Last Monday I began a work placement with the British Library working with its Wikimedian-in-Residence, Dr Lucy Hinnie, to add information and text from the India Office Records to Wikisource and Wikidata.

My first day mainly consisted of a several different meetings. I was introduced to the team dealing with the India Office Records, which really helped me to get a better sense of the importance of the project and its key objectives. I then attended a metadata workshop (metadata is, generally speaking, data about data, e.g. the author of a book, the time a photo was taken etc). This introduced me to the British Library’s current metadata practices and will be very useful when I begin to upload data to Wikidata in ensuring it is as useful as possible. Finally, I attended a meeting with the curators of the Contemporary British collections, which gave me an overview of the range of the Library’s activities online, its current and future exhibitions and its holdings.

On my second day, I finished my basic Wikipedia training and moved on to getting fully registered, which is needed if you want to add new pages to Wikipedia. This requires 10 edits to existing Wikipedia pages. The fastest way to do this was by completing Citation Hunt, according to Dr Hinnie. What she did not mention was Citation Hunt is roughly what would happen if the British Library catalogue and the Easter Bunny came together to plan an Easter egg hunt in St Pancras.

Screenshot of Citation Hunt

Citation Hunt gives a random passage of Wikipedia in need of citation and you can either add a citation or skip to another. As you might imagine, these pages are completely unrelated to one another. As such, Citation Hunt had me trawling the internet for such delights as:

• Proof that William Wallace appeared in Age of Empires II. Unfortunately, ‘I remember that bit from when I played’ does not meet Wikipedia’s reliable source guidelines. (William Wallace - Wikipedia)

• A discussion of the OECD ‘Acquis Communautaire.’ (Acquis communautaire - Wikipedia)

• The amount of RAM of in an Atari 1040ST, even though that computer is well and truly before my time. (Atari ST - Wikipedia)

• Evidence that Bill Gates invested in a particular company. (Bill Gates - Wikipedia)

I also found myself lost in the Bermudan Economy (Economy of Bermuda - Wikipedia) and growing into researching commercial agriculture (Ethylene - Wikipedia). Most surreal of all was adding directions from Google Maps for the relative locations of two places in Detroit. (Detroit - Wikipedia) I have never been to Detroit…

Ending my first week, I attended a meeting of the British Library’s Digital Scholarship team. It was really interesting to hear about all the different digital initiatives going on, both within the BL and in partnership with other organisations.

This week, I'm having further training on the tools I will need to use for this project and then, for the remaining four weeks of the placement, I will be uploading and enriching data from the India Office Records.

I look forward to updating you soon on the progress I make!

This is a guest post by UCL Digital Humanities MA student Dominic Kane.