the line. And the cost and reputational risk to the university could be significant if copyright is breached.
Senior managers also have budget lines earmarked to support key institutional commitments, so the Wikimedian-in-Residence role was closely aligned with these. Employing a Wikimedian therefore represented value for money for the University as there would be a manifest return of investment. The reason being that the kind of activities Wikimedians support are ones which evidence institutional commitment to a multitude of the key priorities currently challenging the UK higher education sector. Namely, supporting the information literacy and digital skills needs of staff and students and meeting strategic commitments to open knowledge, open science and gender equality (Gender Equality, 2020).
Promoting Knowledge Equity and Twenty-First-Century Skills
Hosting a Wikimedian at the university is a vehicle to deliver on these commitments and to promote knowledge equity, through sharing “histories and perspectives that may have been excluded by structures of power and privilege” (Wikimedia, Promoting Knowledge Equity, 2020).
In 2014, biographies about women on English Wikipedia, the largest OER in human history, stood at a mere 15.53 percent (Mathewson, 2020). Surveys have indicated that only 15–20 percent of editors are female with one particular 2011 survey suggesting that around 91.5 percent of editors were male (Balch, 2019; Wikimedia, 2011). The residency was a way to inspire women through celebrating women role models and making them visible on Wikipedia, the most public of digital platforms, and to recruit a diversity of Wikipedia editors to help address content that was skewed or less than fulsome. A way to “do more.” Particularly where Edinburgh had a rich story to tell.
