Contributing to the global commons: Repositories and Wikimedia

There is huge potential for universities and their libraries to leverage Wikimedia in order to expose research outputs and collections. Wikimedia comprises sixteen projects in total, including Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. At the University of Leeds, the Research Data Management Service have successfully run a project that focuses on linking research data with the Wikimedia suite of tools via a series of ‘editathons’, in order to increase the visibility of research data and enable reuse on Wikipedia and elsewhere. The project - "Manage it locally to share it globally: RDM and Wikimedia Commons" - was the winning submission to a competition launched in May 2018 and sponsored by SPARC Europe, Jisc and the University of Cambridge, called the "Data Management Engagement Award", which aimed to address cultural challenges involved in promoting effective research data practices.

The project has served as a springboard to further explore Wikimedia strategically, both at the University of Leeds and across the White Rose Consortium. For example we are collaborating on a new project looking at Wikipedia citations of research from York, Sheffield and Leeds, and the proportion of these that are open access. The long term goal might be to establish a "Wikimedian in Residence" across the consortium. In this talk, we will present the project's outputs - including a toolkit that will enable other institutions to apply the same methodology. In addition we will explore the potential of Wikidata to link up repositories and other data silos in a manner that enables reuse and increases impact.