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End of Residency Report for the Mixed Museum

September 2022-March 2023

Wikimedian in Residence: Leah Emary Tenuous_tree (talk · contribs)

Introduction

A Wikimedian in Residence works with an organisation to build engagement with Wikimedia projects, such as Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. In this case, Digital Skills Wikimedian Leah Emary was embedded virtually as a Wikimedian in Residence with The Mixed Museum, a digital museum dedicated to sharing and preserving the history of racial mixing in Britain. The focus of the residency was on sharing the Museum’s scholarship and knowledge across Wikimedia Projects, on training staff and interns and on exploring partnership working.

Background to the project

The Residency grew out of the National Lottery Heritage funded project, Developing open knowledge skills, tools and communities of practice for sustainable digital preservation 2021-2023, often called Connected Heritage. The Connected Heritage project began with a series of webinars explaining the value of contributing to open knowledge for small and medium sized heritage organisations. The director of The Mixed Museum, Dr Chamion Caballero, attended the first of these webinars and has been enthusiastic about Wikimedia and partnership from the beginning.

After co-hosting two Wiki interns with great success in March 2022, the Connected Heritage team and Chamion decided that a Residency would be a fruitful way to continue work together. The Residency ran from September 2022-March 2023, and Leah spent one full day of work per week on it.

Summary of activities and outcomes

The Residency’s goals were focussed on

Training staff and interns to edit Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons
Using the Museum’s scholarship and expertise to improve Wikipedia
Serving as an example to other small heritage organisations of what a Wikimedian in Residence could accomplish.

The shared understanding of the Residency was documented in a Memorandum of Understanding as well as a document called Residency practicalities and outcomes.

The goals and outcomes of the Residency are also outlined in the table below:

Goals	Outcomes
Attempt to demonstrate some metrics with Google Analytics E.g. ‘our traffic was increased because of partnership’ - put tools in place to make this happen. This could result in a compelling case for others to engage. Also document tools like ‘Mass views’ and BaGLAMa for metrics.	Google Analytics: After the internships and residency, Google Analytics has recorded Wiki websites as the top referral channel source of traffic to The Mixed Museum. Web metrics impact WiR at Mixed Museum MassViews will let us see how many people are viewing pages where The Mixed Museum is cited https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/massviews/?platform=all-access&agent=user&source=search&range=latest-20&project=en.wikipedia.org&sort=views&direction=1&view=list&target=insource:%20%22mixedmuseum.org.uk%22 BaGLAMa measuring tool created https://glamtools.toolforge.org/baglama2/#gid=1177&month=202212 Image template for Commons Uploads created. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Images_Uploaded_By_TheMixedMuseum
Documenting relevant gaps on Wikipedia, figuring out what needs to be done and which collections, research and scholarship can help fill that: Differentiating the tasks by skill level: Tasks for people with emerging digital skills Tasks for people with secure digital skills Tasks for people with advanced digital skills Tasks for people that are visual or multimedia (rather than text) Tasks for people with research or subject expertise but who are not ready to work live on wiki	Content Scoping Sheet created documenting relevant gaps on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons along with sources which could fill these Translation of the Content Scoping Sheet to a Trello Board system to manage the volunteering process. Differentiated tasks for various skill levels Task assignment board for specific volunteers
Creating guides, templates and training materials that we can give to a new digital volunteer or intern that they can get started independently. Detailing the process and design of a Wiki digital volunteering programme to form the basis of a funding or development bid for the Museum.	Digital Volunteering Programme. Outlined a prospective Wiki-based digital volunteering programme. This document could serve as the basis of a funding bid to hire a digital volunteer coordinator. Creating an account video for The Mixed Museum, now out of date Set of slides drafted meant to be a self-study resource. Bite-sized training videos recorded and a few edited BUT with the new wiki skin these were quickly out of date and need to be redone or the training reconceptualised. Creating a User Page Creating an Account Creating a User page video for The Mixed Museum, now out of date
Develop guidance about how wiki work might fit with current Museum practice A ‘Wiki Roadmap’ - prompting you in future to ask the right questions at the right moment. Particularly around images and multimedia but also text-based editing.	Open License Clearing Process for The Mixed Museum drafted to document the process by which we established the provenance and licensing status of a set of images from The Mixed Museum collection.
Training Chamion A few structured editing sessions - 10-30 minutes each via Zoom and recorded Making an account, user page, preferences Creating a sandbox: formatting, citations, reference list and infobox First live Wikipedia edits. Starting with this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_(United_Kingdom_ethnicity_category) Uploading images and embedding these in Wikipedia. Choose these images strategically from the collection, link them back explicitly to the museum. Create the BaGLAMa. Base training materials on these recordings. Keep them short and focused. Short videos for youtube Everyone can and should edit wikimedia projects. This is why we’re involved This has been the impact of what we’ve done so far	Case study of the training model drafted to be shared with the Wiki community as an outreach and advocacy model. Recordings created and saved. Connected Heritage a partnership between Wikimedia UK and The Mixed Museum Short videos created: Connected Heritage: a partnership between Wikimedia UK and The Mixed Museum
Brown Babies images Upload these to Commons Work with Lucy Bland / ARU to embed these in the correct places Explore issues around open licensing and 20th century materials Set up a template for volunteering Ways to look at future exhibitions and curation	Two images uploaded to Wikipedia Images researched (see the Open License document above) Copyright and exclusion issues around 20th century images of mixed race people discussed and explored. Village Pump discussion had with the Commons community. Holnicote House Wikipedia page updated by Chamion with Brown Babies paragraphs. Brown Babies page updated and illustrated with image.
Use the Museum’s scholarship, research and expertise to improve Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.	Residency Dashboard (Chamion’s edits) Internship Dashboards 2022 2023
Wikidata project Chamion has lots of uncatalogued materials, primary sources. Could we potentially create a Wikidata project plan for her?	Not tackled
Documentation and communication What are we doing week by week? Why are we doing it? What is the emerging impact? Communications: blog posts, newsletter, social media	Blog postings on WMUK blog Residency Announcement Residency report (first stage) 2023 internships announced Final blog posting Weekly internal updates on Slack Residency highlighted in TMM and CH newsletters Information included on the Connected Heritage Project Page Dedicated Connected Heritage webpage on The Mixed Museum website. Roundtable presentation at the Heritage Dot Conference, March 2023 Paper Presentation to the Museum Ethnographers Group Conference, April 2023

Reflections

The Residency was a positive experience for both Leah and Chamion. We enjoyed wide-ranging conversations most weeks about the impact and usefulness of our Wiki-based work. This section outlines some particular highlights and particular challenges we experienced during the seven month Residency.

Successful Aspects of the Residency

Training Chamion:

Training Chamion to edit Wikipedia herself was one of the residency’s initial priorities. Chamion had meant to edit Wikipedia for years but had never gotten around to it. Instead of training her in a group Wikithon or having her use an online training module for self study, we scheduled five short 121 training sessions on Wednesday afternoons in September and October. This model worked really well for Chamion, as the training was organised to fit around her busy schedule, taking place in 10-40 minute chunks with ample time for reflection and practice in between.

Though it’s an intensive investment of 121 time, I believe this model could work for training with other key individuals who are time poor but whose advocacy and skill are crucial to further the goals of the open knowledge movement. Chamion now considers herself an informed and knowledgeable advocate for open knowledge now in her wider heritage network. She has also made a small number of highly impactful edits on mixed race history. This could not have been accomplished with a training programme which didn’t suit her needs.

I wrote a full case study of this training model.

Micro-Interns, Queen Mary University, London

In March 2022 and March 2023, The Mixed Museum co-hosted two interns for a four-week microinternship from Queen Mary University, London. The internship model, trialled in 2022 and run again successfully in 2023, got positive feedback from the interns themselves as well as QMUL. The combination of technical and wiki-based support from Wikimedia, the introduction to heritage work by the Museum, and the exploration of hands on wiki editing combined to make an engaging and profitable internship.

The internship’s structure can be found in this blog posting.

The interns’ reflections on their work can be found on blog postings here for 2022 and here for 2023. Highlights for them included a better understanding of open knowledge and their contributions to it, discussions about information gatekeeping and learning to advocate for inclusion. They also enjoyed learning more about remote working tools such as Slack and Trello.

In the Recommendations section below, I outline how to continue this programme in 2024 and the staff resource required from Wikimedia UK or a volunteer to make that possible.

Trello board

Documenting content gaps on Wikipedia, or places where information is missing, incomplete or incorrect, was an important goal of the Residency. I began by creating a Google spreadsheet of these gaps, along with sources to fill the gaps and pages where improvements could be made. The spreadsheet quickly became too long for anyone other than myself to understand. The spreadsheet also didn’t meet the needs of being able to differentiate easily between types of task or different types of volunteer.

As an alternative, I designed a Trello board to manage individual wiki-based tasks. The cards allowed the work to be more visual and to organise things like notes and sources, which can be longer strings of text, into something more readable

The interns said they enjoyed using the Trello board and found it both fun and useful for identifying tasks to work on, making notes on their progress and moving the cards to a ‘finished’ area when they were done. This helped us to see what had been accomplished, and what is still in progress. It will be easy to add new tasks to the Trello board in future and for tasks either to be assigned to new interns and volunteers or for them to pick out tasks for themselves from it in future.

Challenging Aspects of the Residency

Copyright and licensing

From the outset, we had hoped to share images of the Brown Babies to Wikimedia Commons and embed these images. Photographs are crucial pieces of evidence for the history of mixed race people, and so this was a high priority for the Residency.

We quickly established, however, that the provenance of the photographs was unclear and tracking down where each photograph had come from, who took them and whether each one was eligible for open licences took several months. In the end, we could not establish the photographer’s identity, hence the photographs were excluded from Wikimedia Commons. This was disappointing.

Some positives we took from this experience however, were documenting the process by which we established the provenance and licensing status of a single photograph. This will serve as a model for what questions need to be answered for future inquiries and it also flagged up areas for improved accession and donation workflow for the Museum. Two documents relevant to this aspect are:

The experience also prompted us to start a conversation on the Wikimedia Commons Village Pump about systemic exclusion resulting from the strict interpretation and application of copyright by Wikimedia Commons. This example was also presented as a case study to the Museum Ethnographers Group conference in April 2023. A fuller discussion with the community is on the Wikimedia Commons Village Pump.

A few additional issues were raised during the Residency about the feasibility of using open licensing and uploading to Wikimedia Commons for other, similarly-sized and underfunded organisations, such as community archives projects.

The first arose directly from our experience of tracking down the provenance and the individual creators of the Brown Babies photographs. This took much time and concentration, the support of several staff members and former trustee at Wikimedia UK, as well as the pro-bono time of a copyright consultant. The amount of resource and energy we poured into trying to get the images uploaded to Commons would be impossible to sustain long-term, particularly for small heritage organisations. As Chamion said “anyone else who was not us would have given up at the first hurdle.” Community archives groups most likely will be working with a small grant, which would not be enough to pay for the amount of time and expertise required to upload 20th century images to Wikimedia Commons. This has implications for diversifying the content and contributors to the project.

A second concern around open licensing and uploading to Wikimedia Commons centres around the inability to remove an item once it has been uploaded. Chamion shared the potential experience of a person whose family photograph could be taken from the internet and used to print a racist t-shirt. Obviously, a bad actor will not be deterred by copyright or licensing, so putting something on Commons isn’t more inherently risky than uploading it anywhere else on the internet. But there are perhaps unrecognised consequences of not being able to remove an uploaded image, especially one uploaded with the explicit licence for wider re-use.

The desire to remove an image might arise if there was a dispute among family members about whether it was ok to upload it, if the uploader simply changes their mind, or if a situation as described above arose as well.

Volunteer training packs

Editing Wikimedia projects is an ideal basis for a digital volunteering programme for the Museum and was a crucial goal. However, after the scope and scale of recruiting for and managing a volunteer programme became clear, it seemed desirable to fund a volunteer coordinator for the Museum who could deliver this with expertise and focus, rather than making it part of Chamion’s work.

I outlined what would be required to create a sustainable virtual volunteering programme for The Mixed Museum, with the hopes that this could be used for a future funding bid. Read the proposal here: Sustainable digital volunteer programme for the Mixed Museum.

We had initially planned to create a bespoke, self-study training programme for volunteers based on a set of Google slides and embedded videos taken from recordings of Chamion’s Zoom-based training and I spent many hours editing and creating these materials in December and January. Because the editing interface of Wikipedia changed quite dramatically in January 2023, however, the training videos and screenshots were quickly out of date and unsuitable for self study, which altered our plans.

Rather than re-record, we took time to consider the implications of future changes to the interfaces making self study videos obsolete, and the considerable investment they take to remain up to date and useful. As the museum doesn’t have anyone to do that ongoing maintenance work, the bespoke training programme would quickly go out of date. We decided to rely on centrally produced online training for a more sustainable future. For more information on which training we decided on and how to contextualise it, see the Sustainable digital volunteer programme for the Mixed Museum document.

Embedding into Museum practice

As Chamion moves beyond a startup phase with the Museum, one of her strategic goals is to embed work flows and begin to increase the number of paid staff and volunteers involved with the Museum, so that the Museum isn’t at risk of ‘founder syndrome’ that could limit the growth and success of the organisation. From the outset, she was keen to see where wiki practice could augment and enhance existing Museum work, and be factored into Museum operations such as exhibitions, research, and volunteering.

Without a constant and predictable funding stream, however, the cycle of grant applications and project-based work means that work is funded and completed in a specific and project-based manner. Because grants usually support new work and projects, the Museum’s funding doesn’t really support embedding practice into operational work, so it is difficult to channel work and energy into things such as understanding and creating effective work flows.

This type of insight and experience is something that will be explored further by the Heritage Innovation Fund project.

Recommendations

Though the Residency finished in March 2023, there is a strong desire on both sides to continue to work together in future. I suggest the following possibilities:.

Micro-Internships

I recommend that Wikimedia UK continue to co-host the Queen Mary University micro-internship program with The Mixed Museum in March each year. These four week internships involve about 21 hours of Wikimedia UK staff or volunteer time from late February to early April, with the bulk of time invested during the four weeks of March when the interns are in post. Chamion liaises with the university and recruits the interns and is their main point of contact.

The Wikimedian’s duties include:

Initial wiki training (2 hours online)
Setting up a Trello board of Wiki tasks
Setting up a Slack space to communicate between interns, Chamion and the Wikimedian
Monitoring Slack and answering DM questions, giving feedback on Wikipedia edits
Zoom calls to troubleshoot issues and do further ad-hoc training
Closing meetings with the interns (30 minutes each)
Writing and posting blog entries

The timing for this would require a meeting in early December between The Mixed Museum and Wikimedia to assess whether co-hosting is feasible and desirable. Administrative tasks such as refreshing the Trello board and Slack space should begin in mid-February.

Wiki Digital Volunteering

Chamion receives many requests from her audiences for opportunities to be involved or volunteer, which she currently needs to decline. Editing Wikimedia projects seems a natural and useful digital volunteering opportunity.

Wikimedia UK can support Chamion’s efforts by providing a letter of support to grant funders, by helping to spread the word in its networks when and if a volunteer coordinator is recruited, and offering staff or volunteer trainer support for a digital volunteer scheme when it is in place.

An outline of a digital volunteering programme, designed to serve as a backbone for a funding bid, is in this document: Sustainable digital volunteer programme for the Mixed Museum

Serving as a model for the sector

This mini-residency could serve as a model for the sector of what a mini-Residency might look like. Various aspects, whether the 121 training model, the digital volunteer programme, the Trello board, statistics on web traffic referrals, the structure of the internship, might serve as compelling examples of what can be achieved in a short space of time and with no direct financial input from the partner organisation, other than the commitment of time and intellectual labour.

This document pulls together several elements of ‘making the case’ to others, based on conversations Chamion and I had during the Residency about what might nudge others to engage with Wikimedia and what might prevent them from doing so.

Continuing to engage with The Mixed Museum to share the outputs more widely with the sector, for example through the Heritage Innovation Fund research project, would help educate others about what a Wikimedian in Residence might do and how it can work alongside an organisation’s strategic goals.