Witch Lore and Scottish Castles: a Wikipedia Editathon On Friday 27th September we were joined by castle buffs and witchcraft enthusiasts to help us improve the representation of Scottish witchcraft and heritage on Wikipedia. Our Witch Lore and Scottish Castles editathon event saw people coming together in the Digital Scholarship Centre of the Main Library […]

Edinburgh Award 2023/4 Blog This year I had my first experience helping with the Edinburgh Award Wikipedia project. The Edinburgh Award is a scheme which encourages students to volunteer in various projects that are happening around the University whilst undertaking their studies, with the ultimate aim of improving employability and graduate outcomes. Having undertaken an […]

This post is written by new Assistant Wikimedian in Residence, Ellie Whitehead. 23 years ago, on 15th January 2001, Wikipedia was launched as an independent, online open-source encyclopaedia. In its first year it amassed 20, 000 articles appearing in 18 different languages. Since then, Wikipedia has grown to be an internationally known and respected symbol […]

This post is the fourth in a series of blog posts for Open Education Week. By Dr Iraklis Pantopoulos, Edinburgh College of Art, and Dr Charlotte Bosseaux, Translation Studies, School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh. Translation and open education go hand in hand! The historical role played by translation in the proliferation and dissemination of knowledge …

This post is the third in a series of blog posts for Open Education Week. By Jemima John, Digital Skills Intern and undergraduate, School of Law, and Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence, University of Edinburgh. Since the early 2000’s, Wikipedia has acquired somewhat of a negative reputation for being unreliable. Educators are normally wary of allowing Wikipedia …

Wikipedia is the 5th most visited website in the world and is an important first stop when looking up any topic – it is truly an incredible resource. But its power can be dangerous. It lacks diversity both in its editorship and its articles. This means that its systemic biases can have a large impact on …

Addressing the challenges of digital and information literacy, digital scholarship and open knowledge at the University of Edinburgh Summary The University of Edinburgh is the first university in the UK to appoint a university-wide Wikimedian in Residence as part of its institutional strategy to develop information and digital literacy skills for staff and students, and …

Creating new role models on Wikipedia to encourage the next generation of #ImmodestWomen By Siobhan O’Connor, Dr. Alice White, Dr. Sara Thomas and Ewan McAndrew. Wikipedia, the free, online, multilingual encyclopaedia is building the largest open knowledge resource in human history. Now aged eighteen years old, its English language version receives over 500 million views …

Title: “Oh! the Humanities: An introduction to the digital humanities with Jupyter notebooks”  Summary The University of Edinburgh (UoE) is looking to host a Jupyter Community Workshop focused on the uses of notebooks for teaching within the field of digital humanities. The core component of this event will be a 2-day workshop to create notebooks with pre-configured text mining dashboards that will allow non-expert users to …

Title: nbgrader Hackathon/Sprint Summary The University of Edinburgh (UoE) is looking to host a Jupyter community event based on the use of Jupyter notebooks within teaching. The core of this will be a gathering of key core contributors and local stakeholders and contributors for a nbgrader focused code sprint. Local Jupyter contributors within UoE have already spent time working on fixes and improvements for nbgrader which they …