Hello, everybody, and thank you very much for joining us for this global Wikivet Edfest, which is a 15th anniversary celebration of Wikietts. So we're bringing to you today a free live CPD event. We've got over 6 hours of really great quality webinars, taking place throughout the day today, with expert speakers.

So, we would first of all, just would like to thank our generous sponsors, the webinar vets, Nationwide Labs, BSGD, Vettego Diversify, Protein, the Brook, and Simply Vets. And without their generous support, we wouldn't be able to, come to you with all of this fabulous content for free. So thank you very much to them.

So just a little bit of housekeeping before we start. So the event stays running from now until 5 o'clock. We've got a lunch break between 1:15 and 2.

If you miss anything or have to pop out at any point, the recordings will all be available to all delegates from the 30th of September. And from that date as well, you'll also be able to get your CPD certificates of attendance. So this will qualify as a CPD for you as well.

Just worth mentioning that the final session, with David is not recorded. So if that's something that you really want to come to, then make sure you come along to that, at the end of the day. For best quality viewing, if you could make sure you're viewing on a laptop, tablet, or desktop, phones, you're not going to see see quite as much and, and get such a quality experience.

So that, that'll be our recommendation. And then any questions, you could just pop them in the Q&A box. We'll be monitoring that, and we can ask the speakers any questions as they pop up, through that Q&A box.

There's also the chat box, but that's, not going to be sort of monitored as closely. So, for questions relating to those specific talks, just use that Q&A. Lovely.

So, our first speakers are myself and Gemma Gates called Phillips, and we're going to be just giving you a very brief history of Wikiett from the beginning. So, where did it come from? And a, a little bit about Wikiett's journey to today, and, and, and what Wikiett is all about.

So my name. My name is Bev Panto. I am a vet in practise, predominantly working with wildlife, exotic, and zoo species.

Also do a lot of work in universities. So I'm a lecturer in exotics, wildlife and conservation at the relatively new Harper and Kee Vet School. And do a lot of training and teaching in CPD with wildlife.

And I've been working with Wiki Vett since the very beginning, on and off. And sort of for the last few years, have been working, I was CEO, and then when, the webinar vet took over, moved into a consultancy role. So, Wiki Vett has sort of been part of my professional life since the very beginning.

I'm now gonna hand over to Gemma to introduce herself and to, start talking about what you out for us. Hi everybody, I'm Gemma. I graduated as a vet from the RVC in 2010.

Since then I've had a pretty varied career, working as a consultant for Wikiett for a large part of the time, whilst also I'm managing a showropping stables for an international Spanish rider in Spain, working in translation as an editor, in marketing roles, and also pursuing a master's degree in equine reproduction. And I'm now currently, doing a PhD. In a similar, field, using proteomics to identify different biomarkers and quality of stallion sperm, and looking at how artificial reproductive technologies, affect, affect the expression of these proteins, here in Spain as well.

So we're just going to give you a little background talk to Wikiett, and how things started. So firstly, what is Wikiba? .

It's actually started with the concept of online resources when they were just being developed, and they were all very new and things were still available on CDs, . It's a nonprofit making collaborative resource, and it aims to support and enhance veterinary education worldwide using web-based technologies, providing an innovative and dynamic framework, integrating and and expanding veterinary encyclopaedia with related learning materials. Wiett is also one of the most well respected and largest online educational resource for the international veterinary community, and of course, it's free.

Wikiett's committed to supporting global veterinary education and addressing the challenge of accessibility of reliable quality materials faced by, especially by poorly resourced schools, whilst responding to students changing these for innovative learning resources. From the outset, there, there were 5 values which we established, to help direct the growth of Wikibd, and these were sustainability, ensuring adequate resources to continue to support and grow the site. To protect the existing resources and enable regular review and development, quality, to maintain the highest academic standards and relevant pedagogical resources.

This requires constant review and updating of constant, content as things change, and, develop. Partnership, working with partners in veterinary schools, student groups, the commercial sector, to help achieve the goals of Wiki bed and provide impartial and balanced information. Altruism, providing, content of value free at point of access and promoting global high quality veterinary education for all students around the world, .

One of the charitable aims of Wiki Bet, was to provide quality, reliable educational materials free of charge to benefit vets and vet students in under-resourced parts of the world. And the webinar vet, although WikiVett is now not a charity, is continuing to do this. And by achieving these, aims and goals, we hope to have a positive impact on the veterinary profession worldwide as a consequence on the level of veterinary care available.

So the strategic objectives were established in order to achieve the proposed aims and values. These are still a work in progress and include providing a comprehensive knowledge base, addressing the entire veterinary cur curriculum, and, providing a trusted resource for students, offering new opportunities, by e-learning to support professional lifelong learning. Fostering a new community of veterinary educators, learners and practitioners using social media with a common interest in veterinary education.

And creating a sustainable model which ensures the long term viability and growth of the site. We put a brief timeline together to show you how Wikit evolved. It first started and was established in 2007 as a pathology resource, and the consortium was initially formed by three UK veterinary schools, which included the RVC, Edinburgh, and Cambridge.

This this eventually grew to include support from over 10 schools in both the UK and further afield. In 2009, Wikibet was lucky enough to be granted significant funding from GISC, which is the joint was the Joint Information System council, the RCBS, and other government funding. This was a big step for the project and allowed the development of quizzes, with the help of the RCBS, and the Oval and OA projects, which I'll just tell you a little bit about.

Oval stood for opening veterinary access to literature and involved repackaging of previously restricted access, educational resources into an open access, format. And included development of disease pages with resources donated by CAI and flashcards from Testyourself books, which were contributed by Manton Publishing. Some of the disease data sheets were also translated into Spanish and French, which was the beginning of a collaboration with a Spanish university in Murcia, translating some of the anatomy and physiology pages also.

Ovaline Veterinary Anatomy Museum, aim to provide access to a comprehensive and pedagogically structured set of veterinary anatomical anatomical resources. These are aggregated and ordered in an environment which makes them easily discoverable by different cohorts of learners. The project, included resources which were contributed by over 15 academic and commercial partners around the world, and all of these were curated by students from each partner school.

It was a massive undertaking. After these projects, several collaborations with commercial partners ensued. Including Mars Peter, Cedar Animal Health and the Donkey Sanctuary, and these saw the creation of further content of the site.

In 2015, the Wikibat Educational Foundation was formed, to help Wikibat function as a charity and to be able to continue to collaborate with multiple partners whilst ensuring that content remained free to users, after there was a reduction in the availability of government funding. In 2018, Wikibet organised the first Wikibet Live conference, which was the first of its kind, a 24 hour nonstop event for students around the world, organised in three different time zones, and that was a great success. In 2020, the webinar vet took on the responsibility for maintenance of the Wikibat site, and since then has also been growing content and organising events and new initiatives.

Thank you Gemma, so that's hopefully giving you a really good idea of sort of what's happened over time with Wikietts. And just to sort of drill down into a little bit more of the detail there, with relation to the content and, and how that has changed and developed. So, as Gemma said, it started predominantly as a pathology resource.

It expanded then quite rapidly to include anatomy and physiology. And for many years, this is what it was very much known for. It's very much a pre-clinical resource.

Absolutely invaluable, I can tell you, as an as a, as a pre-clinical student for sort of all of that anatomy, physiology and pathology, and still is very useful. But it has gradually expanded. So it sits within a media wiki, so it's a collaborative text and image-based resource, meaning that all users can actually edit, which is, is what a wiki is.

I'm not sure how many of you will be familiar with the fact that Wikipedia is, on the same platform and. Edited by its users. And the way it works is that there's always enough people sort of monitoring that to make sure that it maintains its reliability and credibility.

And Wikiett did that through a team of academics, and, and other veterinary professionals monitoring those changes. So the interactive elements developed over the 1st 2 to 3 years, as Gemma said. So that was Oval, OAM, and also a project called Wiki Quiz, which is where we started to introduce sort of test yourself style flashcard resources.

And it became much more interactive. And there were some really, cool, and still are some really cool drag and drop resources that are fantastic for revision. And that really started to make it a little bit more engaging than just a, a single sort of text resource.

Again, as Gemma mentioned, industry and charitable partnerships developed over the, the following few years, and they all started to develop specialist content sections relevant to their area of expertise. So, some examples of these sections that you'll still find today on Wikiett include a lot of material donated by the donkey sanctuary. So we have a huge amount of, information and resources about donkeys.

Mars Pet Care, I've written and reviewed repeatedly some fantastic sections on small animal dentistry, nutrition, and nutrients. And that's really comprehensive, about sort of the, the, the pet nutrition industry and, and the science behind that. SIA, I've done a section on feline behaviour, and there's been various other specialist content development throughout the years.

And, and as you can see from that timeline, it has just gone from strength to strength since it's sort of early days, and we've seen exponential content growth and development. So today we have over 10,000 pages of content. The original text content forms, so those sort of classically recognisable wiki pages are very much still the core of Wikietts.

But in addition to that, we now have a huge number of different learning resources, to appeal to everybody's different learning styles. They include flashcards, quizzes, podcasts, videos, webinars, and, and lots of other things. And that's being built upon, week on week.

There's a huge range of species expertise. So, as Gemma said, it aims to cover the entire curriculum. So it's now moved into sort of very much clinical, as well as maintaining that huge resource of pre-clinical information.

But it also spans the species pretty well. There's very few species that you can't find something on Wikiett for. And everything that's on there has been always going through a peer and expert review process.

So, we involve, a range of different experts in this process. So our membership has grown rapidly alongside the content, which really shows the need for this open access free online veterinary education resources. And in 2020, when, the webinar that took over, Wiki had a registered user base of over 65,000 members from over 90 countries around the world, and recorded over 2 million individual visits within the academic year.

We have, we have the Student Ambassador scheme, which included over 50 veterinary schools worldwide. And a lot of this is continued today under the Watch for Live, the webinars. So it is very much changing with the times, adapting to, you know, new technologies.

We have a new ambassador scheme, and there's lots of new collaborations for content creation and regular updates on the site. And as I say, it's collaborative, we really want to get, we really want our members to get involved. So if anybody watching this is keen to be more involved with with Wiki Bet to contribute, to be part of the student ambassador scheme, drop Theo an email and her email address is there.

And I just wanted to mention Nick Short, we couldn't have a Wiki Bet event without remembering Nick. Nick was one of the absolute key founders, drivers, and advocates of Wiki Bet throughout its time. We very sadly lost him last year, and he's very sadly missed.

But without Nick, there is no way Wikiett would be what it is today. He sort of poured his life and soul into it, and, you know, was, was everything behind Wikietts. So I just think it's really important that we just take a moment to remember Nick.

So thank you all very much for listening. I very much hope you enjoy today's event and learn lots and take away lots from it. And get in touch if you want to get more involved.