By Dr. Sara Thomas – Programme Manager, Wikimedia UK
Do you have an idea for a Wiki-learning session? Have you found something that you’d like to share with other Wikimedians, or an idea that you’d like to try out? And would you like some help from Wikimedia UK in sharing it?
In response to feedback from the community around having opportunities to improve Wiki-skills, and connecting with other community members, and as part of the overall training package for 2025, we’re excited to introduce a new strand of event programming, called Community Sandbox Sessions.
We’re looking to programme up to 6 virtual events over the next year, which would be open to all members of the UK community, and supported by Wikimedia UK. We’re asking community members to propose sessions that you’d like to lead.
Session suggestions
The type or format of any event is open; but we’d like to encourage proposals which go beyond the traditional Wikipedia editathon – for example:
- Here’s a cool Wikidata tool I’ve found, let’s try it out
- Wikisource transcribe-a-thon
- A talk on how to run backstage pass events
- Here’s how I got this article to Featured Article status
- Let’s add images from this collection to Wikipedia
- A mobile meeting where we take pictures of our local area for Wikimedia Commons
- Minoritised language work – eg: adding Wikidata labels
- Building a worklist & finding reliable sources for future events
Dates and times
Events can take place throughout the year, and can also be on an evening or weekend. Suggested duration is an hour, but longer (or shorter!) events could be considered. We’re suggesting that these events are online in the first instance, to reach the widest possible audience, and all events should of course be run in line with the Wikimedia UK Safe Space policy.
Support WMUK can offer
- Advice on refining your format
- Setting up of Event Registration
- Event promotion through UK listings & mailing lists
- Hosting on the WMUK Zoom account / Google Meet
- Friendly space support from a WMUK staff member (or volunteer) during the event
This is very much an experiment, and we hope that the format will allow community members to share knowledge and skills, and get to know other UK Wikimedians, as well as test out new ideas! If you’d be interested in running a session, please submit a proposal here.
Deadline
The initial deadline for submitting proposals is Tuesday 20th May.
If you have any questions, please contact sara.thomas@wikimedia.org.uk.
Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world. Globally 600 million people live without electricity and 90% of them are in southern Africa. You’ve seen “The boy who harnessed the wind”? Well we want to harness the internet. We plan to create a country where half of the people on Wikipedia are women. Many do not complete primary education and girls become wives before they could consider a career. It requires enormous change and we can only hope to contribute. This doesn’t require an editathon… experience from other large projects (e.g. Women in Red) is that an editathon won’t even mark the surface. Women in Red has been running for ten years and in that time it has had over 300 on-line editathons and nearly 100 in-person events in Edinburgh – but its made a change. There are now many more women on en:Wikipedia and they make up 20% of the total biogs.
This new project doesn’t have a name, but it does have a budget (of zero), early partners and ambition. We have the backing of the Scotland Malawi Partnership, Women in Red, Local Rotarys, Wikimedia Scotland,. The Malawian Women in Red list was under a 100 and now its over 500. There were very few free-to-use images but we’re fixing that and we are still reaching out to gather more…. particularly in Malawi. You may be think that we are still missing stuff… we are ………. but we plan to talk to Wikimedians.