This is a transcript of a talk I gave for the University of Liverpool School of the Arts “Making a difference in the real world” series. 

My name is Lorna Campbell, I’m a learning technology service manager at the University of Edinburgh and I’m also a Trustee of Wikimedia UK, and today I’m going to be talking about Wikipedia as a site of knowledge activism, the representation of queer and marginalised histories on the encyclopedia, and particularly the history of HIV and AIDS activism.  And I’ll also be introducing some of the people who have inspired me on my own journey to becoming a knowledge activist.Slides are available here: Knowledge Activism

First of all I’d like to start with a few acknowledgements.  I know acknowledgements usually come at the end, but as I’m going to be talking about the work of colleagues whose knowledge activism has been deeply inspirational to me, I want to speak their names up front.  So I’d like to thank

• Áine Kavanagh, Reproductive BioMedicine graduate, University of Edinburgh.
• Prof Allison Littlejohn, Director, UCL Knowledge Lab & Dr Nina Hood, University of Aukland.
• Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence, University of Edinburgh.
• Tara Robertson, Tara Robertson Consulting.
• Tomas Sanders, History graduate, University of Edinburgh.
• Sara Thomas, Scotland Projects Coordinator, Wikimedia UK.

Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, the international not-for-profit organisation that supports the Wikimedia projects, of which Wikipedia is the best known.  Wikimedia’s vision is to imagine a world in which every human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.  This is not just a statement it’s a promise of inclusivity.

Wikipedia itself needs little introduction, the free encyclopaedia is the fifth most visited site on the internet, with over 6 billion monthly visitors.  English Wikipedia alone has over 6 million articles and there are an estimated 52 million articles in 309 languages supported by the site as a whole. 

Wikipedia is not just a repository of knowledge in its own right, it’s also a source of information for others services such as Google, whose 92 billion visits per month dwarfs Wikipedia’s paltry 6 billion. Amazon Alexa also draws much of its information from Wikipedia. Whenever you ask Alexa a question, there’s a good chance that the answer will come from Wikipedia.

In the global knowledge economy, knowledge is power, and Wikipedia is the largest repository of free, open and transparent information in the world.  Consequently, it’s perhaps no surprise that Wikipedia is censored to various degrees by numerous countries and regimes throughout the world, and outright banned by several including Myanmar, China, and Turkey. 

Having access to a platform where we can all access reliable, high quality information for free has never been more important in this age of disinformation, fake news, and government sanctioned culture wars.  How information is created and consumed matters like never before, and understanding how knowledge is created on Wikipedia can help people to understand how they consume and reproduce information.

This is one of the reasons why we believe that Wikipedia is such a powerful tool for developing critical digital and information literacy skills. At the University of Edinburgh, we believe that contributing to the global pool of Open Knowledge through Wikimedia is squarely in line with our institutional mission to share knowledge and make the world a better place, and that Wikipedia is a valuable learning tool to develop a wide range of digital and information literacy skills at all levels across the curriculum.  So the first person I want to introduce you to is Ewan McAndrew, the University of Edinburgh’s Wikimedian in Residence, who works to embed open knowledge in the curriculum, through skills training sessions, editathons, Wikipedia in the classroom initiatives and Wikidata projects, in order to increase the quantity and quality of open knowledge and enhance digital literacy.  Creating Wikipedia entries enables students to demonstrate the relevance of their field of study and share their scholarship in a real-world contexts, while contributing to the global pool of open knowledge.  Engaging with the Wikimedia projects also encourages both staff and students to become knowledge activists; not just passive consumers of information but active creators of knowledge.

For example, this article about high-grade serous carcinoma, one of the most common and deadly forms of ovarian cancer, was created by Reproductive Biomedicine student Áine Kavanagh as part of a Wikipedia assignment in 2016.  This article, including over sixty references and open-licensed diagrams created by Áine herself, has now been viewed over 120,000 times since it was published 5 years ago. It’s hard to imagine many other undergraduate student assignments having this kind of impact. Not only has Áine contributed valuable health information to the global knowledge commons, she has also created a resource that other students and global health experts can add to and improve over time. Creating resources that will live on on the open web, and that make a real contribution to global open knowledge, has proved to be a powerful motivator for the students taking part in these assignments. I’m not going to be talking primarily about Wikimedia in education today, but if you’re interested in finding out more, our Wikimedian in Residence and Wikimedia UK have recently published this book of case studies which you can download: Wikimedia in Education.

I want you to hold onto this concept of knowledge activism though. Just because Wikipedia is a free and open resource that anyone can contribute to, doesn’t mean that everyone does.  Wikimedia’s problems with gender imbalance, structural inequalities and systemic bias are well known and much discussed. On English language Wikipedia just over 18% of biographical articles are about women, and the number of female editors is somewhere around 16%. Some language Wikipedias, such as the Welsh Wicipedia, fare better, others are much worse.

 In order to warrant a Wikipedia entry, subjects must be notable and the encyclopedia has extensive policies and guidelines that are used to assess notability, with some domains, such as academia having additional supplementary requirements.  A topic, subject or individual is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article only when they have received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.  As proof of notability, articles need to be supported by reliable secondary sources.  Without sufficient citations, articles run the risk of being flagged for deletion by Wikipedia’s volunteer administrators.  The problem of course is that the bench marks for notability are invariably based on the lives and careers of cis white Western men.  This problem is compounded by the fact that it’s much harder find good quality reliable sources for marginalised groups who are frequently omitted and elided from the historical and the published record.  And this is not just a historical problem. Women, people of colour, LGBTQ+ individuals are still written about less often and cited less frequently.  And the danger here is that we end up with a feedback loop where things that are more visible on Wikipedia, become more discoverable in google, and are written about more in the press, and therefore become more visible to the public, and are written about more on Wikipedia, because you now have more secondary sources.  The danger is that the visible become more visible and the invisible risk disappearing altogether.

So the next person I want to introduce you to is Professor Elizabeth Slater, and I hope some of you have heard of her as she was the first female professor to be appointed to the Garstang Chair of Archaeology here at the University of Liverpool, and you have a research laboratory named after her that was opened in 2015.  Professor Slater didn’t have a Wikipedia entry until I wrote one for her in 2017 as part of Ada Lovelace Day, the annual event celebrating Women in STEM.  And the reason I chose to write about Liz is that I studied with Liz as an under graduate Archaeology student at the University of Glasgow.  I thought Liz deserved an entry because she was one of the few women working in a very male dominated field and I’m pretty sure she was the only female professor of Archaeology in the UK in the early 1990s.  

Although the entry I wrote about Professor Slater was approved by an Admin, a process all new pages go through, I was a bit miffed that a paragraph I had included listing various committees Liz had sat on was removed by the Admin because “we don’t usually include routine academic service (committee memberships etc.) in biographies”.  Of course the point is that participation on high level committees is not necessarily “routine academic service” for many female academics, whose contributions to their field of study are frequently overlooked.  For example, Liz was the only female academic on the 2001 RAE panel for Archaeology. 

Another example of an academic who fell foul of Wikipedia’s notability criteria was Dr Donna Strickland. Dr Strickland, an optical physicist at the University of Waterloo, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2018, and there was something of an outcry when it was revealed that she did not have a Wikiepdia entry until her Nobel laureate was announced.  To make matters worse, the reason that Dr Strickland didn’t have an article wasn’t that no one had bothered to write one.  The reason she had no article was that a new editor had written a draft article but an administrator had decided that it didn’t meet the notability criteria as the references did not show sufficient coverage.  The conclusion that many people drew was that Dr Strickland had to win the Nobel Prize in order to be considered notable enough to warrant a Wikipedia entry.  That wasn’t entirely true, it’s likely that if the original editor had added more citations to the article, it would have fulfilled the notability criteria.  They didn’t though, in fact the editor only made two edits before disappearing from the encyclopaedia all together.  And this highlights another problem, new editors can easily be discouraged if their first articles are flagged with requests for deletion.

This incident caused much debate and soul searching within the Wikimedia community.  The Foundation’s CEO Catherine Maher posted a twitter thread that acknowledged Wikipedia’s systemic biases and structural inequalities, but at the same time commented:

“Curators, academics, grantmakers, prize-awarding committees, and all other gatekeepers — you too are responsible. When you do not recognize, write about, publish, or otherwise elevate women, queer folks, people of color, and others, you erase them and their contributions.”

As it stands, Wikimedia reflects the worlds biases and structural inequalities, and it needs all of us to work to redress these imbalances.

Despite Wikipedia’s gender imbalance being an acknowledged problem, that projects such as Wiki Women In Red, which aims to create and expand Wikipedia biographies about women, have sought to address, too often those who attempt to challenge these structural inequalities and rectify the systemic bias, are the subject of targeted hostility and harassment.

The Wikimedia Foundation are well aware of these issues and has been undertaking a Movement Strategy exercise to shape the strategic direction of the movement to 2030.  Enshrined in this Movement Strategy, are the key concepts of Knowledge as a Service and Knowledge Equity.

Knowledge as a service, is the idea that Wikimedia will become a platform that serves open knowledge to the world across interfaces and communities.

And knowledge equity, is the commitment to focus on knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege, and to break down the social, political, and technical barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge.

The Movement Strategy includes ten recommendations which acknowledge that Wikimedia communities are not yet representative of the diversity of the world. They neither reflect the diversity of people working with knowledge, nor the diversity of knowledge to be shared. Among the common causes for the gender gap, and other gaps in diversity of content and contributors, is the lack of a safe and inclusive environment. This limits the work of existing communities and is a barrier for new people to join, including women, LGBTQ+ people, indigenous communities, and other underrepresented groups. In addition to the Movement Strategy Wikimedia also recently launched a new Universal Code of Conduct, which is intended to make Wikimedia projects more welcoming to new users, especially underrepresented groups who have too often faced harassment and discrimination.   It’s too early yet to know how much impact this Code of Conduct will have but it’s certainly a much-needed step in the right direction.

In a 2018 article titled “The Dangers of Being Open” Amira Dhalla, who at the time led Mozilla’s Women and Web Literacy programs, wrote:

“What happens when only certain people are able to contribute to open projects and what happens when only certain people are able to access open resources? This means that the movement is not actually open to everyone and only obtainable by those who can practice and access it.

Open is great. Open can be the future. If, and only when, we prioritize structuring it as a movement where anyone can participate and protecting those who do.”

This lack of equity in the open knowledge domain is significant, because if knowledge is to be truly open, then it must be open to all regardless of race, gender, or ability, because openness isn’t just about strategies and services, openness is about creativity, access, equity, and social inclusion and enabling us all to become fully engaged radical digital citizens.

Radical Digital Citizenship, as defined by Akwugo Emejulu and Callum McGregor, moves beyond the concept of digital literacy as simply acquiring skills to navigate the digital world, to a re-politicised digital citizenship in which social relations with technology are made visible, and emancipatory technological practices for social justice are developed to advance the common good.

Talking of radical digital citizenship, is anyone familiar with Dr Mary McIntosh?

Mary Susan McIntosh, or Mac as she was known, was a sociologist, feminist, political activist and campaigner for lesbian and gay rights in the UK.  McIntosh’s earliest research was in the field of criminology and the sociology of homosexuality and she was a member of the Criminal Law Revision Committee that lowered the age of male homosexual consent from 21 to 18. McIntosh was also among a small group of lesbians who contributed to the founding of the London Gay Liberation Front and she co-authored their Manifesto in 1971. Along with a group of feminist colleagues, McIntosh founded the journal Feminist Review in 1979 and she was also an active member of Feminists Against Censorship, a group of sex positive feminists, who argued against censorship and radical separatist feminist critiques of pornography, and who defended sexual expression and the right to produce sexually explicit material.

Despite McIntosh’s important contribution to gay rights here in the UK, she didn’t have a Wikipedia entry until I chose her name at random from a list of articles to be created as part of an International Women’s Day editathon in 2017. I have to confess I had never heard of McIntosh before writing her Wikipedia entry and I was shocked that such an important activist and foundational thinker had been omitted from the encyclopedia. Sadly, this was hardly surprising, as queer history is not well represented on Wikipedia.   What really struck me about McIntosh though, was that her omission meant that an important contribution she made to the field of sociology was also overlooked.

In 1968 McIntosh published a paper called “The Homosexual Role”.  Based on a survey of gay men in Leicester and London, this paper argued that rather than being a psychiatric or clinical pathology, homosexuality and same sex relationships were influenced by historical and cultural factors, and that “homosexual” is a social category coercively imposed on some individuals for the purpose of social control. This paper has been described as being crucial in the shaping the theory of social constructionism, a theory later developed by, and widely attributed to, Michel Foucault.  However McIntosh’s formative contribution to this field has been widely overlooked.  Although I created the biographical article for McIntosh, I haven’t really got sufficient understanding to edit the article on social constructionism to include her contribution to the field, so I’m hoping that someone who knows more about social constructionism than I do will pick this up.  Also if you’d like to know more about Mac, the British Library has some fabulous oral history interviews with her that were recorded before her death in 2013 at the ripe old age of 76.

In order to address the omission of queer histories, lives, and experiences, Wikipedia has an LGBT+ User Group that aims to encourage LGBT+ cultural organizations to adopt the values of free culture and use Wikimedia projects as tools for strengthening queer communities, and to increase the overall quantity and quality of this LGBT+ content in all languages.  The user group supports a range of activities including Wiki Loves Pride, and Wikipedia for Peace which, among other things, runs editathons to coincide with the Europride festivals.  In 2019, I was able to attend the Wikipedia for Peace editathon at Europride Vienna as part of a group twelve editors from all over the world who created and translated 113 new articles on LBGT+ topics in a range of European languages and uploaded hundreds of photographs of the Europride parade on Wikimedia Commons, making a significant contribution to improving equality, diversity and queer representation on Wikipedia.

It was while taking part in the Europride editathon that I noticed that the history of HIV and AIDS activism in Scotland was completely absent from the encyclopaedia.  Scottish AIDS Monitor and PHACE West, two prominent AIDS awareness organisations, had no articles at all, and although an article already existed for Derek Ogg, the founder of Scottish AIDS monitor, it only touched on his legal career and made no mention of his important AIDS activism.  This omission was all the more glaring in light of the belated public conversation about the impact of the AIDS pandemic sparked by Russell T Davis’ tv series It’s a Sin, which was broadcast earlier this year. So when the University’s Disabled Staff Network and Staff Pride Network decided to run an editathon for LGBT History Month in February this year, I suggested HIV and AIDS activism in Scotland as a topic.  The Network were keen to address this omission, and HIV Scotland also came on board to support the event, and I’m pleased to say that six new articles were created and several others improved, making a significant contribution to representing the history of HIV and AIDS activism in Scotland on Wikipedia.  I finally got to create an article for Scottish AIDS Monitor, and along with one of the other participants we were able to add images of some of the SAM ephemera we had lying around. But of course there is still a huge amount of work to be done, even in the coverage of prominent AIDS / HIV topics.  For example although an article exists for Gran Fury, the New York activist and artist collective, only 3 of the original 11 members have their own articles and there are numerous other activists, organisations, films, plays and artworks that are still missing.

Shortly after the HIV Scotland editathon, I also created a Wikipedia article for Jill Nalder.  And Jill is the next person I want to introduce you to. Jill Nalder is an actress, activist, and friend of Russell T Davis, who inspired the central character of Jill Baxter in It’s A Sin, and who played the fictional Jill’s mother in the tv series. Nalder became involved in HIV/AIDS activism while living in London in the 1980s at the height of the AIDS crisis. With other members of the West End theatre community, Nalder organised fundraising campaigns, including cabaret shows and performances, to raise money to support AIDS awareness and research.  She also supported HIV positive gay men and made numerous visits to AIDS patients in hospitals around London, something we see the fictional Jill doing in the series.

Now I know that there has been some criticism of It’s A Sin for stereotyping women as carers, and for centering the experiences of cis woman rather than gay men, and while there’s a discussion to be had there, I do think it’s important to acknowledge the many women who played an important role in awareness raising, fund raising, befriending and yes, caring for, people living with AIDS from the earliest years of the pandemic.   If we don’t remember the contribution of these women, and also the experiences of women who contracted AIDS at a time when they were told it was impossible, it’s easy to assume that they simply did not exist.  

I witnessed a stark example of this, just a few weeks after our HIV Scotland editathon, when the Staff Pride Network ran an event on International Women’s Day 2021 on the role of women in AIDS and LGBTQ+ Activism. The event brought together speakers, several of whom were HIV positive, to share their experiences of the earliest days of the AIDS pandemic. While listening in to the event I tweeted one of the participant’s criticism of the absence of HIV+ women in Its A Sin, which immediately prompted this response: 

In the period this is set it was clearly pointed out to Jill that it was of little or no concern to women. So while the theoretical risk was there in the case of injecting users and factor 8 recipients there simply were no HIV+ women – why rewrite history?

And yet there I was listening to two women who had contracted HIV at the very time the series was set, so I guess it depends on whose history you’re trying to write.  

This is just one of the reasons why it’s so important to include and represent the experiences of marginalised individuals, particularly women, people of colour and trans people, who are so often elided from the historical record. If we record their lives and stories, it makes it that little bit harder to deny their existence.

Although I am a lifelong advocate for open knowledge that is diverse, equitable and inclusive, it’s important to acknowledge that openness is not always in the best interests of those who are marginalised and who have experienced multiple intersecting forms of discrimination.

The next person I want to introduce you to is Tara Robertson, an intersectional feminist who uses data and research to advocate for equality and inclusion.  Tara has worked for many years in open source technology communities, including as Diversity and Inclusion lead at Mozilla, and her work on trans inclusion has been featured in Forbes.  I was introduced to Tara’s work at a conference a couple of week’s ago and I want to share it with you now, with her kind permission. In a 2016 keynote titled “Not all information wants to be free” Tara highlighted examples of when it is not appropriate or ethical for information to be open to all.   One example was the digitisation of the lesbian porn magazine On Our Backs, which had been digitised and released under Creative Commons licence by Reveal Digital, an organisation that aims to “bring together fragmented documentary material from under-represented 20th century voices of dissent.”   Although initially excited by the digitisation of On Our Backs, Tara became worried about friends who had appeared in the magazine before the internet even existed. Consenting to a porn shoot that would appear in a queer indie print magazine is a very different thing to consenting to having your image shared online under open licence. Tara undertook extensive research visiting archives, reviewing contracts and copyright legislation and interviewing women who modelled for the magazine.  She was concerned that open licence enables feminist porn to be remixed in ways that could appropriate the content and actually demean these women who had never consented to their image being used in this way.  One woman Tara interviewed commented

“When I heard all the issues of the magazine are being digitized, my heart sank. I meant this work to be for my community and now I am being objectified in a way that I have no control over. People can cut up my body and make it a collage. My professional and public life can be high jacked. These are uses I never intended and I still don’t want.”

As someone who is passionate about knowledge activism and the representation of queer history in open culture, this really gave me pause for thought, particularly as I had recently created a Wikipedia entry for another lesbian porn magazine Quim, which was co-created by a former On Our Backs photo editor.  And it also made me wonder about the ethics of sharing all those Europride Vienna photographs on Wikimedia Commons. Those queens and leathermen might have been happy for me to take their photograph on a euphoric summer afternoon in Vienna, but that doesn’t mean they consented to their image being shared under open licence on one of the largest repositories of open images in the world, for anyone to download and use for any purpose they see fit.

If knowledge equity is the dismantling of structures of power and privilege that prevent people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge, it must also respect the rights of marginalised groups and individuals to choose not to share their knowledge and experiences.  As Tara has pointed out, the ethics of openness are messy; it’s important that we balance the interests of open knowledge with respect for individuals and the right to be forgotten.

To return to the theme of knowledge activism, I want to highlight some research undertaken by Professor Allison Littlejohn, Director of University College London‘s Knowledge Lab and Dr Nina Hood, of the University of Auckland.  Allison and Nina evaluated the experiences of participants at some of the University of Edinburgh’s very first editathons, which focused on the Edinburgh Seven, the first group of matriculated undergraduate female students at any British university. The Edinburgh Seven began studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1869 and, although they did not win the right to graduate at the time, their campaign raised a national political debate about women’s right to access university education, which eventually resulted a change to the legislation that enabled women to study medicine at university in 1876.  The Edinburgh Seven were finally awarded posthumous degrees by the University in 2019, 150 years after they matriculated and four years after the editathon that raised awareness of their campaign.  Seven current undergraduate medical students accepting the degrees on their behalf.

Allison and Nina observed that as participants grew into the editor role they began to recognise their personal responsibility for representing historical people and events that have been traditionally under-represented. The editors recognised how new media forms are continuing to perpetrate existing cultural inequities, and that by becoming knowledge producers and information activists, they were able to challenge and redress these inequities.  Inherent in this role is the exposure of structural and systematic biases and the removal of barriers to the creation and dissemination of information.

Many of Wikimedia UK and the Wikimedia community’s activities focus specifically on challenging these structural and systematic biases, by working to redress gender imbalance, centre marginalised voices, diversify and decolonise the curriculum, and uncover hidden histories. Some inspiring examples include the Wiki Women in Red editathons; Women in STEM editathons for Ada Lovelace Day and International Women’s Day; supporting minority and indigenous languages through the Celtic and Arctic Knot Conferences, the annual international Art + Feminism campaign, LGBTQ+ editathons at Senate House Library as part of their Queer Between the Covers Series, Digitising Africa in the Dancehall at the Africa Centre, Protests and Suffragettes in Glasgow, the award winning Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Wikidata project, and Wikimedia UK’s own Closing the Gender Gap campaign.

Projects such as these provide opportunities to engage with the creation of open knowledge and improve knowledge equity. And what is particularly gratifying is that, as Allison and Nina’s research highlighted, creating open knowledge, often inspires people to further knowledge activism.

So the last person I want to introduce you to tonight is Tomas. Tomas was an undergraduate History student, who spent the summer of 2017 working with us at the Open Educational Resources Service at the University of Edinburgh, as an Open Content Curation intern. While he was working with us, Tomas also took part in a Wiki Women in Red edition run by our Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan, and he was so enthused that he went on to run a successful Wikipedia editathon for Black History Month with the student History Society.

As part of that editathon Tomas created a Wikipedia entry for the Mangrove Nine, a group of British black activists tried in 1970 for inciting a riot in protest against the Metropolitan police targeting The Mangrove, a Caribbean restaurant in Notting Hill, west London.  This trial was significant because it was the first judicial acknowledgement of racial hatred within the Metropolitan Police. Tomas’ article languished somewhat after he created it, with just over 5,000 pageviews in the two years from 2017 to 2019. Interest picked up last summer, most likely as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd. Then in November last year pageviews shot up to over 17,000 in a single day.  That was the day that Steve McQueen’s drama Mangrove aired on BBC television as part of his critically acclaimed Small Axe series.  McQueen’s drama causes a resurgence of interest in the case of the Mangrove Nine, and where did viewers turn to find more information?  Google and Wikipedia.  And they were able to find out more about this important event in British black history because an undergraduate student committed to knowledge activism created that Wikipedia entry three years previously.

Talking about his experience of engaging with Wikipedia in an interview with our Wikimedian in Residence, Tomas said

“The history that people access on Wikipedia is often very different from the history that you would access in a University department; there’s very little social history, very little women’s history, gender history, history of people of colour or queer history, and the only way that’s going to be overcome is if people from those disciplines start actively engaging in Wikipedia and trying to correct those imbalances. I feel the social potential of Wikipedia to inform people’s perspectives on the world really lies in correcting imbalances in the representation of that world. People should try to make Wikipedia accurately represent the diversity of the world around us, the diversity of history, and the diversity of historical scholarship.”

And one of the lovely things about Tomas’ knowledge activism is that it didn’t end when he left the University, three years after he graduated, Tomas turned up at the HIV Scotland editathon we organised in February this year.

All these stories I’ve highlighted are examples of knowledge activism; the commitment to representing diverse and marginalised lives and histories on the world’s largest source of free and open knowledge, and the dismantling of obstacles that prevent people from accessing and participating in knowledge creation. Ultimately, this is what knowledge activism is about; counteracting structural inequalities and systemic barriers to ensure just representation of knowledge and equitable participation in the creation of a shared public commons.  

So how can you get involved and become a knowledge activist?  First of all you can reach out to Wikimedia UK to find out about activities and events they’re supporting.  With many editathons now taking place online, it’s easier than ever to learn how to edit.  For example the Wiki Women in Red editathons run by the University of Edinburgh’s Wikimedian in Residence every month are free and open to all.  And Ewan and one of his student interns, Hannah Rothman, have also created this comprehensive set of resources to help get people started with editing, so please do take a look.  And of course you’re also welcome to get in touch with me if you have any questions, or you’d like any further information about how to get involved with the Wikimedia projects and start your own journey to becoming an knowledge activist.