User:Jason.nlw/National Wikimedian/2018 - 19 Annual Report

Introduction

Background to the project

The National Library of Wales (NLW) first collaborated with Wikimedia UK in 2012/13 when a number of NLW photographs were shared via Commons in support of the MonmouthpediA project. The National Library was named GLAM of the year 2013. During 2014 the Library was approached by Robin Owain, the Wikimedia Wales Manager who proposed installing a jointly funded Wikipedian in Residence. Following negotiations and internal interviews, a Wikipedian in Residence was appointed from the Library Staff on a 12 month contract. The Wikipedian took up the position on January 19th 2015 and was contracted until January 30th 2016. The project was subsequently extended periodically until July 31st 2017. At that time the Library appointed a National Wikimedian as a fully funded permanent member of staff. On August 1st 2017 The National Library was named GLAM Partner of the Year for a second time.

National Wikimedian

The role of National Wikimedian at the National Library of Wales is to support the long term strategy of the Library through Wikimedia based activities. This includes holding regular outreach events, aimed at improving the quality and quantity of Wikipedia content about Wales and its people in Welsh, English and other languages. Sharing digital content openly via Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata are also core activities. The National Wikimedian also seeks to develop partnerships with other cultural and educational institutions in Wales and beyond, and acts as an open access advocate within the library and in Wales more generally. The post holder is also encouraged to seek external funding for specific projects and events, and continues to work closely with the Welsh government to deliver projects aimed at improving the quality of the Welsh language Wikipedia.

2018 - 2019 Key aims

• Deliver the Welsh Government funded Wici-Pobl (Wiki-People) project
• Host a Welsh Hackathon
• Host at least 4 edit-a-thon events
• Develop the use of Wikidata to support the new Dictionary of Welsh Biography Website
• Share the library's framed works of art collection and other images to Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata
• Continue to share open data via Wikidata and support the library's Wikidata visiting scholar

Summary of activities and outcomes

Strategic Goal 1

Increase the quality and quantity of coverage of subjects that are currently underrepresented on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects

Editing Events

• 10 Wikipedia Edit-a-thons held

Attendees	New accounts	New articles	Improved articles
46	33	66	114

• 4 Training events and workshops held

Attendees
87

Hackathon

A Graphic Designer taking part in our first ever Hackathon

This year the National Wikimedian hosted his first Hackathon. The event was based at City Hall in Cardiff and focused on encouraging participants to reuse open data from the National Library of Wales, including data shared via Wikidata. Outcomes included a google map of Doomsday locations, a 19th century crime heatmap and data transformed into music.

Sharing Digital Content

Sharing Digital content with Wikimedia projects was a key goal for the project from the beginning. Page view statistics for articles containing NLW images are a key measurement of the impact and reach of our collections on Wikimedia Commons.

Increasingly Wikidata is being used to release, share, explore and visualize Library data.

Images

The most significant upload of the year was the Framed Works Collection, containing ore than 600 mixed media portraits of mainly British 19th Century interest. In addition to this, a number of smaller collections and individual images were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, including images of our Peniarth Manuscript collection.

Image statistics

Images uploaded	Total views
998	198,963,470

2018 - 2019 Image Highlights

• 
  200 Studio images of WWI Soldiers taken by D C Harries. We hope to share a further 600 images soon.
• 
  A portrait from the Framed Works collection which is made up of oil paintings in various styles.
• 
  The Framed Works collection also contains many Landscape paintings, mostly 19th century paintings of Wales
• 
  Sample images of all the currently digitised Peniarth Manuscripts were uploaded to Commons as part of a data release to Wikidata.
• 
  Images of the covers or spines of the Peniarth Manuscript collection were also uploaded

Wikidata

Contribution to Wikidata has been of growing interest to the National Library of Wales as a means of sharing data openly in a user friendly accessible way. A large number of edits were made to Wikidata items in order to add Welsh language labels, to create data items related to our Aberystwyth Shipping Records, our Framed Works of Art collection and the entire Peniarth Manuscript collection. Wikidata items were also created by the National Wikimedian and Simon Cobb, the Library's Wikidata Visiting Scholar, for Welsh books and other artworks on Commons, Welsh journals, and publishers and printers associated with the Welsh printing trade. The library has actively shared Metadata in order to make this possible.

Statistics

Items/Pages created	Edits
4,271	181,038

Working with Volunteers

The National Library offers all volunteers joining its in-house volunteer program the opportunity to work on Wikimedia projects. Many volunteers join the team for a short space of time. Many are students who only volunteer for a few weeks each year. We also have a core of local volunteers who work on various projects to improve or create Wikipedia articles. Translating English articles into Welsh using the content translation tool is increasingly popular among Welsh speakers who join our program. National Library of Wales volunteers working on Wikimedia based projects recorded 751 hours of volunteer time during the last 12 months, creating over 40 new articles.

The National Wikimedian is also working with a team of volunteers who are creating additional data for the Aberystwyth Shipping records collection which is already in Wikidata. They are using original sources to create biographical data about ships' masters and the first batch of this data was added to Wikidata this year.

Volunteer project outcomes

Project subject	Participants	New Articles
Welsh Translation Project	3	11
Miscellaneous Projects	5	31
TOTAL	8	42

Wici-pobl project

Wicipobl infographic

The National Wikimedian secured Welsh Government funding in order to run the Wici-Pobl (Wiki People) project, which was designed to significantly improve the amount of important articles. The project ran from November 2018 until March 31st 2019.The project was built around the release of 5000 portrait images to commons, with the aim of making the data available in Welsh via Wikidata and improving coverage on Welsh Wikipedia about the sitters and artists depicted, as well as insuring other prominent Welsh people had articles. The project also saw the NLW work in partnership with Menter Iaith Môn to deliver 4 editing events in schools.

The entire project was planned using Europeana’s new Impact Playbook with the aim of exploring and document the changes, or impacts, to different stakeholder groups of delivering a range of Wikimedia based activities focused around collections at The National Library of Wales.

A full impact report can be found here. Below is a summary of the project outcomes.

Outcomes

Participants	Edit-a-thons	New articles	Welsh Wikidata labels
55	5	1445	7000

Total coverage improvement

Below are the figures for the total amount of content released/created on Wikimedia projects during the year, including coverage improvements made as part of secondary projects and events managed by the National Wikimedian.

Wikipedia

	New accounts	New articles
Total	33	1553

Wikimedia Commons

	Images released
Total	998

Wikidata

	Data items created
Total	4271

Strategic Goal 2

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

Advocacy

Jason presenting the library's work at the 2018 Wikicite conference in California

Advocacy is seen as an important element of the National Wikimedian's role. And exposure through the media, public speaking, and networking, has led to the creation of important partnerships and collaborations, such as the Library's close involvement with several Europeana projects. It has also helped to raise the profile of the National Library of Wales as a forward thinking, innovative institution (reputational value).

This year saw the National Wikimedian invited/accepted to present at more events than ever before, with 16 presentations or workshops delivered during the year, along with several radio interviews and an article in Slate Magazine, featuring the Welsh Wikipedia.

Advocacy and media coverage statistics

	Total
Twitter Impressions	1,241,400
Blog Posts	6
TV & Radio appearance	2
Print and web media coverage	2
publications	0
Talks/papers delivered at public events	12
People attended presentations	538

Engagement with Library partners

The library's collaboration with Wikimedia has attracted interest in our work from a number of institutions and has presented many opportunities for collaboration.

Students on Ynys Môn editing Wicipedia as part of the Wicipobl project.

Welsh Government

Following the success of the Wici-pop project in 2016-17 and the Wikihealth project in 2017-18 the National Library again collaborated with the Welsh government for the Wici-pobl project. The library and the Welsh Government are currently in talks about funding two more projects, The first, the WikiLlên project would focus on sharing data and improving content about Welsh Literature and the second is a request, following discussions with CBAC and the Education department, to run a pilot education project aimed at identifying and ensuring the quality of content most likely to be used by school children of different ages. Both projects would see the library partner again with Menter Iaith Môn to deliver events in schools and to document best practice for this area of growing interest.

Europeana

This year the Library's head of Digital Access, Dr Dafydd Tudur, was invited to help develop the Europeana Impact Play Book the aim of which is to develop a framework for demonstrating the impacts of cultural heritage projects. The National Library of Wales was also selected as one of 5 institutions to test the first stages of the playbook and it was agreed to use the library's Wikimedia activities as the basis of the case study. The completed impact report has been promoted by Europeana and our work will feature as a case study in the next phase of the playbook due to be published later this year.

Menter Iaith

Menter Iaith is a community-based organisation which works to raise the profile of the Welsh language in a specific area. For example Menter Môn (Anglesey) fund and support a Aaron Morris as a Wikipedian in Residence focusing on Welsh in education.

During the year the National Wikimedian has had several high level discussions with Menter Iaith management about training local staff on Wikipedia editing, and holding regular Edit-a-thon meetups. Talks have been positive and many local Menter groups are now planning, or at least considering, hosting Wikipedia events. The National Wikimedian continues to develope close ties with Menter iaith Môn's Wikipedian in Residence who is also making progress in encouraging wider engagement with Wikipedia.

Histropedia

The National Wikimedian was able to secure a small grant from the Swiss My-D Foundation in order to commission Histropedia to develop a bespoke timeline tool for exploring the Dictionary of Welsh Biography content, which has already been extensively developed on Wikimedia projects. The project is currently underway and will be completed this autumn.

WJEC

WJEC is the largest Examining body in Wales and produces a range of Welsh language learning materials. The National Wikimedian collaborated with WJEC in the Wici-Iechyd project and secured the release of a number of digital learning resources on an open licence. Following meetings this year WJEC have agreed to support the libraries bid to run an education pilot project by sharing more of it's digital learning resources on an open licence upon request, working on the principal that more open educational content would lead to the improvement of Welsh Wicipedia content in areas directly relevant to school syllabus, enabling more children to study, complete homework, etc, using online Welsh language resources.

CILIP

During the year, the National Wikimedian continued to support CILIP's use of Wikidata to share data about Welsh Libraries. Wikidata workshops were held at a Libraries Hacked event to encourage librarians to take ownership of their data, and a Wikidata map now appears on the home page of the Welsh Libraries Website. Discussions are also underway about holding Wikidata workshops for metadata librarians, and collaborating on editing events. The National Wikimedian was also invited to speak at the CILIP Scotland annual conference in Aberdeen.

Strategic Goal 3

To support the use of the Wikimedia projects as important tools for education and learning in the UK

Visiting Scholar Scheme

The National Library's Wikidata Visiting Scholar, Simon Cobb continues to work closely with the library to share its data on an open license. Simon made hundreds of thousands of edits to Wikidata during the reporting period, including approximately 2000 new items for NLW collections. Simon has already done a lot of work in preparing Welsh book data for upload and It is hoped we will be able to contract Simon to carry out some more data refinement work in order to fulfill the WiciLlên project.

Simon's work during the year includes:

• improving structured data for NLW items on Commons
• created c.2000 items for Welsh books

Wikidata Visiting Scholar output

Wikidata Items created	Wikidata edits
2148	About 100,000

Higher Education

Work continued with the Welsh Professional Translation studies course at Aberystwyth University. A talk was given to all students on the course and 2 students received 1 on 1 support to use the content translation tool to translate articles as part of an assignment. Discussions are underway about holding translation events with all students during the coming year. It is hoped that this will encourage more students to take up the option of a Wikipedia assignment, and may convince course leaders to integrate Wikipedia more deeply into the design of the course.

Members of the Wales Higher Education Libraries Forum (WHELF) have expressed an interest in Wikimedia projects, particularly the use of Wikidata for sharing research data. Presentations and Workshops have already been held in North Wales and a Workshop for south Wales members is in planing.

Reflections

2018-19 has been a busy year, which included the delivery of the Wicipobl project using Europeana's impact playbook, sharing hundreds of digital images to commons, and continuing to explore the power of Wikidata for hosting and discovering open data. The National Wikimedian has also hosted 6 Edit-a-thon, and collabertaed on a further 4 events. However it is clear that the library's activities around outreach, community engagement, open access and linked data are getting recognition from Welsh Government and other cultural institutions, and it is now seen by many as a trail blazer thanks to its commitment to collaboration with Wikimedia.

The Libraries support in embedding Wikidata into the new Dictionary of Welsh Biography website demonstrates it's commitment to emerging technologies and technology trends. The delivery of a Wikidata based timeline later this year will not only complement the existing website but can act as an advocacy tool, to demonstrate the advantages of sharing and reusing Wikidata.

WMUK has been supportive of all Wikimedia activities at the National Library and continues to be a valuable partner in the National Library - Wikimedia collaboration.

Plans for next year

Over the coming year the National Wikimedian will build further in the areas where the most success has been seen, by sharing more library data as linked data, providing open access to more of its collections, development a Wikipedia in education program and continuing with community outreach work. It is anticipated that further funding can be secured from the Welsh Government for Welsh language focused projects, and there will be an continued focus on demonstrating the impact of past and future projects and initiatives, with the help of the Europeana impact playbook. The WikiLlên or 'Sum of all Welsh literature project' will be a focus, as will outreach events such as edit-a-thons and a second annual Hackathon focused on improving content relating to collections recently shared with Wikimedia. The completion of the Dictionary of Welsh Biography timeline will also be a focus over the coming months as will internal discussions about integrating Wikidata into our crowd sourcing platform and exploring the possibilities around using Wikibase to develop a digital assets library.

Footnotes

• Image usage metrics were collected using Baglama2 and GLAMorous
• Article and Wikidata item edit/creation figures were collected using Wikimetrics
• Twitter impressions stats were come from Twitter Analytics
• Other metrics were recorded in house at The National Library of Wales.