The Wikimedia residency at the University of Edinburgh has been shortlisted for the 2019 LILAC Information Literacy Awards.

The CILIP Information Literacy Group is proud to offer an award for achievement in the field of information literacy (IL). IL “is the ability to think critically and make balanced judgements about any information we find and use. It empowers us as citizens to reach and express informed views and to engage fully in society”. IL applies within a number of contexts, including:

• Everyday – when people find information online

• Citizenship – helping people to understand the world around us

• Education – developing critical thinking skills at all stages of education, from school to higher education.

• The workplace - contributing to employability

• Health – finding reliable sources of health information.

Wikipedia is about making connections, wiki-linking from one subject to another, disappearing down the rabbit hole of knowledge. And that’s what the residency at the University of Edinburgh has been about, delivering workshops and creating resources which allow colleagues across the whole university, staff and students, to see the connections between their work and the work of the free and open Wikimedia projects. As such we have now created a network of 'Open Knowledge nodes'. Knowledge activists if you will. We find that when we work with a colleague in one discipline this can often lead to further collaborations and other colleagues being brought in and other disciplines. The number of connections and positive quality interactions that a collaboration with Wikimedia affords makes, I think, working in this space finding areas of mutual benefit makes this the most exciting in academia right now, because it is so emergent but it has so much potential to make a really “significant, sustainable and socially responsible contribution to the world”.

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