OEG Voices 55: OE Award Winner and Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan McAndrew
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Ewan McAndrew: [quote from later in episode] it is a strange kind of excitement. It's weird how people love and know Wikipedia so well, but they don't know what's under the bonnet. They don't know how that information gets there.

Alan Levine: Welcome to our new episode of OEG Voices. I'm your host, Alan Levine and this is a podcast that we do aim at bringing to you the people, personalities and ideas of open educators from around the world. And I'm happy today to be joined by my colleague, Marcela Morales, Hola Marcela, how are you this time of year? 

Marcela Morales: Hola, Alan, I'm doing well. Hola, Ewan, It's so exciting to be here with you guys. Looking forward to this conversation.

Alan Levine: It's been a couple weeks since we announced the recipients of the Awards for Excellence and. Like we've been doing the past couple years, we're, trying to bring you the voices of as many award winners as possible. I have a lot of reasons to be excited to have a conversation with Ewan McAndrew, who I followed in his media work and otherwise for a long time.

I was really excited when he was recognized for this individual award in the Support Specialist area for his extensive accomplishments as a Wikipedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh. So there's so many things we could talk about. I think we might need all day, but we're not gonna take all of Ewan's day.

Say hello, and where you are and you can tell us how close you are to the castle.

Ewan McAndrew: Hello, my name's Ewan McAndrew. I work at the University of Edinburgh and I'm in a building about as adjacent to the castle as you can be, cause we could throw some grappling irons up the slope, but, there's , a student accommodation building that's just got built right next to us.

So you have to go to the top floors of our building to get a really good view. But, we're quite lucky where we're based. But it's a brutalist architecture building that is supposedly one of the ugliest in all of Edinburgh, which is some mean feat.

Alan Levine: So when you're in the castle, you don't particularly pay attention to the office building next door. 

Ewan McAndrew: We're inside. It's great. It's lovely. We've got all the mod corns that we need and we've got beautiful views out the window. It's just like people think the actual building we're in is an eyesore.

Alan Levine: So, where did you grow up? Where were you raised?

Ewan McAndrew: I am often accused of not sounding Scottish, which I take great exception to, but I'm half Scottish. I grew up on the coast in Aberdeenshire. I mention to my students that you know, have a look at how your hometown is represented on Wikipedia and think about things you can add.

So I've added a video of a seal waving hello that I took and uploaded to the page about Newburgh in Aberdeenshire. I'm half Australian on my mom's side. She instilled a sort of wanderlust in me. So my accents got a little bit diluted over the years through teaching abroad.

Alan Levine: I've learned not to guess accents, cause invariably I get it wrong. So I won't play the accent game, and I guess students can respond to that as a really good reason to jump into Wikipedia to something they care about and we'll get to that in a second.

I know you've probably done this a million times, but, how do you describe when you're meeting someone outside our field, what does a Wikipedian in Residence do?

Ewan McAndrew: Whatever, whatever they, they are asked to do. It is such a new discipline, that it can be whatever you want it to be. The essential role as I understood it previously was that it was often based in GLAM institutions. So that's galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.

The very first Wikipedian in Residence was, Liam Wyatt, who volunteered at the British Museum, just for about a month or two, I think . He was so enthused about opening up collections to the world through Wikipedia. , He wanted to showcase how beneficial it was and it was a sort of experimental role.

Since then, Martin Poulter was a Wikimedian in Residence at the Bodleian Library in Oxford University. Again, working with collections, he was running a lot of editathons themed around the Great War and getting more information about the First World War cause they had lots of collections information about that, but also about women in STEM.

That's what peaked my current boss's attention, Dr. Melissa Highton, who's the assistant principal for online learning here. She saw there was a range of work going on in IT through the Wikimedia projects that university IT managers weren't currently engaging with. She wanted to explore whether there was more to just libraries and archives, whether there was real applications across the whole university for teaching and learning. So she brought Professor Allison Littlejohn to come along and evaluate what was going on in a Wikipedia editing event to see if there were was authentic teaching and learning going . The conversations that we're having , in these events were pertinent across teaching and learning. Thankfully she found out it was, and this sort of legitimated my position, which was started off as a one year, part-time role, two and a half days a week, as an experiment to see if academics at the University of Edinburgh would engage with the idea of someone working along other digital skills trainers and other academic support librarians and other learning technologists, as another tool --how I'm often referred to as a tool to engage with the idea of working with Wikipedia and engaging how to benefit from it and how to contribute to it.

Alan Levine: We spoke to Melissa Highton back in February, for her Award in leadership. She definitely spent a lot of time talking about the work that you're doing and the impact. We got a little insight into the Witches project, which I hope we can talk some about. But, you've kind of taken an interesting path there.

I did do some scouting and I might later ask you what Stinglehammer means as a username. You had IT and Computer Science and did some teaching abroad and then you started in the university. You couldn't see this path coming. What was the thing about Wikipedia that, like your first encounter that kind of lit your interest?

Ewan McAndrew: I was a Wikipedia vandal, I guess like in the sort of wild, wild west days. For a friend's birthday, I would change the first name of a radio DJ that was well known and change their name to have their whole biography, be in Wikipedia and present it to them as a printout.

It was changed back thankfully. There's a lot more checks and balances now. There was that sort of flurry of interest, that there was this platform that you could edit to share knowledge, but also there was an opportunity for humorous vandalism.

The immaturity of me, I engage with my student days. , It became that much harder to do that, thankfully. And, you know, sorrowfully as well. I I still try and couch all the work I do about the joy of Wikipedia. The eccentricity that exists on Wikipedia through some of the articles and that joy of going down the rabbit hole of clicking through all the wiki links to find out about opening up obscure topics to a general lay audience.

And it's that joy, I think students react to as well. It's something that they mentioned quite a lot. It's about that they love about Wikipedia and it is the thing that motivates them quite a lot as well. I try and speak to their interest and say this is something that is a resource for the whole world that we can improve on. You can improve it through your own passions and interests and expertise. And unfortunately, you can't vandalize it like you used to. 

Alan Levine: Yeah, that's interesting. It says it's an environment that has some bounds, but that there's opportunity for people to be human in that space. I'm curious how that sort of sense of discovery, makes a change for students who may think , oh, I have to do an assignment or a project, and all of a sudden they discover something that sparks their interest.

Do you see that happen a lot?

Ewan McAndrew: It is a strange kind of excitement. It's weird how people love and know Wikipedia so well, but they don't know what's under the bonnet. They don't know how that information gets there. They also think that there's some sort of elves that just, overnight magic, a page together, and that this work happens organically, like Santa's workshop every year. There's something going on there that they don't know how it happens, but they expect the information to be there. They also don't maybe necessarily question or understand the nature of how a statement got that citation at the end of it, that you should be clicking on the citation to find out more, to make sure it's a verifiable statement. It's when you start saying, look, this is something you can edit and here's how.

Here's the sort of easy route in. Suddenly their eyes light up a bit . Oh, I can actually contribute here. It looks reasonably easy. How can I, how can I help? And it's just saying, look, you know, start small or start big, 50 words or more, and you've got something you can publish as long as you've got those citations and cite what you write.

They do get an insane amount of pride. On the Reproductive Medicine course, they love the fact that it gets students from science backgrounds and from medical backgrounds together at the start of the semester in their honors year .

All of them together are the same space working in groups around a table, maybe with a postgraduate student tutor to keep them on track. They research an article in three hours and then publish it in another three hour session. The final bit, they talk about the end part of the Great British Bakeoff. There's this flurry of activity and rushing around to make sure that the article is prepped and ready for inspection. They do a little presentation of what their group's worked on. Addressing knowledge gaps in reproductive medicine for the world to read about is essentially what they're doing.

They do actually say to you, I'm really proud of that.

Alan Levine: I love that metaphor. My family and I were just watching an episode last night, and it's always that, that last minute, it seems like there's no way it's gonna come together. And it does beautifully. I like that sense of joy that comes through there as, as well. 

There's so many projects we could talk about from the Wikipedian in Residence site. What are your favorite ones to talk about as a showcase for what this role has done?

Ewan McAndrew: The Reproductive Medicine one is a really nice one cause it's the one we've done longest. I wouldn't probably still post if , it hadn't worked cause they engage with it as early as 2015 and it's been run every year since. They just love it because it's that group collaboration.

It's getting the students talking about important digital research skills that are gonna come in handy for them, but also getting them to think about writing and communicating for a lay audience, which they feel like they don't often get a chance to. In medical careers, that's really important to be able to communicate quite complex jargon heavy terms to someone that's not going to potentially understand that right off the bat. 

We do this data fair every year on the Design Informatics course. They really want to teach data science and have a data literate workforce to support Scotland's digital economy.

The university's been charged by the Scottish government to come up with 10,000 data literate students. But the lecturers in that course really want them to be practically literate. That's how data science is really understood, through practical work with real world data sets.

Every year we have this data fair where they get about 13 to 15 problem holders or data holders to come and pitch, in three minutes, a problem and a data set to the students. So it can be people from different parts of the university with a research data set, or someone from the Scottish government or someone from the National Records of Scotland, or someone from the National Library of Scotland.

All these data sets are pitched, like the National Library of Scotland have a database of the whole Encyclopedia Britannica going back years. Or the Edwin Morgan poetry archive. They're interested to see what the students can do over a six week period to come up with some creative, practical visualizations , rise to the challenge of working with that data set, processing it, and delivering something that we can showcase at the end of the seven weeks.

Every year I pitch the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database, taking it from a static Microsoft Access very textual, data set and turning it into something that can be machine readable through linked open data, as in Wikidata, which is Wikipedia sister project. Every year, we have such rich answers to that data set and that's turned into a website now, ,we call the Accused Witches of Scotland website where we put all our linked open data visualizations of what the students have come up with over the years.

Alan Levine: We could talk a lot about the Witches project because it's like 4,000 some sites that are on that map. Is that right? 

Ewan McAndrew: It's estimated somewhere in the reach of 3000 to 4000 accused witches, in Scotland from 1563 to 1736. But we don't know all of their names. Some of them were groups of anonymous women that were put to death. Where we have names and where we have place of residence information, we've managed to geolocate them on a map of about 3,141 accused witches, 85% of the women.

Alan Levine: Right, right. It had a significant impact. If I understand right, a pardon was issued to address the wrong that was done to all these people, right?

Ewan McAndrew: An apology from the First Minister of Scotland was issued. I think there's more work to be done about a pardon and a memorial. There's still ongoing discussions in the Scottish government circles. But there are a couple of campaign groups, Witches of Scotland, Remembering the Accused Witches of Scotland, which are lobbying very effectively to further the pardoning of these women. 

What was really great is that we already had this rich data set, which looked at all the historical records in Scotland of accused witches. And weirdly, Scotland did document quite a lot of what happened, and they just put it in this Microsoft Access database they've completed in about 2003. It remained relatively static-- where there's 30 tables, 300 columns of information, a really rich data set.

There are lots of gaps in the data cause it's historical data. One thing we do seem to have for most of the accused witches in here is at least some idea of their place of residence that seems to have been noted. 

If we could just get a student with a geographic background, we could get them to sit down with some old georeferenced maps from the National Library of Scotland, take the names of these places and see if there are coordinates we could get them approximately or exactly right. It wasn't always easy, but it was a lot of detective work and we managed to get somewhere in the region of 800 place names geolocated and that allowed us to create maps.

That seemed to bring home to people the sort of extent of the witchcraft panics in Scotland. But also it localized things and seemed to bring home that, oh, there was like three accused just down the road from me, and you'd want to read a bit more and wondered why there was no sort of memorial to them.

Alan Levine: Right, and in a way it just seems to make that so much more accessible or meaningful than a giant database, to be able to zero in on the location or this idea we don't know exactly where this location was, let's, let's do that mystery work to find it. 

Did you have any sense about where this project would go when you started?

Ewan McAndrew: No, not really. I talk about nodes-- open, nodes of knowledge. My boss, Dr. Melissa Highton, I think, coined it. 

When we first started, Wikipedia was not well understood at the university. It was kind of anathema to what the university was trying to do and we were trying to find a way to get academics to engage in conversations how open knowledge gets online, how people are consuming information. Cause we're doing a lot to generate, we're knowledge generating, a research generating institution. But we wanted them to think about how are people are engaging with that information and do we have more we could do here to share knowledge and work more with open access.

What we found is that we would get people in the room at times that they could attend. We'd go to forums, do little talks that were already happening at the university, or we'd run sessions at times of the day or times of the year when they could attend. 

And we'd have hooky topics, like Edinburgh Gothic for Robert Louis Stevenson Day, where we'd get ,you know, historians and artists and architects all in the same room, and students and staff all in the same room. What we found is that if we could plant a seed, if we could get people to challenge us about discussing like, "isn't Wikipedia the devil?" And we'd have a conversation about, "No, there's a bit more nuanced understanding to be here."

They would go away and it would plant a seed of an idea. 

It was the same thing with Wikidata as well. I would do presentations on Wikidata at certain conferences, and then I found one of the academics came to me later on and said, could you present on Wikidata at our data fair on the design informatics course?

I then sort of went, well, okay, yeah, but I need a data set that we could work with to process into Wikidata. It was my line manager Anne-Marie Scott, who said, "Well, there just happens to be a database of witches at the university that's about 20 years old that it's web interface is looking a bit long in the tooth."

Maybe if we could turn that into some linked open data, they could do some creative visualizations. And we did little pockets of work , cause it was just a six week course. We'd create items about the data and about each accused witch and all the people involved in their trials. But I was always wanting to do more. Can we do more? 

Because we'd done it three years in a row, Anne-Marie suggested, well, we might be able to leverage some money for an internship, get that geography student you wanted, get them to do 12 weeks , getting all them geolocated on a map. 

Like I say, it was six weeks hunting down all the locations and then we had all this information and Wikidata that we could turn into a variety of maps showing like how they were tortured, where they were detained , timelines as well. We had all this information we needed to visualize, so we just wanted to put it on a website. It was then six weeks of creating a website. The paint was still drying on the site when we held our end of project seminar.

It was Professor Melissa Terras that just decided to tweet about it and said, this is a really cool site. And then it took off and became a bit of a sort of viral sensation for a while. Three years after that, we've still had that level of engagement with the site and being discussed in newspapers about getting pardons and memorials and apologies. It's always been there bubbling away that there's this public attention now on what happened to these women in Scotland. We didn't want to lose the momentum. 

I was able to get a Witchcraft Investigator student intern this summer because there was lots of rich information about the overarching witchcraft investigations, you know, accusations of shape changing and where the witches meetings were supposedly held, what happened, the appearance of the devil, how he was described, all of this in rich information.

We got a student, Maggie, to be our witchcraft investigation student to add all that information to Wikidata. And now I need to get another student, which we're gonna call maybe a "witchcraft hunter" to make sure that the data's really, really robust, that it's doing what it's expected to when you're looking up the results.

So just to make sure that all the data we've added is really cleaned up and we're really happy, the quality, so that we can then release these new visualizations to the world and hopefully get the same level of engagement and understanding and educational-- I wouldn't say joy in the same way as Wikipedia, cause it's quite a dark subject. But there is a sort of grim fascination with what happened in Scotland in that period that was previously not well understood.

Alan Levine: It definitely taps into an interest level. And I love the fact that you come up with some of these names. I saw one of the posts on your site about your student being a "Wiki Sorcerer" for working with Wikisource. 

You mentioned something earlier that, that struck a chord to me of yeah, there's, there's a lot of familiarity with Wikipedia, the encyclopedia, is something that most people have an understanding with. But some of these other parts of the enterprise, like Wikidata and Wikisource, which I hope you can talk about, are a little bit less mainstream products, if you will. What can you say about the other parts of the Wikimedia federation, that intrigue or have some potential?

Ewan McAndrew: There are about a dozen open knowledge projects supported by Wikimedia. My role is Wikimedian in Residence, so I'm supposed to facilitate engagement with all of these projects. We tend to focus on about the main four, I would say. 

Wikipedia is obviously the most well known and a lot of people engage with Wikimedia through that. Wikisource is the free and open digital hyper library. It allows you to have 100% searchable HTML versions of longer documents. A lot of people were putting all these essays and out of copyright short stories and novels onto Wikipedia. We needed a place to have all those out of copyright and public domain texts. So it's our kind of version of Project Gutenberg. The main strength of anything in the Wiki universe is the hyperlinks.

What's really nice is you can see who mentions who and create a sort web of 18th century authors who are mentioning other authors or other texts and link through to those texts cause a lot of the time we're dealing with out of copyright works.

So we are, we're looking at texts that are from the 18th century that are in there. I always use Robert Louis Stevenson as my go-to example cause we've got Treasure Island and j Jekyll and Hyde. You can look up individual phrases is like "moist eyebrows" -- if you search for "moist eyebrows" in the search bar, it'll take you to "A Lodging for the Night" by Robert Louis Stevenson.

So it's quite useful in that way if you're looking to work with text and who's citing who, who's mentioning who . It's sort of being able to sort of look at someone in the round , so you can see all the images of Robert Louie Stevenson on Wikimedia Commons, you can read about his life on Wikipedia, you can read his stories on Wikisource. 

And not just his novels, his short stories, his travel writing, and you can query some of the information about him through Wikidata. If you have machine readable information stored in structured linked open data, you can ask, " Can you show me all of the works written by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne?" You can create a SPARQL query that will show you the results of that.

It's that opening up of all of the different platforms and being able to wiki link between them in a really useful way that I think gives the Wiki universe an edge over other platforms. It does have that relationship with Google as well, where you can have images from books. Like there's an Explorer, Frederick Bower-- I think he did some engravings of botanical specimens on trips around Australia. And the images that he illustrated , you can crop them out of the book. You can upload the book onto Wikisource and have the images there, but the images themselves will be cropped out into Wikimedia Commons.

And what's nice is that when you look up Frederick Bower on Google, the Wikipedia page will come up as one of the top results, but the little Google knowledge graph will have like little elements from the Wikipedia page, but also those images that have been cropped out of the book. I always find it hard sometimes or harder than it should be, to find open licensed images. Looking at out of copyright or public domain works and being able to get some beautiful illustrations cropped out and added to the public domain is really a another strength I think, of working with Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons.

Alan Levine: I came across some of your intro materials to Wikidata, which seeded an interest for me , and I'm trying to figure out some ways that we can do some projects through OE Global. I've been hogging the microphone and I wanna give a chance of my colleague, Marcela to, to ask you something.

Marcela Morales: Just a quick question. First of all, congratulations. I'm just fascinated by your work. The question that I have for you is, we know that the Wikipedia as you have been describing is one of the world's largest open educational resources out there. And whenever I'm exposed to a community that have not heard about openness, I think that they do get Wikipedia.

It's like, "Oh, now I understand." And in many parts of the world, that we have Wikipedia, there's students or teachers that are trying to do openness in a way, but don't find their way to it. After listening to all the amazing work that you have been doing, I wonder if you have any advice to these students out there that would want to engage with Wikipedia more than just using it to contribute it in an individual way.

Is there a way for them to be part of that project or do something about it?

So for example, whenever I could be working with students, let's say, and they are just, as you were describing, very excited to be part of it , but they are afraid to work with Wikipedia like, no, no, I can just read it.

How can we encourage them to actually be part of the conversation, even if they are part of a university that maybe don't have such a robust, program where they can link to.

Ewan McAndrew: if it's first students or academics or both . There are chapters of the Wikimedia Foundation, around the world, , like my role as a partnership between the university and Wikimedia UK. They're quite small bodies like, you know, it's a hundred percent donation funded organization. There's about, I think, 10 people that work down in the London office, but their role is to help people, to facilitate engagement, to help people see the connections and ease them into that first encounter. They have a lot of knowledge and that's what my role is essentially that for the University of Edinburgh, I'm the conduit to allow them to see how it can be made easy . So I would maybe advise students or staff at any institution to get in contact with the nearest Wikimedia chapter to them.

So Wikimedia Mexico or Wikimedia DC or Wikimedia Canada. They should be able to give you some advice. There are things you can do to make it nice and easy. We do have lots of examples, case studies that we've done in education so that we can say, here's how they did it. And they can start thinking about how it would work in their own context. 

And I run online workshops every month. Anyone's welcome to attend, where I try and teach people within 45 minutes to an hour how to edit. And then if they want to, they can stay on for the rest of the afternoon, and I will suggest pages that they can create related to a notable woman that doesn't have a page on Wikipedia.

And all we need, like I say, is fifty to a hundred words. Cite what you write. Write in your own words. And so fifty to one hundred words backed up by three or more reliable published secondary sources, and you've got something you can publish by the end of the afternoon. So I run those sessions on the last Friday of every month, both online and in the library at the university. I think the library's a really important place still because not everything's online, not everything's digitized, far from it. So it's about saying, "Look, we can just spend an afternoon, or less, you can just spend an hour learning how to edit."

It really sparks an idea if someone gets past that hurdle of, "Oh, I've published." Yeah. And that you get that joy and you can start seeing how long it takes to get in Google's top results. I do it as a sort of like end of month, end of working week, like go home happy that you've contributed to knowledge and there's a page there that you created.

And once they get past that hurdle of seeing how it's done, they get that little bit more confident that they could do something more in their own sphere. 

I also point them to little things they can do, like taking a picture of a historic building or a landscape near them, uploading it to Wikimedia Commons, inserting it into a page. That's like five minutes. Or adding a citation. We've got Wikipedia's 22nd birthday coming up on January 15th. They run this #1Lib1Ref campaign every year where they ask one librarian or one person to add one reference to Wikipedia to improve its verifiability, and that's a gift of fact-checked open knowledge as a birthday present to Wikipedia.

If all the people that use Wikipedia just take five minutes to contribute and remove one of those citation needed tags, then it improves this public resource that much better. What's nice about the Citation Hunt tool is that you can filter it to something you're interested in. 

And it will show you little snippets from Wikipedia, whether you're interested in, I don't know, Canadian sports or Scottish writers or ... whatever you're interested in, you can filter and it'll show you the snippet. And say, here's one that has a citation needed tag. Do you want to add it, that citation? Can you find that citation or do you wanna click next to, to get shown another one that might be a bit easier. 

So I call it like whack-a-mole for citations. There's all sorts of things you can do. Citations, images, I uploaded a video of a seal waving hello, cause we have seals at the local beach near my hometown. And you can just see how your hometown is represented on Wikipedia. 

And if you're still too conscious that information is being represented online and you're a bit worried about getting it wrong, there are tutorials, there are Wikimedia sessions online and in person you can go to. You don't even have to start with Wikipedia. You can go to Wikisource or to help transcribe books that you're interested in.

Just do a few pages at a time. Or you can go to Wikivoyage and look how your hometown or a holiday destination you like is represented in terms of things to see, places to stay, Places to buy things, where to eat and drink and just bullet pointed guides in a sort of Lonely Planet or Rough Guide way to introduce people. 

Wikivoyage has got a reputation as being a nice place to be, and it's got a nice help section called the Travelers Pub. There's little things you can do to improve knowledge and just dip your toes in the water basically without going the whole hog.

Alan Levine: We've been trying to encourage people to join the #SheSaid effort through Wikiquote and that seems like a lower barrier of entry than dealing with the Wikipedia article, which, you know, gets a lot of attention. There's maybe a little bit more pressure. So those are great ideas.

Ewan McAndrew: Sometimes I get people fired my way. If they're new to the Wiki world or a new Wikiemedian in Residence or starting at the Wikimedia Foundation, they'll get sort of pointed my way to in that one hour monthly workshop as a how to get started. I'm not saying I'm perfect at it. . But the idea is that we just have this monthly place, and it's where you can meet like-minded individuals and you can ask us questions as we go along.

It's for all learners, of any particular background or any level of Wiki experience. You can come with none and go away having created a page and feel that you've contributed to in a very social and supportive atmosphere, hopefully.

Alan Levine: In the period you started was that time when students were discouraged from using Wikipedia because it had a reputation that it wasn't reliable enough. What can you say, like, where it stands now?

What has that transition been like for you to experience having lived through seeing Wikipedia become main stage or just more understood?

Ewan McAndrew: I think it's weird how people do have preconceived ideas of Wikipedia. It has become emblematic of all the ills of the internet, when I'm looking at what's happening with Twitter and yeah. I mean, "Wikipedia's worse?" Uh, okay.

But I work in an institution that has about 13,000 staff and 37,000 students. There's people at the university who get it, who really understand Wikipedia and love it and are happy to engage with it. My main problem is that it's really difficult to communicate with everyone because there are so many communication channels, so many email lists. 

But if I do manage to get the right email list and find the right person, they are very switched on already. They don't need any convincing. They're already convinced, and I think that's a credits to Wikipedia, that it's become this pivotal part of our knowledge infrastructure that people don't think of it in unhealthy or unappealing terms anymore.

There are still , some people that are wiki skeptics and they just need a little bit of convincing, and that they become wiki converts. I do think we do have a growing open knowledge network, particularly in our university because we're having the conversation.

I think if you're not having the conversation, it's really a detriment to your staff and students cause it leads you into so many other avenues about open access, about verifiable sources, about academic referencing, about digital literacy and 21st century digital research skills, neutral point of view, bias, you name it.

These are all graduate competencies that students need. And one of the things I really like at the moment is we run an Edinburgh Award. We support the students for their extracurricular activities as well, because we know that student life isn't all about the studies, it's about the volunteering. They do the experiences outside of the university as well, and we want to accredit them for doing a sustained body of work from October to the end of March. And we created one for digital volunteering with Wikipedia where they spend 50 to 80 hours working on a subject they are interested in, either related to their studies or completely different.

They can switch hats from their studies or they can do something complimentary if they so wish. But the idea is to have a defined project goal that they can research from October to the end of March and demonstrate that they developed three particular graduate skills that they want to improve, whether that's critical thinking or academic referencing or problem solving. The evidence over the course of that period is that they've improved on those three skills, but also had a demonstrable significant impact on Wikipedia as well.

So we did Women in Astronomy, 9,200 words last year. The female artist, Helen Chadwick, her artworks were not well understood on Wikipedia. She was seen as a more of a teacher of young British artists, but she was an artist in her own right with exhibitions in the V & A Museum in London.

And one student decided, I'm gonna write about her artworks. I'm gonna contact the V & A and ask them to send images that they can put on the Wikipedia pages. So those are some of the projects we're doing just now that are really interesting to me because we're not just covering students on one particular course, on one particular level. A lot of academics want students to collaborate with other levels of students. So like post-grads working with undergrads, PhD students in the same space. And Edinburgh Award allows that to happen in an accredited way. They can have it recorded on their university transcript and have a celebration event at the end of their project, feeling proud that they've contributed to public knowledge.

Alan Levine: Wow, this has been so impressive. Right, Marcela? I can just imagine what if more institutions established a Wikimedian in Residence? Think about all the impact and the effect that you've had, it's a great thing to imagine. We're hoping maybe we can bring one into our work here to get a Wikimedian Residence to help guide some projects we can engage the open education community. As you describe, there's no end to the amount of work, meaningful work, that we can find to do in Wikimedia.

Ewan McAndrew: Yeah, the amount of areas that it takes you into in teaching, in learning, in libraries, in archives, in research, in all the sort of graduate competencies, it supports all the kind of digital skills we want to teach, all the data skills we want to teach. My boss Melissa Highton always says, a lot of people say they can't afford to, but we think you can't afford not to, because it really opens up a whole area. We think it's a multiple return on investment.

If you just have someone in post, who has that sort of charge to help facilitate and keep up to date with the Wikipedia projects and allow academics and students a way in.

Alan Levine: I think the impact on students we heard earlier in the year when we talked to Charlie Farley about the work in the Geosciences and Education program, I mean, profound impact on students who went through that learning experience.

Ewan McAndrew: They get so much out of it. They can see that their work is published and has some lasting good. There was one student in particular, Áine Kavanagh who I keep going back to cause she talks about how the work that she did in reproductive medicine hadn't really been relevant outside of lectures and exams.

And she was taking that knowledge that hadn't seemed terribly relevant and applying it in a real world application of teaching and learning, taking her scholarship and creating this page about high serious grade carcinoma, one of the most deadly and most common forms of ovarian cancer. And it didn't have a page on Wikipedia. She was plugging a knowledge gap online, using her research and credible open access material, at least 60 citations in that article, and creating her own diagrams because she couldn't find any copyright free ones. So she had to create her own diagrams in Photoshop to help explain this high serious grade carcinoma to a lay audience.

That page has been viewed 150,000 times since she published it. So that's impact right there. And she still talks about it. She's left the university now and , she still came back to talk with us when we did a podcast last year. She still felt really proud and enthused about the work she'd done on Wikipedia as part of that course.

It had an impact and it made things relevant and much more grounded or real to her. And that was something she really took away from the whole project.

Alan Levine: So do you have any spare time or do you get time to, to devote to your mandolin playing?

Ewan McAndrew: Not as much mandolin. The mandolins a little bit too hard , so I'm going to the guitar first, guitar and piano, and then I'm gonna go back to the mandolin once I've mastered the guitar.

Alan Levine: I did a little digging around your Wikipedia page and came across that. 

I just wanna thank you so much for spending this time with us and, we could steal your whole day cause I would love to hear more. Any closing message , to encourage more people to engage in this work that you do?

Ewan McAndrew: Melissa and I keep getting asked how do you convince senior managers to do this? We point to Alison's research, Allison Littlejohn's research that she's done on the topic. We point to our exemplars and the kind of impact that we've had. We try and write up all the work that we do to. 

Our students have created a website of open licensed how-to video resources that Hannah won an award from OE Global a year or so ago.

She wanted academics and students to be able to have the easy to use polished resources that we weren't convinced were there. And just have them in a one stop shop , but open license them so that anyone could use them and embed them in virtual learning environments if they want to. Like a how to add a citation or how to add an image, you know, two to three minute video clip.

There are little things you can do. We just sort of say if you want to do it, if you think it's important, engage in the conversation. Have the conversation with academics, have the conversation with the students and you'll find that their interest to explore it.

Do small scale experiments. Have an edit-a-thon, hold one in a time at the universities having a little break. See if that could then be elongated into more project work, plant the seed of ideas in academics minds, how they could use it in their own backyard, their own domain. And you'll see that it grows. And it's inexpensive it. These are free and open Wikimedia projects. If you have a digital skill trainer or learning technologist or someone that's there to support work at the university in any way, shape or form, just seconding a little bit of their job remit , is easy to do... well, it should be.

Alan Levine: When you see the output on the website that Hannah Rothmann helped organize , it definitely says a lot about what can happen. We hope more people are motivated by this. 

Thank you so much, Ewan again for joining us. This is our episode of OEG voices, our podcast that we produce here at Open Education Global.

When I publish this, we're gonna have some intro music, a track that I found called "Wiki Leads" by an artist, M33 Project, licensed Attribution, Non-commercial. We like picking music from the Free Music Archive, another great resource for music, although there's lots of music you can find within Wikimedia Commons.

So you'll find this episode on our site voices dot global dot org and hope you can continue and maybe follow up with conversations with Ewan in our OEG Connect community. 

Thanks again and we're always looking for more suggestions about who we should have on the show here.