The original proposal for the project was entitled Manage it locally to share it globally and states boldly that we will invite experts from the Wikimedia Foundation to co-facilitate an editathon across the White Rose Consortium focused on a specific subject and featuring high profile academics from each of the three universities (Leeds, Sheffield and York). Having never run, or even attended, an editathon I had naively envisaged a big one-off event at the end of the project where academic experts would upload a range of seminal datasets to Wikimedia Commons (magically already curated in repositories with DOIs and high quality metadata) and collaborate feverishly to improve Wikipedia with authoritative citations to open data and research.
Writing a proposal and actually delivering a project are two different things however…
Local engagement
The watchword for the project is “engagement” and we first need to start small to build a local community so with that in mind, the short term plan is to run a series of small scale Wikipedia editing sessions (editathon might be overstating it, probably more of a sprint) and I’ve begun to tentatively recruit academic colleagues in the course of day to day interraction, when I process a dataset for example. In addition I’m actively identifying datasets from UK based institutional data repositories* and uploading suitable media files to Wikimedia Commons with a view to building up a collection of openly licenced material that can subsequently be used in editathons.
* at this stage I’m using IRUSdata (beta) to identify potential datasets, rather than using Datacite (or the new Google Data Search) to keep it managable and to focus on insitutional collections rather than big repositories like Zenodo or Dryad.
International Open Access Week
In any project, a small amount of serendipity is as inevitable as it is welcome and in the course of our planning for International Open Access Week I’ve made contact with inimitible Leeds academic and recent Wikimedia editor of the week Alaric Hall. Alaric and I hope to run a small editathon during OA Week at the end of October, not necessarily overtly focussed on the project, rather to help us learn the ropes and generate interest across campus. More details soon, though if you are interested in taking part please get in touch sooner than later!
Ewan McAndrew, award winning Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh has been very generous to my enquiries and I also hope to head up North to visit the Scottish Capital at some point to take part in a proper editathon.
Upcoming conferences
I’ll also be heading South to London to present at a couple of conferences, the 5:AM Altmetric Conference on 27th September and Internet Librarian International on 16-17 October.
The 5:AM presentation is called Has anyone seen my data? Incentivising #opendata sharing with altmetrics and will present preliminary results of how and where datasets are being shared online as tracked by altmetric.com. Data sourced from IRUSdata (beta) is available here.
Spoiler: altmetric data for datasets is currently underwhelming and I’ll also explore how data repository managers can encourage and facilitate data sharing through social media networks, blogs and Wikipedia.
Internet Librarian will be a more general overview of the project and an appeal for collaboration and input.
As soon as recordings and/or slides are available from both conferences I’ll post them here.
If you’re at either conference, please come and say hello!
RDM Engagement – get involved
To read more about the project and register your interest please visit this shared Google folder which includes the original proposal and a preliminary project plan.
You can also get in touch via this blog, on Twitter or via Wikipedia.
Leeds University Libraries Blog 