This post was written by Fabian Tompsett, Volunteer Support Organiser

“Emergence (…) refers to the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns, and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems.”
(Emergence as a Construct: History and Issues, Goldstein 1999)

Technological innovation can appear as the determining factor of how are habits are reshaped as new facilities come online, each with their new bundles of characteristics, which in turn release new capabilities and create new potentialities in the hands of their early adopters. However where the constraints of the commodity form – as in the free software movement – are in abeyance, the ability of how these early adopters form themselves into a community can play a more determining role.

The 21st century saw the emergence of Wikipedia as a beautiful example of this: Wikipedia could only take off thanks to a self-organising community which incorporated user-feedback not only in its own self-regulation, but also in the regulation of how the wiki software underlying the encyclopedia would be improved. By adopting the encyclopedic form, the appeal was always to everyman, i.e. any “person having ordinary skill in the art” of accessing the internet. The combination of the personal computer and the internet means that there is a continual flux in the capacities innovation unlocks in such a distributed environment.

Wikidata was launched in October 2012 as an application of the “Wiki Way” in a new environment: that of an on-line knowledge base. Wikidata was originally conceived as a way of providing a data spine through which related articles on various wikipedias could be linked. This was achieved in early 2013. However Wikidata soon moved forward from simply reconciling internal issues, to dealing with external sources. Wikidata is one of several projects to reconcile identifiers and authority files from different sources, but with the integration of data from Google’s Freebase, it is becoming an increasingly important resource outside of the Wikipedia context. Alongside the development of the database as such various tools are continually being developed to access the knowledge base and make increasingly complex searches.

As Wikipedia enters its fifteenth year, Wikidata sees Already this collaborative approach is having an impact, one which will go much further if the Wikidata for Research funding application is successful. has highlighted its potential to attract more Citizen-Scientists – Wikidata can change the way citizen scientists contribute. Lydia Pintscher, Product Manager for Wikidata, Wikimedia Deutschland, has discussed the social scaling needed if Wikidata is to realise its potential. Currently many organisations are looking to provide Wikidata with more and more data. But this leaves the question – how will the community develop to match these new opportunities?

Ways to get involved:
In the UK we have set up an e-mail list to supplement the other lists. The object of this list is to focus on activities in the UK and Ireland (Go here for the more general Wikidata list). We have also started have specific Wikidata Meetups, two in London so far. We are also discussing having an event in Manchester. We have also started a project page: Wikidata:WikiProject UK and Ireland.

Up coming activity:
Open Data Day (Saturday 21st Feb/Sunday 22nd Feb). Local open data activists have already gained the support of Hampshire County Council for a two day unconference in Winchester.

Contact fabian.tompsett{{@}}wikimedia.org.uk for more information.

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This post was written by Fabian Tompsett, temporary Volunteer Support Organiser

After a short break I am back in the Wikimedia UK office, now in the role of providing cover for Katie Chan as Volunteer Support Organiser for about four months. One of the first things I’ve noticed is that the place has a different feel: the team is no longer approaching a big event with a mixture of apprehension and excitement. Things are “back to normal”, but actually, not really!

Wikimania 2014 has given Wikimedia UK a big boost at various levels:

Confidence

There’s a sense of “we did it”, we coped with playing a significant role in delivering Wikimania alongside our partners the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimania London team. Many members of staff have taken a bit of a break but are now back at work with renewed enthusiasm. We have been so happy to get back in contact with some Wikimedians who have had little to do with the chapter recently, as well as meeting up with new volunteers, including a number of Wikimedians of long standing who had not previously engaged with Wikimedia UK. So we also have the feeling that Wikimania had the endorsement of the Wikimedia community in the UK in general. Thank you all.

Innovation

But this self-confidence is not accompanied by complacency. Actually people are focussing on how we can use the experience of Wikimania and some of the new ideas we came across to take Wikimedia UK to a new level. One aspect of this is my new colleague, Roberta Wedge, who is already having an impact on staff by raising issues which affect our engagement with women in various ways. Also as we have attracted a number of volunteers very local to our London Office, we have initiated regular Wiki Wednesdays to help deepen their involvement with the Wikimedia movement. More examples will emerge over time.

Volunteering

In my new role I shall be involved in volunteer support, something dear to my heart. I certainly learnt a lot about volunteer support from being involved in Wikimania, and certainly the Wikimania London team contributed to that learning. As this is a temporary position, part of my work is picking up on the activities Katie has been running. But as I got to know many of the new volunteers who signed up for Wikimania a key part of my work during these four months will be to develop our relationship with them.

We are also asking for input from volunteers to help shape how we make the most of the new opportunities which are arising post Wikimania. To help with this we shall be conducting a survey amongst our volunteers to get a better understanding of their views. However, I would welcome any direct contact from new or long standing volunteers to discuss any ideas you may have.

You can reach Fabian by calling the office on 020 7065 0990 or emailing fabian.tompsett@wikimedia.org.uk

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I am just coming to the end of a four-month stint working for Wikimedia UK helping to deliver Wikimania 2014 at London’s Barbican Centre. It was all quite exciting and as The Signpost put it was “not too bad, actually”. In the whirl of events seeing dozens of hackers bringing hacking home to Hackney, hunched over their laptops, while other devotees were busy tweeting, it became all too easy to miss some key aspects of the event, and so to fail to recognise that Wikimania contributed to saving lives.

Wikipedia is not just a website, it is also a somewhat heterogeneous international community which thrives on face-to-face encounters in meatspace. For myself my involvement gained an extra dimension when I started attending the regular London Meetups six years ago. It was meeting other human beings rather than tapping away while staring at a computer screen which made it interesting.

So, this August the London Meetup page modestly subsumes Wikimania within its calendar of monthly events, within an expansion to a three day event with between 2,000 and 4,000 attendees (so much for “British understatement“). But in essence it is the face-to-face interactions outside the formal sessions which make Wikimania such a powerful event. I don’t want to be dismissive about the formal sessions and all the hard work which went into them, it is just that I want to focus on the other aspects and use this to show why I believe Wikimania saves lives.

A couple of weeks after Wikimania a discussion opened up on the Wikimedia Ghana list which spoke of an initiative by Carl Fredrik Sjöland of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine who have teamed up with Translators Without Borders to set up a Translation taskforce. As they explained a couple of years ago “We believe that all people deserve high quality healthcare content in their own language.” Faced with the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa the focus of these activities has shifted to finding  people to translate information about Ebola into the relevant indigenous languages. There is something similar happening through the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team who have also been very active developing mapping resources for the medics on the ground.

I had hoped to make it to the OpenStreetMap 10th Birthday Party (the London celebrations were held nearby, to coincide with Wikimania) but I got caught up in other things and only arrived after most of the people had left. But that was precisely what Wikimania was like: you find out more and more about it in the aftermath.

Another aspect I found out afterwards was Denny’s comments on A new metric for Wikimedia where he discusses the availability of Wikipedia in different languages. Considering the recent Ebola outbreak above, this is not just a “nice idea”, but something which requires support now. Often it is not so much getting hold of finances, but finding a way in which those people with the relevant language skills can be linked up with and given the resources to make things happen.

An important aspect of this is that the speakers of these languages are not just passive recipients of knowledge generated in the geographical north. They can also contribute their own knowledge. This also touches on the notion of cognitive justice  as developed by Shiv Visvanathan in The search for cognitive justice

Cognitive justice is not a lazy kind of insistence that every knowledge survives as is, where is. It is an idea which is actually more playful in the sense the Dutch historian Johann Huizinga suggested when he said play transcends the opposition of the serious and the non-serious. Play seeks encounters, the possibilities of dialogue, of thought experiments, a conversation of cosmologies and epistemologies. A historical model that comes to mind is the dialogue of medical systems, where doctors once swapped not just their theologies but their cures. As A. L. Basham put it, the dialogue of medicines, each based on a different cosmology, was never communal or fundamentalist. It recognized incommensurability but allowed for translation.

This is a viewpoint which has been taken up in what is called Open ICT for Development, where “openness” is understood to include the the participation of communities in the governance of their own lives.

So what I found out in the aftermath of Wikimania is the question: Does Wikimania save lives? Can it help people get together and come up with practical methods by which people get in touch and existing initiatives can find that they are taken to a higher level? Will it have an affect in this example and save lives? So in this sense Wikimania is not over. It’s legacy depends on what action people take in its aftermath.

So I am writing this blog because I want you to see if there is something you can do to help either the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team or the Translation taskforce find more support for their projects in fighting Ebola.

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In this post, Fabian Tompsett, Wikimedian and co-ordinator of the Wikimania support team, shares his views on his his first few weeks in post

It has now been a couple of weeks since I started as one of the three Wikimania support staff taken on by Wikimedia, along with Chris McKenna and John Cummings. We started by catching up on all the preparations which have been going on behind the scenes. That has provided us a good basis to work from. Now it’s a matter of getting out there, whether it is amongst our fellow Wikimedians through Wiki Meetups (watch out for some new ones coming up), or spreading the word amongst educational, heritage or open knowledge groups.

Our team has been allocated desks together at the end of the office, which helps us maintain a close working relationship. We each have our particular focus, and a lot of my time goes on following up and developing links in the educational field. There is a real shift in how educators regard Wikipedia: they now see it as much less of a threat, even if they are not quite sure what it has to offer them as educators. Another interesting aspect is that whilst Wikipedia is a household word, not very many people realise that it is the product of a new kind of on-line community. Sometimes explaining the relationship of Wikimedia UK, the charity, to this broader community can be complicated, but more and more people are getting it.

One element we have been involved in is working on the five pre-Wikimania fringe events. These are taking shape now, and offer an opportunity to develop input for Wikimania itself. We are currently looking for volunteers to get involved in these as well. Keep an eye out for a volunteer open day on Saturday 12 July.

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