As we close the door on 2024, what are your Wiki New Year’s Resolutions for 2025?

Wikimedians across the UK have achieved so much over the last year – at our recent Community Celebration we heard about the national press coverage about Lucy Moore writing articles about a woman from every country in the world, Jonathan Deamer attending his first Wikimania, and lots of people who participated in Wiki Loves Earth in Scotland for the very first time.

So what’s that one thing that you’d like to achieve in the Wiki world this year?  Do you want to finally publish an article that you’ve been drafting for a while now, or learn how to query Wikidata? Maybe you’d like to attend a meetup, or learn how to use OpenRefine? Perhaps you want to take more photos, and submit them to Wiki Loves Folklore, Wiki Loves Earth, or Wiki Loves Monuments?  And if you’re brand new to the world of editing, maybe you’d like to learn to edit Wikipedia? Whatever it is, we’d love to hear about it – and we’ll send you some encouragement!

New Year’s Resolutions can be hard to keep – so if you let us know what it is that you’d like to do, then we can send you a reminder, and we’ll send you any relevant information on the challenge that you’ve chosen. So for example, if you’d really like to contribute to Wiki Loves Monuments this year, we’ll send you the information about the competition when it launches. Or if you’d like to learn how to edit Wikipedia, we can send you links to training materials.  

You’ll be able to sign up for a Wiki Resolution any time throughout January, and we’ll follow up with you from February.

The post Wiki Resolutions 2025 appeared first on 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.

The post The 2024 UK Wikimedian of the Year Awards appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

My adventure with the Wikimedia movement started in 2012, 10 years ago. Ten years is a long time, and when I joined as a staff member at Wikimedia UK, freshly established as a charity, there were already plenty of established community members around me. I remember coming to the global Wikimania conference in 2012, where in the opening session the audience of over a thousand people were asked to stand up, and then sit down in sequence depending on how long they’ve been in the movement – starting from the newcomers. As I sat through the countdown, embarrassed by my short tenure, I got the message that what’s valued in the movement is your length of service, and a direct connection to the key moments in its history. 

With English Wikipedia being established in 2001, I now have roughly the same tenure in the movement as the longest standing stalwarts at that point of Wikimania 2012. Somehow I don’t feel like one of the movement’s wise old women, despite living through some of its rather interesting moments. I also note, gladly, the movement’s tentative shift towards celebrating its newcomers. 

At a recent Wikimania the countdown went from the longest standing to the newest participants, with the newbies getting an ovation when they are the last people standing. 

When I joined Wikimedia, not long after completing a philosophy degree, I thought of Wikipedia as an experiment in epistemology of testimony, in how you decide to believe the information shared by someone else. Turns out things are much more complicated than that single angle, especially because the Wikipedia project doesn’t happen by itself – it’s made by people and their interactions, and that’s complicated. 

Since my early days I’ve been exposed to a number of beliefs about Wikipedia and its movement which I approached with suspicion. As a way of reflecting on my ten years with Wikimedia, I’m sharing five of my enduring hesitations, meaning approaches I came across that I’m suspicious of and try to mitigate (I could go for a commemorative ten hesitations but even I would find that a bit demotivating!).

Build it and they’ll come

This is a common adage in the techno-social projects and movements, where you believe that when you set up a tool, a space (in terms of tech and logistics), people will appear and engage with it. I’ve had conversations with potential partner institutions believing that if they set up their own wiki, it will work just as wonderfully as Wikipedia itself, with volunteer contributors appearing out of nowhere. This might work sometimes but usually doesn’t, and it’s true even within Wikipedia across its many internal projects – the magic of Wikipedia isn’t uniformly distributed. Providing community support and facilitation is non negotiable, so is designing inviting ways of getting into the project, especially if we want to ensure inclusion. I captured some of these thoughts within a collaborative book project I supported, Collective Wisdom.

Move fast and break things

Another common tech phrase speaks to the spirit of fast iteration, putting out minimum viable products and getting them critiqued in order to improve quickly. I have fully embraced sharing my thinking and documents early and can’t quite imagine working on something without colleagues’ eyeballs on it. But moving fast and breaking things feels quite individualistic and doesn’t give justice to the communities that may be using or relying on whatever is being broken (even if to improve it). 

I’m also forever astounded by how many things in the movement have been quick temporary decisions that somehow solidified into permanent solutions (not dissimilar to when you move to a new house and a temporary DIY solution you did in week 1 is somehow still there 10 years down the line). The added complication is that people come and go, and at one point nobody remembers why something is done the way it is, and who to ask about changing it. 

Rely on hive mind

Because of this distributed knowledge in a distributed system, we often don’t know who has the information we require. It can be useful to crowdsource answers to a problem at hand; however, it relies on people having the time to engage. Wikimedia movement hasn’t really cracked knowledge management (has anybody?) but more effort put into documentation and making knowledge accessible would be a good thing. 

Revere open knowledge

Of course I think open knowledge is a good thing and a force for good. Wikipedia has been called the last best place on the internet, and as much as I’m not into exceptionalism, perhaps there’s something to it. Often the partnerships I set up with external organisations are motivated by the inherent belief that working on open knowledge simply contributes to some greater good. However, I believe that it’s useful to be self critical about openness. This thinking has developed somewhat in recent years, with examination of ‘ethics of open’, or reflections on how the nature of the open movement is excluding some people. 

Together with these tensions and criticisms there is no shortage of ideas within the movement of how to change things. Hopefully I’m wrong, but sometimes I do think that master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house – or at least that it’s pretty hard. It does seem difficult to change the Wikimedia movement, which I’ve experienced acutely while working on the implementation of the global 2030 Wikimedia vision of knowledge equity. Generalising, it’s hard for newcomers and their fresh ideas to get heard and accepted, while the thinking of the longstanding members is constrained by operating within existing movement structures and approaches (even if they’ve been DIYed!). On top of that, the movement is so beautifully amorphous that even if there are good ideas of what to change, it’s hard to know how to implement – and we’ve even tried complexity theory which is supposed to be good for such settings.  

Taking the long view, however, things have changed somewhat. During that first Wikimania I attended in 2012, the organisers ran out of conference t-shirts for women – they didn’t expect quite so many of them to turn up. These days we speak of barriers to participation, ensuring friendly spaces, and try to think about how participating in Wikimedia may benefit people, rather than the project itself. I hope that with ten years of experience on my back I can continue to support and amplify these good ideas. 

The post Taking the long view – my 10 years at Wikimedia UK appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

This year Wales took part in the international photography competition ‘Wiki Loves Earth’ organised by the Wikimedia movement. Founded 9 years ago as a focus for nature heritage, the competition raises awareness of protected species and sites globally. 

Wikimedia UK and the National Library of Wales coordinated the WikiLovesEarth, Wales, a project, which saw 1,888 new images uploaded to Commons from National Parks, Sites of Special Scientific Interest, Sites of Outstanding Natural Beauty and other protected areas in Wales. This was done in partnership with a number of large organizations including Natural Resources Wales, Pembrokeshire and Snowdonia National Park, the Welsh Mountaineering Club, Edward Llwyd nature society, WiciMon and others.

Iestyn Hughes, one of the judges from Wales said, “It was a pleasure to see such an enthusiastic response to this competition from so many photographers. The top ten images edged ahead in a field of some two thousand entries, and display both excellent technical quality and empathy with their subject matter.”

Our second Judge, Wildlife Photographer and Author Jean Nappier, said “The standard of the images was very high especially the wildlife images of the seabirds”

With 1,888 images taken, Wales is in the 7th position (out of 33 competing countries, just in front of Sweden, Italy and Spain); the percentage of images used on Wikipedia, to date, is also one of the highest in the competition, at 17%, with 38 uploaders (photographers) competing. The number of uploaders registered after the competition start was slightly lower than the norm, at 68%. In the last couple of months, the 323 images used on Wikipedia articles have been viewed 1.3 million times!

Jason Evans, National Wikimedian said that “The National Library of Wales was thrilled to co-host this years Wiki Loves Earth Wales contest, along with our partners Wikimedia UK as part of our wide and varied digital outreach programme. The level of engagement and the standard of photography was fantastic to see and the winning images are a testament to our rich and diverse natural environment.”

The winning photo from Wales is of a protected species, a brown hare, by Alun Williams, himself a very keen ornithologist and naturalist, and a member of Llen Natur. Wikimedia UK has worked closely with Llen Natur over the last 6 years. Williams, who also took the photo which came 2nd, is a retired headteacher from Llanrwst.

Robin Owain, Wikimedia UK Manager (Wales) was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the images saying “the quality is surprisingly good and helps us record of the state of play for some of the protected species in Wales. Working on a global level in this way we can highlight our concerns about the effect of global warming, and celebrate the work done to preserve these species and habitats with our partners.”

You can view the 10 wonderful Welsh winning images here.

WLE Wales Website on Commons here.

View the stats from the competition here.

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The previous 12 months has seen all of us challenged like never before. Collectively and
individually we have faced new ways of living and changes to how we work and volunteer.

As a staff and Trustee team we are sending our appreciation and thanks to each one of you for your dedication, commitment, passion and belief that time volunteered on open knowledge is time well spent.

Thank You!

The post Thank You To Each and Every Amazing Volunteer! appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

This year Wales is taking part in the international photography competition ‘Wiki Loves Earth’ organised by the Wikimedia movement. Founded 9 years ago as a focus for nature heritage, the competition aims to raise awareness of protected sites globally.

Robin Owain who leads the Wikimedia UK projects across Wales said “Today we’re excited to be launching Wiki Loves Earth 2021 in Wales. This is one of the largest photography competitions in the world focusing on National Parks, Sites of Special Scientific Interest, Sites of Outstanding Natural Beauty and all other protected areas. Robin explained “The biodiversity and geology of Wales is unique, and this competition allows Welsh photographers to show the beauty of their landscape, the flora and fauna of their protected areas on a world stage.”

Organizations who will be supporting this exciting competition include Natural Resources Wales, Pembrokeshire and Snowdonia National Park, the Welsh Mountaineering Club, Edward Llwyd nature society, National Library of Wales, Wikimedia UK, WiciMon and others.

Jason Evans, National Wikimedian at the National Library said, “”The National Library of Wales is thrilled to support this competition, which will encourage people to explore and document Wales’ diverse wildlife and landscapes. This aligns with our commitment to community engagement and will complement our current Welsh Government funded project to support the improvement of Welsh language data and mapping services.”

This year, the international winning photos will represent two categories — landscapes, including individual trees if it has a preservation order, and macro or close-ups of animals, plants, fungi etc. Examples of past winners can be seen at #WikiLovesEarth. For instructions on how to upload, Google ‘Wiki Loves Earth 2021 in Wales’, or follow this link.

Any photographs taken in the past (even on a phone) can be uploaded during June, with prizes at both country and national level for the winners. Robin added “The competition is open to everyone. We ask our friends, volunteers and staff to put Wales on the international map by entering their photographs of our beautiful and diverse country.”

Read more about Wiki Loves Earth 2021 in Wales here on Wikimedia Commons.
More on Wiki Loves Earth can be found here.

Cystadleuaeth Ffotograffiaeth Byd-Eang Ar Natur – Cymru’n Cystadlu

Mae Cymru’n cymryd rhan eleni yn y gystadleuaeth ffotograffeg ‘Wiki Loves Earth’ (Wici’r
Holl Fyd yw’r enw Cymraeg) a drefnir gan y mudiad rhyngwladol Wikimedia, mam Wicipedia!

Ymhlith y sefydliadau eraill fydd yn cefnogi’r gystadleuaeth y mae Cyfoeth Naturiol Cymru, Parciau Cenedlaethol Eryri a Phenfro, Clwb Mynydda Cymru, Cymdeithas Edward Llwyd, Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru, Wikimedia UK, WiciMon ac eraill.

Yn ôl Robin Owain sy’n arwain gwaith Wikimedia UK yng Nghymru, “Mae heddiw’n ddiwrnod cyffrous iawn, gan ein bod ni’n lansio Wici’r Holl Ddaear 2021 yng Nghymru. Dyma un o’r cystadlaethau ffotograffiaeth mwyaf yn y byd sy’n canolbwyntio ar Barciau Cenedlaethol, Safleoedd o Ddiddordeb Gwyddonol Arbennig, Safleoedd o Harddwch Naturiol Eithriadol ac ardaledd warchodedig eraill.” Esboniodd Robin “Mae bioamrywiaeth a daeareg Cymru’n unigryw, ac mae’r gystadleuaeth hon yn caniatáu i ffotograffwyr o Gymru gofnodi ac arddangos ei harddwch: y tirwedd a’r golygfeydd, a chyfoeth yr amrywiaeth bywyd sydd yma: anifeiliaid, ffwng a phlanhigion.”

Ymhlith y sefydliadau eraill fydd yn cefnogi’r gystadleuaeth y mae Cyfoeth Naturiol Cymru, Parciau Cenedlaethol Penfro ac Eryri, Clwb Mynydda Cymru, Cymdeithas Edward Llwyd, Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru, WiciMon a Wikimedia UK.

Dywedodd Jason Evans, Wicimediwr Cenedlaethol Cymru, “Mae’n bleser gan Lyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru gael cefnogi’r gystadleuaeth hon, a fydd yn annog pobl i archwilio a dogfennu bywyd gwyllt a thirweddau amrywiol Cymru. Mae hyn yn cyd-fynd â’n hymrwymiad ni i ymgysylltu â’r gymuned a, bydd yn ategu ein prosiect presennol, a ariennir gan Lywodraeth Cymru, i gefnogi gwella data a gwasanaethau mapio yn y Gymraeg.”

I gael hyd i’r cyfarwyddiadau sut i uwchlwytho, a rhagor am ymgais Cymru, Gwglwch Wici’r Holl Ddaear 2021 Cymru, neu dilynnwch y ddolen: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Earth_2021_in_Wales

Gallwch uwwchlwytho lluniau rydych wedi eu cymryd unrhyw bryd yn y gorffennol, neu fynd ati o hyn tan ddiwedd Mehefin, ac yn ôl Robin, “Gall unrhyw beson gystadlu, gan ddefnyddio camera eu ffôn neu gamera pwrpasol! Be sy’n bwysig ydy ein bod yn cystadlu, fel cenedl ar lefel rhyngwladol!”

Dolen i wefan Cymru: yma ar Comin Wicimedia

The post Spotlight on Wales for International Photography Competition appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

“GB1900 is a crowd-sourcing project to transcribe all text strings from the second edition six inch to the mile County Series maps published 1888-1914. The project is a collaboration between the National Library of Scotland, the Great Britain Historical GIS team at the University of Portsmouth, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, the National Library of Wales and the People’s Collection Wales.

The final goal [was]  to create the largest historical place-name gazetteer for Great Britain specifically including co-ordinates.”(1)

A screenshot of Cymru 1900’s user interface

So why create a gazetteer of Great Britain, when you are trying to understand the lay of the land at a frozen point in history? Why not simply rely on old maps? And perhaps it’s worth detailing what entails a gazetteer to the non-geographers among us… A gazetteer is a ‘geographical dictionary’, to be used alongside a map or even an atlas, which gives more detailed description of the physical or geographic features of an area, at ‘land-level’.  The presentation of the project began detailing the versatility of a gazetteer as a medium, stating that gazetteers “… are better than maps!” Historically, we have many more gazetteers to rely upon than maps, which are comparatively, a more recent phenomena – with maps only being commonplace from the 18th Century. Secondly, gazetteers are functional for walkers and navigating new areas – with descriptions of landmarks, as and when you come by them, (on a weekend stroll perhaps).

What were the team looking to achieve by transcribing a gazetteer or Great Britain, frozen in 1900? “We have three main aims. Firstly, to contribute to the overall development of “citizen science” by showing how working on particular local areas that matter to them affects the motivation of volunteers.” Following on from this, the team hoped that the project would encourage similar online crowdsourcing projects. Lastly, the project team wished to demonstrate how their work benefits the general public, “…we need to show not just that many people use our websites, but to report on what our sites help people to do.” (2)

The project’s process & outcomes

A need was identified for ‘a new historical gazetteer’ of Britain, as pre-existing historical gazetteers had partial data on either postcodes, features or parishes – but no completely descriptive gazetteer available as a whole.  Discussions for such a project initially began in March of 2011, at first as ‘Cymru 1900- Historic Place names of Wales’, . After forming partnerships supporting the idea, the People’s Collection of Wales, the Centre for Advanced Welsh & Celtic Studies, National Library of Wales and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, decided to create a uniquely crowdsourced Welsh historical place name gazetteer. The collaboration then further partnered with the citizen science platform, Zooniverse, to host the development of the project’s bespokely required interface system. The website ‘Cymru1900wales’ was launched by October 2013, with transcription of the historic Ordnance Survey maps active until their completion in September 2016. The place names transcribed and verified by the volunteers in that time for the Cymru1900 gazetteer, were then also able to contribute to The List of Historic Place Names of Wales index, quickly being able to demonstrate the versatility of open- citizen-sourced data.

Soon after the successful completion of Cymru 1900, the project was then decidedly extended to attempt to transcribe the rest of Great Britain towards the end of 2015. In order for this to be achievable, it was recognised that several more volunteers were needed to be recruited, who would be fundamental in the execution of the project. The volunteers ideally would need to have an idea about transcription, and be interested in the History of Great Britain; the team turned to advertising part way through the project, through the ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ magazine’s ‘Transcription Tuesday’ initiative. This proved successful in adding some new faces to the team of dedicated volunteers who were enamoured by the project’s aims.

The team and volunteers proceeded to run with the GB1900 aims without funding, having officially launched their volunteer engagement in September 2016 and using high quality, historic map scans from the National Library of Scotland. A separate supporter site was then created for the volunteer’s to interface, building upon the successful format used for the Cmyru1900. The site designed so that volunteers could track the ‘contribution leaderboard’, and take a look at the maps as their data points grew in progress. At the project launch, by happenstance, I sat next to one of the many dedicated volunteers, who shared their delight not only at participating in the place-name subscription, but also the opportunity to share personal ‘place-memories’ of the areas they were working on, through the volunteer interface. By January 7th 2018, the whole of Great Britain at ‘1900’ had been completely transcribed. This of course was with great thanks to the 1000+ volunteers, several of which were presented to have given up to 20 hours a week to the project. Awards were given to the volunteers who had given the most hours, in the appropriate form of the printed ordnance survey maps, from the National Library of Scotland, featuring the regions that the volunteers has contributed the most to.

“In total, the volunteers located 2,666,341 strings on the maps, and contributed 5,500,339 transcriptions. It is hard to see how this could have been matched by an academic research team.” (3)

Following the presentation of the project, Dr. Southall and Paula Aucott, research associate of the project, used the opportunity to encourage the use of the open data – following the example of the proven versatility of the Cymru1900 project before hand. On the project’s website – it is made clear to whoever might interested, what forms of data are available e.g. the project’s ‘raw data’ or as ‘cleaned versions’ of the data – matched with the coordinates and modern district names of the transcribed place names – and what license they’re available under – e.g. CC by 0 & CC by SA, respectively. There were following presentations, giving insight to initial uses of the data set; by representatives from  the University of Wales Centre for Advanced and Celtic Studies, demonstrating the historic linguistic research now attainable through the transcribed place names, and from The Ramblers, demonstrating how the data can be used for their Finding Historic Footpaths project.

Attending the project’s presentation was a clear demonstration of the possibilities of citizen science, with even just a small and dedicated team coordinating it’s growth and volunteer engagement behind the scenes. What was most poignant to me as an attendee of GB1900 launch, was the personal experience that was resonant with many of the volunteers who transcribed the coordinates of the gazetteer, with many focusing on areas where they had once lived or spent holidays. The project and it’s now open outputs reside within a wonderful overlap, whereby this new formation of data is not only useful, but has brought to life personal histories of places across britain, that were always there, simply waiting to be noted, and brought together.

To see the data sets, you can visit the Vision of Britain website.

1. https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/sheetlines-articles/Issue111page46.pdf
2. https://support.gb1900.org/portal/kb/articles/gb1900-volunteer-study-participant-information
3. https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/sheetlines-articles/Issue111page46.pdf

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This post was written by Roberta Wedge, Gender Gap Project Worker

On Wednesday evening a small team of staff and volunteers left the Wikimedia UK office for the Science Museum, for some focussed research on what makes a great Late. These monthly adults-only events are a popular way for galleries and museums to open themselves out to an under-served audience. The V&A claims to be “the original contemporary late night event”, and since 1999, GLAMs large and small have tried their hand at “drinking and thinking” evenings. After many years of sampling, I still think that the V&A and the Science Museum are the best exemplars.

As you may have heard (through the UK-wiki list and on the Water Cooler page within the WMUK wiki), the Science Museum has offered WMUK the opportunity to showcase our work at the Late in November. In October they’re launching their biggest gallery in many years, The Information Age, and unusually, the Late on Wednesday 26 November will be themed around that. We’re very fortunate in being invited to take part.

Last night was one of the best Lates I’ve been to. Not only was the whole museum packed with about 5000 happy people (all over 18 and most under 35, and crucially for my role, about half of them were women), but the range of events was truly impressive. I counted about 30 things going on, most of them free, from pub quiz and game show to demonstrations and workshops. September’s theme was the science of magic and illusion. Make your own zoetrope! Enjoy safe but satisfying indoor explosions with Punk Science! Watch the salinity of the oceans change, speeded up a million times and modelled on a 2m glowing globe! Debunk the Cottingley Fairies!

So as we were sitting in the IMAX theatre, watching the cheerfully scruffy presenters rouse the crowd to participate, we were thinking, what would this look like with a Wikimedia theme? How could we harness their dynamic but informal style to bring out the fun and wonder of wiki-ness? I would love to see a data whiz take on the challenge of filling that floating globe with the traces of Wikipedia edits, different languages ebbing and flowing like ocean currents as Indonesia goes to sleep and Germany wakes up — and the sun never sets on the anglophone empire. We already have high hopes of big-screen audio-visual manifestations of our activities, like Listen to Wikipedia, but it’s all up for grabs. If there’s something you’d love to show off at the Information Age Late, please let me know as soon as possible. We already have almost a dozen ideas, but want to expand the pool of possibilities before meeting with the Science Museum again, when cold reality may have to come into play.

More research is needed: I can’t wait for the next Science Museum Late, on October 29, with the theme of “Food and Drink”.

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In what feels like something of a landmark, iconic UK quiz show University Challenge hosted by journalist and former Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman this week featured a bonus round of questions about Wikipedia editors. UK readers can watch the clip on BBC iPlayer here for the next few days. The whole show is good, but the section in question begins around 5m45 in to the clip.

For Wikipedia to be featured in such a prestigious television show with a core audience of people in higher education is a great acknowledgement of the growing credibility that Wikipedia holds. But how would you fare against the students of Jesus College, Oxford University who faced the questions?

1. In 2012, the philosophy graduate Justin Knapp became the first person to be credited with 1,000,000 Wikipedia edits. He’s especially noted for his work on the bibliography page of which English novelist born in Bengal in 1903?

2. Secondly, what institutions associated with a beverage, and with for instance the Chinese city of Chengdu, give their name to the help space which is, quote: “A friendly place to help new editors become accustomed to Wikipedia culture”?

3. In an interview in 2014, the Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales stated that he “used to edit a lot of entries” about which specific UK political body often symbolised by a red portcullis?

The answers are below, but if you correctly answered any of the questions then you did better than the students, who got each one wrong. A sign that there is still some way to go, perhaps!

(Answers: 1. George Orwell. 2. Teahouse. 3. The House of Lords.)

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Towards the end of 2013 there was an interesting discussion on a Wikimedia-related email list regarding whether the movement should accept donations in alternative currencies, such as Bitcoin.

During this discussion, Wikimedia UK Trustee Chris Keating remarked that: “other forms of money that we do not currently accept include gold coins, Yap money, Tesco Clubcard Points, cowrie shells and cattle… though if anyone wants to donate a herd of cattle to Wikimedia UK, please could they let the office know in advance.”

Well, we certainly didn’t get any advance notice, but today saw the delivery of this herd of cattle. As you can see, Peter the Platypus is already making them feel welcome – and no doubt making sure they know not to put ginger nut biscuits in with any other biscuit.

This does raise some questions: Does anyone have any tips on how to care for plastic cattle? Who is the kind-hearted yet anonymous donor that sent us this generous gift and how can we say thank you? What should the cattle be called? And did they sign a gift aid declaration?

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