A vital part of the Avebury Papers project is to bring Avebury’s archives to the widest possible audience. With billions of page views every month, and its content scraped to power artificial intelligence, digital assistants, and search engines, there’s a case to be made that Wikipedia is one of the most effective ways to get information – including images – out into the world.
Below, I’ll outline what we’ve been doing ‘on-Wiki’ with Avebury Papers material. But first, I have to give a nod to ‘Beyond Notability‘, a project looking to recover the stories of women in archaeology. This project has shown how Wikipedia and Wikidata are powerful tools not only for sharing finished research, but also managing and enriching research-in-progress. The ‘Beyond Notability’ team – Professor Katherine Harloe, Dr Amara Thornton, Professor James Baker, Dr Ammandeep Mahal, and Dr Sharon Howard – certainly inspired me to include Wiki within the scope of Avebury Papers activities, and also were so helpful when I reached out to ask questions early in this project, so thanks are due to them.
So, what have we done so far with Wiki and the Avebury Papers, and what’s in the pipeline?
Wikipedia is perhaps the best-known of the Wiki projects. But, it’s not really the place to share research-in-progress: it’s an encyclopedia, which should only gather information and images that are linked to already-published sources. So, the big impacts on Wikipedia for the Avebury Papers will have to come *after* we’ve released the archive online with the Archaeology Data Service (ADS). For now, we’ve made small improvements to Avebury-related articles drawing upon information from Isobel Smith’s Windmill Hill and Avebury (for instance, adding in the Stone number for the ‘Barber Surgeon of Avebury’).
And we’ve been adding a few photos to Avebury-related articles, just to demonstrate what people will be able to do with Avebury material once it is released with the ADS. For instance, Denis Grant King’s article now features a map from one of his diaries.
Any photo on Wikipedia has to first be uploaded to Wikicommons. Wikicommons is Wiki’s image repository, where you can store images and information about them (and anyone can then download and reuse this material however they want). In 2025, the staff and volunteer team will be selecting a few ‘fan favourite’ photographs from the archive to share via Wikicommons and Wikipedia, as a way of – hopefully – encouraging more people to go to the ADS to find the super high res versions and more information.
To prepare for sharing information and images from the archive on Wikipedia, this year 13 Avebury Papers volunteers attended a training session run by the National Trust’s first Wikipedian in Residence, Lucy Moore (who also happens to be a doctoral researcher at York, and something of a legend in Wiki circles!).
One of our volunteers, known as Peregrinate Allevana on-Wiki, was so inspired by Lucy’s session that they couldn’t wait to get started, and they’ve gone on to edit thousands of Japanese Wikitionary entries. Their fabulous efforts have been recognised by Wikimedia UK, who awarded Peregrinate Allevana “Up and coming Wikimedian of the Year”! Congratulations PA!
We’ll be turning those skills towards Avebury material in the coming months…
Wikidata is the third Wiki site we’re using for this project. As I mentioned above, this is not only an excellent space for sharing research, but a very powerful tool to help research-in-progress.
Wikidata is a multi-lingual Linked Open Database. Essentially, this is a space in which to store information about people, objects, and concepts, in a structured way. Wikidata’s structure allows users to run ‘queries’ (that is, ask questions using the coding language SPARQL) to generate lists or maps.
I have recently been cleaning the catalogue data we’ve made during this project using Wikidata. One way that we are symbiotically improving our data and improving Wikidata is in relation to the people of the archive. Wikidata draws together unique identifying numbers that already exist in different collections for historical individuals, and we’ve been able to add the various aliases (nicknames or abbreviated names) for people that are found in the Avebury collection. This helps me to ‘clean’ our data, so that names of people can be standardised (eg. ensure that F St George Gray, Mrs St George Gray, Florence Young, and Florence St George Gray are all the same individual). With over 1000 names in our archive, this is an ongoing task in the coming months. This will not only make our catalogue easier to search internally, but also sets up our data to link with collections around the world!
As an experiment, we have also added the stones of Avebury to Wikidata, along with their coordinates, and, in a few cases, photographs from the archive. This data can now be queried to create a map of the stones (screengrab below, or you can run the query yourself here, just click the blue ‘play’ button on the page you land on!).
Between Wikipedia, Wikicommons, and Wikidata, Avebury’s data will be sprinkled in various formats across the internet, as human-readable text, images, and structured data. Hopefully, this means that people are more likely to stumble across Avebury Papers-created material when they run a Google search for related keywords.
What we are creating as part of the Avebury Papers are only very simple example of what people will be able to do with the archive once it is released with the ADS. Not only will it be interesting to see where Avebury Papers data ends up, but I also hope that people will enrich and change and add to the data: to enable queries and visualisations which pull Avebury materials together with information from other collections, or in creative combinations that I can’t even imagine yet.
Finally, a big thank you to the judges for the Wikimedia UK Awards, who awarded me the rather fancy title of ‘UK Wikimedian of the Year 2024’. It’s very humbling indeed, as Wikidata is still a very experimental space for me, and there are so many fabulous individuals and projects out there that have inspired me – not least Lucy Moore and Richard Nevell (and it was a total delight writing an article together championing Wiki for historians and archaeologists). Wiki-stuff started out as a hobby while I was studying for my Masters, and I now volunteer as a trainer for Wikimedia UK in my spare time. It’s so rewarding being able to bring my love of all things Wiki to the Avebury Papers, and I am looking forward to sharing more results from this project!
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Some reading / projects you may like to explore…
If you’re interested in reading more about Wikipedia and archaeology, please check out the article by Lucy Moore, Richard Nevell, and me for Postmedieval journal, on the potential of Wikipedia as a tool of public history and archaeology.
Do also check out Amara Thornton’s 2012 article which was – and still is – ahead of the curve, and which I inexplicably managed to edit out of the final version of the Postmedieval piece. Amara Thornton, ‘Wikipedia and Blogs: A New Field for Archaeological Research?’, in C. Bonacchi, ed. Archaeologists and the Digital: Towards Strategies of Engagement (London: Archetype, 2012), pp. 103-113.
The ‘Beyond Notability‘ database by Professor Katherine Harloe, Dr Amara Thornton, Professor James Baker, Dr Ammandeep Mahal, and Dr Sharon Howard.
The ‘Survey of Scottish Witches‘ project at Edinburgh University which absolutely shows the power of Wikidata for storing and querying historical data.