Wikimedia and
research impact
Nick Sheppard
Open Research Advisor
Leeds University Library
n.sheppard@leeds.ac.uk
@OpenResLeeds

www.menti.com
5843 5990
Quick poll

Wilson Armistead
?

• Guerrilla inscription: Transatlantic abolition and
the 1851 census -
https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/145070/
Wilson Armistead
Did you know…
…that in 1851, Wilson Armistead
from Leeds hosted escaped slaves
Ellen and William Craft when they
fled the United States after the
Fugitive Slave Act?

“The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”
• permanent and evolving source of verified
information
• transparent record of edits over time
• set of fundamental principles
• accuracy comparable to Encyclopedia
Britannica
• Wikipedia just one of 16 interconnected
projects (e.g. Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata)
Wikipedia is only as good as its contributors
All articles must strive for verifiable accuracy, citing reliable, authoritative sources, especially when the topic is
controversial or is about a living person. Editors' personal experiences, interpretations, or opinions do not belong on
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars

Top 10 DOI referrals from websites in 2015
https://www.crossref.org/blog/where-do-doi-clicks-come-from/
1. webofknowledge.com
2. baidu.com
3. serialssolutions.com
4. scopus.com
5. exlibrisgroup.com
6. wikipedia.org
7. google.com
8. uni-trier.de
9. ebsco.com
10. google.co.uk
Wikipedia shapes language in science
papers
https://www.doi.org/10.1038/nature.2017
.22656
SSRN preprint (2017) Thompson et al
“Academia is fighting Wikipedia””

• White Rose Research Online (Leeds, Sheffield, York)
• data extracted from Altmetric.com (April 2019)
• results analysed for Open Access compliance using
Unpaywall
• 6454 citations of White Rose Universities’ research
on Wikipedia: Leeds (2406) | Sheffield (2523) | York
(1525)
• approx. 50% open access
• 904 links to White Rose Research Online (insource
search results) (04/08/21)
Links from Wikipedia to WRRO
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=insource%3A%22eprints.whiterose.ac.uk
%22&ns0=1&fulltext=Search

Might this be automated by bots
using unpaywall, CORE etc?
https://whiterose.altmetric.com/details/16900363/wikipedia
Wikipedia:OABOT

• Wikipedia
• Just one of 16 interconnected projects
• Wikimedia Commons
• repository of openly licensed
media files
• photographs, diagrams, video,
audio
• Wikidata
• fastest growing Wikimedia project
• structured data
• read / edited by human or
machine
Wikimedia ecosystem
Wikimedia, screenshot of Wikimedia project
icons, https://www.wikimedia.org/

• Manage it locally to share it globally: RDM and
Wikimedia Commons (2018)
• Data Management Engagement award -
Cambridge University, SPARC Europe, Jisc
• link RDM with the open science movement via
the Wikimedia suite of tools
• Wikimedian in Residence
• Edinburgh
• Coventry
• Oxford (Bodleian)
Wikimedia in Universities
‘Universities really can’t afford not to have a Wikimedian in Residence
these days. It still surprises me how few do.’
Melissa Highton, Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services, University of Edinburgh

• https://doi.org/10.5518/252
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PEATMAP.jpg
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q58417726
PEATMAP

• Knowledge graph
• Experimenting with datasets
• https://doi.org/10.5518/29
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q91013391
• https://w.wiki/3nJG
Datasets and Wikidata

• http://witches.is.ed.ac.uk/
• https://tinyurl.com/y9cd2ot7
• Electrifying Women
• https://electrifyingwomen.org/
Witches and Electrifying Women

“The original idea of the web was that it should be a
collaborative space...by writing something together
[people] could iron out misunderstanding” Tim Berniers
Lee (2003)
“It has taken all of us to build the web we have, and now
it is up to all of us to build the web we want - for
everyone” Tim Berniers Lee (2017)
The World Wide Web in 2021
Paul Clarke [CC BY-SA 4.0
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sir_Tim_Berners-Lee.jpg
“open infrastructure that easily enables research outputs, media and other digital assets
to be distributed at scale with clear provenance and copyright information that can be
linked back to institutional systems via persistent identifiers (PIDs) such as DOIs.”
Wikimedia and Universities: Contributing to the Global Commons in the Age of Disinformation

• Poulter, Martin, and Nick Sheppard. 2020. “Wikimedia
and Universities: Contributing to the Global Commons
in the Age of Disinformation”. Insights 33 (1): 14.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.509
• Wikimedia resources from the University of Edinburgh -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:University_of_
Edinburgh/Resources
• Wilson Armistead -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_Armistead
Thank you