Grants:APG/Proposals/2017-2018 round 1/Wikimedia UK/Impact report form

Purpose of the report

This form is for organizations receiving Annual Plan Grants to report on their results to date. For progress reports, the time period for this report will the first 6 months of each grant (e.g. 1 January - 30 June of the current year). For impact reports, the time period for this report will be the full 12 months of this grant, including the period already reported on in the progress report (e.g. 1 January - 31 December of the current year). This form includes four sections, addressing global metrics, program stories, financial information, and compliance. Please contact APG/FDC staff if you have questions about this form, or concerns submitting it by the deadline. After submitting the form, organizations will also meet with APG staff to discuss their progress.

Summary of Achievements

Wikimedia UK is pleased and proud to share the key achievements of our programme delivery in 2018 - 19 through this report. This is the final year in the UK Chapter’s three year strategy from 2016 - 2019, and our success in 2018 builds on the significant progress made over the previous two years towards our overall strategic aims and outcomes.

We have met or exceeded all of our targets for 2018/19, with particular highlights as follows:

We involved 7523 participants directly in our activities, compared to 6252 last year and a target for the year of 5200
Over a million Wikimedia articles were created or improved as a result of our work - significantly above our target of 202,000
Of the 41,256 images added to Wikimedia Commons through our programmes, 20,435 were used in Wikimedia article pages - a reuse rate of almost 50%
There were 342 leading volunteers, of whom half were women
Volunteers contributed 23,254 hours of their time
92% of the community leaders who responded to our annual survey would recommend volunteering with Wikimedia UK

The narrative stories from this report are equally impressive. The following list is just a snapshot of some of the highlights of these activities:

We held the second annual Celtic Knot conference, this time in partnership with the National Library of Wales and attended by Wikimedians and partners from the Basque Country, Brittany, Catalonia, Cornwall, Ireland, Sami-speaking areas, Scotland and Wales.
We held events at organisations such as the Royal College of Art as part of Art + Feminism 2018.
We supported a range of other gender gap events within partner institutions. These included the Vote 100 Wikipedia event at Edinburgh University - which used the centenary of women’s suffrage to highlight historic and current inequalities - and events for Ada Lovelace Day.
The Wikimedian in Residence at Bodleian Libraries continued in post for another year. His work has been critical in developing our understanding of how Wikidata can significantly enrich public access to cultural heritage.
The Scottish community played an active role in Wiki Loves Monuments this year, supported by the newly appointed Scotland Programme Co-ordinator in Scotland as well as Wikimedians in Residence based at Scottish institutions.
Our programme in Scotland has seen an exponential increase since the appointment of our first dedicated Progamme Co-ordinator for this work. The range of new projects, events and relationships being developed illustrate the benefit of appointing local staff when working in the UK’s constituent countries.
We have continued to develop our advocacy activities, and responded to a high number of public policy consultations during the year. It has been encouraging to see the impact of this work at a regional and national level; particularly given the disappointing results of our combined advocacy efforts towards influencing problematic elements of the EU Copyright Directive.
Our partnership event with the Mayor of London and Bloomberg during London Tech Week 2019 attracted a high level of press coverage and online support.
Finally, the inclusion of Wikimedia into the Welsh Baccalaureate is a significant achievement both for the chapter and for our local partners in Wales who have helped to make this happen.

Background & strategic context

Wikimedia UK endorsed the new strategic direction for Wikimedia in 2017, and noted the high level of overlap with our own strategic priorities – particularly in terms of diversity and equality, expressed in the Wikimedia 2030 strategic emphasis on knowledge equity. We are now closely involved with the structural discussions around the global strategy.

We are committed to the ideal of a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge, and believe that here in the UK, we can play a unique and important role in realising that vision.

Our vision is of a more tolerant, informed and democratic society through the shared creation of, and access to, open knowledge.

Our mission is to support and advocate for the development of open knowledge, working in partnership with volunteers, the cultural and education sectors and other organisations to make knowledge available, usable and reusable online.

In the period 2016–2019, Wikimedia UK has been working towards the following longer-term benefits, or outcomes:

Our work has significantly increased access to knowledge about, or held in, the UK
The Wikimedia projects reflect our diverse society and are free from systemic bias
Learners in the UK are able to understand and engage with open knowledge
Wikimedia UK is recognised as a leading organisation for open knowledge

To support the achievement of these outcomes, during 2016–19 our strategic goals were as follows:

Increase the quality and quantity of coverage of subjects that are currently under-represented on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects
Contribute to the development of open knowledge in the UK, by increasing understanding and recognition of the value of open knowledge and advocating for change at an organisational, sectoral and public policy level
Support the use of the Wikimedia projects as important tools for education and learning in the UK

These strategic goals relate directly to our three key programme areas:

Diverse content and contributors
Promoting open knowledge
Education and learning

These programme strands are interconnected, with some of our activities – such as Wikimedians in Residence - helping to deliver our strategic goals; however for the purpose of planning and reporting we have identified which key programme strand and strategic goal to which each of our activities relates.

Grant metrics overview - all programs

To see definitions of grant metrics, see Grant Metrics.

Overall

Metric	End of Year Targets	Achieved annual outcome	Explanation
Participants GM1	5,200	7,523	Whole range of people we have fairly in depth engagement with – either participation in workshops, or listening to our talks. People engaging with WMUK through editathons, Wikipedia in Classroom courses, training sessions, workshops, conferences. In 2018, WMUK staff and leading volunteers delivered 52 presentations highlighting residencies, Wikidata, open knowledge, Wikipedia and education. Over 500 people participated in this year’s WLM competition. 80 training and workshops, 79 editathons.
Newly registered editors GM2	800	1,064	Our editing-focused programmes often train new editors to edit. 437 new editors come from Wikipedia in Classroom courses at Stirling University, Middlesex University London, University of Edinburgh and Dundee University. 209 people created accounts to participate in Wiki Loves Monuments 2018.
Articles added/improved GM3	202,000	1,117,114	An overwhelming number come from improved and new items created on Wikidata. 436,993 from NLW’s Wikidata visiting scholar and 457,521 from the WIR in Oxford. We didn’t expect that there will be such a rise in working on Wikidata datasets, hence such a significant overachievement on metrics here.
Volunteer hours	18,300	23,254	Time spent by volunteer organisers making our programmes happen. Over 8,000 hours from education courses and other educational activities, 1669 from leading volunteers organising workshops, editathons and representing the chapter in conferences and talks, 300 hours from Mayor/Bloomberg event, 180hrs from WLM competition, and 828 from the Volunteer Programme at NLW.
Total audience and reach (online or in person engagement with Wikimedia UK)	65,450	74,145	‘Participants’ above plus our online engagement reach. This is a total number of people that we feel we reached with our messaging. Social media: Twitter-12504, Facebook 3101, YouTube 272, Newsletter 1383 (subscribers), Mailing List 512, Instagram 369, Youtube channel views 1381, Welsh twitter: 5037 welsh wici twitter: 1384.

Color coding of the results

Achieved	Target has been achieved or exceeded
Opportunity for improvement	Good progress has been made towards achieving the target, but the target has not been reached
Attention required	Little or no progress has been made towards achieving the target

All of our metrics - summary

Grant metrics in italics. For context and explanations, see narratives for each of the programmes.

Metric	Annual targets (2018-19)	Achieved outcome
1. Total audience and reach	65,450	74,145
2. Number of newly registered users	800	1,064
3. Total participants	5,200	7,523
4. Number of lead volunteers	250	342
5. % of lead volunteers who are women	38%	49.70%
6. Estimated number of volunteer hours	18,300	23,254
7. Volunteers would recommend WMUK	85%	92%
8. Volunteers feel valued by WMUK	80%	80%
9. Volunteers have developed new skills	75%	78%
10. Images/media added to WM Commons	20,000	41,256
11. Images/media added to WM article pages	3,000	20,435
12. % of uploaded media used in article pages	15%	49.58%
13. Content pages created or improved, across all WM projects excl. Commons	202,000	1,117,114
14. Number of articles created	30,200	66,919
15. Digital media reach	60,000	66,440
16. Responses to consultations	3	5
17. Policy change affected	3	3

Programme 1 all metrics

Grant (GM) and Grantee-Defined Metrics (GDM) are in italics. For context, targets and explanations, please see narratives under the individual strategic programme descriptions.

Metric	Annual targets (2018-19)	Achieved outcome
1.Number of total participants (GM1)	1,600	2,294
2. Number of newly registered users (GM2)	600	627
3. Number of articles added/improved (GM3)	200,000	1,112,699
4. Estimated number of volunteer hours (GDM1)	8,500	8,409
5. Total audience and reach (GDM2)	1,730	2,460
6. Number of leading volunteers	130	166
7. Female % of above	38%	49.70%
8. Volunteers would recommend WMUK	80%	92%
9. Volunteers feel valued by WMUK	85%	80%
10. Volunteers have developed new skills	75%	78%
11. Images/media added to Commons	20,000	41,256
12. Images/media added to Wikimedia pages	3,000	20,435
13. % uploaded media used in content pages	15%	49.58%
14. New articles added	30,000	66,656

Programme 2 all metrics

Metric	Annual targets (2018-19)	Achieved outcome
1.Number of total participants (GM1)	3,000	3,942
2. Estimated number of volunteer hours (GDM1)	4,800	6,339
3. Total audience and reach (GDM2)	63,080	70,324
4. Number of leading volunteers	80	102
5. Digital media reach	60,000	66,440
6. Responses to consultations	3	5
7. Policy change affected	3	3

Programme 3 all metrics

Metric	Annual targets (2018-19)	Achieved outcome
1.Number of total participants (GM1)	600	1,287
2. Number of newly registered users (GM2)	200	437
3. Number of articles added/improved (GM3)	2,000	4,415
4. Estimated number of volunteer hours (GDM1)	5,000	8,506
5. Total audience and reach	640	1,361
6. Number of leading volunteers	40	74
7. New articles added	200	263

Telling your program stories - all programs

Programme 1: Diverse content and contributors

Overall goal 1: Increase the quality and quantity of coverage of subjects that are currently under-represented on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects

This programme addressed both the quality and quantity of online content, ensuring that under-represented subjects are covered as well as increasing file diversity, and diversifying the editor base. This takes inspiration from Wikimedia's gender gap work, which addresses inequalities in both content and contributors.

Metrics

Metric	2017-18 full year achieved	2018/19 full year target (total for all programmes) Strategic Programme 1	2018/19 year achieved (total for all programmes) Strategic Programme 1	Explanation
Participants (GM1)	2,686	1,600	2,294	A varied group of people took part in our events - Wikipedia/Wikidata training series, open events, editathons, conferences, workshops, volunteer programs, and educational courses.
Newly registered user (GM2)	734	600	627	New users amongst the participants above.
Articles added/improved (GM3)	344,786	200,000	1,112,699	Primarily Wikidata work - see narratives below. For example, NLW worked on ‘The sum of all Welsh literature’ which created Wikidata item for every piece of Welsh literature in the Library’s catalogues (around 350,000 items).
Volunteer hours (GDM1)	8,639.6	8,500	8,409	The overall volunteer hours time exceeded our target, but we didn’t quite meet our target in this programme. More energy than anticipated was spent on advocacy and education, reflecting our increased focus on digital literacy.
Total audience and reach (GDM2)	2,819	1,730	2,460	Mostly the participants above
Leading volunteers	133	130	166	Community organisers making our programmes happen
Female % of above	42.85% (57 women)	38%	49.70%	Continuing the trend of high female participation - many of our leaders are partners at external organisations, which helps with diversity
Volunteers would recommend WMUK	72%	85%		Write up of the survey below
Volunteers feel valued by WMUK	82%	80%		//
Volunteers have developed new skills	68%	75%		//
Images/media added to Commons	27,207	20,000	41,256	Many came from Wiki Loves Monuments
Images/media added to Wikimedia pages	8,456	.3,000	20,435	This is much higher than anticipated, partly due to how we are now reusing images on Wikidata
% uploaded media used in content pages	31.08%	15%	49.58%	As above
New articles created	35,489	30,000	66,656	4,341 new articles from Wikidata - including a data set of 3,395 about Eastern and Asian paintings and sculptures to Wikidata, 847 from the Wales Wiki Asturias project, 236 through university courses, over 20,000 from the Wikidata visiting scholar at NLW, Over 20k items were created for WLM in Scotland (HES database of listed buildings and scheduled monuments)

Background

Strategic Goal 1: Increase the quality and quantity of coverage of subjects that are currently under-represented on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects

Creative heritage projects almost always have websites, but the information they generate is not sustainable – who is looking after the sites five years on? Often, the information generated by publicly funded projects is lost (from the digital realm) after a few years … Wikipedia is a key knowledge platform, and an excellent way for us to deliver an international audience to our local heritage project (and vice versa).
— tara s Beall, lead community organiser in Scotland

Wikimedia UK works in partnership with the cultural and education sectors and other organisations to make knowledge freely available, usable and reusable online. By developing partnerships with institutions with diverse collections, and other organisations that hold important information about diverse subject areas, we can produce and release material about under-represented subjects and help address systemic bias.

This logic model illustrates how our focused work with organisations in the UK leads to greater diversity of content available to all people:

Working with our community underpins all of our programme delivery. However, given the scope and scale of our work to increase coverage of under-represented subjects, a significant proportion of our work with volunteers falls under this programme strand. This is reflected in our targets for this programme and demonstrates how our extensive offline work with the Wikimedia UK community translates into online impact (as this is also the programme with the highest outputs and targets relating to content creation). It is also within this programme strand that we put the most emphasis on diversifying our volunteers and editors.

This logic model explains why we see volunteer engagement as key to our programmes, and how we are developing an engaged, diverse community:

In common with many countries, the UK’s knowledge economy is highly differentiated. There are many structural inequalities in terms of who has access to knowledge, and who has the ability to create knowledge and to share it with authority. Improving the quality and range of coverage of under-represented subjects remains a priority for us. A second priority is working with minority and marginalised groups to improve their ability to discover their own heritage, to tell their own stories, and to make themselves heard. Our purpose is to multiply and amplify the voices of those currently less visible in our cultural spectrum.

Work with volunteers from all backgrounds is essential to all of our programme delivery; however, as part of our first programme strand, we deliver specific activities to try and diversify, multiply and amplify the voice of this community, and to support the diversification of Wikimedia’s content and its contributors.

The key themes of our work under this programme strand in 2018/19 were:

The Celtic Knot
Addressing the Gender Gap
Cultural Heritage
Community Development

Highlights of programme activity

Our projects within this strategic goal coalesced around specific themes, all feeding into diverse knowledge. We describe our achievements within those themes below.

The Celtic Knot
Wiki Health was one of the projects led by National Library of Wales, with Government funding This strand of work has been of key importance to us. It underpins our growing expertise in supporting minority languages and cultures, while collaborating with local governments and institutions. In July we held our second Celtic Knot conference (click link for a case study). This was organised by the Wikimedian at the National Library of Wales, Jason Evans, in partnership with Wikimedia UK. The event served as a focal point for our work on minority languages. It brought together Wikimedians and wiki partners from Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany, Catalan, the Basque country, together with representatives of the Northern Sami, to discuss ways in which Wikipedia can support minority or endangered languages. The technical workshops offered at last year’s event were very popular. To meet continuing interest in this field, we ran a Wikidata and technical track, in which participants shared challenges and solutions for rapid expansion of a minority language wiki. For example, our ‘How to run a Wikipedia Translation workshop’ encouraged attendees to run their own translation workshops. The conference enabled us to create momentum behind some key work on Celtic content. Working with WiciMon and the National Eisteddfod (the annual Welsh festival of literature, music and performance), we will be turning the biographies of people accepted into the Druidic Circle into Wikipedia articles. Work with Llen Natur on the database of species also continues. Technology has been a key element of our work to support minority languages. We have drawn on technical solutions to generate new content in a scalable way and to share existing knowledge with third parties. This helps us to support the wider knowledge ecosystem in a systematic way. Examples of this work include: Dictionary of Welsh Biography - National Library of Wales, our partner, is working on a new interface for the Dictionary to help users to visualise and explore its content. The interface will be powered by Wikidata and hold narrative content from Wikipedia alongside images hosted on Wikimedia Commons. When this project launches, it will cement the Library’s commitment to making use of Wikimedia content to develop its own innovate online infrastructure. Welsh National Terminology Portal (Bangor University) collates 12 standardised academic dictionaries. Recently Llen Natur Dictionary has been accepted into their main portal as the de facto source for species information. Since we have worked with Llen Natur to embed Wikimedia content into their portal, 17,000 images from Commons now also appear in the Welsh National Terminology Portal website. There are also 9,000 links to Welsh language articles on Wicipedia Cymraeg. Carl Morris’s Women in Red project - we collaborated with a volunteer in Wales to create this gender gap/Wales heritage activity. The project uses Twitter to highlight existing high quality articles about women. It also provides ideas for improvements and for brand new articles. Many Welsh Wikipedia articles on women remain stubs; this project will promote those articles for expansion, thus producing richer and more detailed articles. The Twitter feed posts a mixture of automated and manual tweets, and relevant retweets. The feed also draws on the recent biographical image uploads on Commons by the National Library of Wales. ‘Wiciproject Cyfoes’ - project on cywiki to make all ‘time related’ fields in infoboxes automated through Wikidata. Similar work was delivered on the Locations infobox (which needed to be revised, properties added and translated). This work is ongoing but already delivering significant benefit to Welsh Wikipedia. There are several other projects that fall under our ‘Celtic Knot’ theme. At the Scottish Libraries and Information Council (SLIC) the resident continued to build links to engage public library services across Scotland with Wikimedia. The ambition has been to build the digital skills of library staff through regional training sessions, encouraging them to share the libraries’ collections through Wikimedia. Specialisms of librarians trained through the SLIC residency Libraries in Scotland that have completed the Train the Trainer course We have also been exploring ways to continue to support the Gaelic language, following our Gaelic language residency project in partnership with the National Library of Scotland in 2017. Our Scotland Coordinator and one of our board members have reached out to the Glasgow Gaelic School, while the Co-ordinator has also had an exploratory meeting with the Literature Alliance to take this work forward.

Addressing the Gender Gap
Wikimedia UK remains committed to addressing the gender gap on Wikipedia, and we are working with many partners on different initiatives to tackle this, including: Art+Feminism was delivered as a part of an annual global project that saw 275 events and 4,000 people participating worldwide. In the UK we worked with a range of organisations such as the Royal College of Art, The Photographers’ Gallery, and Birkbeck College to create articles about women in the arts. One of the most interesting aspects about the chapter’s involvement with Art+Feminism this year was our work with students interested in addressing systemic bias beyond the gender gap. We partnered with the UnBias project at the Royal College of Art, where the events involved talks from trans activists involved in technology, and discussions of how to address systematic bias at a source level. The University of Edinburgh continued to deliver work to address the gender gap – while being primarily an education-focused Wikimedian in Residence partnership – running monthly Women in Red editathons, and holding a Suffragette 100 editathon on International Women's Day in 2018. Wikimedia UK also held a Vote 100 Wikipedia event at the University of Edinburgh, celebrating the Scottish Suffragettes on St Andrews Day in November. This connected with the university-wide Vote 100 exhibition. We prepared a Histropedia timeline of Scottish suffragettes on a smart table for the exhibition in a new collaboration between Learning, Teaching Services and the Library & University Collections team. It is also worth highlighting that the University of Edinburgh’s Athena SWAN Silver Award Action Plan for 2018–2022 includes Wikimedia activities. This gives a lot of recognition to gender gap Wikimedia work at the university and supports internal advocacy. The international Ada Lovelace day in October was another focal point for our gender gap activities. We harnessed the campaign to galvanise partner institutions around this theme, delivering a series of editing events focused on women in science. We partnered with Digital Science.com, GirlsCode (Liverpool and Milton Keynes) and others, and also supported a (successful) funding bid for the Electrifying Women Project led by the Science Museum and University of Leeds. This work builds on the Women Engineering Society's Centenary Project, and also ties into our broader collaboration with the Women Engineering Society. It will start in spring 2019 and will include editathons focusing on women electrical engineers throughout history. Through SLIC we ran a Women of Skye editathon for librarians and archivists. Remote events have proven difficult in the past, so we worked closely with the all the key cultural organisations on the island. The SLIC resident engaged with the archives centre and the library who helped prepare the research in advance and provided a venue for the event. Atlas Art, the local art organisation, brought their event planning skills and local contacts - something we have struggled with in the past. Those three teams attended the Intro to Wikipedia staff training ahead of the event so they had a good understanding of what running an editathon might entail and the editathon itself was run over two days, allowing for different members of the community to participate. The aim of improving the coverage of notable women from an island community was a very cohesive theme which had the local community very enthused, and the event received coverage on the BBC news and the Highland Free Press. We feel this model could be replicated again with success in other rural areas or islands in Scotland.

Cultural Heritage
The WLM resource Delphine Dallison produced for librarians One of our four key strategic outcomes is that our work will increase access to knowledge about, or held in, the UK; enriching our understanding and engagement with our collective cultural heritage and ensuring that this is available in digital forms as much and as freely as possible. This work was led by the resident at the Bodleian Libraries, Dr Martin Poulter. He delivered a mass China Biographical Database import, based on the freely accessible scholarly database hosted by Harvard University. He also built a Wikidata-driven website for exploring different eras of Chinese and Japanese history. This gives the public a novel – and free – way to navigate these historic items, and is the biggest database improvement project delivered as a part of the residency. The upload is not just about public access to records but also provides a compelling argument for the inclusion of Wikidata in the strategic aims of the university. Throughout the year, Bodleian’s resident continued work on querying Wikidata to show how connections between collections are represented in Wikidata's knowledge graph. Wiki Loves Monuments had a particularly strong focus on engaging heritage partner organisations in Scotland. One of the key successes was running a live demo of the WLM website and tool at the quarterly Scottish Libraries Information Council Digital Champions Meeting. The resident, Delphine Dallison, produced a Wiki Loves Monuments resource for librarians, which was publicised across the SLIC libraries network. We reused these materials for engagement with Museums and for Heritage Organisations, led by our Scotland Programme Coordinator. There was further engagement from our partners in Scotland. Historic Environment Scotland provided an up to date database of monuments, which we uploaded to Wikidata (the HES database is open by default, we liaised with them to ensure that the public version was as up to date as possible. Nav Evans of Histopedia was absolutely critical in this process, helping us as a volunteer). Archaeology Scotland supported the project through press releases and competition prizes. The Castle Studies Trust funded a project delivered by Archaeology Scotland and Dig it!, which included taking and uploading photos during WLM. This provided a basis for our developing relationship with Dig It! and we are now working on a small scale Wikimedian in Residence programme with them.

Community Development

Volunteers at a SLIC training event

An editathon with Dig It! and Archaeology Scotland

Our approach to community development is grounded in our existing programme strands. For example, Wiki Loves Monuments 2018 was used in Scotland to galvanise the community of volunteers and organisations. The SLIC resident rolled out a library engagement pack; we also engaged with museums and heritage organisations to establish programme tie-ins and publicity support.

In general, we have been working harder to connect volunteer interests to programme opportunities this year. One of our Programme Co-ordinators on the staff team designed a process whereby new volunteers were signed up to a rolling introductory newsletter series, with information about the Wikimedia movement and the work of Wikimedia UK. People were given a chance to explore their engagement with Wikimedia UK. This tailored approach took a few months to bear results, and towards the end of the trial we made some very promising connections. We also connected this process to incoming enquiries from potential partner institutions. Every interaction was different, but some examples of how this worked include:

We connected an enquiry from Halsway Manor, the second largest collection folk collection in England, to one of our existing volunteers. We matched the volunteer’s interest, location and skills to create this connection.
We had an enquiry from Watercolour World (a collection focusing on ‘undiscovered pieces’ that are found from people’s houses; forgotten pieces which may give a unique snapshot in time). The team were looking for guidance concerning Wikimedia’s ‘Open’ practices, and information on Commons uploads. Following an initial discussion, they were connected with person from Creative Commons UK – a new volunteer keen to assist Wikimedia UK in advocacy efforts. Mahmoud and Watercolour World have since carried on communications, in hope for large contributions to Wikimedia Commons in the future. It’s likely that this will continue to be a self-sustaining relationship.
We worked with Waddesdon Manor (a National Trust-owned Rothschild collection in Buckinghamshire). Their Digital Team contacted us to understand whether their collections could feature more across the Wikimedia projects. We matched them with accredited trainers with an interest in heritage management.

This way of working has the advantage of being sustainable, beyond the capacity and staff leadership of the programmes team. It requires a larger initial investment of time, but pays off longer-term by creating a more engaged, skilled community.

Wiki Loves Monuments proved to be a great opportunity to galvanise our communities, and we capitalised on this - particularly in Scotland. We ran a wide reaching social media campaign around the competition and involved many of our key partners across the country. We worked with SLIC, University of Edinburgh, Museums Galleries Scotland, Archaeology Scotland, Dig it!, Built Environment Forum Scotland, the Dumfries Historic Buildings Trust, the Scottish Civic Trust and Doors Open Day on WLM 2018, with the partnership links we generated showing an impressive range of volunteer leadership. The SLIC Wikimedian in Residence also promoted Wiki Loves Monuments across the wider library sector in Scotland through SLIC affiliated librarians. WLM was also used to mobilise inactive partners in Scotland, with the resident facilitating a series of Doors Open Days editathons through the Scottish Civic Trust network. This opened up several potential future partnerships at institutions such as the City of Glasgow College and Aberdeenshire Libraries.

Interestingly, the volunteer community in Scotland is very closely linked with our partner organisations and so our approach to volunteer management is somewhat different there compared to other parts of the UK. We are using programme campaigns such as #1lib1ref to boost volunteer activity. The community meetups organised by the Scotland Coordinator have a strong focus on partners as well.

At the end of our financial year we surveyed our community in order to receive structured feedback on our engagement with volunteers. We chose to focus on ‘lead volunteers’, which for us can mean volunteer organisers or external partnership leads; and so the survey specifically targeted community leaders. There were 38 respondents, and the key metric results are as follows:

	2016-17 actual	2017-18 actual	2018-19 target	2018-19 actual
Volunteers would recommend WMUK	72%	81.25%	85%	91.67%
Volunteers feel valued by WMUK	82%	75.86%	80%	80.00%
Volunteers have developed new skills	68%	81.48%	75%	77.78%

The full report is at https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7uZ08mzX5bvX2QyUHpvSlhucjBNdGtSOHZYSlpsYzNpUWRv

Our key reflections from the survey are that in general our Community Leaders feel well supported, valued, and enjoy the work that they do with Wikimedia UK. Additional capacity in Scotland has been appreciated, with positive comments reflecting the benefit that additional stewardship of partners in particular has had. However in other areas the challenges faced by the organisation in terms of capacity over the past year has been felt. Our volunteers would benefit from additional support in terms of stewardship, generally.

Innovation

There are a few innovative programme approaches from 2018 we would like to highlight. This is especially true around the programmes in Scotland, where we had more capacity than previously to experiment thanks to our placement of the Scotland Coordinator.

Within the SLIC programme, we trialled a new model of Wikimedian in Residence support, setting up a student placement from the University of Strathclyde’s MSc in Information and Library Studies to work alongside the resident. The student had an interest in information literacy, and led on the #1Lib1Ref engagement within the SLIC network, and also led a history group editathon. This boosted the programme’s outputs, and supported the next generation of library professionals.
The Scotland Coordinator has previously work as a Wikimedian in Residence with two different institutions in Scotland; and so she has been able to draw on her experiences in this role to inform her work as a member of the Wikimedia UK team. As a resident she often found that there wasn’t time to organise social meetups, and didn’t feel that she had the license to organise partnership meetups. In the new role, it was natural to bring together some of our Education and GLAM partners (particularly those with a connection to a WiR) for knowledge exchange. This has been highly productive and allows us to keep knowledge from being lost between residencies and projects, whilst further strengthening the bonds between partners and the ScotWiki community in general.
In May, in partnership with SLIC, our Scotland Coordinator presented a one hour live streamed event on Periscope, as part of Glasgow Women’s Library’s Open The Door event. Following (broadly) the route of the GWL Merchant City Heritage walk, and taking pictures along the way and uploading to wikiCommons using #WikiShootMe, we presented a Wikimedia-meets-local-history talk. This event also featured a representative from Glasgow City Heritage Trust. There have been 1,300 views so far. Photos were uploaded to Commons and the event prompted the creation of two new Wikipedia articles.

Changes, Challenges and Learning

Change

The Celtic Knot Conference hosted by the National Library of Wales was one of the ways we supported underrepresented langauges in 2018.

Compare with our proposal

We believe that overall, we delivered strongly on this goal, and that our programme delivery was tightly focused on this strategic priority. We delivered many of the anticipated activities. The appointment of the Scotland Programme Coordinator has been particularly beneficial, with the impact of this post within the first year exceeding our expectations.

There were some projects that were were not able to realise, such as implementing the text-to-speech technology with Bangor University, working with the Women’s Equality Party, or picking up partnership work with the British Library. Depending on the nature of the projects, we have shifted energies to other projects that promised to be more fruitful. So, for example, we didn’t do as much work within cultural heritage, however, we focused on the emerging area of expertise around technology for underrepresented languages.

Challenge

We experienced some barriers working with minority languages, largely connected with broader representation issues on Wikimedia. We continue to explore the wider themes of knowledge equity and how this fits into Wikimedia. Working at the fringes of ‘acceptable’ knowledge means that we do come across challenges. As an illustration of this, the SLIC resident recently delivered a Wikipedia presentation for librarians and archivists involved in Local History projects. Questions were raised on how Wikipedia could support local history projects where there is limited information available in secondary sources, and a lot of knowledge is based on oral history. It is very encouraging that the Wikimedia movement is commiting to supporting a wider range of knowledge; however, at the moment it is difficult to see how this can be translated into practical solutions, such as a differentiated approach to notability.

We also want to reiterate the challenge of working with small organisations, who often hold underrepresented knowledge. The Feminist Library, established in 1975, holds a large archive collection of Feminist literature based in London. It has more than 8000 publications in their fiction, non-fiction and periodical rooms. The library possesses unique archival materials, with large sections of their collection created and published by the Feminist Library during the second wave of Feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. The library’s key organisers are also the founding members of the UK-wide Feminist Library and Archive Network, the ‘FLA’.

Recognising the importance of their collection, we established a partnership with The Feminist Library early in 2018. We also saw the potential in upskilling a national network of librarians and community engagers focused on content about women. Often the underrepresented content we want to work with and to share online is not accessible because it has been underfunded. Both the FLA and the Feminist Library are run entirely by volunteers, and struggle to source stable funding. This means that time and capacity for innovation within the organisations is limited. The archive is also relocating this year: not having proper funding means they do not have a permanent space. As a result we have had to put the collaboration on hold. This complication does pose an interesting question: if we are to work even more with underrepresented content, should we also work on the contextual barriers experienced by holders of such knowledge? And if so, how? What resources might be required to achieve this?

The SLIC residency experienced issues getting images onto Commons. The resident is working with several small institutions doing limited – but very valuable – image uploads. These donations have been stuck in the OTRS backlog. We are aware of this issue, however as it is a community-owned process there is limited scope for direct action other than through the community. Various workarounds have been suggested, however these are not ideal. This creates barriers to engagement for small, under-resourced organisations who have only just started working with open knowledge and can be easily discouraged by such an issue. We are hoping that wider changes on Wikimedia Commons will offer a solution in the coming year.

Learning

We have been working increasingly in the area of technology and applying it to knowledge underrepresentation. We have been very mindful of the need to upskill our Wikimedians in Residence cohort in this context. Their projects continue to grow in complexity, and the demand on their skills is greater. Many Residents have taken on data projects – this is a very promising area of work, but it’s difficult to support because of poor documentation, poor searchability of existing documentation, and a lack of skilled trainers on specific processes. If a Resident wants to learn about a particular Wikidata process of a tool, they need to do it themselves. Many of our Residents have worked on self-upskilling, and so there is a lot of knowledge in our existing network. Therefore to help with the need for skills for our Residents, we organised a sharing summit in Autumn to facilitate learning within the network. Each participant knew something useful to share with others, and as a result we upskilled the whole cohort.

The University of Edinburgh's Head of Archives (Rachel Hosker) and Wikimedian in Residence (Ewan McAndrew) unveiling the new Women's Suffrage in Scotland timeline developed by Histropedia and built from structured data on Wikidata about Scotland's suffragettes.

At a movement-wide level, we have had a number of opportunities to share the UK chapter’s learning. Two of our team members attended an international Volunteer Supporters Meeting in Vienna. This event focused on building connections with other staff who work on volunteer management. Our key contribution was sharing our experience and skills in running Wikidata events. This is in line with our general approach to volunteer support, where we enable the community to build the key skills required for programme delivery.

Future

We are finalising our 2019–22 strategy at this point, but it is clear we will continue working on the knowledge equity strand. There is a lot of learning generated through the experiences above, and it gives us further ideas to experiment within the 2019 programme. This fits into our general strategy of trying out new projects and approaches in the coming year. For example, with Wikidata quickly becoming one of the most-used linked data hubs, we are testing out ways we can work with partner institutions on this emerging trend. This could include working on Wikibase developments.

Two exciting projects to highlight within this programme area are:

A part-time Wikimedian in Residence at the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland starting in January 2019, and a deeper collaboration with WiciMon project in Wales (previously more independent). These two additional projects will be bringing additional activity into the Celtic Knot programme.
National Library of Wales will be leading on another Government-funded thematic content project – this time focused on people of Wales (WiciPobl). This is a multi-faceted project, which includes activities such as releasing open data for Welsh Portrait Archive images on Commons, making the data available in Welsh and English, holding an open data hackathon in Cardiff, creating Welsh Wikipedia biography articles, holding translation events at NLW.

Case studies

Using Wikidata to uncover collections

Volunteers and partner organisations – The Dumfries Stonecarving Project

Within the Bodleian Wikimedian in Residence project, we have been working with the Oxford GLAM network on innovative products. Oxford GLAM contains world-class collections of museum objects, library resources and natural world specimens. Many of these have been digitised. The Bodleian Libraries’ SOLO (Search Oxford Libraries Online) service alone provides access to more than 15 million items, and GLAM’s digital collections as a whole are approaching one petabyte (a quadrillion bytes) in scale. However, these resources are often of variable quality and not optimised for digital access; they can be hard to find online, do not provide the user with any further contextual or relevant information (e.g. incomplete metadata), and can be presented in different formats. This means that people can’t access them easily.

It is currently not possible to get an overview of what Oxford holds on a specific topic as there are no common identifiers that allow users to browse from one type of collection to another. The lack of links reduces the discovery of collection objects by ‘hiding’ information from those without an expert knowledge of the locations of objects, or knowledge of how to search for objects within specific collections.

To address this, the Oxford GLAM network is creating and piloting 'search and discovery' tools to help facilitate search and retrieval for students and specialists, as well as the broader public. This fits very well with Wikimedia UK’s approach, where the aim isn’t so much to generate new content, but to shine a light on existing hidden knowledge.

A traditional way to browse collections would be to go to a specific museum site, select a collection, select a topic, then choose an item from the resulting list. Faceted browsing would start with a view of the whole collection, which is reduced - by specifying multiple properties - to a small set of items of interest. In contrast to these procedures, a web of topics has multiple entry and exit points and can support many different user journeys. Topics can include historical periods, languages, locations, or people. Each of these topic pages can link to related topics and each has a gallery of significant items from the collection.

A presentation by Martin Poulter on Wikidata

As each item in the application is addressed via its Wikidata identifier, the transparent URL design allows other visualisations to build on top of it. These can include interactive maps, timelines, and image galleries, all of which can be created with Wikidata’s query service. This gives the topic pages a number of cues that might be missed in the catalogue description of an item. For a start, Wikidata provides alternative names and foreign-language labels. These labels appear in our pages and can be indexed by search engines.

This approach is entity-based: disambiguating the user’s search as early as possible and giving results relevant to the topic itself. It also gives the user a large number of links, allowing them to construct their own journey through the collection. However rather than being unstructured and confusing, the links are connected by topic and prioritised by indicators of interest. This encourages exploration and serendipitous discoveries. The results can appear as static web pages. They are bookmarkable and have social sharing built in, which is great for further sharing of knowledge.

Scotland Programme Coordinator Sara Thomas has been working with tara s Beall, of the Dumfries Historic Buildings Trust, to support their new Stonecarving project. The project is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, Holywood Trust and the People’s Project.

Our Scotland Coordinator has collaborated with tara s Beall across a number of projects. They connected over an editathon at the Glasgow Museums while Sara was a resident at the Museums Galleries Scotland. They later ran an editathon at the Glasgow Women’s Library with tara’s Strong Women of the Clydeside (SWaC) project team, and then another (also for SWaC) at the Mitchell Library when Sara was Wikimedian at the Scottish Library and Information Council. tara maintained the connection with Wikimedia across various projects she was working on. In this way she operated as a partnership lead, but could also be described as a lead community organiser, bringing a Wikimedia element into any project she was working on. She would also volunteer in some editathons run by Sara outside of her work projects.

tara connected with Sara early in 2018 to talk about a potential wiki connection with her new project. This was a Dumfries activity focused on the stonecarving heritage of the area.

Creative heritage projects almost always have websites, but the information they generate is not sustainable – who is looking after the sites five years on? Often, the information generated by publicly funded projects is lost (from the digital realm) after a few years … Wikipedia is a key knowledge platform, and an excellent way for us to deliver an international audience to our local heritage project (and vice versa).
— tara s Beall

When it comes to community heritage, it’s all too common to see excellent digital outputs disappear shortly after the project finishes – websites that expire, apps that aren’t maintained, content held on a third-party commercial service that’s bought out and subsequently vanishes.

With this in mind, Sara helped set up a Wikimedia activity for the Stonecarving project. The Dumfries Stonecarving Project aims to promote the rich stonecarving heritage of the area, and includes practical taster sessions, summer schools with local young people, an exhibition, and workshops and ‘stonecarving quests’ with photography groups to record some of that heritage. Using Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, the project seeks to give this heritage a global audience, disseminating it through channels which have longevity, and which can, through tools like Magnus Manske’s GLAMorgan, give them insight into where their content is being used.

It has been a very positive experience working with an organisation that sees the potential in using open licensing and engaging with the Wikimedia projects in ensuring the sustainability of their digital outputs.

We are also delighted to be offering workshops to local photography clubs (like the Dumfries North West Photography Club) where they can learn about Creative Commons licences, and best practice for uploading their images to Wikimedia. And because the images are shared under an open licence, everyone can enjoy the beauty of our sandstone heritage. Dumfries has an amazing history of stonecarving, and a wealth of local buildings with incredible carvings on them — from ‘green men’ to gargoyles. Working with Wiki will allow us to get a large number of local people engaged with these histories and interacting with Wikipedia – getting local people involved in preserving their heritage.
— tara s Beall

Within this project, tara s Beall is both a community leader and a partnership contact. The project itself is also building a community of volunteer contributors. Sara has been training volunteer photographers connected with the stonecarving project who then upload their photos to Commons. This is an example of how the community support in Scotland connects volunteer and partnership work.

Programme 2: Promoting open knowledge

Overall goal: To support the development of open knowledge in the UK, by increasing the understanding and recognition of the value of open knowledge and advocating for change at an organisational, sectoral and public policy level