The resident, Ewan McAndrew, worked with course teams to quickly generate real examples of technology-enhanced learning activities appropriate to the curriculum. As a result, students in a variety of disciplines benefit from learning new digital and information literacy skills appropriate for the modern graduate. The published outputs of their learning have an immediate public impact in addressing the diversity of editors and diversity of content shared online. For example, World Christianity postgraduate students wrote new pages about women in religion and on topics such as Asian Feminist Theology, and Reproductive Biology undergraduate students, where each year ~90 percent of the cohort are female, worked collaboratively to create missing articles related to reproductive health.
Many of the training workshops facilitated by the residency focused on addressing underrepresentation of topics on Wikipedia and encouraging more women to become editors. Student societies have been motivated to initiate collaborations with the residency and have designed and lead edit-a-thon events focused on such topics as Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM), LGBT+ History Month, Black History Month, Mental Health Week, and Edinburgh’s global alumni.
Between 2016 and 2020, the residency has worked with over a dozen course programs, facilitated over 200 training workshops along with 100 edit-a-thon events celebrating: International Women’s Day; Ada Lovelace Day; Gothic Writers; Feminist Writers; Women Architects; Contemporary Scottish Artists, Scottish women authors; Women in Anthropology, Women in Chemistry, Women in Law and Global Health; Women in Engineering; and Women in Espionage. A thousand students and 500 staff have now been trained to edit Wikipedia, with an estimated 3,500 articles created and improved. Stories that may not have been shared otherwise are now discoverable and being read, added to and improved, as OERs shared with the world for the benefit of all.
Women in Red Workshops
Wikipedia has a gender problem. In considering the diversity of editors and content, “the “overwhelming majority of contributors are male” and the vast majority of biographies (81 percent on English
