 Hi, my name is Yun McCandrew and this is a short introduction to Wikipedia, its main policies and guidelines. It's important to know that Wikipedia is the charitable foundation that supports about 12 projects of which Wikipedia is probably the best known. But if we focus on four of the projects, we can look at whether you have articles, media, source text or secondary data. These four projects can provide all the information needs you have. For example, if you have an article on Lord Byron, it can be placed in Wikipedia, the free and second-pedia. You can have his image, links to from Wikipedia, stored on Wikimedia Commons. You can have his longer poetic works stored on Wikisource. And you can have items of data on Wikidata. And these projects all link with one another. Wikimedia projects are free, multilingual, crowdsourced from volunteers and open process. They have around 2 billion contributions, around 80,000 regular contributors, around 500 million visitors a month and about 39 million articles in many different language Wikipedia's and 31 million media files stored on Wikimedia Commons. The Wikimedia vision is to imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. We're not there yet. So what is Wikipedia and how does it work? Well, it's in Cyclopedia, freely available on the internet. It's also, according to the Atlantic's May 2016 article, the internet's favourite website. It has on average more than 52 million people. It's routinely among the top 10 most popular sites and it's the only non-profit in the top 10. It gets about 15 billion page views a month. 7,000 news articles are created every day and 15,000 or so edits are made every hour. And apparently it's now even trusted more than news sources like the BBC, ITV, newspapers like The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Mail, The Express, The Sun, The Mirror. That's according to a UGov 2014 survey that found that British people trust in Cyclopedia more than they would do traditional news outlets. But with great power comes great responsibility. There is a need to redress the gender gap. At present, Wikimedia projects have about 85% of their editors are male and only around 15% are female. So that skews the content on Wikimedia. So that biographies of notable females only tend to be 15% of the total number of biographies. So Wikiproject women in red are determined to redress that balance by turning red links of articles that don't yet exist on notable females into blue clickable ones. And this way they are addressing the very real gender gap and the very real problem of content being skewed on Wikipedia. So there is a feedback loop. Things that are more visible, e.g. on Wikipedia, become more visible in Google searches, which in turn get more written about in the press, which are therefore more visible to the public. And therefore get more written about because you can now add a media source to the Wikipedia article. So instant feedback loop. The rich get richer and the poor may disappear entirely. So there is a social activism aspect to writing an article for Wikipedia. So if you're interested and passionate about being involved in Wikipedia editing and you have an area that is a gap on Wikipedia, then we'd love to have you involved. In terms of the main guidelines of Wikipedia, there are five main pillars. One, it's an encyclopedia, not a gossip column. Two, you have to write every article with a neutral point of view. Three, it's free content that anyone can use, edit and distribute. And every page on Wikipedia has a license at the bottom, which says as much. Respect and civility, number four. So if we're engaging in conversations on the article's talk pages, we have to be respectful and civil to the other editors on those talk pages. And number five, no firm rules. If you are creating an encyclopedia that is the sum of all human knowledge, then there has to be the scope that occasionally there is going to be an exception to the rule. And you should be able to argue for that. And an informal rule here as well, be bold in your editing, but not reckless. So have a go at editing, but don't be irresponsible with that editing. Stick to writing with academic rigor, fact checking, backing up everything you say with reference to high quality sources. In terms of writing with a neutral point of view, we avoid peacock terms and weasel words. So we avoid any terms that we can't attribute to a high quality source. Some people say, well, who? If we can't back up who said it, then it doesn't go in. We avoid any peacock terms or weasel words that we can't back up. Again, stripping back to just the facts. The animal we do like is the bear. Here are things to bear in mind. Topics should meet Wikipedia's standards of notability. That means that every article on Wikipedia should be notable in some way. Why is this article worthy of inclusion on Wikipedia? Why is that person or topic remarkable or significant in some way? If we establish that in the first line or two, that goes a long way to establish the notability of the article, but also the quality and number of high quality sources that are at the bottom of the page go a long way to establishing the notability of that article. So if we can't find enough good quality sources, then that article should not be on Wikipedia. We don't include any original research on Wikipedia. We're after reverability, not truth. So essentially that means Wikipedia should not be the place that you first publish any piece of work. So Wikipedia is a tertiary resource which uses secondary sources to back up what is being said in the article. We don't tend to include primary sources. We also need to avoid conflict of interest. This means can people trust your judgment if they know that you are close in some way to the subject of that article? So we avoid writing about family members, friends, work colleagues, employers generally. Anything where our judgment could be called into question. So what is a reliable source? So Wikipedia is based on reliable public sources with a reputation for fact checking and accuracy. So this tends to mean that we use academic and peer reviewed scholarly material. But high quality mainstream publications are also used. Internet blocks are not considered reliable whereas BBC, CNN, high quality news sources tend to be thought of as reliable. And again going back to the idea of notability if no reliable sources can be found on a topic then Wikipedia should not have an article on it. So if available academic and peer reviewed publications are usually the most reliable sources. Other reliable sources could include university level textbooks, books published by respectable publishing houses, magazines, journals, mainstream newspapers. It's important to mention also the differences in different language Wikipedia's. Here we see that English Wikipedia is the most viewed and quite highly viewed according to when compared against other languages like Spanish, Japanese, German, Russian, Wikipedia's. Now we can see the number of articles and the differences in the number of articles through the different languages. English and Swedish being the most populated in terms of number of articles. Thankfully though we have a good new content translation tool and you can bring up one page in one language Wikipedia on one side and you can then create a new page in a different language Wikipedia paragraph by paragraph using an automatic translation tool. Although it still requires a native speaker just to make sure that translation is as good as it can be. And it's at this point that I'd like to end this introductory session. If you want to know more you can email me un.mcandrew at ed.ac.uk or contact me through Twitter or through the university. Thanks for listening. Bye.