Extension to Wikimedian-in-Residence project at the Natural History Museum

At the end of the initial Wikimedian-in-Residence project John's contract with the museum was extended to the middle of January 2014. He will be working part time (50%) on the Wikimedian-in-Residence project, funded by Wikimedia UK with the rest of his time spent on a project on the abyssal megafauna of the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone with Gordon Paterson.

The official project page on Wikipedia can be found here: Wikipedia:GLAM/Natural History Museum and Science Museum

There is some background to the project and other information on my website: Wikipedian in Residence (Natural History Museum and Science Museum)

Transcribing letters from the NHM archive using Wikisource

As an experiment John Cummings, Wikimedian-in-Residence at the Natural History Museum has made a few selected scans from the museum's archive available for transcription on Wikisource.

To familiarise myself with Wikisource I have translated the following letter from Charles Harte to Walter Rothschild. Harte worked as an impresario for Mademoiselle Paula (the famous reptile conqueror), and was offering Rothschild the chance to buy a snake from her collection.

You can read the transcription over at wikisource: Mdlle Paula, the famous reptile conqueror
(Click on the page numbers at the bottom of that page to view the transcriptions)

There is some background to this letter in this blog post on the NHM website: Item of the month (October 2011) Paula conquerors a time gone by and an old press cutting from the Otago Daily Times: Reptile Handling for a Livelihood.

Contribute

There is a list of other letters from the archive that you can have a go at translating on our GLAM project page.

NHM Informatics Horizons

Informatics Horizons is an event on biodiversity informatics at the Natural History Museum, London focussing on the museum's work in this field. I will be giving three talks (one with Vince Smith).  John Cummings (Wikimedian in Residence) at the museum will also be talking. The event will be live streamed here on the day.

Writing for Wikipedia: an introductory workshop

An event by John Cummings - our Wikimedian in Residence at the Natural History Museum and Science Museum.

Originally posted at Physics and Maths info @ Imperial College London Library: Writing for Wikipedia: an introductory workshop

This 90 minute workshop, led by John Cummings (Wikimedian in Residence at the Natural History Museum and Science Museum) and other Wikimedia trainers will involve a short general introduction to the Wikipedia projects and a discussion of how they are created and developed, followed by a more in-depth practical session involving learning the basics of editing and engaging with other contributors.
During the session, Dr Steve Cook (Senior Teaching Fellow, Biology, Imperial College London) will talk about how he uses Wikipedia with undergraduate students and Professor Henry Rzepa (Professor of Computational Chemistry, Imperial College London) will also talk about his work with Wikipedia.

This workshop is aimed at academic staff, researchers, postdocs, teaching fellows, learning technologists and postgraduate research students.

Details:
Thursday 6 June 2013
10.00am – 11.30am
Central Library, South Kensington campus, Training Room 1

To book:
If you would like to attend please email Andrew Day to book your place. Joining instructions will be sent on booking.
For further information email Jenny Evans.

An article is born.....

Way back in October 2008 I started a Wikipedia article on the Rosemary Leaf Beetle (Chrysolina americana) with barely a paragraph of text and a couple of references. It looked like this:

I then forgot all about it, until I started reviewing some of my old Wikipedia edits since we got a Wikipedian in Residence at the Natural History Museum. Since my original and minor contribution the article has grown, although it still could be improved upon greatly. Out of curiosity I pulled up what all of the edits have looked like - it's quite interesting to watch the community come together and make continual gradual improvements.



The final result (so far) is this - I'd encourage the coleopterists among you to go and improve it some more....

An article is born..... by Ed Baker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

John Cummings begins work as Wikimedian in Residence at Natural History Museum and Science Museum

John Cummings radio interview

Reposted from the Wikimedia UK Blog:John Cummings begins work as Wikimedian in Residence

Wikimedia UK is very happy to report that John Cummings, a long-standing and well known Wikimedian, has begun his work as Wikimedian in Residence at the Science Museum and Natural History Museum.

This is a ground-breaking partnership between two of the UK’s most prestigious cultural institutions and the charity that promotes and supports Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in the UK. His role with the museums will last for four months.

John said: “It’s a real privilege to work with institutions with such important places in the history and public understanding of science. I hope I will be able to help the museums in their goals.”

John is the co-founder and project leader for MonmouthpediA and Gibraltarpedia, the world’s first Wikipedia town and city, and he is a Wikimedia UK accredited trainer for communities and institutions.

He is also technical lead for Leaderwiki, a collaborative education resource for emerging leaders from all over the world who want to make a positive contribution in their communities.

John will be working with myself and the rest of the Biodiversity Informatics team at the NHM, as well as other staff from the across the museum. You can see what's happening here.

Measuring the Impact of Wikipedia for organisations (Part 3)

Previous posts in this series:

• Part 1
• Part 2

As mentioned in a previous post in this series I have downloaded all of the Wikipedia pages that make a direct link to the Natural History Museum website. While this is useful in attempting to measure the impact of the NHM and Wikipedia on each other this post is a little bit more for fun at this stage (although the data was collected for an upcoming project).

An obvious thing to do with these downloaded pages is scan for them links - then build a graph of the interconnections between them. The script I set about this task is taking a while - so I decided to see what I could summarise about a topic (Wikipedia page) based on the articles that page links to. In all of these examples the numbers are the number of links from the 'subject' page to the other page.

First up is the iconic Dippy (Diplodocus):

4 | Othniel_Charles_Marsh
3 | Carnegie_Museum_of_Natural_History
3 | Sauropod
3 | Walking_with_Dinosaurs
2 | Jurassic
2 | Diplodocidae
2 | Type_species
2 | John_Bell_Hatcher
2 | William_Jacob_Holland
2 | Diplodocid
2 | Fossil

These as a set seem to be a reasonable, high-level, summary of the Diplodocus.  There is a mixture of information that is technical (type species, Diplodocid), cultural (Walking with Dinosaurs) and about the discovery, description and display of the fossil (Marsh, Hatcher, etc).

Let's go for another species, the Holly Blue

3 | Lycaenidae
2 | Eurasia
2 | North_America
2 | India
2 | http://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRpt/SingleRpt?search_topic=TSN&search_value=188523
2 | Holly_Blue
2 | Main_Page
2 | Wikipedia:About
1 | Biological_classification
1 | Animal
1 | Arthropod

This time the information is more about the biogeography and higher taxonomy, but nevertheless can be seen as a reasonable, if subjectively limited, summary of the species.


Time for something different: first up a member of NHM staff, Chris Stringer

2 | Archaeology
2 | Biological_anthropology
2 | Social_anthropology
2 | Cultural_anthropology
2 | Feminist_anthropology
2 | Fellow_of_the_Royal_Society
2 | http://www.ahobproject.org/
2 | http://books.google.com.au/books?id=wTnWJGnBwgUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Giacobini+Hominidae&hl=en&ei=jRvcS6rVJZLg7AO9_sC_Bg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
2 | http://books.google.com.au/books?id=Ke7_cl6tQ1EC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22Chris+Stringer%22&hl=en&ei=JhDcS4WCF43u7APBsoiuBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false
2 | http://www.nhm.ac.uk/business-centre/publishing/det_humevol.html
2 | http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/2008/march/stringer-wins-kistler-book-award.html

In short, a Fellow of the Royal Society who is an anthropologist and has written a number of books. In a purely professional sense: pretty much spot on.

So what does this kind of summary allow us to do? In a limited sense it allows us to make brief summaries of people, species and institutions that have a Wikipedia presence. But the real use comes when a large number of these analyses can be aggregated, queried and visualised. More of this another time, however here is a quick visualisation made from hacking the demos that come with arbor.js.




Full Screen Version


 
Measuring the Impact of Wikipedia for organisations (Part 3) by Edward Baker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://pblog.ebaker.me.uk/2013/03/measuring-impact-of-wikipedia-for_19.html.

Measuring the Impact of Wikipedia for organisations (Part 2)

This post continues from Measuring the Impact of Wikipedia for organisations (Part 1) which looked at a number of statistics relating to page views and links using linkypedia (well - a slightly customised version of linkypedia).

Part of my reasons for doing this might have become clear based on a subsequent post on this blog: Wikimedian in Residence at NHM.

This post uses a  feature I added to linkypedia to save a copy of pages that link to the NHM website into a database. This allows for some quick queries to identify both the type of pages, and the content they contain.

13580 pages have links to the domain www.nhm.ac.uk

This includes (type of page, number of pages):

User pages 44
User talk pages 39
WikiProjects 2
WikiProjects pages 6
WikiProjects talk pages 20
Wikipedia Signpost 3
Village Pump 1
Reference Desk 9
Graphics Lab 1
Copyright Problems 3
Suspected Copyright Violtaions 2
Possibly unfree files 2
Media copyright questions 1
Articles for creation 2
Featured article candidates 4

Examples of other queries that can be run:

Biota InfoBox 12768  (can be assumed to be good indicator of pages about a taxon)
Type specimen 52
Lepidoptera 12773
Stub 12412
Lepidoptera stub 12190

This looks like the NHM has quite a sizeable Wikipedia footprint, however  a huge majority of these are stub lepidoptera pages with very little content besides a link back to a project on the NHM website.

Sample stub lepidoptera page (Accessed 02 March 2013)

Considering the number of type specimens the museum holds (20,000 mosses alone) the figure of 52 is one that is definitely open to some improvement.

 
Measuring the Impact of Wikipedia for organisations (Part 2) by Ed Baker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Wikimedian in Residence at NHM (Closing date 10/02/2013)

Fancy coming to work with us?

Vacancy reference: NHM/WIR/SN
Location: South Kensington
Employment type: Fixed Term
Area of business: Life Sciences
Closing date: 10/02/2013


The Natural History Museum and the Science Museum are in partnership to recruit an experienced joint Wikimedian in Residence (http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedian_in_Residence) with a good understanding of GLAM projects (http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cultural_partnerships). As the official Wikimedian in Residence the successful applicant will be expected to make an impactful contribution to the public’s knowledge of the work of both institutions and their important and unique collections. You should have an understanding of the Wikimedia movement and Wikimedia UK’s mission to help people and organisations build and preserve open knowledge to share and use freely. You will also be expected to help develop strong and on-going links to build a long term relationship with the broader Wikimedia community and help to develop methods for assessing the impact of Wikipedia and sister projects on both institutions and the communities they serve.

The successful candidate will use their strong communication and organisational skills to promote the use of Wikipedia and sister projects to museum staff including scientists, curators and educators by fostering a broader understanding of Wikipedia (and sister projects) and arranging training in use and editing with groups and individuals. You should have an understanding of Wikimedia’s movement and Wikimedia’s UK mission to help people and organisations build and preserve open knowledge to share and use freely. In addition you will work with the museum staff to improve the quality of Wikipedia pages using items of the museums’ collections, libraries and archives and discussions with curators and researchers and act as a Wikipedia advocate through outreach to museum staff about Wikipedia’s mission and how they may contribute through workshops, events and one to one interactions.

An undergraduate degree in (or strong and demonstrable knowledge) of a scientific or technological discipline with experience of working within the Wikimedia community is also essential for this post.

Wikimedia UK is currently looking for several other Wikimedians in Residence in various cultural institutions within the UK. If you would like to find out more, please contact daria.cybulska@wikimedia.org.uk or visit http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cultural_partnerships#Wikimedians_in_Residence.

Knowledge, skills and experience:
An undergraduate degree in (or strong and demonstrable knowledge of) a scientific or technological discipline

Wikimedia UK

• An understanding of, and empathy for, Wikimedia’s movement and Wikimedia UK’s mission to help people and organisations build and preserve open knowledge to share and use freely
• Experience of editing Wikipedia or its sister websites. Supplementary training may be given
• Experience of working with the Wikimedia community
• An understanding of and commitment to Wikimedia UK’s Equal Opportunities Policies in both services to members and employment

Museums

• Good understanding of the ethos and activities (curation, research, education) of national museum
• An understanding of the GLAM sector, its culture and aims.

General

• Ability to teach and support those learning to use Wikipedia and its sister projects (including via organising events/workshops
• Ability to work tactfully, sensitively and effectively, as part of the two institutions, the Wikimedia community and with a wide range of individuals and also under your own initiative
• Ability to communicate in English clearly, both verbally and in writing to a wide range of audiences alongside use of basic numeracy
• Experience of successfully meeting deadlines
• Awareness of issues related to intellectual property, confidentiality, commercial benefit and transparent working practices.

Apply here

Measuring the Impact of Wikipedia for organisations (Part 1)

The following series of posts will be about analysing the impact and use of Wikipedia by organisations. For convenience I have used the example of the Natural History Museum (NHM), as it's the one I am most familiar with. Doing such studies on an unfamiliar organisation might prove difficult.

The linkypedia project set out to answer these kinds of questions.  A local installation of linkypedia,  with modifications, has been used to generate the statistics presented here. All links are from pages on Wikipedia to pages on the domain http://www.nhm.ac.uk/.

Measuring Impact via Page Views
One (probably flawed) measure of an organisation's Wikipedia impact is the number of page views on Wikipedia pages that reference that organisation.

 The following data are total page view from December 2007 to December 2012 (and ignores the fact that these pages might not have had links for all of this time).

Wikipedia Page	Number of links to www.nhm.ac.uk	Page views Dec' 07 - Dec' 12
Cat	1	19,958,264
Charles Darwin	1	15,323,809
Dinosaur	1	10,740,744
Horse	1	10,692,007
Great Britain	1	9,669,059
Chocolate	1	9,243,390
Tomato	2	6,756,291
Tyrannosaurus	3	6,012,785
Cattle	1	5,868,187
Homeopathy	1	5,378,978
Taxonomy	3	5,303,333
Dodo	2	5,210,713
James Cook	2	4,977,016
Nature	1	4,874,884
Pangaea	1	4,827,257
Binomial nomenclature	2	4,514,425
Moose	1	4,432,025
Giant squid	1	4,209,529
Eggplant	2	3,910,621
Largest organisms	3	3,585,714

There's a pretty good correlation between this list and things the NHM is known for, I guess some people might be surprised that homoeopathy makes the list but the link is to a debate between Peter Fisher and Ben Goldacre held at the museum.

The graph below shows that of the 13,000+ articles linking to www.nhm.ac.uk most are in the long tail of page views, and relatively few articles with links to the NHM have over 1,000,000 page views.

 Another way of measuring Wikipedia impact might be to see how many links to an organisation's website there are on pages that relate to the organisation's core activities. The following table shows the Wikipedia articles with the most links to the NHM's website.

Wikipedia Page	Number of links to www.nhm.ac.uk	Page views Dec' 07 - Dec' 12
Sematurinae	62	5,722
Wildlife Photographer of the Year	9	24,226
Chris Stringer	7	48,001
Natural History Museum	6	945,997
Nemapogon granella	6	5,996
Bumblebee	6	2,567,265
Systematic & Applied Acarology Society	5	96
Nemapogon	5	3,001
Systematic & Applied Acarology	4	209
Amastus	4	3,833
Tinea pellionella	4	23,723
Niditinea	4	1,805
Niditinea fuscella	4	3,045
Tinea trinotella	4	3,443
Tineola bisselliella	4	196,615
Monopis laevigella	4	6,212
Monopis obviella	4	2,359
Ectropis	4	6,279
Perizoma	4	6,880
Drepanogynis	4	1,492

Most of these are species or genera or months, so there is some obvious scope for improvements in other areas of study. (In fact there are a few thousand stub articles on lepidoptera that have little more than a link to a catalogue on the NHM website).  Chris Stringer is a member of NHM staff, and the Wildlife Photographer of the Year is owned jointly by the NHM and the BBC.

More results to follow.


Measuring the Impact of Wikipedia for organisations (Part 1) by Ed Baker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

The Great nofollow

Flickr and Wikipedia among others are sites that append the rel="nofollow" automatically to all external links. What does this mean and how does it relate to the free web?

First of all the rel="nofollow" attribute is added to hyperlinks to prevent search engines using the link between sites as part of their ranking process. In some search engine routines a link from page A to Page B is considered a "vote" for Page B by Page A. Google uses this method, although it has further routines for calculating the voting power of a link compared to others (a link or "vote" from a more important site has higher authority or "voting power" than one from a minor site).

In strict terms I guess the search engine should not follow the link to Page B, although some do and some don't. What is clear is that the big players in search technology (Google, Yahoo, Bing) do respect the notion that links with the rel="nofollow" attribute have no "voting power".

Why was such an idea considered necessary? In order to overcome the havoc to search engine results that could occur by people posting comments that include links to a large number of sites, e.g. blogs, photo-sharing websites, etc. In fact the attribute was the brainchild of a Google/Blogger sharing of minds before Blogger became part of the Google empire.

In an ideal world there would be no need for such a tag. Spamming would be removed by caring blog owners (or blog platform operators), or could be corrected for by the search engines (this comment is spam, I will ignore the link). Unfortunately neither of these is entirely possible, or entirely foolproof.

Blanket use of rel="nofollow" however seems a bit mean. For example I use Flickr regularly and I also blog regularly. Strangely enough sometimes I even post photos and blog about the same thing! When this happens I tend to link from my blog to my Flickr photographs, and from some of my Flickr photographs back to my blog.

When I link from my blog to Flickr my votes count. My blog actively increases the importance of my photographs (at least as far as search engines are involved). When I link from my photos to my blog however Flickr automatically adds a rel="nofollow" attribute to my links. The importance of my photograph cannot be shared with my blog. Flickr keep all of its voting power for internal site links (a great way to increase its importance at my expense). I should point out that this is for photograph, set and collection descriptions - not only comments.

In this way Flickr has become a PageRank super-sink - it pulls in importance from thousands and thousands of sites across the web, and gives nothing in return. It's the start of a uncontrollable PageRank monster. In fact I have started calling Flickr 'The Great Importance Attractor' - probably because I like physics and maths too much.

Is this fair? No, of course it isn't. I'm not too fussed if the links in comments on my photographs and blog posts get their votes removed. This is where the majority of spam comes from (besides forums I imagine). But my content? I think I should be able to link it together in a way that doesn't contribute to the making of PageRank monsters.