GLAM/Newsletter/September 2014/Contents/UK report

This Month in GLAM – Volume IV, Issue IX, September 2014

UK report

September, a month for the Arts

By Jonathan Cardy (WereSpielChequers) & Roberta Wedge, with quotes from Hamiltonstone and Michael Maggs

Scholarly collaboration, with coffee

This section by Roberta Wedge who is working on the gender gap for Wikimedia UK

Not new: a group of scholars gathering to discuss their chosen subject use the opportunity to expand and update the relevant Wikipedia page.

New: a group of scholars gathering to discuss their chosen subject use the opportunity to make contact with WMUK. Together we set up an editathon to work on the relevant page, hosted in our central London office, and joined by virtual colleagues.

Last Thursday saw the Anna Kavan Symposium, a day of discussion about this twentieth century novelist, organised by the Institute of English Studies (part of the University of London) in association with Liverpool John Moores University Research Centre for Literature and Cultural History and Peter Owen Publishers.

Friday the 12th September 2014 saw the Anna Kavan editathon, a morning of editing the Wikipedia page about her. This collaboration was the brainchild of en:User:Cathsign, a French writer whose first edit was a year ago at the Ada Lovelace Day event in Brussels. London is an expensive place to stay, so many of the symposium attendees left immediately afterwards, but remote participation in the editathon was made easier by an etherpad.

Wikimedia UK has that precious resource, meeting space in central London. Our office is near Silicon Roundabout, aka Old Street, on numerous bus routes, and at the junction of two cycle paths. We have coffee and wifi, and laptops to loan and expertise on tap. We extend an invitation to other experts coming to London: give us notice, and let’s see if we can help you improve your subject area on Wikipedia.

PCF

The Public Catalogue Foundation has agreed to donate some of its catalogues to Wikipedians. These are impressive large books which together form a huge catalogue of the publicly owned oil paintings in the UK.

I got down to using the volume today. As always, I concentrated on women artists. As always, I immediately found a case of a significant female artist who had no Wikipedia entry at all. So, thanks to the Public Catalogue Foundation's excellent volume, Wikipedia now has an entry on Kate Downie. I then moved to use other sources to fill in biographical detail, but had it not been for the coverage in the reference book, I would not have started this item.

And yes, more than willing for you to quote me in the writeups. Anything that encourages awareness of our work, and for it to be taken seriously. Hamiltonstone

We still have more PCF books available, editors who could make good use of them are welcome to email Jonathan Cardy. Editors who are Wikimedia UK members and who need access to other specialist books may like to know that the microgrant program currently has budget available.

Wiki Loves Monuments

September is the month for Wiki Loves Monuments, and in 2014 the UK took part for the second year running. This year due to popular demand we extended the contest to include Scheduled Ancient Monuments and hundreds of thousands of Grade II listed buildings and their equivalents in Scotland and Northern Ireland. The extension of Wiki Loves Monuments to Grade II listed buildings has had some interesting results, including improved coverage of Listed War Memorials.

More than 500 people took part in the UK branch of the competition, together adding 35GB of photos. In a departure from last year, the competition relied on the contents of Wikidata, with Magnus Manske helping by adding thousands of entries on listed buildings, and creating a tool to display them on a map, making them easier to find in person.

This year we are extremely pleased to have secured the support of the Royal Photographic Society and English Heritage, and we hope that our work with them this year on WLM will mature into a longer-term relationship. Both organisations have kindly agreed to provide professional photographers for our judging panel.

—Michael Maggs, Chair, Wikimedia UK

The competition in the UK finished with 7,300 images uploaded, of which:

66% were of monuments in England
20% in Wales
10% in Scotland
1% in Northern Ireland

Women in classicism

This section by Roberta Wedge who is working on the gender gap for Wikimedia UK

The Institute of Classical Studies, part of the University of London, opened its doors to an editathon on women in classicism and archaeology. I've been to several such events and this was one of the best. It was co-organised by Richard Nevell, who works at WMUK, and Claire Millington of the ICS. WMUK brought the trainers, the lunch, and a couple of loaner laptops. The ICS provided layers of resources: the meeting room, coffee, and wifi, without which nothing could happen; a big screen and a flipchart to demonstrate; suitcases of books laboriously borrowed from several specialist libraries; a targeted list of articles to work on, generated at a previous conference; and a dozen or so classicists and friends who wanted to cut their teeth on Wikipedia.

User:Fæ and I were there to assist the people learning to edit, and I found myself guiding two participants by Skype, which was a new experience, and not without international technical teething trouble, but persistence won the day. Mary Beard, the Cambridge classicist and telly don whose talk on "The Public Voice of Women" is rich with implications for my role, gave the editathon her blessing by tweeting the link and calling the event "much needed". I asked her if, as a thank you, she'd like us to improve or indeed create any particular biography. She suggested Eugenie Sellers Strong, which at the beginning of the day ran to all of four sentences. That Wikipedia's article about a long-dead woman was merely a stub didn't surprise me; what surprised me is that there is in fact a full-length biography, published a decade ago, ripe for the reading. By end of the editathon, Strong was much stronger, and days later, her health continues to improve, thanks to an enthusiastic and meticulous new editor.