WikiCommons Upload-athon

The Open Research team held their first Wikimedia event in the Milstein Room at Cambridge University Libraries and Archives on Friday 16th October. This was in collaboration with colleagues at Cambridge University Press (CUP), with a parallel session being held at the same time at the University of Leeds. Both the events ran as a drop-in sessions from 10am to 3pm with dedicated training held at 10am and 1pm, as well as Wiki-trainers being available throughout the session to guide and answer questions. Katherine Burchell and Kim Clugston, of the Open Research team, Monica Westin (CUP), and Ross Mounce (Arcadia Group) were present at the University of Cambridge event and Nick Sheppard and Lucy Hinnie (University of Leeds) ran the University of Leeds session.

The event was held as an introduction to the Wikimedia movement, and Wikimedia Commons, where content uploaded is open and free to use by everyone, worldwide. This can lead to greater discovery and impact than publishing only in research articles. Attendees were encouraged to bring along their own images and research. The event brought researchers and librarians together to learn how to responsibly upload images to Wikimedia Commons, whilst considering any copyright issues. Images uploaded to Commons are then available to use in any relevant Wikipedia articles, adding to the wealth of knowledge available to the Wiki community.

The small group, drop-in format, provided a comfortable environment for attendees to learn the basics of Wikipedia and opportunity to ask all types of questions such as what to include in Wikimedia Commons, how to source images for reuse, and how to apply the correct licence for reuse.

During the session at the University of Cambridge, Katherine Burchell noticed there wasn’t an image of the Library BookDrop located outside Cambridge University Library on the existing Wikipedia page, so she took a photo and uploaded it to Wikimedia Commons. Ross Mounce helped add it to the Wikipedia article for Cambridge University Library and edited the text to give more information about the box and its origins. Shortly after the event, the collaborative and attentive Wiki community added to this new addition by providing even more information to elaborate on the sentence and provide a reference.

For those attendees that didn’t have any images to upload but still wanted to learn how to do it, we had sourced some CC-BY images from the University of Cambridge Repository, Apollo. Some examples of these images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons include a Photograph of the star alpha Tauri, taken by Isaac Roberts (1829-1904) as well as a Photograph of the Meridian Instrument, Lick Observatory, Mount Hamilton. 

Meanwhile, 150 miles away and building on extensive Wikimedia activity at the University of Leeds, Nick and Lucy were hosting academic colleagues at the Edward Boyle Library. In partnership with Wikimedia UK, Leeds hosts Lucy as a ‘Wikimedian in Residence’ to support colleagues across the university to contribute to Wikimedia, improving Wikipedia articles in their areas of expertise or uploading scientific images from open access research papers. 

Nick said “It was great fun to work with Cambridge on this event. The fantastic thing about Wikimedia is that it helps people see the real value of open access beyond funder or university mandates. We had some fascinating conversations with colleagues from a range of different disciplines who were surprised by just how easy it is to upload an image and to use it on Wikipedia.”

The project at Leeds has uploaded dozens of images to Wikimedia Commons, and many have been added to Wikipedia articles that collectively receive tens of thousands views each month.

Organisers and attendees learnt a lot throughout the day and had fun whilst doing so! It demonstrated the movement of Wikimedia UK and the dedication of this community to curate and share knowledge as widely as possible.

A dashboard was created to track images uploaded, linked to articles, and to track changes made in Wikipedia articles.

We’d like to thank our colleagues at CUP and University of Leeds for collaborating on this event, and hope to be able to collaborate on future events.

Slides are available via Apollo: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.136613