(Episode 133) Promoting Open Knowledge at the University of Leeds with Lucy Hinnie and Richard Nevell

Intro: 00:00:00

Welcome to the Research Culture Uncovered podcast, where in every episode we explore what is research culture and what should it be. You'll hear thoughts and opinions from a range of contributors to help you change research culture into what you want it to be.

Nick: 00:00:23

Hello, it's Nick, back with another episode of research culture uncovered all about open research.

Well, perhaps more accurately on this occasion about open knowledge, and I have a couple of guests to introduce to you today. But before I do, I want to start with a quote, not I hasten to ad d from either of my guests, but that they will certainly be familiar with for Melissa Highton, Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services at the University of Edinburgh.

So according to Melissa, universities really can't afford not to have a Wikimedian in residence these days. It still surprises me how few do. So today we'll be talking all about Wikimedia in universities with Dr. Lucy Hinnie and Dr. Richard Nevell. Lucy is in fact our very own Wikimedian in Residence here at the University of Leeds, or to give her official title, Wikimedia and Open Knowledge Adviser.

been with Wikimedia UK since: 2021

worked at Wikimedia UK since: 2012

He completed a PhD in archeology at the University of Exeter and has first hand experience of sharing research on Wikipedia. So hello both and welcome to the podcast.

Lucy: 00:01:41

Hello.

Richard: 00:01:42

Hi. Thanks very much for having us.

Nick: 00:01:45

So I guess the first question, perhaps just to put to you, Lucy, is what exactly is a Wikimedian in Residence?

Lucy: 00:01:52

A Wikimedia in residence is somebody who works within an organisation to advocate for and upskill members of staff and volunteers in using Wiki platforms like Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata. You'll commonly find them in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, um, but also in universities. So I'm currently in post at the University of Leeds. I've previously held a post at the British Library doing a similar kind of role. Um, we also have a Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh , and they are in the process of hiring a resident down at LSE as well. So there's gonna be a few of us in higher education, um, in the coming year, which I think will be really exciting.

Nick: 00:02:35

Yeah, well we'll come back to that and I think is it is part of your role, Richard, to support these, uh, Wikimedians as we call them?

Richard: 00:02:42

Yeah, absolutely. So at Wikimedia UK we do lots of partnership work, um, with say the heritage sector and with higher education. Uh, and Wikimedians in Residence are a really important element of that because these are very often multi-year projects which help an organisation along its journey to sharing stuff openly.

Universities are a little bit different because they already have lots of guidance. On, um, open research, uh, open access publications, they have university repositories. And so a lot of people have some familiarity with creative commons licensing, uh, and the reach you can achieve with that. But there's very often a gap around how you share that more broadly, like the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, are a great platform for sharing information. Uh, it's read by, uh, well 22 billion times every month at the moment. So it's a fairly universal resource, but there often isn't a lot of support in getting the stuff out there. Mm-hmm. So that's often what we're doing. We're helping the residents, uh, be advocates within their organisation.

Nick: 00:04:02

Thank you. So yeah, we'll get into a bit more detail about, um, exactly what that looks like in a university. But I suppose just to go back to that quote that I said, um, uh, from Melissa, Highton. So just to give that a bit of context, that was actually from a survey that myself and, uh, Dr. Martin Porter, who's another well-known Wikimedian. Mm-hmm. Um, uh, conducted a survey back in 2019, I think. So it was a good few years ago, asking, just trying to establish to what extent universities and their libraries were engaging with Wiki, uh, Wikimedia, and that time it was relatively few. I mean, there have been pockets of this, uh, is it, it is getting a bit more common? I think, uh, Lucy just mentioned a couple there and there's another one, down at Exeter as well, isn't there? So there's still a long way to go, isn't there I think with engaging universities with this type of work.

Richard: 00:04:48

Yeah, I think there's so much scope with it. You could have absolutely a Wikimedian in Residence at every university. You could realistically have a team of them there's that much to do, I think. What we'd really like to see is Wikimedia work being understood as core to a university's public work. It's sharing information in the most public way possible. Uh, all kinds of outreach with, um, public facing events, uh, press releases, stuff in the news, uh, conferences and so on are all really good. But when you're looking for longevity, it is hard to beat something like Wikipedia, which has become kind of the backbone of the internet. So there are more universities getting involved, especially with residencies, and it has different flavors depending on the university. Some have a very strong focus on the research, sharing the results of what the uh, departments are doing, and some have a stronger focus on the educational skills, teaching the students the digital literacy aspect of editing Wikipedia. So there are just so many ways it could be taken.

Nick: 00:06:06

And, uh, as I say, as we go, we'll surely talk in a lot more detail about our, our residency and the work that Lucy's doing here. But I suppose just to, before we do that, just to give us a bit of a, um, an insight into your background, Lucy, to come to you first, uh, your academic background and sort of what brought you to, to, uh, to Wiki?

Lucy: 00:06:23

Sure thing. Um, so I did my PhD in the 2010s at the University of Edinburgh, um, which was kind of a, quite a transitional time, I think, for those of us doing PhDs because the job market was tightening up and the expectations of what a traditional PhD would lead to were, were changing quite rapidly. So in the mid 2010s, I sort of pivoted my interests in medieval Scottish literature into more of a digital humanities space. And that led to my postdoctoral fellowship in Canada at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. Uh, where I spent two, well, I would say two really happy years. One really happy year, one pandemic year.

So the pandemic year was slightly less happy because it was a little bit stressful. Um. But what I was working on there was text and coding and digital editions, and I became more and more interested in two things. One was how to engage students with digital humanities work, and the other was the idea of knowledge activism and social justice through digital forms.

So in the pandemic year, I attended a series of, um, seminars that the University of Alberta did digitally with, um, Erin O'Neill, who was their Wikimedian in Residence at that point. Um, and Erin's seminar series was all about Wiki as a tool for social justice, for indigenising Wikipedia, for opening up pockets of political and... really seismic thinking, um, for both staff and students about how to engage with knowledge in a very real and tangible way. So I decided I would run a wikithon with my students on my honors level class, which is how I first kind of encountered Wikimedia UK who helped me with that. Um, it was a bit of a disaster.

tish Library where I was from: 2021

And from that point on, it's just been all wiki all the time, every day. That's what I do now.

Nick: 00:08:59

Um, and you work, as I said at the beginning, you both work for Wikimedia UK, that's, uh, give, give us your background, Richard, if you don't mind, and, uh, tell us a little bit about Wikimedia UK as well, and, and how that relates to the broader Wikimedia, um, movement around the world.

Richard: 00:09:14

Yeah, so I got involved with the Wikimedia movement back in 2006 as a volunteer editor. Basically, everyone who edits Wikipedia to generalize is doing it on a, a voluntary basis. Uh, and that's how I got started. So research and Wikipedia editing have been intertwined from the start for me. I found that Wikipedia was a really good place for leaving notes for myself essentially, and helping me absorb information. So I was editing Wikipedia before I'd even started university. So there's a kind of this development in my thinking and how stuff is put together. Uh. My own research is about medieval archeology, specifically the destruction of castles in the Middle Ages, and what I've really enjoyed about that is it's bringing together information for the first time, very often looking at this on a national scale, and it felt very wiki in the sense that you are pulling together vast amounts of information and creating something new from it. And my own experience of sharing research through Wikipedia is that for several years I identified the Wikipedia page on the topic that I was writing about as a pretty woeful page with all sorts of inaccuracies, and I really wanted to get that sorted, so I had to wait until I had some peer reviewed publications in the area that I could refer to and said what I needed to say to then start integrating it into Wikipedia. So that's kind of how it's come about. For me, it was very much a case of Wikipedia and research go hand in hand and think about how stuff can be shared and how it shapes the public understanding of a particular subject.

So back in: 2015

It was, uh, a depiction of someone suffering from leprosy, and it was hosted by the British library initially, and it was mislabeled as showing the black death. And this got picked up by Wikipedia, and from there, because of this huge audience, it just spread. Globally, so there were all sorts of places reusing this image as one of the is most famous visual depictions of the Black Death because it's free to use. So everywhere from personal blogs through to the BBC website and uh, academic textbooks, everyone was picking this up. And so that was a really good way of understanding the role that Wikipedia has to play in sharing information.

It's not just, is it on Wikipedia, it's the authority behind that information, the source that goes behind it. If it had just been on the British library websites or if it hadn't originated from a reputable source, it wouldn't have had nearly the same spread. It's that combination, which allowed it to go very widely.

The Wikimedia movement itself is really large. So it's got something like a hundred thousand people who edit Wikipedia every month. When you compare that to social media websites, it's not very many, but it's a very different kind of situation. These are people creating and sharing knowledge, uh, rather than a social media website.

rgest project, uh, started in: 2001

Organisations like Wikimedia UK are really important for local outreach, doing activities which connect with organisations, which hold information that we want to share. And that's especially important as well because Wikipedia, the way it's been put together, the structures it has around, access to information and reliable sourcing means that topics which get the most attention in society tend to get the most attention on Wikipedia as well.

Mm-hmm. As a result, it can be imbalanced in its content and partnerships with universities or museums are really important for taking active steps to address those imbalances, to write voices back into Wikipedia that have been overlooked.

Nick: 00:14:49

Yeah, and that's certainly an important part of the work that we've been doing and Lucy already alluded to that as well, I think your introductory was through the indigenous, uh, work that, you know, you were exposed to in Canada and we're certainly doing a lot of that at Leeds as well, I suppose, it's just so worth emphasising though, as well, isn't it, that, I mean, we're all from kind of a humanities background, I think, on this call, you know, just having this conversation. Um, and perhaps I should say something about my sort of introduction to Wikimedia and Wikipedia is, uh, like yourself I guess it was just, it's an organic process, isn't it? You sort of, you know, it's ubiquitous Wikipedia, you see it around all the time. You get lots of information from there. It might not always be reliable, and as you say, we've already discussed some of those biases, but because I was working in a big research intensive university, um, lots of, uh, obviously research, humanities research, but also STEM,, social sciences, um, and, sort of, you know, increasing the impact and, uh, the, the public engagement with that research was part of my role as an open research adviser.

Um, and I thought, well, you know, we, we've seen all this, uh, research through our services within the library, which is openly licensed, you already referred to Creative Commons licensing early on, and there's a real potential there to get it onto Wikimedia Commons. So, um, one of the things that we're hoping to do is upload openly licensed images from, you know, research papers, whatever that may be to Wikimedia Commons where they're immediately more visible, they're cited back to the primary research and they've got then that authority, if you like, of the sort of academic record behind them as well. So that's one of the, the things that we're trying to do, and I think perhaps come to you, Lucy, because, uh, by your own admission, I think you're learning quite a lot around, uh, STEM. You're not a, like me, you don't have a STEM background, you've got a Humanities background and uh, obviously a lot of the colleagues we are working with are scientists. So how's, how's that been an experience been for you?

Lucy: 00:16:41

Amazing. Like one of the things I love most about working with Wiki is you get to talk to people about the things that they care about and know the most about, um, which is so nice.

I think when you're on a purely academic trajectory, you can often lose sight of like the bigger picture. Someone once told me that doing a PhD is learning more and more about less and less, and I think that that can be true. You can get really tunnel visioned about it. So being able to look at and think about these areas where I never would've thought 10 years ago I would be, um, at all involved in, so things like climate data, looking at different cloud patterns, looking at water politics, and, and supplies across the globe.

It's so refreshing and fascinating to do, and what unites all of us is the ability to share this knowledge on Wikipedia in a way that anyone can understand. And I think that's super, super important, especially in, um, kind of this really digital age and moment that we're living in.

Nick: 00:17:41

Yeah and that's, uh, I mean, that puts me in mind of a particular project and mean obviously, uh, hopefully talk about a few of the other projects that you and I are working on here at Leeds. Um, but expert reviews is one thing that, um, yeah, I'm hoping to really promote. That's been really interesting, hasn't it? So, uh, perhaps tell us.

Lucy: 00:17:57

It's been really cool. Yeah, so what Declan Finney had come up with, um, which I think has just been a really interesting way of, of looking at Wiki, is this idea that a lot of people have the knowledge and expertise, but not necessarily the time or inclination to pick up those Wiki skills.

And we're, we're very pragmatic at Wiki, like we're very realistic. Not everyone has the time to edit or the inclination to do so, and there can be barriers to it, like conflict of interest or, yeah, overly citing yourself if it's something you've written about. So what Declan introduced was this idea that groups of experts, um, in this case, a group of kind of postdocs and early career researchers could look at a Wiki page, not actively edit it, but rather write an overall review of it.

Then that review could be posted to the talk page of the article for other editors to action should they choose to. And this, I think, has been a really thorough and useful way of improving particularly scientific content on Wiki because a lot of it is about citation and making sure that, um, information is accurate and up to date as possible.

So that's a, a mode of working that I think developed from, originally, Tatiana Belata's work at the University of Exter, uh, where she focuses quite strongly on climate. That's the, the focus of that residency. Tatiana and Declan had worked together in the past and this idea kind of came to fruition and it's definitely one that we're really excited about at Wiki UK and really looking forward to maybe implementing in other residencies and other Wiki projects that we're working on.

Nick: 00:19:32

Yeah, and it's still early days here at Leeds, isn't it? And certainly, you know, if any colleagues from Leeds are listening, it's certainly something we'd like to explore with, with other colleagues in different disciplines, different contexts around the university. Mm-hmm. Uh, because we need those people with the expertise, as you say.

Um, and obviously in a university we're in a privileged position where we've got access to those experts that can help us to actually improve the global commons. All that information on, on Wikipedia, absolutely. And also it is just related to that as well. You also alluded to it. 'cause I think this, um, I dunno if you could comment on this, Richard.

There's quite a lot of discussion that, um, remember talking to Martin actually that scientific articles, perhaps other types of articles as well, but scientific articles often aren't that easy to read. You know, they're not actually written in, as, in, as an accessible way, as they, as they could. And that's a skill I think for, for, for researchers, a valuable skill in this day and age to try and make their expertise, um, as clear as possible.

Richard: 00:20:29

Readability is a really interesting challenge. Uh, that's something we've seen in various areas, like especially to do with climate change. They may be taking some quite complex topics and replicating some of the, the high level jargon stuff, which is a quick and easy way of communicating to people in your field who are in the know, who have the background. But on Wikipedia, very often you're talking to people who don't have that background. So it is another skill to write for that kind of audience, and one which I think is hugely beneficial to all researchers to engage with because it helps think about the clarity of your writing and what ideas you might be taking for granted that needs to be explained, which is also really helpful, not just for talking to the public, but others of your peers as well, because jargon can be really useful as a quick of, uh, shortcut information, but at the same time, it is a way of shutting people out. Yeah. So it can be a good way of not just sharing information with the public, but with, say, early career researchers.

Uh, from my own research, I do notice a difference in the way I read research papers now to how I did when I was an undergraduate student. Um, I can look at a paper now and if I don't understand something, I can work out if it's because I don't understand the topic or if it's been poorly explained. Um, and I know that as an undergraduate student, I bumped my head against a few articles and just thought, I must be reading it wrong. Yeah, communication is a whole set of skills and whatever you can do to practice them is worthwhile. Wikipedia is a great way to be doing that in a very productive way as well, because you have a tangible output that people will be able to benefit from.

Nick: 00:22:35

Hmm. Yeah. Anything to add to that, Lucy?

Lucy: 00:22:38

Yeah, I think there's just also this thing of like, when Richard and I were at uni, which was super recently, we were undergrads last year, I'm sure, um, there was a push against Wikipedia is like, it's not reliable. Don't, don't use it. And I think one of the big shifts that we've had is this like: "but people do use Wikipedia, so let's make it the best it can be." And I think that makes it really unique on the internet in terms of that accessibility and that, um, accuracy, um, is making it this, this source that rather than pushing against it and saying, let's shut it down, we've opened it up, made it better, and made it as reliable as we can.

And I think that's, I dunno, it's quite heartwarming, I think particularly in the, the current landscape of sort of internet spaces. I think it makes it pretty unique.

Nick: 00:23:26

Yeah, and of course it's not just human readers, is it, that, uh, access and use Wikipedia. So I mean, that ties in, I mean, sort of artificial intelligence in large language models. We suspect, uh, uh, well, we, we know, I mean, again, the black boxes aren't we to some extent. And I know Declan and Tatiana have, uh, explored this a little bit as well, but, you know, the, the, the, the issue that actually, it's such a big open corpus that, uh, uh, these types of tools, uh, do use, uh, Wikipedia. So it's actually even more important now to, to get them, um, accurate and also to teach people about information literacy and any sort of comments on, on that sort of side of things? I know it's, uh, it's a fast moving area, but, uh, yeah...

Richard: 00:24:12

Lucy do you want to go?

Lucy: 00:24:14

Um, I'm trying to find the citation for a quote that I really like that I've been using in my training, um, which is this idea that Wiki has this really unique chance to be the counterpoint to AI slop by being as accurate as it can be and maintaining its vision and focus.

Um. I see all the work that goes on behind the scenes, both at Wiki UK and on a larger scale to keep that the case. Um, but it's an ever-changing playing field, and it's a, it's quite a challenging time, I think, to, to be existing in this web space of, of sort of mis and disinformation and ai. Um, but we do everything we can to at least feed it good food, I suppose.

At least keep it as accurate as we can and make sure there are some sources that are citable and I think wiki's reliance on citation will stand it in good stead as we start to look more closely and scrutinise more deeply what is coming out of these large language models when we query them.

Richard: 00:25:10

One small parallel that occurred to me is that when AI and LLMs really took off with the launch of ChatGPT 3, um, there were similar initial reactions to when Wikipedia became part of the mainstream, warnings to not use it because it's unreliable.

nowledge, and I think that in: 2025

articular action. Back in the: 2010

They now own WhatsApp. Google owns YouTube. They have the potential to use those platforms however they want, so Facebook ads can be used to drive people to particular political parties. Um, news stories can be suppressed if organizations so choose. It's that potential manipulation that is most concerning about the monopoly situation.

Whereas with Wikipedia, it's that shared ideals about sharing information, but also having a framework which centers independent, reliable sources as a key building block for those articles, which means that it's not really possible to have a monopoly on Wikipedia itself, it just wouldn't really work.

That is my, uh, optimistic view. At least Wikipedia though, it's one of the most visited websites in the world, does not have a monopoly on knowledge. Um, there aren't many online encyclopedias out there, certainly not at the scale of Wikipedia, and those which are successful are much more specialized than Wikipedia.

I think a healthy Wikipedia should lead to a healthy internet. Mm-hmm. Signposting readers to more information summarizing important stuff. Wikipedia should never be the endpoint in a search for information.

Lucy: 00:30:15

I think one, one truth that has remained is that Wikipedia is not itself a source. It's a source for sources, and that's how we should treat it, and we should make sure that those sources are as good as they can be.

And on that note, I just, I, I was a good Wikipedia and checked my own citation, and it was Ted McCormick, uh, who's a historian on Blue Sky who said that, uh, Wiki had the opportunity to provide a comprehensive counterpoint to AI slot at a time when it's badly needed. So thank you Ted McCormick for that quote, because I think it's really apt.

Nick: 00:30:44

Okay, well I'll, uh, when we publish this, I'll do add some show, show notes with various links in et cetera. And I think this is a really interesting discourse at the moment. I just wanted to maybe, um, well, not even play devil's advocate really, but I mean, uh, you know, we've already alluded to some of the risks associated to Wikipedia, potentially through AI and LLMs.

You know, I think there's some concern that people might start using those instead of Wikipedia, even though that is actually feeding Wikipedia, I think there is some evidence that some AI slop is actually finding its way onto Wikipedia. Is that, is that the case? Um, and also just to. Um, as I say, slight, uh, counterpoint to to what you were saying, Richard, and you know, it, it is a battleground for the culture wars, isn't it?

I, I suppose, you know, increasingly we do live in strange times information wise. Um, and there's an accusation isn't there, it's left leaning and woke, um, and all these kinds of things. Um, so, you know, we don't perhaps wanna get too political around these things, but I think this, but this is why it's so interesting as a space for the generation of, and the dissemination of knowledge.

I dunno if you, either of you got any thoughts on, on those points?

Richard: 00:31:50

Absolutely. So I take, uh, an optimist view, which is that Wikipedia has faced similar challenges in the past. I mean, not, not identical by any means and come through the other side. So one thing that springs to mind is that back when Google started including snippets in its, uh, search results, there was concern that people would get the information they needed from that and not go through to Wikipedia itself.

So you have the little kind of summary box on Google. It will give you a couple of sentences very often sourced from Wikipedia. Uh. And there was a concern that that might lead to fewer people visiting Wikipedia. The community itself of writers weren't too concerned because the idea is that if people are getting the information from Wikipedia and benefiting from it, it doesn't perhaps matter too much where they find it.

It's a bit more nuanced than that, and there's a serious issue that, if you don't have people going to Wikipedia as readers, you will also likely see a drop off in people contributing as editors. That would be very serious indeed. I think that there will be a core of Wikipedia editors who continue because of the value they see in such a project, but to make sure that is most useful, it does need people coming to the website.

With LLMs and AIs, it's kind of a similar situation in that if people ask for a summary of something or key facts, um, they're likely to be getting that from AI these days. I think that the more skeptical people will still look for other sources of information. But there seems to be whole variety of ways of using LLMs and ai, uh, such as instructional stuff, which Wikipedia doesn't really do.

Um, so there are some very specific use cases, which could be an issue for Wikipedia. So far I haven't noticed the publicly available traffic statistics decline, uh, and AI LLMs have been available for best part of two years now. That could change very quickly because of how search engines use ai. So, uh, Google have been using Gemini and it puts stuff at the top of their search results that could have a very significant impact in people going through to Wikipedia.

I think it's around 70 to 80% of Wikipedia's traffic is through search results, so that is really important for Wikipedia. If Wikipedia results end up ranked lower, that does mean fewer readers and ultimately fewer people contributing to Wikipedia and keeping it up to date. As an encyclopedia, it covers a whole lot of stuff. It does also cover news topics. It's not a newspaper, but it does sometimes effectively aggregate as a news source. So that could end up losing some people as a result. So it is a concern. Uh, I'm optimistic that it is a concern that the Wikimedia community can rise to, but uh, it is hard to predict how it will go.

Lucy: 00:35:34

Mm-hmm. I think we're sitting at a really interesting intersection where people, so Wikipedia is gonna be 25 next year. So it's been old enough to drink in America for the last four years, and now it's, maybe that's about old enough to rent a van or something. I'm not sure what you can do at 25. Um, I think we're at this interesting point where we people are being born into a world where they've never not known Wikipedia. And I think in that way, some of the wonder has maybe gone from the younger audiences because they take it for granted that it's there. And I think there is still this opportunity to engage and enthuse people by saying, you know, you can be part of this, you can change it.

And one of the things when we were in Katowice in Poland last year for Wikimania. One of the things that really struck me in a very positive way was how many of the Wiki personalities who were being highlighted as Wikimedian of the year were younger, were in the kind of 18 to 25 age bracket. I think there was even a high schooler was getting commended for the amount of editing they'd done.

And I think, I like to think that there's going to be a resurgence of that interest and enthusiasm from this generation who maybe haven't quite realized just how spectacular Wiki is and how unique. Mm-hmm. And in terms of AI and, and culture wars. I, I think often about the, the quote from one of the Monty Python, uh, creators, when life of Brian came out, that everyone was so offended by it, they'd actually done something quite remarkable 'cause they'd united all the major religious groups by creating something that managed to, uh, to rankle everyone. And I would say that although there is a lot of right wing ire at Wikipedia, to which I would say the truth is timeless, and if you have a problem with the truth, then that speaks to something greater that is wrong. There are still people on other sides of the political debate who find Wikipedia upsetting for different reasons as well, which makes me believe that somewhere along the way we're doing something right. We're balancing it. I don't know. Maybe that's what the truth is.

Nick: 00:37:37

Yeah, no, and it is fascinating. I mean, just on the political point, um, we'll come back to the issue at hand, which is obviously your work here in the residency here at Leeds and, and universities. Um, but it, the, another potential risk, um, that we could perhaps just mention if not going in too much detail is the Online Safety Act proposed by the British government, which potentially, uh, classes Wikipedia as a site that will need to be age verified. I dunno if you could comment quickly on that. I know it's ongoing and, uh, there's no conclusions been made there yet I don't think has there?

Richard: 00:38:13

So with the Online Safety Act, one of the things about Wikipedia is that it is quite an unusual website. It has a very large user base in terms of the number of readers, but it doesn't really function the same way that the likes of, uh, Facebook and other social media sites do, or other content services like YouTube. Part of it comes down to, uh, protecting people from potentially extreme content, uh, and the damage that may cause with Wikipedia and its position explicitly as an educational resource, um, it's, it's very different as well.

So it's one of those things where we are kind of an outlier and working out where Wikimedia sits in this situation, I think that all parties would want to avoid a situation where, uh, Wikipedia ends up blocked in the UK that would be harmful for not just Wikipedia, but its readers in the UK and creates this potentially unusual vacuum. Wikipedia is consulted so often on a almost daily basis by just about everyone. It's used by, uh, everyone from school kids, uh, using it for homework through to people preparing briefings at work, and they need a primer on a particular topic. Mm-hmm. So it is a regular part of people's lives.

I think that it's likely people do whatever can be done to avoid that kind of situation. So again, I am taking a, uh, an optimistic outlook here. I think there is the broader issue that while Wikipedia is kind of an outlier here, there are other open knowledge projects like say Geograph, which will not be a a tier one project, but it's worth considering what the impacts of the online safety Act would be for them.

And I think that if you are potentially shutting down a source of information, which is so widely used, you need to consider what the implications of that would be, because you are potentially creating an information vacuum and what fills that vacuum will initially be slop. Junk and mis and disinformation.

So I think that the people involved will be very cautious about what they do.

Nick: 00:41:07

No thank you. And it is a complex situation and, uh, just conscious of time. So perhaps we'll just return back to talk, uh, a little bit more about the residency and the work that, uh, you and I are doing. Um, and you, Richard, obviously you are part of this work that leads as well.

Lucy: 00:41:22

Absolutely.

Nick: 00:41:23

Perhaps tell us a little bit more, um, about some of the, well, some the high, well, I suppose I'm interested, Lucy, I can't say you're new any longer can I, but you are, you are only part-time you're only with us two days a week and you started in January. So, um, you know, what were your early impressions of, of Leeds and, uh, tell us a bit about some of the work that you've enjoyed doing in the relatively short time that you've been here...

Lucy: 00:41:46

I really like this question, um, so I'm obviously, as you can tell from my voice, I'm from Scotland. I'm, I'm not from around here. And when we moved back from Canada, we moved to York. So I haven't actually spent a huge amount of time in Leeds.

Um, when I worked at the British Library, I was involved in quite a few things with BL North, so I'd gotten to know the city a little bit through that. And one of the things I, I really love about Leeds is a real sense of like civic pride and engagement and everything that happens in the city and the people who are involved in it.

Um, for eight years of my life, I lived in Glasgow and I find that Glasgow and Leeds are, are quite similar in that way in a really, um, for me, a very comforting way and also a very exciting way as someone who wants to, to work in open knowledge and, and with local communities. So my first impression of the university has been really positive. The people that work here are incredibly open-minded, incredibly interesting. Um, it's just been a real pleasure to kind of slot into some of the things that are already ongoing here at Leeds. Particularly I would say the Knowledge Equity network that's been, uh, kind of second home in the work that we've been doing.

But also to meet people from across the disciplines and across departments who are all looking to engage more widely with the question of what it means to share knowledge on Wikipedia, how we can encourage people to do that and how we can, um, make it part of the, the kind of flow of knowledge that occurs in higher education institutions.

I think a, a highlight event for me, two spring to mind. One is the Africa Week wikithon that we ran back in June, which was very well attended. Um, and just a very engaging event all round with staff researchers. Um, and we were lucky enough to, uh, curate a conversation with Tochi Precious, who's an outstanding Wikimedian in her own right and came to speak to us about some of the work she'd been doing on African language wikis, and that leads into a, an event that we ran just in July, um, which was one of, one of Nick's, um, it was a Sheppard Classic. It was a, a, a quick and brilliant idea, um, that grew arms and legs in the best way , we ran a translation editor on, um, where we encourage people to translate things out of English Wiki and into their own languages or languages they were familiar with.

That was actually quite new territory for us, um, although Wikimedia UK has done a lot of work with minoritized languages and the University of Edinburgh has worked with translation studies MSc, translation is still something that I personally was a little nervous about because I think, um, being English speakers, we get quite lazy about other languages.

We have a huge monopoly of, of what we can access. So taking time to work with staff and students and researchers to put things into other languages was just really remarkable and we're hoping to continue that workflow maybe with some, um, sort of touch base meetings in the coming months. So those were my two highlights, but there've been numerous other things that have been just amazing to be involved with as well.

So it's been a really fruitful eight to nine months so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing where we go next.

Nick: 00:44:57

It was great, wasn't it? The translation event. And again, you know, I'm tragically monolingual, I'm afraid. Um, but it was, uh, I keep mean to count up the number of languages we had. I'm not quite sure, uh, if we could put a number on it, but it was plenty, wasn't it?

We had African languages, we had, yeah, some European languages. Um, uh, I can't remember. I'll have to sort of dig, dig them out. But, um, and obviously there are wikipedias in what, over 300 languages altogether. So this Wiki

Lucy: 00:45:23

over 320 yeah.

Nick: 00:45:25

And again, that's another benefit being in a university. 'cause we've got a, a wide pool of colleagues all from, you know, from all around the world. And it gives us a unique opportunity to sort of bring them together and to do some of this, this type of work. Mm-hmm. Um, and just to touch, I think you referred earlier, um, Richard, to some of the things we do have to bear in mind as a university because, um, wikipedia and people may not be familiar actually with a lot of the rules and the sort of, uh, um, perhaps rules is, you know, to, to the sort of framework around, around Wikipedia. So you alluded earlier to conflict of interest. So that's something, and again, Lucy, you've written something on our Wikipedia, wouldn't you, which I'll link to, around conflict of interest. So perhaps you could just tell us a little bit about that because there's absolutely no reason we can't edit Wikipedia as a university, but we do have to just be aware don't we of, uh, one or two guidelines.

Richard: 00:46:18

It's a really interesting line to walk because we want to get the benefits from expert knowledge and have that in Wikipedia.

At the same time, we want to avoid the, the downside of conflict of interest to do with, uh, being seen as promotional, for example. It's worth keeping in mind that most of Wikipedia's experience with conflict of interest stuff is around, uh, companies and trying to stealth advertise and do a bit of PR, that kind of thing.

It has less experience of working with academic audiences, people who say are trying to share their research, um, in appropriate ways, uh, or even museums who are, are sharing stuff to do with their, um, area of expertise that is the minority of cases for Wikipedia. So most Wikipedia editors might be more geared towards, uh, dealing with pR and for-profit stuff that's going on. Uh, and it sometimes isn't all that subtle or all that ethical unfortunately. There are guidelines for how to do it properly from the Chartered Institute for Public Relations. Uh, but then you'll see someone like North Face who as documented by BBC, uh, made some changes to Wikipedia articles to promote their products, uh, get photographs in, uh, say Wikipedia pages about hiking and that wasn't looked on terribly favorably. I mean, there were right ways and wrong ways of going about it uh, that was the wrong way. You need to be transparent about what you are doing. Because that is a great strength of Wikipedia. Transparency allows the editing community to make informed decisions about what content should be included.

So when it comes to being a researcher and sharing your own work, you've got to think about, how that could appear not just to Wikipedia editors, but the public. Is information you are adding just about you and your work, or is it broader? It might be a, a small update, in which case a citation to your work is all that's needed, but if you are addressing a topic which is a bit broader and you are contributing towards that, then it's very helpful to cite other people's work as well. Yeah. It shows that you are not just in it to boost your own stuff, but you are thinking about what the public would benefit from. I think a really good principle is that, uh, if you are in doubt about what constitutes a conflict of interest, mention it on Wikipedia's talk page. Ask for the input of other editors. Explain what it is you want to do. And they will give you some advice. They will say, oh, don't do that, but you can do this. Or they might say, that sounds fine. Go ahead and add it. Mm-hmm. The important thing is having that dialogue with the community because. That gives them an opportunity to have a say on the content, uh, before it's added into the Wikipedia page because when you add information to Wikipedia, it is live immediately to everyone.

The review process such that it is relies on the number of Wikipedia Editors. It's people checking the new changes feed, checking their watch list, keeping an eye on things as it comes through. There isn't a formal process of someone needs to tick this button against its edits before someone can see it. So we're trying to get it right when it goes live, uh, and especially when conflicts of interest are involved, you need to declare the conflict, uh, the interest, and have, uh, a dialogue with the community about it, because we do want expert involvement. Yeah. That is so incredibly valuable.

Nick: 00:50:25

Yeah, and that transparency, I think that's what I've certainly learned. And uh, um, that's essentially what Declan did, um, with the expert review as well, isn't it lucy that yoy referred to at the beginning. So it just, uh, you know, we did a review, but we didn't actually make any changes to the article until we posted on the talk page and had a, uh, an opportunity for the community to, to, to contribute to that discussion, um, before we went ahead and made the edits.

Lucy: 00:50:50

Yeah, and I think this is where a resident comes in really handy is, well, one of the many places I hope that we come in handy is explaining and advocating for some of these Wiki policies that to an outsider who just wants to quickly share some information that's cool, um, which is a great thing to want to do, may immediately get frustrated with, with all this kind of red tape around it. But being able to have someone on side, on team, who's able to, to talk through that and explain it, I find that that's often a really good way of deescalating conflict and also making sure that people understand why things are the way they are. I, there's nothing, I hate more than being told no for no reason. So I like being able to give people that context as Richard's just done there of like, why certain things are and aren't okay, and how that ultimately benefits Wiki, um, even if it's frustrating in the instant moment.

Nick: 00:51:40

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's great. Thank you very much. I mean, just a final question, uh, one each for you before, um, I'll let you go. Uh, I suppose first of all, for you Lucy mm-hmm. You know, if colleagues are interested in getting involved with this work, um, any suggestions to them? I mean, obviously get in touch with you , um, but, uh, yeah, how would you encourage people, what would you say, what would be your pitch to our colleagues to, to get involved with this work?

Lucy: 00:52:04

I would say get in touch. We'll have a chat, we'll have a cup of tea. I know that tea is very important to the Leeds, um, knowledge economy, so we can do that. But otherwise, I would say there's an excellent book of education case studies, um, I'll give Nick a link for the show notes, that was compiled by the University of Edinburgh. I think there's over 20 case studies in it that show you all the different ways that Wiki can be used, particularly in the classroom. Um, have a look. See if there's something you like, something you'd like to emulate, something we can advise on.

Um, find Wiki pages that interest you. See where the gaps are. Come along to one of our trainings. Um, make yourself known, give us a wave and we'll make sure to take you along with us to whatever we do next. So, yeah, don't be a stranger. Um, as you probably gathered over the last hour, we really like talking about Wikipedia, so we're never offended when people pop outta the woodwork to ask us questions.

Nick: 00:52:57

Thank you. And uh, sort of related question, I guess for you, Richard, is if there were listeners from other universities or other institutions, other organizations, whether that's GLAM or in particular universities, um, again, how would you encourage them to get involved with Wikipedia? And, uh, I suppose you are the person to perhaps get in touch with about that?

Richard: 00:53:15

Yeah, most universities aren't lucky enough to have a Lucy Hinnie. Uh, and if you don't have a Wikimedian in Residence and you are based in the UK, get in touch with Wikimedia UK. Uh, we have a, an email address called programs@wikimedia.org.uk and that will go to myself and my colleagues. Uh, we have experience of working with, uh, universities and, uh, further education as well.

We can help you, whether it's delivering, uh, a one-off Wikipedia workshop through to developing, uh, plans for how to integrate Wikipedia editing across a module so you can work out what digital skills you want the students to pick up. Uh, what activities would help with that and what might help with the, uh, assessment and reflection as well.

So, we do have some good experience with that, uh, and it's really fun to do as well because it's...

Nick: 00:54:12

yeah, that's, that's my overriding message. It's fun.

Richard: 00:54:14

Absolutely.

Nick: 00:54:14

It's, it's a great community event, you know, and isn't it as well. And, just to add to that quickly as well, Richard, I mean, you've got lots of volunteers haven't you?

Volunteers, editor of which I am one, um, so, you know, as well as my own university. Um, I'm happy to, uh. Uh, volunteer for other organizations and other projects as well. So, uh, yeah. Um, thanks very much. Do get in touch with, uh, uh, Lucy, Richard, or myself if you'd like to learn any more about this, uh, this work and more generally about Wikimedia and Wikipedia.

Um, but thank you for your time, Richard and Lucy, and I'll let you get on.

Richard: 00:54:47

Thank you very much for having us,

Lucy: 00:54:48

that was fun.

Intro: 00:54:49

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