I’m Ben and I’m going into my fourth and final year studying International Relations. I’ve spent this summer as a Learn Foundations Intern in LTW. This experience has given me the opportunity to meet some wonderful people and learn important professional skills. However, I’d like to talk about one specific aspect of my time at LTW; one that is extracurricular to the Learn Foundations Internship.
Working With Wikipedia
Near the beginning of the internship, I took an interest in the Wikipedia workshops run by Ewan McAndrew. I attended one of these events with other interns and became engrossed with the chance to edit and create my own pages. I’ve been an avid Wikipedia user for years (as my screen time can attest) and often read pages in my spare time or find myself going down rabbit holes after simple Google searches. However, I had never made my own page or made any significant edits. During Ewan’s workshop I started by editing pages on places related to my hometown of Port Seton and surrounding areas. This is a great way to start contributing to Wikipedia. It requires minimum research since you’ll likely already know about the topic, and pages on very specific areas are more open to everyone to edit.
It’s a common misconception that anyone can just put anything on Wikipedia. The truth is that Wikipedia is monitored by thousands of volunteers who will be quick to remove any unsourced or untrue information. Pages on important or controversial matters, such as politicians or ongoing conflicts, are also often locked to general users, allowing only trusted accounts to edit them.
After this I looked for something related to the University or more specifically ISG. I realised that Argyle House itself didn’t have a dedicated page and was only mentioned on one other page on the whole site (West Point). Starting a Wikipedia page from scratch can be a debacle. If it’s not related to a pre-existing page it will need a minimum number of sources, linked to other pages, tagged for Wikipedia’s internal categorisation, etc., and after that it might get taken down anyway for a lack of notability. All this, of course, keeps Wikipedia of sufficient quality, but makes it a headache for editors. This work paid off, however, and you can see Argyle House’s own page right now.
Women in Red: A WikiProject
Again, with some fellow interns, I went to another of Ewan’s workshops. This time a Women in Red editing session. These sessions are for creating pages of important women related to the University or city, the red referring to the title of a page that doesn’t exist. Less than a fifth of Wikipedia contributors are women, and this has led to a disparity in biography pages with just over 20% being about women as of 2024. The Women in Red project is not limited to Edinburgh, and was founded in Mexico City in 2015. At the time of the project start, the number was only 15.5%. While this may not seem like a stark increase, we need to remember that thousands of pages on significant men have also been created in that time, so the pace at which the project is making pages is still impressive, especially on a site with over 2,000,000 biographies.
Being a small part of this project was certainly a highlight of my time at LTW, and I encourage other interns and staff to get involved in the initiative whenever they can.
