Wikimedia UK has today published its latest Strategic Report, showcasing progress and impact across its key themes of knowledge equity, information literacy, and climate and the environment. The report highlights how the charity’s work is helping individuals and communities to access, contribute to, and critically engage with free knowledge at a time of growing challenges to information integrity worldwide.

Over the past year, Wikimedia UK has strengthened its partnerships with educators, cultural institutions, and civil society organisations to expand inclusive knowledge and develop critical information literacy skills. The report also demonstrates how Wikimedia UK is supporting the creation and dissemination of accurate, open knowledge on climate change, an issue of urgent global importance. An independent evaluation found clear evidence of impact, from embedding information literacy in schools and universities to amplifying underrepresented voices on Wikipedia.

Explore how you can support Wikimedia UK’s mission, whether by donating, partnering, or volunteering, to help build a more open and informed future.

The post Wikimedia UK launches its 2024/25 Strategic Report appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

The UK’s Online Safety Bill (OSB) addresses important safety issues to protect children and adults online. However, in its current state, the Bill unduly threatens the survival and welfare of projects that prioritise the public interest over profits. The Bill neglects to protect free knowledge, privacy, freedom of speech, and the strength of civic society in the UK.  

The signatory coalition represented in this letter includes organisations from across the cultural, scientific, and charitable landscape. They run or support projects that are used by and benefit a wide cross-section of the UK public: from young people to retirees; professionals to amateurs; and those with global, national, or hyper-local interests. Wikipedia, open science initiatives, crowdsourced UK heritage catalogues, and other public interest projects are the most socially, culturally, and scientifically valuable parts of the web.  

In an attempt to weed out the worst parts of the internet, the OSB jeopardises the best parts of the internet. So, we are calling on the UK Government and Parliament to exempt public interest projects from the OSB. 

Our coalition, and supportive members of the House of Lords, are urging the UK Government to act. Fixing this is simple; it requires adding a new paragraph to Schedule 1 of the Bill, exempting public interest projects (see this letter’s accompanying FAQ). Should the Government fail to act, Parliament will need to make the necessary changes itself. The Bill’s upcoming Lords “Report Stage” voting, starting July 6^th, is the UK’s best and final opportunity to enact this change. 

We hope the UK Government will take swift action to protect the best parts of the internet — public interest projects that uplift civic society and promote access to knowledge online. 

Yours faithfully

The signatories

• Arcadia Fund
• Big Brother Watch
• CILIP
• CILIP Scotland
• Code The City
• Creative Commons
• FixMyStreet / mySociety
• Flickr Foundation
• Global Partners Digital
• Inspire High Energy Physics
• Liberty
• London College of Communication
• Open Plaques
• Open Rights Group
• Open Scotland
• The Heritage Alliance
• The Mixed Museum
• Wellcome Sanger Institute
• Wikimedia Foundation
• Wikimedia Italia
• Wikimedia UK
• Zooniverse

• Dr Andrea Wallace, The GLAM-E Lab & SCuLE at the University of Exeter, Exeter Law School
• Dr Amanda Crawley-Jackson, Associate Dean Knowledge Exchange, University of the Arts London: London College of Communication
• Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia
• Oliver Creighton, Professor of Archaeology and President of the Society for Medieval Archaeology, University of Exeter
• Professor Peter Cox, Director of the Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter

Co-signatories

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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.

The Mixed Museum is a digital museum and archive that is working to spread knowledge about Black and ethnic minority British history through sharing and preserving the social history of racial mixing in Britain. 

In March 2022 we welcomed two interns from Queen Mary University London to work with the Mixed Museum on articles relating to Irish history, specifically South Asian people in Ireland and Black people in Ireland. This drew on the rich Mixed Museum collections, and enabled us to add a further 200 years of knowledge to Wikipedia. One of the interns is preparing a blogpost for us to talk further about this important work. We are excited to further develop our partnership with the Mixed Museum in the coming year.

Reimagining Lincolnshire is a public history project which aims to bring to light hidden and neglected stories from Lincolnshire, specifically those of people of colour, objects of empire and unheard women’s voices.

It seeks to uncover hidden and neglected stories from Lincolnshire, of those whose contributions to the county, country and internationally have largely been forgotten. It addresses the complexities of empire and slavery, in order to understand key Lincolnshire figures such as Sir Joseph Banks and Sir Isaac Newton in new ways. It offers additional layers of complexity as well, relating to class, gender, sexuality and ableism, for example, that help to reveal the past in a more inclusive, thoughtful and thought-provoking light. We are looking forward to running an Editathon with Reimagining Lincolnshire in October 2022 for Black History Month.

The Almeley Quakers and Rotherwas Together are local history collectives, dealing with social history and forgotten stories of people and places from their local areas, and in the case of Rotherwas, the lives of women at war. 

Rotherwas Together was formed in 2018 to help to unite all of the groups and individuals who were interested in finding out more about the Rotherwas Munitions Works, the people who worked there and how it shaped the lives, buildings and social history of Hereford. 

ROF Hereford changed the city from the day that land started to be cleared to make way for the site in 1916 through to today. The site and the munitions made there helped the allies to gain victory in both the first and second world war and also changed the lives of thousands of people.  For some, it gave opportunities for a career or the chance to work and live elsewhere but, for others, it led to lifelong health problems and infertility. We were delighted to run a hybrid Editathon for Rotherwas on 14th April 2022.

The Almeley Quakers are interested in uploading material to Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource. We have been working together to support the society with Commons training and a workshop on Wikisource, with input from the University of Edinburgh.

Create Place is a leadership programme for mid-career professionals in culture and creative industries, focussed on place-making in heritage and arts. At the end of March, we ran a two hour Wiki workshop for a group of professionals on how to edit and implement Wikimedia Commons into their cultural heritage work. It was a fantastic opportunity to work with create professionals, and we look forward to supporting Create Place with future events.

The Audience Agency are fellow members of our NLHF cohort. They have been working with a group of cultural organisations to help them share their work online and engage new audiences. We ran a Wikithon for Audience Agency affiliates in early February 2022.

Workers Education Association (WEA) – We are working with the WEA to organise a Wikithon in Newcastle, which will coincide with their Routes of Social Change immersive history walks in the North East. This event will look at elements of social history and will run, in person, in June 2022.

How to get involved with Connected Heritage

In 2021 and 2022 we hosted four webinars and one editathon ‘potluck’ – named as such because the participants brought their own topics which we advised on how to best add to or refine on the Wikimedia projects. We’ve followed the same model in 2022, with four very successful webinars and one potluck. When participants sign up, they receive the Connected Heritage resources. SSome organisations decided the webinar was enough for them to start work in their organisations independently. Others are working directly with Wikimedia UK through activities like Wikithons, advocating for open knowledge in their organisations, and uploading and editing collections’ content onto the Wikimedia projects. We aim to work with as many as 20 organisations in this way, with the hope that some partnerships will evolve into longer term collaborations.

You can sign up for our public events on Eventbrite.

The post Connected Heritage partnerships appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

Aim of the session

Wikimedia UK works on a three year strategic planning cycle, and we are now developing our new strategy for 2022 to 2025. I gave a brief overview of the process that the organisation is currently engaged in and what’s happened so far. Our schedule is aligned with our application deadline for funding from the Wikimedia Foundation, for which we’ll be applying for multi-year funding for the first time.

Introductions

As part of the introductions, everyone shared their aspirations for the meeting, with key themes being to make connections, understand Wikimedia UK’s priorities and engage with the wider community. The meeting was also another opportunity (following our AGM in July) to introduce our new Chair of Trustees, Monisha Shah. Monisha shared a little of her own background, and why access to knowledge is so important to her. She explained that she has a portfolio career focused on board roles within the arts, culture and media sectors, following high level roles at the BBC. Monisha emphasised her interest in hearing from the community. She noted that she is not active on social media but that volunteers were welcome to contact her via LinkedIn or the Wikimedia UK team. 

Blue Sky Thinking

After this introduction, we split into three breakout groups to finish the statement “wouldn’t it be fantastic if…” for what we’d like Wikimedia UK to achieve in the next three years. This generated lots of great ideas and objectives which coalesced into some key themes, as follows:

EQUITY

A high proportion of responses to the prompt question above were focused on equitable participation and representation. This ranged from diversifying the UK’s editors, administrators and membership, through to working with small language Wikipedias, delivering diaspora outreach, and supporting initiatives to repatriate knowledge as a form of decolonisation.  

CLIMATE

There were several responses focused on the climate crisis, with an aspiration for us to be able to offer wide-ranging and trusted information about the climate crisis across multiple languages. There was a question over whether Wikimedia UK should be applying pressure on the government regarding the crisis. On a practical level, it was felt that in the first instance Wikimedia UK needs to identify what we can do to support editors documenting and sharing information about climate change (including those involved with WikiProject Climate Change)

OPEN KNOWLEDGE

Many responses to the prompt statement “wouldn’t it be fantastic if” involved the opening up of knowledge and information. Under this general umbrella was an aspiration that all publicly funded institutions should commit to ethical open access as their default position; and that we are able to address copyright law to ensure that publicly funded research has to be made available under an open licence. Other responses included more partnerships with heritage organisations, local history initiatives and archives; more Wikimedians in Residence; and more work with diverse communities and collections. A number of responses were specifically about images – such as every notable structure in the UK having a photo and Wikidata item, and working with external partners to ensure an image for every UK article. 

EDUCATION

It’s clear that the Wikimedia UK community remains deeply concerned about misinformation and disinformation. There is a strong commitment to helping young people understand how knowledge is created and shared, and develop information literacy skills. There is also a clear ambition to have an impact on the school curriculum – particularly in England (following our success in Wales) – and to have more residencies in Universities. 

PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT AND AWARENESS

A number of responses were focused on the public’s understanding of Wikimedia. In particular, it was felt that there needs to be more understanding that Wikipedia is a tertiary source that can be edited by anyone, and greater awareness and use of the sister projects, such as Wikisource. It was noted that Wikimedia UK should have sufficient technical development capacity to be actively contributing to MediaWiki development for Wikimedia’s sister projects. The perennial issue of the distinction between Wikimedia UK and the Wikimedia Foundation was also raised.

COMMUNITY/MOVEMENT

Two out of the three breakout groups identified an objective to diversify Wikimedia UK’s funding base so as to be less reliant on our core grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. It was also suggested that the role of affiliates will be under more scrutiny with the creation of the Movement Charter and Global Council; and that within that context, Wikimedia UK needs to be clear about its purpose and relevance. Other comments were more focused on community engagement, with a number of responses around a theme of developing closer relationships between the affiliate and online communities, and enabling people who engage with our programmes to become more involved with the work of the organisation, contributing to the movement in broader ways.

Emerging Strategic Themes

After this very productive session, I introduced participants to the key themes which have emerged from the board and staff away days held earlier in the autumn. Once these are finalised, they will form the basis of our programme development and delivery over the next three years:

• Knowledge Equity
• Information Literacy
• Climate Crisis

A number of other areas have been identified, which we believe are essential to delivering an effective programme. These are still in draft form, but include community, advocacy, communications, equity, diversity and inclusion, and organisational resilience and sustainability.

It was encouraging to see the extent of the overlap between the themes that emerged from the board and staff away days, and the priorities identified through this community session. 

Engaging Volunteers

At this point I handed over to Daria Cybulska, Wikimedia UK’s Director of Programmes and Evaluation, to lead the final session of the meeting. This was focused explicitly on community, and asked participants to respond to the following questions, in a plenary discussion:

1. As a community member, where do you see an opportunity to get involved in the emerging strategy, and what would you need from WMUK to support that?
2. How could the Wikimedia UK community deliver the ideas generated so far?

These prompted a wide range of responses, contributions and further questions. I’ve summarised the key discussion areas below, all of which have given the team food for thought in terms of volunteer engagement and support:

• Do we have communities of interest or communities of place? Do volunteers see themselves as aligned with a particular project – e.g. English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons – or the chapter? And does this matter?
• People’s journey into Wikipedia is often through competitions such as Wiki Loves Monuments. How can we use this knowledge to galvanise more participation? Other entry points are vandalism and correcting typos. How can we use this knowledge to support editor recruitment? There’s something important about small, accessible tasks as a way to start. It could be correcting typos, or adding categories and references to articles.
• This led to an interesting discussion about the use of the word ‘editathon’ which might suggest something that’s a slog, requiring stamina and discipline. Should we change the language to focus more on words like workshops, training, introductory sessions etc. It was noted that increasingly, work lists for online editing events have tasks across a broad range of activities, reflecting different levels of digital confidence and time constraints.

Wrapping up and next steps

I wrapped up the session by explaining that I would be sharing the draft strategic framework for 2022 – 2025 later this month (November) and welcome feedback on it. Please watch this space for that! And thanks again to everyone who attended. It was wonderful to see people (even if it was over Zoom) and to hear from our community about what’s important to them in the creation of Wikimedia UK’s next three year strategy. 

The post Talking strategy with Wikimedia UK’s community appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

2019 board elections and resolutions

Thank you to all members who attended our AGM on Saturday or voted by proxy. We had an excellent response from eligible voting members, receiving 91 votes in total – ensuring that the meeting was quorate and helping us to elect five board members and agree all the proposed resolutions. The full minutes of the AGM will be on wiki soon, but in the meantime we’re happy to announce the election of:

• Sangeet Bhullar
• Lorna Campbell
• Andrea Chandler
• Josie Fraser
• Rod Ward

Sangeet, Lorna and Josie were all existing trustees who were standing for another term, so we’re very pleased that Wikimedia UK will continue to benefit from their considerable expertise. We’re also delighted to welcome Andrea and Rod as new trustees, and look forward to seeing how their skills and insights can enrich the Wikimedia UK Board. 

We’d also like to take this opportunity to formally thank the other members who stood for the board and encourage you to consider standing in future years, and continue to work with the charity in other ways in the meantime. 

Presentations and workshops

We were delighted to hear from a range of speakers on Saturday, and our Communications Co-ordinator is currently editing a film of the talks so that they can reach more of our members. Brandi Geurkink, European Campaigner from Mozilla Foundation, gave a fascinating and informative keynote talk on the information supply chain and combating misinformation online; calling for those of us working in and passionate about open knowledge to support this work. Our programme co-ordinator in Scotland, Sara Thomas, wove a magical story of ogres and witches to shine a light on recent on-wiki activities to remember Scotland’s hidden historical women; and four other members gave Lightning Talks on subjects including Wikimedia and Museums, the Central and Eastern European Wikipedia article writing contest, Wiki Loves Monuments, and the WiciMon project in Wales – which you can learn more about by watching this video.

We had a stimulating discussion about how the policies, structure and culture of Wikipedia impact on the behaviour of its contributors. The conversations as a plenary and in smaller facilitated groups proved to be highly insightful and informative, and we are pulling together the notes from this session to inform our work on community health going forward. As an alternative to this workshop, several members went on a photography walk around the Old City in Bristol to capture some of the landmarks missing from Wikimedia Commons.

Awards

Lorna Campbell announced Wikimedia UK’s Partnership of the Year and Wikimedian of the Year, along with honourable mentions for both categories.

The Partnership of the Year Award went to Amnesty International for their collaboration with Wikimedia UK on the BRAVE campaign. This project – focused on women human rights defenders – saw 550 articles created or expanded across seven languages, as well as new relationships and partnerships between local Wikimedia groups and Amnesty sections. An ‘honourable mention’ in this Award category was given to The Dumphries Stonecarving Project, which celebrates the sandstone heritage of Dumfries. 

Wikimedian of the Year went to Dr. Jess Wade, whose work is making women in science more visible through the creation of a high number of biographies on Wikipedia about prominent women in STEM; and who has inspired others to do the same in science and other disciplines. Andrew Gray received an honourable mention for his extensive and valuable work on his Wikidata project focused on British politicians.

More details about the winners and honourable mentions can be found here.

Honorary members

Former Chair and outgoing trustee Michael Maggs introduced the charity’s first Honorary Memberships, awarded by the Board to those members who have contributed significantly to the progress of the chapter. These were presented to Carol Campbell and Greyham Dawes in recognition of their outstanding work as Chair of ARC and Treasurer of Wikimedia UK respectively, and we were especially pleased that Carol was able to make the journey to Bristol to accept her Honorary Membership. 

Thank you to everyone who made the AGM such an enjoyable day. You can find an online version of the Strategic Report that was in the delegate packs here, and a video about the day will be on wiki soon.

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Wikimedia UK is working hard to make sure that volunteers are at the heart of everything the charity does. The next step on this journey is the upcoming volunteer strategy day on Saturday 25 July.

The day is designed to develop a better understanding of how the charity works with its members and volunteer community to further the work of the Wikimedia movement.

There will be a short presentation, and discussions about our proposed structures and mechanisms for interacting with volunteers and engaging them in our work. This will be followed by discussions on the new proposed project planning process, designed to ensure we have ambitious and sustainable projects.
Please bring your ideas for projects and your ideas for how we should work with the community. We hope to have a productive day and finish with some actions for both Wikimedia UK and the community.

As an added incentive our CEO-elect, Lucy Crompton-Reid, will be dropping by to meet the community.

This is a great opportunity to have your say about how Wikimedia UK goes about its mission. We very much hope to see you there. Full details, including address and registration, can be found here. The volunteer strategy day is also followed by the charity’s AGM, so why not come along to both?

The post Have you signed up for our volunteer strategy day? appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

This post was written by Michael Maggs, Chair of Wikimedia UK

Wikimedia UK needs your help. We want to transform the way we work so that we can bring volunteering right into the heart of the charity.

We plan to:

• Establish a new volunteer engagement panel or steering group, focusing specifically on volunteering and volunteer engagement
• Embed members into our day-to-day decision making via a new evaluation panel
• Encourage the setting up of volunteer special-interest working groups to replace the existing non-board committees
• Set up cultural/GLAM and educational outreach expert advisory boards to advise the Wikimedia UK main board on high-level strategy
• Change our Articles of Association to allow volunteers to be appointed full members of board committees
• Provide more effective support for volunteers via the new project coordinator staff roles
• Move toward project-based working practices to improve efficiency and to enable better self-evaluation of our work

These draft plans follow on from the excellent feedback we received from our last Volunteer Strategy Gathering. They deliberately don’t attempt to answer all possible questions about implementation, as we think it best that both further questions and the answers to those questions should come out of collaborative discussions. The plans are not set in stone, and with the community’s help they can be improved, strengthened and fleshed out.

We would like your feedback, either online or in person at our next Volunteer Strategy Gathering on Saturday 25th July 2015, in London. For more information, see the links on the right of that page.

Feedback, comments and discussion are more than welcome on the discussion page, or you can email chairwikimedia.org.uk if you have feedback you would prefer not to make public.

To read the full details on wiki see here:  https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Volunteer_strategy_consultation_2015

The post Volunteering with Wikimedia UK: a call to action appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

This blog post was written by John Cummings, Wikimania support at Wikimedia UK and Harry Mitchell, Wikimedia UK volunteer.

Wikimania 2014 is a 2000+ person conference, unconference, festival, meetup, workshop, hackathon, and party, spread over five days in August 2014, preceded and followed by fringe events. It’s the official annual event of the Wikimedia movement, where you’ll discover all kinds of projects that people are making with wikis and open content, as well as meet the community that produced the most famous wiki of all, Wikipedia!

Attending Wikimania

The main event itself is held from the 8–10 August in and around The Barbican Centre in London, UK. All are welcome, whether you’re an expert, enthusiast, beginner or just curious! Early Bird Registration is available until June 15th, Single day tickets are £30, full conference and hackday tickets are £55, click here to register.

There are also a number of fringe events that are free to attend:

• 7–8 June Free Culture Weekend (this coming weekend, places are still available)
• 21–22 June Future of Education Workshop
• 5–6 July Open Data Weekend
• 19–20 July Open Scholarship Weekend
• Hackathon: 6–10 August 2014

There are a number of local Wikipedia meetups being organised locally, a member of the Wikimedia UK Wikimania team will be available at each one to answer questions.

Volunteering opportunities

There are many opportunities to get involved in Wikimania; we will need volunteers in the run-up to the conference and to help with the smooth running of Wikimania itself. For most tasks you don’t need to be a Wikipedia editor and you don’t need any experience – just a willingness to help! We need volunteers to:

• Talk to the public about Wikipedia
• Teach people to edit Wikipedia
• Moderate sessions (making sure the sessions run smoothly)
• Tweet about the day’s events and spread the word via other social media
• Video sessions and help with any technical issues
• Direct people to and around the venue and to be on-hand in the hotels
• Meet and greet speakers
• Assist attendees as they arrive into the UK
• Talk to the media
• Staff the registration desk
• Other general tasks to help with the smooth-running of the conference.

For volunteering opportunities at Wikimania please sign up here, for questions contact hera@wikimanialondon.org

Scholarships are available

If you’re based in the UK, or you’re a British citizen living abroad, and you would like financial support to attend Wikimania, Wikimedia UK may be able to provide you with a scholarship to help with your registration fee, or with the costs of travel and/or accommodation. Scholarship applications are open until the 15th June. For more details, including how to apply, please see this section on the Wikimedia UK water cooler.

For questions about Wikimedia UK scholarships please contact katie.chan@wikimedia.org.uk

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