendium. However I found that I did not have the time – or inclination – to edit this article. Looking at the article today it seems that the “page was last modified 09:25, 10 January 2008” and “has been accessed 221 times“. It is perhaps good news that the page has been viewed so little as it is not only very out-of-date but is also poorly written. It also seems that there have been no content added to the Talk, Related Articles, Bibliography or External Links pages or the also no entries

In comparison we can find that the Web Accessibility entry in Wikipedia has been edited 575 times by 277 users. There were also 10,911 views in November 2011.

Discussion

Perhaps there may be those who could argue that Citizendium isn’t a failure, but has a valuable role to play in a particular niche area which is not being addressed by Wikipedia. But how can this argument be made when Citizendium’s aim to “endeavor to achieve the highest standards of writing, reliability, and comprehensiveness through a unique collaboration between Authors and Editors” results in entries such as this one on Silverlight vs Flash:

With the rocket development of Internet, the techniques used for building web pages is improving all the time, which not only brings people more information but new experience of surfing on the Internet. Many techniques have been applied to enrich the web page these years, from totally the plaintext in early 90’s, first to web page with pictures and then that with embedded sounds. Later, Sun Microsystems proposed Java Applet, which was popular for not long time until being conquered by Adobe Flash.

Back in March 2008 the Citizendium FAQ asked the question:

How can you possibly succeed? Wikipedia is an enormous community. How can you go head-to-head with Wikipedia, now a veritable goliath?

The solid interest and growth of our project demonstrates that there are many people who love the vibrancy and basic concept of Wikipedia, but who believe it needs to be governed under more sensible rules, and with a special place for experts. We hope they will join the Citizendium effort. We obviously have a long way to go, but we just started. Give us a few years; Wikipedia has had a rather large head start.

Three and a half years later it seems clear that in the battle between the online encyclopedia “governed under more sensible rules, and with a special place for experts” has been unable to compete with the “vibrancy and basic concept of Wikipedia“.

I’m pleased that Steve Wheeler’s link to Larry Sanger’s blog post helped me to remember my initial curiosity regarding the more managed approach to gathering experts’ knowledge provided by Citizendium and demonstrated the failings in such an approach. Let’s continue making Wikipedia even better is my call for 2012.

Microattributions, Wikipedia and Dissemination

Microattributions Session at #SOLO11

One of the sessions I attended at the SOLO (Science Online London) 2011 event held in London last week addressed the role of ‘microattributions’ in science (note that there isn’t a specific page on the SOLO11 Web site which I can link to so I have created a Lanyrd page about the Microattributions breakout session).

Use of Microattributions in Wikipedia

The session began with Mike Peel (@Mike_Peel) showing how contributions to Wikipedia provided an example of a service which supports microattributions. Looking at an example which I am familiar with, a year ago in a post entitled How Can We Assess the Impact and ROI of Contributions to Wikipedia? I commented on the potential value of entries in Wikipedia with the example of Andy Powell’s update to the HTTP_303 entry. This entry has been viewed no fewer that 5,032 times in the past 30 days which I think illustrates Wikipedia’s strengths in providing outreach. However I hadn’t been aware that it was possible to view details of the contributions made to Wikipedia articles. Looking at the list of contributors for the HTTP_303 entry I find that Andy Powell is the top contributor, having made 7 updates – between 09.53 and 10:13 on 24 September 2010.

Looking at a more significant article, such as the Wikipedia entry for World Wide Web, we can see that the top contributor, Susan Lesch, has made 253 edits between March 2008 and July 2011. The next most prolific contributor, NigelJ, has made 127 updates followed by the Cluebot bot, which has made 70 automated updates (fixing vandalised updates to the article).

Mike Peel illustrated the importance of being able to identify significant contributors to Wikipedia in a story of Professor Gets Tenure With The Help Of His Wikipedia Contributions. The Wikimedia blog provided further information on the contributions which Professor Michel Aaij had made: “more than 60,000 edits, a couple of Good Articles, a Featured List, almost 150 Did You Knows“.

Microattributions in Scientific Research

Following Mike Peel’s very tangible example of both use of microattributions and the value that they can provide for an individual, Martin Fenner (@mfenner) described the origin of the term. As Martin described in a recent blog blog one of the first mentions of the term appears to be an August 2007 Editorial in Nature Genetics (Compete, collaborate, compel). Martin provided a definition of the term:

Microattribution ascribes a small scholarly contribution to a particular author.

and went on to describe how a paper published in March 2011 in Nature Genetics (Systematic documentation and analysis of human genetic variation in hemoglobinopathies using the microattribution approach) concluded that “microattribution demonstrably increased the reporting of human variants, leading to a comprehensive online resource for systematically describing human genetic variation“.

A Microattribution Article in Wikipedia

During the Microattributions session we heard of several other examples of microattritibutions including contributions to source code on software repositories such as Github.

During the session Mike Peel updated his personal page on Wikipedia with some of the ideas which were discussed. On the page Mike pointed out that there wasn’t a Wikipedia entry on Microattributions and invited volunteers to create a page.

I responded to this challenge and created the initial stub entry for the article, as illustrated.

In my initial draft which, following the suggestion provided by the article creation wizard, I created in my personal Wikipedia space, I included the other examples of microattributions which I mentioned above. However since I wasn’t aware of any significant publication which had documented use of the term in these contexts I defined microattributions in the context of its use in the Nature Genetics paper.

Making Use of Wikipedia in Other Areas

I don’t know if the Microattributions will remain in Wikipedia. It might be deemed to be not sufficiently note-worthy. Or perhaps it could be included in some other entry: what, for example is the relationship between a microattribution and a nanopublication – a term coined, I think, by Barend Mons.

However I am convinced of the importance of Wikipedia for defining scientific and technical terms and documenting significant issues related to their origin and use. Should funders, such as Research Councils and JISC, encourage funded projects to make use of Wikipedia as a dissemination channel which can help to enhance the impact of funded work? If this does happen there will be a need to understand best practices for creating and maintaining sustainable items in Wikipedia, including concepts such as NPOV.

I also feel it would be useful to be able to monitor contributions to Wikipedia across sectors, such as JISC-funded project developments. Although it seems that we can identify individual contributors I don’t know if it is possible to aggregate information related to groups of individuals. Since myself and Andy Powell both have profiles in Wikipedia, is it possible, I wonder, for statistical information about our contributions to be automatically gathered and analysed? I’ll leave that as a challenge to developers :-)

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Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

How Can We Assess the Impact and ROI of Contributions to Wikipedia?

On Friday Andy Powell tweeted about a sentence he had written. He had written:

303 See Other is one way of responding to a request for a URI that identifies a real-world object according to Semantic Web practice (the other being the use of hash URIs)^[1].

I responded to Andy suggesting that “this might have been the biggest impact you’ve made!”

The contribution Andy had made was to the Wikipedia entry for the HTTP 303 status code. Andy’s contribution to this brief entry was to add a “note about Semantic Web usage of 303 response to indicate real-world object being identified”.

My comment to Andy was based on the usage statistics for this entry – in August 2010 there had been 3,515 views of the page and over the past year there have been a total of 35,489 views as illustrated.

Now although the contribution appears modest it does amount to about a quarter of the full article:

The HTTP response status code 303 See Other is the correct manner in which to redirect web applications to a new URI, particularly after an HTTP POST has been performed.

This response indicates that the correct response can be found under a different URI and should be retrieved using a GET method. The specified URI is not a substitute reference for the original resource.

This status code should be used with the location header.

303 See Other is one way of responding to a request for a URI that identifies a real-world object according to Semantic Web practice (the other being the use of hash URIs)^[1].

The addition makes it clear that the HTTP status code has an important role to play in Semantic Web usage – something that wasn’t mentioned in the original version. So if there are a further 35,000+ views in the next 12 months they may benefit from this additional information. And although there are much more detailed articles about use of the HTTP 303 status code in this context, such as “How to Publish Linked Data on the Web” the addition to the Wikipedia article has the advantage of brevity and the little effort needed to add the sentence.

In a recent post on Having An Impact Through Wikipedia I suggested that it would be useful if JISC-funded project work used Wikipedia as a means of disseminating their knowledge and went on to provide examples of how well-read technical articles in Wikipedia can be. But how would we assess the impact of such work and identify the return on investment?

In the case of the HTTP 303 article it appears that Andy created the first version of his update at 09.52 on Friday 26 September with the final version being published at 10.13. This suggests that the update took about 20 minutes to produce – although it should be noted that Andy pointed out that he “contribute[s] to wikipedia so rarely, it always takes me ages when i do“.

So can we speculate that 20 minutes work may provide a significant part of an article which will be read by over 35,000 people, based on current trends? And how does this compare with other ways in which 20 minutes of work? Is a blog post likely to have a similar number of readers?

I can’t help but feel that contributions to Wikipedia (by which I mean ‘sticky’ contributions which are not removed) may have a more significant contribution in certain areas that many other dissemination channels. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any incentives for such contributions to be made apart from the ‘Big Society’ approach of doing good on a voluntary basis in order to provide benefits to others. This approach, I feel, won’t scale. So shouldn’t we encourage contributions to Wikipedia as a dissemination activity which should be formally recognised?

My question, therefore. is should JISC programme managers encourage projects to contribute to Wikipedia and encourage the projects to report on successes they have doing this? And if you want an example of the outreach which can be gained through use of Wikipedia have a look at the August 2010 usage statistics for the Scientology article (158,845 visits in the month) – an article which Martin Poulter (a well-established contributor to Wikipedia who is ICT Manager at the ILRT, University of Bristol) has contributed to.

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Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

How Well-Read Are Technical Wikipedia Articles?

In a recent post on Having An Impact Through Wikipedia I suggested that it would be useful if JISC-funded synthesis reports, for example reports on emerging new standards, used Wikipedia as a means of enhancing access to such work. In the post I pointed out that “I can’t find usage statistics for the page [but] I suspect that the article [on Amplified Conference which I created] will have been read my more people than have read my various peer-reviewed papers, blog posts, etc.” In response to a request for examples of tools which provide usage statistics for Wikipedia articles Martin Greaney suggested that “It’s quite basic, but the tool at http://stats.grok.se/ might give you enough of an idea of the traffic to certain articles in Wikipedia“.

As Lorcan Dempsey suggested in a tweet “The Wikipedia article traffic stats site mentioned in your comments is quite interesting. wonder how reliable is“. I agree and thought I would explore what the statistics tell us about Wikipedia entries for a number of areas related to Web, metadata and related standards of interest to the JISC development community.

My survey was carried out on 6 July 2010. The following table provides a link to the relevant Wikipedia article, the data the article was created (with a link to the original page for the article), my comments on the article and the usage statistics for October 2009 and June 2010 (two dates chosen to observe any significant variations).

Page	Created	Summary (subjective comments)	Stats: Oct 2009	Stats: Jun 2010
Linked Data	May 2007	Multiple concerns have been identified with this article.	5,423	8,102
HTML	Jul 2001	Appears to be a well-written and comprehensive article. Includes info box so factual information is available in DBPedia.	147,357	143,386
XML	Sep 2001	Appears to be a well-written and comprehensive article. Includes info box so factual information is available in DBPedia.	159,749	126,599
XSLT	Feb/Jun 2002	Appears to be a very thorough and comprehensive article. Includes info box so factual information is available in DBPedia.	7,160	18,938
RSS	Sep 2002	Appears to be a well-written and comprehensive article. Includes a very brief info box so factual information is available in DBPedia.	7,160 (gaps)	18,938
AJAX (programming)	Mar 2005	Appears factually correct .	98,629	90,300
SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language)	Sep 2004	Appears to be a very thorough and comprehensive article.	4,421	2,942
Z39.50	Oct 2004	Brief article which has been flagged as in need of improvements.	3,960	2,592
Search/Retrieve Web Service	Feb 2004	Very little information provided.	506	462
Dublin Core	Oct 2001	Appears factually correct though citations need improving.	7,013	7,501
METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard)	Sep 2006	Appears factually correct though citations need improving.	7,236	4,573
MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema)	Aug 2006	Appears to be a reasonable although succinct summary.	546	583

Extrapolating from the usage statistics for the two dates it would seem that popular articles such as HTML and XML have an annual number of views of around 1,750,000 and 1,720,000 whilst an article on a less well-known standard such as METS has an annual number of views of around 70,0000. It is perhaps surprising, in light of the high viewing figures for METS that the annual viewing figures for MODS is around 6,700. Perhaps this is due to the name clash between the METS acronym and the Mets name used to refer to the New York Mets. However there isn’t, as far as I am aware, such scope for confusion with names such as HTML, XML, SAML, etc.

What conclusion might we draw from such statistics? I would suggest that if I had an interest in ensuring that users had a good understanding of what Dublin Core is about and had access to the key sources of information then contributing to the Dublin Core Wikipedia page would be a good way of achieving that goal – after all the estimated viewing figures of around 87,000 surely can’t be ignored.

Now Matt Jukes pointed out the potential difficulties of getting content into Wikipedia. But that is a question of ‘How we go about contributing to Wikipedia?‘ rather than ‘Should we?‘

Can we accept that the answer to the second question should be ‘Yes‘ so that we can explore ways of addressing the first question?

Having An Impact Through Wikipedia

Re-Discovering Amplified Events

A recent tweet from Miquel Duran (a University professor, researcher in quantum chemistry, fostering communication of science 2.0 and university 2.0) alerted me to a blog post on The ‘Amplified Conference’.

As this is a particular area of interest to me I read the post and thought “yes, I agree” with its summary of the benefits of an amplified event :

• Amplification of the audiences’ voice: Audience members through the use of such social media technologies (such as Twitter) can create online discourse during the sessions in real-time
• Amplification of the speaker’s talk: Widespread and inexpensive video and audio-conferencing technologies
• Amplification across time: With low-cost technologies, presentations are often made available after the event, with use of podcasting or videocasting technologies
• Amplification of the speaker’s slides: With social media lightweight technologies, (such as Slideshare) entire presentations can simply be uploaded, shared, and embedded on other Web sites and commented upon
• Amplification of feedback to the speaker: Micro-blogging technologies (such as Twitter) are being used not only as for discourse and knowledge exchange among conference participants
• Amplification of collective memory: With the widespread availability of inexpensive digital cameras, photographs are often uploaded to popular photographic sharing services
• Amplification of the learning: With the Web resources and social media technologies, following links to resources and discourse about the points made by a speaker during a talk propagates the learning which takes place at an event.
• Amplification of the historical conference record: The ‘official’ digital resources such as slides, video and audio recordings which have been made by the conference organizers

I then thought that the words sounded familiar and, on rereading the Amplified Conference page on Wikipedia, I realised that I was reading words I had coined when I created the Wikipedia page in on 30 August 2008!

The blog post mentioned above linked to a previous post on Amplified Conferences in the Social Media World written by the author for Suite101.com. I found it interesting to compare the examples provided in the post with my Wikipedia article. I had written, for example,

Amplification of feedback to the speaker: Micro-blogging technologies, such as Twitter, are being used not only as a discussion channel for conference participants but also as a way of providing real-time feedback to a speaker during a talk. We are also now seeing dedicated microblogging technologies, such as Coveritlive and Scribblelive, being developed which aim to provide more sophisticated ‘back channels’ for use at conferences.

Amplification of a conference’s collective memory: The popularity of digital cameras and the photographic capabilities of many mobile phones is leading to many photographs being taken at conferences. With such photographs often being uploaded to popular photographic sharing services, such as Flickr, and such collections being made more easy to discovered through agreed use of tags, we are seeing amplification of the memories of an event though the sharing of such resources. The ability of such photographic resources to be ‘mashed up’ with, say, accompanying music, can similarly help to enrich such collective experiences.

The Suite101.com article had nicely summarised. It was perhaps surprising that the article hadn’t provided a link to the Wikipedia article which, I would assume, was a source resource – but this isn’t something which particularly concerns me. Indeed I did wonder that if Suite101.com has a policy that one shouldn’t cite Wikipedia entries (as may be the case in higher education) whether the author would be in a position to cite the resource? I have to admit that when I wrote the article I only cited Lorcan Dempsey’s original (brief) blog post and an article published by Paul Shabajee in the Times Higher Educational Supplement – the main body of the text was content I created in Wikipedia and had not published elsewhere (which perhaps I shouldn’t have done?).

Maximising Impact Using Wikipedia

Despite my uncertainty as to whether I should have first published an article described amplified conference which I could then cite (although I would then not have a neutral point of view!) discovering the reference to Amplified Conferences has made me appreciate the impact which an article in Wikipedia can have. Although I can’t find usage statistics for the page I suspect that the article will have been read my more people than have read my various peer-reviewed papers, blog posts, etc. (Can anyone suggest on ways in which this claim could be validated?)

I have previously suggested that Wikipedia should be used more widely across the higher education sector. Shouldn’t, where appropriate, the outputs of JISC-funded reports be included in Wikipedia articles? As an example consider the JISC-funded report on MODS: Metadata Object Description Schema [PDF]. This report, written in 2003, was commissioned by the JISC and is now hidden on the JISC Web site. meanwhile there is a brief entry on MODS in Wikipedia which, I would have thought, would have benefitted if the information provided if the JISC report had been included.

The JISC report does state that the copyright is held by JISC. This is a barrier to providing content in Wikipedia, which must be made available under a Creative Commons licence. But as JISC seek to be proactive in encouraging take-up of their deliverables under open access licences, I suspect this is not a fundamental barrier on allowing such content to be made available in a popular environment such as Wikipedia.

And with the growing interest in DBpedia (the Linked Data representation of Info boxes in Wikipedia entries) providing content in Wikipedia may also allow such content to be integrated in Linked Data applications.

Whilst I feel it would be inappropriate to mandate that the content of reports commissioned through public funding should be made available on Wikipedia, I do feel that this should be encouraged. What’s your view?

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Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

What Is JISC?

I recently noticed a referrer link to this blog coming from the Answers.com Web site. I’ve not visited this site before so I thought I’d visit and use the service to find an answer to a question. The question I thought I’d ask was “What is JISC?” And, as shown below, I found that “The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) supports United Kingdom post-16 and higher education and research by providing leadership in the use of ICT (Information and Communications Technology) in support of learning, teaching, research and administration. JISC is funded by all the UK post-16 and higher education funding councils.“.

This answer is taken from the JISC entry in Wikipedia. Similar results are found by asking questions such as “What is UKOLN?” and “What is Bath University?” as well as for more general questions such as “What is research” although for questions such as “What is education?” the answers are drawn from a variety of sources, with the Wikipedia definition to be found after results from sources such as The American Heritage Dictionary, Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition and the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia.

What are the implications of this? The first, unsurprisingly, is that if information about your organisation or your areas of interest are available in Wikipedia, then the Creative Commons licence which is assigned to the material will help to ensure that this information is surfaced in multiple locations.

And perhaps more subtly, if you don’t use Wikiepdia, or you require that your students don’t use Wikipedia, you may find that you are inadvertently using information held by Wikipedia and made available via others services such as Wikipedia. In the search for JISC the top entry was clearly labelled as coming from Wikipedia, but in the example of “What is education?” the first set of references came from more traditional sources of information, and if you scroll down you may miss the citation details for the entry from Wikipedia.

My view is that providing information about your organisation of the topics you care about in Wikipedia will help to maximise awareness of and an interest such information. And failing to provide such information on the grounds that people shouldn’t use Wikipedia is mistaken. But if you do make use of Wikipedia you should be careful to provide an objective and encylopedia-like definition and avoid the trap of the entry sounding like an advertisement:

Wikimindmap

A post on Mind maps & Wiki on the 2coach blog introduced me to the Wikimindmap tool.  This provides a visualisation of information provided on Wikipedia.

And a post on the Web2learning.net blog illustrates how a search for “Library” is displayed, but I was more interested in searching for my hobby in the analogue world – “rapper sword”.

Although text on the home page implies that the service may not be sustainable (“Due to high request, WikiMindMap will soon be available as intranet solution. Please come back here to keep you informed.“) I was more interested in this service as an example of how making your data available for reuse by others (content in Wikipedia has a Creative Commons licence) and providing access to the data can allow applications to be developed which the original developed may not have considered.

My colleague Paul Walk mentioned this recently in a post on “The coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else“.

Is this interface of use?  Perhaps it may be considered somewhat gimmicky – but I do wonder if this type of graphical interface to an encyclopedia might provide accessibility benefits?

Wikipedia – Can We Provide Open Access For Training Materials?

Melissa Knighton, who works on the Staff Development Unit at the University of Leeds, and I took part in a workshop at ITCP held in Trieste a couple of years ago. So I was interested to rediscover her Elgg blog recently. Her posting on Wikipedia – a resource for learning and teaching? described a staff development course on the role of Wikipedia in learning and teaching. Further exploration of the Elgg blog service at the University of Leeds led me to a posting on Wikipedia: What the critics say by Angela Newton, the Information Literacy Team Leader in the Library at the University of Leeds. Angela’s posting summarises Wikipedia’s strengths and weaknesses – issues which, I’m sure, will be addressed more fully in the staff development course.

But how much time and effort will be spent in duplicating the development of similar materials across the library and information sector? The Library sector, in particular, should appreciate the benefits to be gained by providing open access to resource, and such benefits need not be restricted to research publications – Creative Commons licences can also be used with document and training materials. This is an argument I made in a paper on Let’s Free IT Support Materials! which I presented at the EUNIS 2005 conference.

Which will be the first Library to provide a Creative Commons licence for its documentation and training materials? And have a Creative Commons logo on slides used in training courses? Or is this already happening?