By Dr Richard Nevell, Programme Manager for Wikimedia UK
Wikimedia UK organises the UK Wikimedian of the Year Awards to recognise the efforts of people and organisations who contribute to our work as a charity. This support is vital to our work, allowing us to improve the Wikimedia projects for everyone. The awards are a celebration of our community, and especially those who have been nominated.
This year’s winners were announced at the online Community Celebration in late November. Thank you to all of the shortlisted contributors, and to everyone who made a nomination. The awards will return next year, and nominating someone is a great way of making sure they get some recognition.
Partnership of the Year
This award was won by GLAM-E Lab, a joint initiative between the Centre for Science, Culture and the Law at the University of Exeter and the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU Law. GLAM-E Lab develops model policies and terms for cultural institutions that are creating open access programs. They began working with WMUK during the Connected Heritage project and continued this into 2024 as part of their project to develop a toolkit for organisations looking to go open for little to no budget. Andrea Wallace and Francesca Farmer have been tireless champions of Wiki and the potential it has for GLAM organisations globally.
Our Honourable Mention was awarded to the National Trust who hired their first ever Wikimedian this year, and they are recognised for trying new approaches. The fixed-term project was warmly received by the English Wikipedia’s editors, as well as WMUK’s volunteers.
As well as these two organisations, the full list of nominees included the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, the IDEA network, the Khalili Foundation, LEEDS 2023, Protests and Suffragettes, and the Sankofa London Schools project.
Up and Coming Wikimedian
This award was won by Perigrinate Avellana, who having only signed up in January has made over 5000 edits to Wikitionary, focussing on Japanese. The sheer quantity and consistency and dedication from a new Wikimedian is amazing!
We had two Honourable Mentions this year, recognising Jonathan Deamer and Joanne Forster-Martin. Jonathan is finding his place in the wiki world and it’s been lovely to see him putting his effort to community organising with a meet up in Leeds and organising a parkrun at Wikimania. Joanne has been enthusiastically involved with Women in Red, writing biographies and collaborating with others. It’s great to see skills learned on her Wikipedia placement in Oxford become part of wider volunteering.
The full list of nominations included Ruby Imrie and Ellie Whitehead.
UK Wikimedian of the Year
This award was won by Fran Allfrey, an enthusiastic Wikimedian who does much of her work in academic spaces, acting as a voice of encouragement to those who want to experiment. She is also a generous collaborator – recently co-writing an article on medievalism and Wikipedia. Community minded, she supports gender based Wikimedia initiatives, and advocates for sharing information with Wikidata and Wikipedia in her research career, notably the Avebury Papers project.
As with the Up and Coming Award we had two Honourable Mentions, going to Ruby Imrie and Sae Kitamura. Ruby has worked incredibly hard to help illuminate what happened in the Scottish witch hunts of 1563 to 1736 by focusing on opening up the rich historical data in the University’s landmark Survey of Scottish Witchcraft database. Sae is Wikimedian in Residence at Trinity College Dublin which is a post she organised and found funding for along with Sophie Whitfield of Wikimedia Community Ireland. Sae’s work with languages has been hugely beneficial and she contributed to the Celtic Knot Conference run jointly by WMUK and Wikimedia Community Ireland.
The full list of nominees included Perigrinate Avellana, John Cummings, Lucy Moore, Harry Mitchell, and Ellie Whitehead.