 Helo! Very nice to see you. If there are people online, hi, and hi to everyone in the room. My name is Lucy, I'm the Chief Exec of Wikimedia UK. I am a native English speaker, and I can start to talk quite quickly. Please, just shout at me to slow down if that's an issue. So please don't stand on ceremony to say, slow down please. So I'm going to talk to you today about Wikimedia UK's first Wikimedia in Residence, which is focused on the climate crisis. I'm going to start with a little bit about Wikimedia UK because I don't expect you to necessarily know much about us beyond the fact that we're the UK chapter for Wikimedia. I'm going to try and do this awkward thing of both moving forward on the slides here and on my laptop, so we'll see how that goes. But I just wanted to say that whilst Wikimedia UK obviously is inspired by the idea that everyone in the world accesses the summable knowledge, that we are a separate registered charity in the UK. We have our own board and our own strategy and our own vision emissions, so this is our vision. And our mission, which I'm going to read out, is to enable people to engage with open knowledge and access reliable information in order to develop their understanding of the world and make informed decisions about issues that affect them. I think that mission is particularly important and relevant when it comes to our work on climate breakdown. Quick facts about us. We've got 16 staff currently based across the UK. I personally live in Scotland. We've got a really diverse board of trustees, 11 trustees. And unusually within the Wikimedia movement, our governance model is such that actually very few of our trustees come from the movement, so it's quite an interesting model for the movement. We obviously work with lots of volunteers and we define community leaders as those lead volunteers that make things happen that wouldn't otherwise, so they might be delivering training for us or giving a talk or running a project. And we have hundreds of community leaders who work for us, but for the last five years, around half of those have been women and that's a really important part of our programme. And we are trying to diversify that community in many other ways, but I feel like we've done quite good work on gender. And I'd say that our programme is probably characterised by really quite major partnerships with big, world-renowned cultural and educational institutions. I often talk about that work, but today I'm talking about... See, I told you I'd get out of sync. Oh, no, hang on. Oh, it doesn't go back. Then really quickly, Impact on Reach, I won't talk through this, but this is just a few metrics from the work that we do. But this last one's quite important because we're working with content-holding organisations. Whilst this is a whole separate conversation, often those organisations hold content about the world, not just about the UK. So it's really important to us that that's released online openly. And in the year 2021-22, there were 15 billion views of those images. But climate, right? That's why we're here. So we have three strategic themes in the UK and climate and environment is a new one for us. We introduced it in 2022. It sits alongside knowledge, equity and information literacy. But it recognises the accelerating climate crisis and Wikimedia is really vital role in providing unbiased up-to-date information about the impact of climate breakdown, but also potential actions and mitigations. And one of the reasons that we identified this as a strategic theme, and I mean this with absolutely no diminishment of the incredible work that volunteers have done on the Wiki, but the climate coverage on Wikimedia could be better. It's a small editing community. It's generally been quite focused on Europe and North America. Whereas, as we know, actually the global majority are currently the people experiencing the sharp end, the sticky end of climate change. Missing disinformation is a concern. And I've said here on non-English Wikis, but I mean obviously it's also a concern on English Wiki, but that gets a bit with more users, with more readers. I think that might get picked up more quickly. There's an issue with greenwashing. I've got quite an interesting example about that, but I won't go into that now in terms of time. But that's compounded by a lack of open data from climate NGOs. I don't know if any of you are in the session down from Creative Commons, but their open climate, what's it called, open climate campaign work, is really important in this area to try and get content-holding organisations to release their data. So we were super excited. I've just noticed that it's there. Oh my goodness. Sorry, I just noticed that they put the slides there too. It's like super exciting. So we were really excited to launch a Wikimedia in residence at the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter. And we launched that last October when I say launched, I mean that's the point when the member of staff started. There were several years of work running up to that, and very happy to talk about that if anyone has any questions around how we established that partnership. But just in brief, that came about firstly, very much due to the work and the connections of that small editing community that I mentioned. But also the support of the Global Systems Institute and their vision and their understanding of how working with Wikimedia could help them and help get their research and their messages out there. But also we were really fortunate to receive funding from an external foundation and they funded one year of the project but we, I think literally in the last two days sent off all our proposals for a second year of funding with the idea that would expand into the Spanish Wikipedia alongside English Wiki in the second year. And I'm not going to read this out but this is what the Global Systems Institute says about themselves. They are a well-leading institute working on climate so it's an important strategic partner for us. And many of you will be familiar with the Wikimedia in a Residence model. In the UK we've got a really strong track record in residencies and we try and make sure that everyone is completely bespoke and responds to the objectives of the host organisation and also our own strategic themes. And the resident has been undertaking a real mixture of these activities. Internal advocacy within an institution is always just the first port of call and the first thing that you need to do to try and establish relationships and connections and actually make change happen. But in terms of activities there's also events and training, student engagement expert outreach trying to encourage experts to review articles and actually inform us from their expert perspective of what needs changing. External advocacy often with institutions that I mentioned who are holding data that could be relevant or visuals or various things. Partnerships, content relations, resources improving imagery and I'm going to give just a few examples of that work. I'm going to scroll back to the movement strategy 2030 that many of you will be familiar with and there's this initiative around topics that impact which we're really interested in but I think it's fair to say that topics for impact is not entirely well defined or articulated within the strategy and actually this project has been really enabling us to think about what that means and how we prioritise in the sea of climate articles, how we prioritise which one should be changed and yes it's about higher page views but it's not just about that, it's also ones where the editing community have identified misinformation where it might be an article about something that doesn't make an explicit link to climate crisis but there should be so that work's been really interesting for us and then this is like a super concrete example that I just thought I'd share from an edit that was made during one of our editathons so the article on coral reef on Wikipedia basically said that coral reef isn't threatened by ocean acidification and that's just not true so you can see here how that's been changed through one of our editathons and there's quite a few examples of that which is I think incredibly important we need people to come to Wikipedia and know that if they're looking at climate information whether that's to inform their own the way they live their own life or whether that's as a researcher or a broadcaster that they're getting the right information and also we've been trying to encourage the coverage of key concepts and making those really clear to people so another example is carbon neutral and net zero certainly in the UK can just sometimes be used into changeably but they're quite different concepts so we've worked with an external organisation to develop those articles and distinguish them enabling people and particularly organisations and businesses to understand the different strategies the different potential impacts and intercept goals related to climate change that are actually meaningful within their context and more broadly this fits with our our theses that clear information really helps to ensure that actions are based on a real understanding of different strategies and their impacts external advocacy has taken different forms but this is just an example where Tatiana who is the this is a picture of Tatiana Bellata she is the Wikimedia visiting fellow she was hoping to do the presentation with me she didn't manage to get here in person and we just decided I mean not least because of the time difference that I would give this so Tatiana is a South African science communicator she's now based in she's working in Exeter which is in South West England and one of the pieces of work that she's doing is encouraging researchers to really understand the impact and value of working with Wikimedia and in particular thinking about the state of global tipping points report which will be launched at COP28 later this year and how we make sure that that is shared openly and partnership working underpins everything we do clearly it's a partnership with the Global Systems Institute but this is one example of working with other partners across and beyond the movement so working with Wikimedia New York City, Earth Alliance and the influence of Depths of Wikipedia who apparently has 1.2 million followers which is incredible and we organise a climate change editathon in New York and the thing I love about the themes here are you know it's about how you live how you eat, how you move all these things that really bring it home is how our own we are all in relation to the climate and you know sometimes I think it really helps to bring it to that level that human level rather than necessarily looking at the big statistics and the scary stuff about climate breakdown but this is a great event and improved saw improvements to various articles as an example the impact of flying first or business class I'm sure none of you did over here I certainly didn't never have but there's a big difference between flying economy and flying in one of the fancy seats or fancy beds rather so just a quick snapshot of some of our key achievements but I wanted to start with the looking at the detail of what we're doing because obviously that underpins these statistics and that the sort of detailed one to one work that goes into training editors into getting people on the side into motivating people to want to change Wikipedia and the information that millions of people are accessing really quickly about challenges see I put this in red like so securing a work visa for Tatiana was a bit of a nightmare it weren't amazing to know that basically the UK doesn't want people to come to it so it took about six months but it's great that she's now in Exeter academic timetables I'm sure many of you working with higher education have come across this that there are particular cycles but certainly within the UK and probably in other areas there have been ongoing strikes around conditions and terms and that's really affected our programmes right across the whole team and not just in terms of this project and I think that has compounded the challenges of trying to secure expert input retaining interest in editorthons that's starting to diminish clearly we need to find new ways of engaging people in new communities to do so and there's a lack of metrics for the quality of edits these are not things that will be new to this project or to you but just sort of synthesising some of the challenges of this particular programme so I mentioned the next steps we are hopefully fingers crossed securing a second year of funding and expanding the work to the Spanish Wikipedia we will work across other language Wikipedia's as well and for sure that's really important but the starting point has been working on English Wikipedia but we really see this as expanding into different languages and I think that's my last slide apart from this beautiful orchid I'd recommend going to the National Orchid Garden in the Botanic Garden while you're here if you get a chance in time, thank you so much for listening if you have any questions or comments or things to share then please do go ahead Anton I think you're supposed to use the mic Thank you so much, really interesting presentation I wanted to take a step back and ask you to tell a bit more about why did you decide, did Wikipedia UK decide to choose climate as one of its strategic priorities in the first place and why do you think makes Wikipedia UK specifically best suited to address this topic Really good questions So the first one I guess it's I felt really personally that we are living through massive existential crisis and I really wanted to be helping to in a tiny way address that crisis through the work that I'm doing and that my team's doing and other people on the staff team felt the same and it did involve quite a lot of conversations with our board because it was a bit of a departure from this focus on knowledge equity and information literacy but it just felt like as an organisation trying to enable people to access information that makes a difference to their lives if we weren't working on climate then what were we doing I felt really strongly about it so I guess I spearheaded that in terms of our strategy and hopefully brought other people alongside I guess I'm passionate about information but not just about information being out there but actually how that affects people and what change that enables in people's lives so it felt like an obvious fit I don't think that the UK is the best place to do it, I just think that we are an organisation that could support this work I haven't shared with you our strategic objectives around climate because I thought that would be a bit boring but the way we've articulated it has tried to be really sensitive to the fact that well A, lots of this work is going on already and B, whilst the UK obviously is experiencing changes in climate we're not at the sharp end in terms of this stuff so addressing climate justice, how the intersection of knowledge equity and climate change and the climate crisis is really important and I hope that that is, I believe that that is informing our approach through this residency but through the other partnerships that we're delivering but just to be clear I don't think the UK is the best place I think we felt passionately about it and we felt that we're a pretty well resourced organisation within the movement and if we can add some support to what had been and still is to a degree small, incredibly committed but a small editing community working on climate yes, thank you Hello, you mentioned that researcher and expert availability and interest was one of the challenges as a researcher myself I would like to know I guess I have a three part question in your ideal world, how would researchers be more involved in your project what are the barriers that you see for more researchers getting involved and what are you doing to reach out to researchers? I will try to answer that, the caveat is that I'm not delivering this project so I won't have the most comprehensive knowledge of the different tactics that are being used so in terms of what we're trying to do one of the things that we're trying to do is get expert input into articles and there are different mechanisms for that expert review I guess in an ideal world we train some of these senior academics at the institute and they edit Wikipedia themselves but we don't insist on that there are ways of ingesting their review into Wikipedia through editathons where volunteers can make those changes in some cases they're literally just marking up a word page and we get them to sign a licence agreement so we're trying to make it work for them but in terms of the availability I really think it's just about the sheer workload and capacity of most academics and I happened to have a meeting with someone else at the University of Exeter about a totally different project, an AI project but he's I know, I happened to know that Tatiana had emailed him and so it came up in this conversation and I wasn't putting him on the spot but it's that thing oh yeah, that does ring a bell there's just a massive workload so we've got to acknowledge that and then additionally apart from the expert review there's also if people are working on research related to climate trying to make sure that where they have that power and I know that researchers don't always but to make it open access right so in terms of the barriers I mean I think there's lack of time lack of understanding of how Wikipedia works lack of still in some cases a lack of credibility and legitimacy and then in terms of the tactics actually I guess Tatiana building those relationships trying to make the case delivering editathons being in Exeter now at the Institute in person I think will make a difference and she says that's only been the case since April but yeah, thank you for the question are there any other questions or comments? hi I think yeah, yes where actually did come the funding from? so there's a foundation working in the area of climate and what's quite interesting is that usually so Wikimedia UK gets a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation but that represents about 40% of our income and obviously we are proactively going to grant makers in this case there is a real alignment of the stars because I've been working with a group of Wikipedians and also the Global Systems Institute to build the concept for this project we had initially gone to a big tech company and they hadn't supported it and we'd been looking at other funding and then this particular funder went to this approach to Wikipedia editor working in this space and said I'd really like to do something with Wikipedia so it was incredibly fortunate and we're really lucky that they've invested in this programme and hopefully are going to invest in a second year it's always really well, I don't know whether you're working in this area in terms of fundraising but it's always really difficult but when this bit of serendipity comes along you don't turn it you don't walk away Hi Lizzie, I'm Jonathan from Wikimedia Deutschland I'm also at the Climate Work and my question is when you're talking with policy, grant or other decision makers how do you tell them why Wikimedia because I'm very interested in this being actionable Yeah, so just to be clear you're talking about decision makers which sort of decision makers are you talking about? I was mostly focusing on grant and policy decisions So there's a whole backstory to this but the short version is that our sort of policy our public policy work certainly around climate, it's around information literacy and things like the online safety bill and so on in terms of decision makers with funders Honestly, I don't think that I could say we have made a breakthrough in terms of their successful arguments This is something we're trying to learn and we are experimenting with different ways but we were really fortunate in this with this instance because the funder itself is focused purely on climate they understand and one of the things that this we had a champion within that funding organisation but we have put together presentations and so on to illustrate how fundamental Wikimedia is to people's access to information and how that can drive changes in behaviour if we're making sure that that is up to date unbiased doesn't have crap light the fact that the coral reef doesn't mind the ocean turning acid so in my experience having always helped if you have a champion somewhere but then working with that person to think about the best ways of influencing in this case his seniors who held the budget not rocket science there sorry Any other questions? Thank you for the excellent talk I really enjoyed it and I've seen some coincidences with our work, we are a group of users we are scientists we work for the academia should I put some words? We can still hear you Okay, I sit here Let's see Okay I had a talk two days ago with Andrew Luang or something he works in Canadian and work for Wiki journal and I think that one way of working with the challenge of evaluating the quality of the articles would be perhaps publishing them in the Wiki journal so they are peer reviewed and the scientists that cooperate or the academics that cooperate may add to their CV another article This is a fresh idea to me and I am evaluating what do you think? Would it work for your climate project? That sounds like a super interesting idea and I'll take it back to the team working on this As I mentioned climate is an emerging theme for us we are this is our first residency for climate so we are open to new ideas and suggestions in ways of working I've talked about Wikipedia mainly but obviously we are also working on WikiData and WikiCommons but I don't know if we've done anything on WikiJournals but I'll certainly talk about that idea bring it back, thank you Sorry Siobhan Leachman just said there's a person online who has a question for you their name is Jan How would you recommend another affiliate to get started copying what you have done? Please copy, that's what we're here for we're an international movement and we share ideas so you can only give so much in a short lecture like this and I've tried to I guess tell a little bit of a story but please reach out to us directly and get more very very happy to talk to other affiliates who are looking to do something similar what I haven't talked about is the time is the setting up time and the challenges of that and the main challenge around it really was getting funding but equally there are always two thing problems at the start of a residency like this and things to work through and we're very happy we've had to produce interim report for the funder and very very happy to share that because it gives a lot more detail than what I've talked about and also to have a video call or whatever say I don't think I can synthesise my advice really other than to say sorry I think one thing is really important is to make sure that you're working hand in hand with the community Thanks for the question Was it Jan? A half left if anyone has any final questions or anything to share about what they're doing in terms of climate Oh yeah go ahead Thanks it was super interesting something I've found in engaging on academic topics on Wikipedia is there's a lot of them and there's a lot of content that's already there that you've it's quite hard to engage with it's quite hard to address a page sort of half good half bad how to get people to work through that so I was just wondering how that worked with these projects and also a bit more about that climate must be a massive there must be a massive number of pages that relate to climate in Wikipedia and do you have any tools for how you've kind of made that selection to narrow things down? So there's two things in that isn't there so I think for me the first thing is to not to frame any of this stuff as being academic topics because I think that's really important this is whilst it's informed by academic research you know it's really at the forefront of everyone's lives the crisis and I think that's just sorry I think that's an important point in terms of framing and the way we've tried to go about it and actually I think when we've got people