Page 30 – WMUK

Wikipedia receives Spain’s Princess of Asturias Award for International Cooperation

This post was originally written by Katherine Maher for the Wikimedia Foundation’s blog and can be found here.

The Princess of Asturias Foundation has announced that it is awarding Wikipedia the 2015 Princess of Asturias Award for International Cooperation. The Awards recognize exemplary cultural, scientific and social achievements.

“On behalf of our global community of Wikimedians, we are deeply honored to accept this prestigious award,” said Jan-Bart de Vreede, Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees. “The Princess of Asturias Awards recognize achievements and organizations that celebrate and advance our shared human heritage. As a collective project of shared human knowledge, we are honored Wikipedia has been recognized today.”

Presented in eight different categories ranging from Arts to International Cooperation, the Awards are considered to be amongst the most prestigious honours in the world, especially in the Spanish-speaking world.

“Wikipedia is an incredible project that has been created by millions of people from around the world. We are honored to be recognized in the category of international cooperation, which is at the heart of our mission,” said Lila Tretikov, executive director at the Wikimedia Foundation. “This award honors those volunteers—the editors, photographers, writers, and developers—who make Wikipedia possible.”

Wikipedia is read by nearly half a billion people every month, making it one of the most popular knowledge resources in the world. From its humble beginnings nearly fifteen years ago, it now offers more than 35 million articles in 288 languages—including a number of indigenous languages—all written by volunteers from around the globe.

According to the jury Wikipedia is an “important example of international, democratic, open and participatory cooperation—to which thousands of people of all nationalities contribute selflessly—that has managed to make universal knowledge available to everyone along similar lines to those achieved by the encyclopedic spirit of the 18th century.”

“Cooperation is what Wikipedia is all about, and it is a tremendous honor to be recognized by the Princess of Asturias Awards,” said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. “I hope this inspires more people to become involved in the mission to share in the sum of all knowledge with the world.”

Previous recipients of the Princess of Asturias Award for International Cooperation include the Fulbright Program, the International Red Cross, the World Health Organization, Al Gore, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and others. A full list can be found on Wikipedia.

The awards ceremony will take place in Oviedo, Spain, on the 23rd of October, under the presidency of H.M. King Felipe VI of Spain. The prize consists of €50,000 and a sculpture by Joan Miró.

The 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta

This post was written by User:Rodw and User:Hchc2009

Everyone knows something about the Magna Carta. Wikipedia’s article about the medieval charter has existed since January 2002, when User:F. Lee Horn began a text on what he described as a “landmark document in English history, as well as in the history of democracy”. Over the years the article grew and matured, via over 5,000 edits, until in November 2014 this article in the Observer highlighted the forthcoming 800th anniversary of the events of 1215, predicting a surge in interest by the public, schools and the media. As a result several discussions started on the article’s talk page about what was needed to make the piece a comprehensive, reliable, high quality reference work for the worldwide users of Wikipedia.

A process of collaborative editing took place over the next few months, with User:Merlinme, User:GrindtXX, User:Hchc2009 and User:Rodw making multiple contributions, although the editing and discussion on the talk page involved many more. Along the way there were extensive discussions about which were the highest quality academic sources to draw upon, getting the balance of the language right on the most sensitive issues, and how to best present the complex details of the medieval legal terms. External help arrived in the form of the British Library, who released some beautiful images of some of the documents, and Hereford Cathedral, who spotted a long standing mistake in part of the article, prompting a fresh flurry of research and discussions. More crowd-sourced assistance emerged through the Guild of Copy Editors‘s User:Jonesey95, who improved much of the prose. The article was nominated as a good article and reviewed by User:Tim riley, finally passing on 30th January this year.

The national and international interest in Magna Carta has been reflected in the readership of the refreshed article, which has received as many as 10,213 hits a day in recent weeks, which equates to over 1 million page views per year. Wikipedia’s 10,000-word article is one of the very few fully referenced, rigorous, general purpose overviews of the charter, complementing specialist academic sites such as the Magna Carta Project and those of museums and cathedrals. With a number of new specialist studies being published in 2015, the article will inevitably require updating during the coming year to keep abreast of the academic literature, and may potentially reach featured article status – but that is one of the wonders of the wiki: anyone can help by editing it!

UK at risk of losing Freedom of Panorama

Every day, millions of Europeans are breaking copyright law. Due to an obscure rule known as Freedom of Panorama, those innocent snapshots of modern buildings you’ve taken in countries such as France and Belgium are breaches of copyright. While the UK has this freedom, we are at risk of losing it in the ongoing copyright reform negotiations taking place in the European Parliament.

A report on copyright reform by Julia Reda MEP is attempting to harmonise EU copyright laws and to introduce UK-style freedom of panorama across the EU. In a statement in favour of common sense, the report calls for the Parliament to: “ensure that the use of photographs, video footage or other images of works which are permanently located in public places are permitted.”

However, there are a number of MEPs attempting to introduce a non-commercial clause into the freedom of panorama rules which would mean that freedom of panorama is useless. In some cases it would mean that posting your holiday snaps on Facebook or using them to illustrate Wikipedia articles is illegal.

“Many of us have cameras and computers built into our phones,” said Michael Maggs, Chair of Wikimedia UK. “Digital photography and technological improvements make it easy to share our images online. This non-commercial exception to freedom of panorama not only prevents Europeans from sharing their content, it removes existing freedoms from UK citizens.”

In the UK and other countries, such as Germany, the right of freedom of panorama is protected, so those photos you’ve taken in public spaces are fine. But other countries such as tourist hotspots France and Greece, do not have an equivalent right. There, any unapproved photograph of a modern public building is an automatic infringement of the architect’s copyright in the building design. Taking and uploading your own photos of those buildings is unlawful unless approved in writing by the copyright holder.

It becomes even stranger in some cases. For example, you can share a photo of the Eiffel Tower because of its age – but only if it is taken during the day. If the photo is at night, the lighting is considered a separate installation and falls foul of Freedom of Panorama.

Worryingly, it’s not just holiday snaps where this becomes an issue. Wikipedia, a website many of us use every day, cannot even use these images for free educational purposes.

“The problem we have today is that many Wikipedia articles about buildings and monuments cannot be appropriately illustrated when the structure is located in a country without Freedom of Panorama,” Maggs said. “It’s important that the European Parliament takes care of freedom of panorama. We support the very long-standing right of UK citizens and visitors to these shores to take photographs of buildings in public places and to do what they want with their own photos without having to seek permission from any third party commercial rights holder.”

The current European Parliament review of copyright is ongoing, with reforms expected to follow soon.

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

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

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

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

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

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