Cornelia Parker to discuss Wikipedia-inspired Magna Carta artwork with Jimmy Wales

A detail from Magna Carta (An Embroidery)

This post was written by Wikimedia UK volunteer Emily Sørensen

On 15 June, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and artist Cornelia Parker will discuss the artwork Magna Carta (An Embroidery). This is a ticketed event, held at the British Library and led by their Chief Executive Roly Keating.

English sculptor and installation artist Cornelia Parker was commissioned to create the artwork Magna Carta (An Embroidery) in commemoration of the 800-year anniversary of Magna Carta. This extraordinary piece of artwork is a replica of the Wikipedia article on Magna Carta and made of pieces of fabrics embroidered by many people from across the UK.

Artwork contributors include lawyers, artists, barons, prisoners, among others, much in line with Wikipedia’s own emphasis that everyone can contribute as an editor of its articles. Jimmy Wales, lifelong Internet entrepreneur, and Cornelia Parker, one of Britain’s most inventive artists, will likely have a nuanced and thoughtful discussion from artistic, technological and historical perspectives.

With the Human Rights Act currently under scrutiny in Parliament, Parker’s piece could hardly have been publicised at a more poignant time. The discussion between Parker and Wales is therefore likely to cover aspects of democracy, human rights and the historical significance of Magna Carta in the context of our digital age as well as contemporary politics. The discussion is presented in association with the Ruskin School of Art.

Magna Carta (An Embroidery) is exhibited at the British Library until Monday 24 July 2015. The artwork is based on the Wikipedia article as it appeared on Magna Carta’s 799th anniversary in 2014. For full details of the event, including ticketing, see the event page on the British Library’s website.

Next steps for Scottish Residency

One of the workshops delivered by Sara

This post was written by Sara Thomas, Wikimedian in Residence, Museums Galleries Scotland

Three conference presentations, seven internal presentations, 22 Glasgow Museums’ staff trained to edit (that’s about 50% of the curatorial staff), one editathon of our own, three organised by other people, and three meetings of the Wiki Working Group. The last few months have been a bit busy.

My four month secondment as Wikimedian in Residence with Glasgow Museums has now finished, although I’m returning on Monday to speak to a group of senior staff about what we achieved, and what the project needs to keep moving forward now that I’ve gone. With it being such a short period of time, sustainability in the project has been a priority.

One of the main achievements of the residency was establishing the afore-mentioned Wiki Working Group, a group of curators and other staff who were trained to edit, and who are interested in realising the benefits of open knowledge in a museums context. They’ll look to find gaps on Wikipedia, and what they can do to fill them; organise events including further editathons; and continue to work towards a donation of images under an open license to Wiki Commons. The group is driven by Tracey MacDonald, one of the assistant curators from the (currently undergoing refurbishment into a multi-partner cultural hub, due to open in 2016) Kelvin Hall team, with whom I was embedded. You can read the minutes of the most recent meeting in my Summary & Reflections report here.

The model is one internal to Glasgow Museums, but which could be easily and successfully replicated in other organisations. It helps to lend both legitimacy and impetus to the project, acting as a focus for activity and longer term cultural change in favour of open knowledge. Huge thanks should go to the Kelvin Hall team and John Ferry, Glasgow Museums’ Digital and New Media Manager, for their help and support throughout the residency.

For the next eight months, I’m working nationally, using Museums Galleries Scotland’s network to engage Scotland’s museums in opening up their collections to the world, with a particular focus on the Recognised Collections. I’ll be offering training, advocacy, events, advice and general enthusiasm. Scotland has some incredible museums, some amazing collections, and massive potential for this GLAM-Wiki partnership.

In the meantime… if you’re in or near Glasgow on the 18th June, swing by the sixth Glasgow Wikimeet!

Volunteering with Wikimedia UK: a call to action

The most recent volunteer strategy gathering

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:

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 chairatwikimedia.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

Speaking at the Managing Online Reputation conference

Detail from one of the presentation slides

This post was written by Stevie Benton, head of external relations at Wikimedia UK

Over the last few months I’ve been receiving a spate of telephone calls over from comms and PR folks who were looking for advice on how to engage with Wikipedia to try and ensure that articles about their executives and companies were accurate and up to date.

Understanding that this is a live issue for the comms industry, I made contact with the editorial team at Corp Comms magazine which is, as the name suggests, aimed at in-house communications professionals. I suggested that I could write an article for the magazine giving some hints and tips on how Wikipedia works, how the community works and the best ways to engage. The editor, Helen Dunne, agreed, and so a feature has appeared in this month’s edition (and will appear online next month).

As well as the article, I was invited to speak at a conference on Managing Online Reputation, which happened on 20 May in London. I’ve spoken publicly at events before and never been especially nervous, but when the audience is made up of 70 or so of your peers – very senior comms professionals from some of the UK’s biggest brands – it’s a different thing entirely, especially as many people spoke to me to let me know that my session was their main reason for attending. As I was speaking at the end of the event, it gave me plenty of time to reflect not only on the calibre of the earlier speakers, but to begin to get nervous. Thankfully, the nerves passed and the presentation went well.

Following the presentation I was part of a panel which included Paul Wilkinson, long-time Wikipedian, and Neil Brown of the RICS, who has recently been engaging with the Wikipedia community. We took plenty of intelligent and thoughtful questions from the room and the audience went away with a really good understanding of how Wikipedia works and how to effectively engage with the volunteer editors. Most of all, they understood that under no circumstances should they edit about themselves, their brands, products or executives and to always use the talk page.

Several people got in touch after the session and asked for further help and guidance, which I am in the process of making available. On the whole this was a rewarding experience for me personally, but also very worthwhile for the charity. The fact that there was great willingness from the audience to learn how to respect Wikipedia’s rules and editing community is very encouraging – and some may even become Wikipedians themselves.

To get a sense of how the event went, visit Twitter and search for the hashtag #CCConf.

Booking open for Wikipedia Science Conference

Photo shows the front of a large building at night
The Wellcome Building, host to the Wikipedia Science Conference

This post was written by Dr Martin Poulter, Wikipedia Science Conference lead and Wikimedia UK volunteer

One striking theme in last year’s Wikimania conference in London was the enthusiasm for Wikipedia and Wikidata from scientists, publishers, and funders. Wikimedia projects are now seen not just as platforms to feed public curiosity about science, but as new ways to share data, measure impact, contextualise new research, and even to write papers.

That energy and enthusiasm inspired Wikimedia UK and the Wellcome Trust to create a new conference, exploring Open Access, wiki communities, and the scientific process. The Wikipedia Science Conference will take place in the Wellcome Collection Conference Centre on Euston Road in London on Wednesday 2nd and Thursday 3rd of September.

The keynote speakers are Dame Wendy Hall of the University of Southampton and Peter Murray-Rust of the University of Cambridge. Respectively from computer science and from chemistry, they are both committed enthusiasts for scientific data being available freely and openly on the web.

International speakers will include the Research and Data Lead of the Wikimedia Foundation, Dario Taraborelli; Daniel Mietchen talking about integrating Wikipedia and Wikidata with scholarly publication; and Stefan Kasberger, a Austrian social scientist who uses Wikipedia as a data source.

A theme through the whole programme is how, in a world of open access and open knowledge, we can all take practical steps to promote the widest benefits of science. This can involve building links from Wikipedia to the best peer-reviewed research or using open-access material to build reference and education materials.

The conference is more than just its programme. A big block of the second day is deliberately unallocated, with the whole conference centre available. This “unconference” is a chance for impromptu talks, discussions, and skills-sharing. Participants can bring a laptop and take their first steps in wiki editing or creating new tools that extract and use free data.

All registered attendees are invited to a wine reception on the evening of Wednesday 2nd, in Wellcome’s unique and inspiring Reading Room. This is thanks to the generosity of the Royal Society of Chemistry, whose Wikipedian In Residence is also giving a session.

For those who want more chances to delve into code, a hackathon on Saturday 5th September will create and improve tools for the benefit of scientists and Wikipedians. This is hosted by Wikimedia UK and financially supported by CrossRef.

The commitment of partner organisations and volunteers has kept costs very small. Booking is available online now at a price of just £29.

Feedback from the Wikimedia Conference

The photo shows a man and a woman, both seated, having a conversation
Alice Wiegand and Patricio Llorente at the Wikimedia Conference

This post was written by Stuart Prior, Wikimedia UK Project Co-ordinator

Berlin, this year’s host city for the Wikimedia Conference, is full of sparrows. Which for me seem a strange and exotic bird these days given their sad and unexplained decline in the UK, but it’s another thing Germany still has that we seem to have lost here in the UK (along with efficient public transport and affordable housing!).

It certainly makes for a pleasant visit, and I was there to attend the annual gathering of the Wikimedia Foundation and Affiliate organisations, organised by Wikimedia Deutschland and held at the Tagesspiegel offices.

The three day event (with some pre-conference meetings) is designed for people starting, or already involved with established, Wikimedia Affiliate organisations, to meet and share knowledge and experiences about how best to facilitate the work of the movement. Over 50 organisations and countries were represented at the conference, from usergroups, thematic organisations and chapters.

I attended some great sessions on programme management, fundraising and events, though the programme covered finance, governance, volunteer support and various other activities that we all need to understand. But a lot of the benefit was meeting other affiliates and exploring ways we can help each other.

As an example, Wikimedia Netherlands has helped Wikimedia Poland with access to content on the Battle of Arnhem, which involved numerous Poles but which Poland itself has little record or artifacts from. This is just a hint of what cooperation can do, and something that the UK could really achieve in with our strong cultural institutions and diverse society.

Lila Tretikov, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, gave a talk about their strategic direction, emphasising the fact that the Foundation cannot achieve the goals of the movement on its own, and that local organisations like us are a valuable asset for effecting change on the ground.

Additionally, a lot of focus was given to follow up on the conference, and how momentum built can be carried on at Wikimania 2015. Ivan Martinez and Cornelius Kibelka gave a good presentation about just this.

I myself will be trying to carry on those conversations and expand those ideas in the coming months, and prevent this just being a weekend of ideas when it can be a starting point for actions.

Restructure and CEO recruitment update

Statement by D’Arcy Myers, interim chief executive

Following on from my statement on 9th March, in which I explained that the board had asked me to undertake a review of the charity’s structure, I am now able to give you an update.

The period since March has been one of active review, though out of respect for individual staff and to ensure an objective and fair process we have not been providing a public narrative. I can however now announce that the staff discussions, review, appeal periods and subsequent restructure have just been concluded.

In order to ensure that the charity is best resourced to deliver impactful projects we have made a number of staff role changes, and the total staff headcount has been reduced from 14 to 9. Initially, 8 positions were proposed, but following full discussions with the staff it has been decided that we do actually require 9. The new organogram can be seen here. The staff page will be updated to reflect the new staffing over the next two weeks.

It is always regrettable to have to restructure in a way that loses staff who have contributed much to the charity. We thank the departing staff and wish them all the best. If anyone would like to make personal contact, please note that staff emails and accounts on the UK wiki will continue to be active until month end.

I am confident that with the new structure we can be more responsive to new ideas, bringing volunteering into the heart of our projects, and I would encourage you to get involved.

Another change in the staffing of the charity is the quest to find our new CEO. We are looking for an ambitious CEO who will provide strategic leadership and supportive management to volunteers and staff alike. They will be working to increase our profile and impact with our partners, engage with the volunteer community and develop our programme activity. A major part of this leadership will be the development of new income streams. We have retained the charity recruiters Prospectus to manage the recruitment process. You can view the recruitment pack here.

We expect to make an appointment in early July, and until such time as the new CEO is in post and ready to take over I am honoured to be leading the charity.

D’Arcy Myers, interim CEO

 

Mediwikis – a collaborative medical learning platform based on Mediawiki

This guest post was written by Stuart Maitland, Founder, Mediwikis

Mediwikis is a platform built on Mediawiki that supports the medical learning community in the UK. Medical students use Mediwikis to collaborate and share best practice, ideas, and learning strategies at their university, and to tap into the knowledge of students at other universities.

Medical students are in a perfect position to share the examples of best practice occurring in their institution – as part of their teaching they are often taught by a wide range of experts in their respective fields, and quickly have to build learning strategies for remembering large amounts of information. By enabling students to share the information and resources taught at their university on an open and collaborative platform, those resources can be shared and compared with students at other universities across the world.

Mediwikis’ enthusiastic editors tell us they contribute information to Mediwikis to “pay it forwards” to the next generation of medical students, and feel pride of being part of such a community. They feel ownership and academic self-esteem for contributing to the project and producing something that other students would find helpful.

We have been working with Wikimedia UK to realise this goal of making the information students write open and accessible to all. Our previous license, the CC Non-Commercial No-Derivatives, was certainly too restrictive for students to reuse the information in building their own resources, and the chapter has helped us to understand the benefits of open licence, and helped us in changing our license.

As Mediwikis is introduced to more universities, we begin to see the diversity of education methods for medicine in the UK and overseas. I hope that medical students everywhere will be able to utilise the strengths of certain universities and their peers across the country.

To find out more about Mediwikis, please visit us at www.mediwikis.com

Wiki Club: using Wikipedia as platform to shout about Scotland’s Heritage

This article was first published in Archaeology Scotland’s membership magazine and is reproduced with kind permission. Written by Doug Rocks-Macqueen, Cara Jones, Jeff Sanders and Leigh Stork.

We all use (and love!) Wikipedia, but we are sometimes frustrated by the quality of the content on the Scottish Archaeology pages. We decided to do something about it and in Spring 2014, the Edinburgh Archaeology Wiki Club was born! Our aim is to meet up once a month and gradually improve the content of Wikipedia pages on Scottish archaeology. As archaeologists, we are regularly required with our work to go and visit archaeological sites in Scotland and are able to take lots of photographs that we are then able to upload. We are also familiar with a lot of the sites, are used to dealing with archaeological information, and have access to good data. We felt that we couldn’t complain about the quality of Wikipedia if we didn’t do something about it ourselves!

However, let’s go back to our first meeting. We were fortunate that Wikipedia provided two Wikipedians-in-residences (Pat Hadley and Ally Crockford) for our initial meet up. They were able to supply us with instructions, do’s and don’ts, and guide us through our initial steps of editing. Both have become a point of contact and support for our group, helping us to tighten up our wiki-editing skills. It is worth noting that (at the time of writing) there are currently two Wikipedians-in-residences in Scotland, and they are here to help you! One great aspect of Wikipedia is how supportive it is as an organisation. One of us (Doug) was funded by Wikipedia to go to the 2014 Wikimania in London and was able to bring back new skills and knowledge to share with the group. Wikipedia takes its contributors seriously and helps support them when they can.

So why do we do this? Well, for one, we are fairly like-minded people who believe passionately that knowledge should be accessible to all, and one way to help disseminate this knowledge is by using an established digital platform (Wikipedia) that is utilised by so many. Wikipedia is one of the top ten visited websites in the world – think about how you use Wikipedia in your daily life – for example to plan your holiday (“ahh I can see that there is an Neolithic Chambered Cairn near us”) or to find out more about your favourite TV programme (“hmmm how accurate really is 10,000BC?”).  Go a step further and think about how you could possibly use Wikipedia to encourage visitors to actually visit your local heritage, sometimes by simply adding a photograph (“my goodness – those ramparts look amazing, I must go see that site”).

How easy is it to edit Wikipedia? There are strict rules involved with editing or creating Wikipedia pages – you have to declare any potential conflict of interests on your biographical page, and (when adding text) you must also reference reputable source material. That said, it is actually an easy thing to do and if you get stuck there is a whole army of online advisors out there who are more than happy to help. It is also a fun thing to do once a month – whether you are a group of friends or perhaps a community heritage group.

What is next for our group? Well, we are still learning, but as a group (and some of us are better than others!) we are learning together (i.e. Cara takes a lot of photographs on her travels…Doug helps upload them!). We have two fringe events scheduled at national conferences this year where we hope to help other archaeologists engage with Wikipedia and we have also had enquiries through social media from other archaeologists keen to create a Wiki Club in their area. Watch this space…or rather, Wikipedia page.

Go further

Check out one of our earlier Wikipedia entries on Leckie Broch – can you help improve it?

You can learn more about the Wikipedian-in-residence project at http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedian_in_Residence

See Doug Rocks-Macqueen blog (www.dougsarchaeology.wordpress.com) for several articles on Archaeology and Wikipedia.

If you would like to learn more about what we do or if you would to set up a Wiki Club in your area, please get in touch with Cara on twitter @carajones82

Looking ahead to April

Editathons in action

March has raced by, and while April is nearly upon us Wikimedia UK has a programme of events for everyone.

The month kicks off with a Wiki Hour of Power at the University of Edinburgh students, staff, and academics are invited to spend their lunch hour editing Wikipedia. It’s a monthly event, and the last one coincided with International Women’s Day.

Editathons are a great way to get together with other people to improve Wikipedia as a team and learn how to edit. So there are events at the University of Lancaster, the National Library of Wales (not once but twice!), and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

There are five meetups scheduled this month across Leeds (12th April), London (12th April), Oxford (19th April), Edinburgh (22 April), and Manchester (26 April). Most take place on the weekends, except for the one in Edinburgh which is on a Wednesday. It’s an opportunity to meet other Wikimedians. There is a full list of upcoming meetups so you can find one near you, and if there isn’t one perhaps it’s time to start one yourself!

For those of you with a GLAMorous side, GLAM-Wiki 2015 organised by Wikimedia Netherlands takes place in The Hague in the middle of the month. Closer to home the GLAM Committee will be discussing all things related to Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums on 21 April. Join the conversation to learn about what the charity does in this area.

On top of all that there is training available for the GLAM upload tool, helping you get to grips with mass uploads. The tool underpins some of the charity’s fantastic work, such as uploads from the National Library of Scotland (look, here’s a castle). Two dates are available, but if you’re interested and can make either session leave a note at the foot of the page.

We hope to see you at our events in April, but most importantly of all enjoy editing!