OER Service Digital Skills Events
The OER Service runs a wide range of workshops and events as part of the University's Digital Skills programme. Our up and coming events are listed below, and you can find a full list of workshops we offer here: OER Service Digital Skills. If you would like us to come to your school or college to run a session tailored to your requirements, please contact us at open.ed@ed.ac.uk.
- This event has passed.
Women in Red – a project to add biographies of women to Wikipedia
Join us to add of all the incredible women missing from Wikipedia!
The University’s Information Services team run a monthly Wikipedia ‘edit-a-thon’ focused primarily on improving the systematic bias on Wikipedi by adding more articles about notable women missing from the free and open online encyclopedia.
These are social and supportive workshops where you can meet like-minded colleagues, learn a new digital skill and feel free to edit on any subject.
- 1pm-1:30pm– Crash course in Wikipedia training.
- 1:30pm-4:30pm – Research and EDIT!
- 4:30pm-5pm – Publish.
- 5pm – Close.
Then you can check how long it takes for your new page to appear in Google’s top ten results!
Wikipedia is the 5th most visited website in the world and the first point of information for many so surfacing knowledge there can make a huge impact. Yet, as of 19th August 2019, only about 17.94% of the English Wikipedia’s biographies are about women. Not impressed? Physicist Jess Wade certainly wasn’t. She has written 460+ articles about women in science in the last year and has been named in Nature’s 10 people who mattered in 2018 as a diversity champion.
No prior knowledge is required. You’ll learn how to edit Wikipedia and participate in an open knowledge community. Participants will be supported to develop articles of their choice related to notable women missing from Wikipedia.
We’ll be there 1pm to 5pm so join us when you can and stay as long as you want to/need to (some people get VERY into writing their articles when they get started).
Open to all. Everyone is welcome.
As part of the university’s commitment to Athena SWAN, the University’s Information Services team run this session as a monthly Wikipedia meetup/edit-a-thon to address the systemic bias on Wikipedia where only 18.04% of biographies are about notable women.
More details can be found on the Women in Red page.
These are informal drop-in sessions so knowledge of Wikipedia editing is beneficial. However, Wikipedia editing can be easy to pick up as this 5 minute walkthrough of the new Visual Editor interface demonstrates. (If you have not edited before then please come at the beginning of the session for a quick crash course).
Come along to learn about how Wikipedia works and create new role models for young and old alike!
Programme
- 12:30pm: Welcome and crash course in Wikipedia editing for those new to editing.
- 1:30pm – 4:30pm:EDIT! (Drop in when you can and stay as long as you want to/need to and you’ll be supported to publish an article – Warning: Wikipedia editing is highly addictive)
- 4:30pm –5pm Publish your new article and event close.
Then you can check how long it takes for it to appear in Google’s top ten results!
Have a look at the event page to see if there are pages you would like to help edit/create and if you fancy learning more about Wikipedia ahead of time then you can view the Wiki Basics site.
Register your place on Eventbrite
