This post was written by Stuart Prior, Fundraising Assistant
I recently spent the weekend at Mozfest, the annual Mozilla conference, held in Greenwich.
The aim of going was to find out how Mozilla’s community worked, to make project and fundraising contacts in the open sector and, after my role in organising our own community conference, Wikimania 2014, to see how they did it.
Also, to see and support in any way I could, the Open Coalition work that Bekka Kahn was doing there in the form of running the Community Building track of the conference.
It was both very similar and very different. There were more workshops and discussions than talks, which was refreshing, if a little intimidating. The content was often very technical and platform based, and not being a Mozillan, unfamiliar to me.
But, what felt exactly the same was the sense of community and optimism. The fact that people were friendly and open to talking to you, and I spent a lot of time explaining Wikimedia projects and how the movement worked, and met some interesting people with some interesting projects.
Moreover, Mozilla’s focus on creating an open web, and on encouraging digital literacy and engaging young people with the Open Source movement is invaluable to a free and open society. With serious concerns about online monopolies and a restricted, highly commodified and profoundly un-free internet, this is increasingly important and something we in the Wikimedia movement should all be supporting.
On 23rd October Wikimedia UK board member Alastair McCapra took part in a debate at the Cambridge Union about the right to be forgotten.
The panel debated a motion that supported the right to be forgotten (RTBF). Alastair spoke against the motion, which was narrowly defeated.
The RTBF is a complicated issue and arguments both in favour and in opposition are numerous. The panel reflected a range of interests and included academics, campaigners and an MP.
Given his position on the Wikimedia UK board, and his role as chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, Alastair is in a unique position to offer an informed view of the RTBF. He has written a comprehensive report on the debate which clearly summarises both sides of the argument which can be read here.
Alastair said: “The Google judgement has taken the existing principle of a right to be forgotten and turned it, in the European Union at least, into a general right to hide behind broken links (RTHBBL). There are problems with the right to hide, and there are even worse problems if we move on from that to a real right to be forgotten.”
This post was written by Rachel Beaumont of the Royal Opera House and published here. Used with kind permission. You can also contact Rachel via her Wikipedia user page here.
Our recent event brought together ballet fans with Wikipedia experts to improve the online encyclopedia’s articles on choreographer Kenneth MacMillan.
When was the last time you used Wikipedia? With the online encyclopedia receiving more than 6 billion page views a month in more than 250 languages, ‘very recently’ is likely to be your response. Wikipedia provides a unique way for almost anyone anywhere to find out more about the world. And it is almost entirely the work of volunteers, dubbed ‘Wikipedians’.
But because the content is determined by volunteers’ interests, Wikipedia’s coverage of certain subjects is better than others. Dance is one of those areas that needs improving, which is why the Royal Opera House teamed up with Wikimedia UK to host our second ‘editathon‘ – an event bringing together ballet fans with experienced Wikipedia editors to work together on improving the resource, and so share our passion with a wider audience.
Last year our focus was Frederick Ashton, Founder Choreographer of The Royal Ballet – so this year it only made sense to look at the life and works of Kenneth MacMillan. MacMillan was one of the greatest choreographers of the 20th century, and a key figure in the history of The Royal Ballet.
We were hugely lucky to have with us two key MacMillan experts: Jann Parry, dance critic and author of Different Drummer, the definitive MacMillan biography; and Dame Monica Mason, former Director of The Royal Ballet, who created the first of her many roles for MacMillan aged just 20. With them were ROH archivists Laura Brown and Catriona Cannon, who presented historical items from the ROH Collections.
For Cheryl Agyei, ROH Student Ambassador at UWE, the event was an ideal way to find out more about her favourite choreographer and the workings of Wikipedia: ‘Before I knew it the day was over and I had not only edited my first article on the dancer Tetsuya Kumakawa but had also created one on Michael Coleman, who created a role inElite Syncopations – the first ballet I ever watched, and which had me hooked from the start.’
The highlights for dance writer Laura Dodge were: ‘Monica Mason and Jann Parry’s personal tales of MacMillan, including about his early rehearsals with Darcey Bussell, the content of his personal diaries and his attitude to creating ballets. It was fascinating to hear from two real MacMillan experts and get an insight into the choreographer’s personality behind the scenes.’
John Cummings is not one to shy away from large-scale projects. Fresh from helping build one of the largest Wikipedia endeavours ever – converting the Welsh town of Monmouth into the world’s first “Wikipedia town” – John moved on to become the Wikimedian in Residence at the Natural History Museum and Science Museum (NHM).
His upbringing has played a key role in developing his interests, shooing him onto a path towards the role. “I’ve always had an interest in natural history,” he says. “I didn’t study science at university, but my mum’s a garden designer, I grew up in the countryside… This is one of those roles that probably doesn’t happen that often.”
He held the role at the museums in South Kensington between 2013 and 2014, and helped to promote a culture of openness there as well as exploring what the institutions could do with Wikipedia.
One major aspect of this was looking into content donations, and how they could be beneficial for the museums in promoting their content.
“One of the main ways I encouraged content release under an open licence was just to tell people how Wikimedia projects are made and how many people see the information. It’s amazing – it’s such a wide audience and not just in Britain.
“You can reach people in lots of languages, and amazing projects like Wikipedia Zero [a project to allow free access to Wikipedia in developing countries] give people access to information they can’t get in another way.”
John says that working with the museums provided an avenue to improving Wikipedia by simply tapping into the tremendous resources there.
“It was a wonderful opportunity not only to engage with the public,” he says, “but also with research scientists who have a specialist contribution to make to Wikipedia, built over a whole lifetime of knowledge.
John Cummings at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington Photo: User:Rock drum, CC-BY-SA 4.0
“The thing about the Natural History Museum is you work there because you care about the natural environment, and people are very willing to spend their time educating the public,” John adds. “Wikipedia is just one more avenue for that, but the great thing about Wikipedia is that it has such a large audience, so that contribution can have a wide impact.”
One major event John helped to organise was with the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the non-ministerial department tasked with collecting and collating statistics on various aspects of politics and life in England and Wales.
“Working at the museums gives you a lot of opportunity to connect with other organisations,” John explains. “One of those was the ONS. They produce all their content under the Open Government Licence which is compatible with Wikimedia projects.
“They produce wonderful infographics about all sorts of subjects that help people easily understand complicated statistics, and we’ve been able to put them straight onto Wikipedia with no change of license, it’s completely compatible.”
He is also keen to take ONS data and feed it into Wikidata, a relatively new Wikimedia project focused on open data collection. “This would allow the ONS to reach a wide audience in many languages very easily,” he says.
This attitude of helping to promote the museums’ work to as many people as possible has been the driving factor behind John’s time in the role. He argues the interaction has given them a chance to reach millions by learning to tap into the global reach of Wikipedia.
“Having a Wikimedian in Residence is a great way to engage with a wider audience that is potentially quite hard to engage with without this kind of bridge into the movement,” he says. “Wikipedia is not the easiest thing to edit in a lot of ways. It’s great to have the understanding of licensing, the rules around conflicts of interest, and other guidelines that the Wikimedia movement has.
“It’s really helpful to have someone internally within the organisation, who’s easily accessible, who’s able to get people started with engagement,” he continues.
“It’s like learning to ride a bike or play an instrument – it’s hard to start off with, but once you get going you kind of feel your way through… it takes practice.”
The position paper has already been shared with key members of the European Commission. The main recommendations from the paper are that:
The Commission should clarify the European copyright framework by harmonising legislation and creating a single EU Copyright Title
The Commission should ensure everyone has the liberty to freely use and share images taken in public spaces by introducing Freedom of Panorama universally (currently optional under Directive 2001/29/EC Article 5 Point 3.H)
The Commission should ensure that all works created by officials within the EU administration and institutions are open for use and re-use by everyone. Such works should hence not be subject to copyright protection.
The Commission should re-balance the current culturally and economically harmful mismatch between public commons and private property and close the “20th century gap” by shortening copyright terms to the minimum term possible under existing international treaties and conventions.
The FKAGEU is a grouping of European Wikimedia chapters and other open knowledge organisations from throughout the EU. The work has largely been co-ordinated by Dimitar Dimitrov, the movement’s Wikimedian in Brussels.
This landmark paper has been signed by 33 parties from 17 European countries, of which 16 are Wikimedia chapters, thematic organisations or user groups. You can see a full list of signing partners here.
There has been an interesting story circulating on the internet this week about a young Scottish amateur footballer, Fraser Hobday, who had a longer Wikipedia article than Brazilian World Cup star Neymar. The article has since been nominated for deletion by the Wikipedia community and this case raises some interesting questions.
How do you decide what goes into an encyclopedia? It’s a tricky question and one Wikipedia and its millions of editors have debated since the site was created in 2001. What they settled on was the concept that to be included, a topic had to be ‘notable’. In short, a subject needs to “have gained sufficiently significant attention by the world at large and over a period of time”.
In many cases ‘notability’ is clear cut. Leaders of countries should obviously be included in an encyclopedia and will have innumerable people writing about them. The chances are your next door neighbour doesn’t have this kind of coverage. What happens when opinions differ on a subject’s ‘notability’? A discussion is opened, and Wikipedia’s writers voice their opinions.
We hope that by teaching people how to edit we can lessen the cases in which new editors find their articles deleted. Sometimes articles which should be included are deleted because an inexperienced editor is not fully aware of how ‘notability’ is measured. What Wikipedia looks for is independent third-party sources. Newspaper articles and books are great examples.
By and large, the people who fall foul of the ‘notability’ guideline are newer, less experienced editors. They may spend a great deal of time and effort crafting their article only to see it deleted. No matter how valid the reasons, and how understanding the people discussing the article are, feelings can get hurt. This is especially true when people are writing about people, especially as sometimes people end up writing about themselves. If you write about yourself or someone you know – though Wikipedia actively discourages this – it can feel insulting to be told that you are not notable. It is important to keep in mind that the discussions are not about the value or worth of a person, or whether they ‘deserve’ an article, but whether it’s the kind of thing which belongs in an encyclopedia.
A lot of people learn what goes into Wikipedia through trial and error. Wikimedia UK is a UK registered charity, and one of its branches of activity is training people how to edit. In part this involves the how-to aspect of these are the buttons you press to make changes. That’s the easy part. The more nuanced aspect is helping people understand what goes into an article, and what articles go into Wikipedia!
Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, but it helps to have someone friendly and knowledgeable on hand. If you’re interested in editing but haven’t taken the plunge yet, why not take a look at the charity’s event page and see what’s going on in your area?
And what of Fraser Hobday? There is a specific notability guideline for footballers – to be considered notable they must have played or managed in a strictly professional league, or played or managed a senior international. We hope that one day Fraser’s career will reach that point and his article can be reinstated. We wish him the very best of luck.
A description of a new species of Brazilian Paraportanus, uploaded by Open Access Media Importer
This post was written by Dr Martin Poulter, Wikimedia UK volunteer and Wikipedian
As part of Open Access Week, I’d like to explore some overlaps between Open Access and what we do in Wikimedia, and end with an announcement that I’m very excited about.
We who write Wikipedia do not expect readers to believe something just because Wikipedia says so. We cite our sources and hope that readers will follow the links and check for themselves. This is a kind of continuous quality control: if readers verify Wikipedia’s sources, then bias and misrepresentation will be winnowed out. However, we do not yet live in that ideal world. A huge amount of research is still hidden behind “paywalls” that charge startlingly high amounts per paper.
Here in the UK, a lot of progress is being made in opening up research, thanks to the policies of major funding bodies including Research Councils UK and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. This is a difficult cultural change for many researchers, but Wikipedia and its sister sites show that a totally open-access publishing system can work. These sites also provide platforms that give that greatest exposure and reuse for open access materials.
Open Access in the Broadest Sense
There is much more to open access than being able to read papers without paying. The OA agenda is about getting the full benefits of research, removing technical or legal barriers that restrict progress. You may sometimes hear about “Budapest” OA, referring to the 2002 declaration of the Budapest Open Access Initiative which said that open access would “accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.”
This guest blog is an interview with Bekka Kahn, Open Coalition Project Co-ordinator, and Beatrice Martini of Open Knowledge. They will be leading a track at MozFest about community building – a great fit for the Open Coalition. It was originally published on the Mozilla Webmaker blog here
What excites you most about your track?
In the early days of the web, Mozilla pioneered community building efforts together with other open source projects. Today, the best practices have changed and there are many organisations to learn from. Our track aims to convene these practitioners and join forces to create a future action roadmap for the Open Web movement.
Building and mobilising community action requires expertise and understanding of both tools and crowd. The relationships between stakeholders need to be planned with inclusivity and sustainability in mind.
Our track has the ambitious aim to tell the story about this powerful and groundbreaking system. We hope to create the space where both newcomers and experienced community members can meet, share knowledge, learn from each other, get inspired and leave the festival feeling empowered and equipped with a plan for their next action.
The track will feature participatory sessions (there’s no projector is sight!), an ongoing wall-space action and a handbook writing sprint. In addition to this, participants and passers-by will be encouraged to answer the question: “What’s the next action, of any kind/ size/ location, you plan to take for the Open Web movement?”
Who are you working with to make this track happen?
We’ve been very excited to have the opportunity to collaborate with many great folks, old friends and new, to build such an exciting project. The track was added to just a few weeks before the event, so it’s very emergent—just the way we like it!
We believe that collaboration between communities is what can really fuel the future of the Open Web movement. We put this belief into practice through our curatorship structure, as well as the planning of the track’s programme, which is a combination of great ideas that were sent through the festival’s Call for Proposals and invitations we made to folks we knew would have had the ability to blow people’s mind with 60 minutes and a box of paper and markers at their disposal.
How can someone who isn’t able to attend MozFest learn more or get involved in this topic?
Anyone will be welcome to connect with us in (at least) three ways.
We’ll have a dedicated hashtag to keep all online/remote Community conversations going: follow and engage with #MozFestCB on your social media plaftorm of choice, we’ll record a curated version of the feed on our Storify.
We’ll also collect all notes, resources of documentation of anything that will happen in and around the track on our online home.
The work to create a much awaited Community Building Handbook will be kicked off at MozFest and anyone who thinks could enrich it with useful learnings is invited to join the writing effort, from anywhere in the world.
Ada Lovelace, considered to be the world’s first programmer
This post was written by Sarah Staniforth, Wikipedian and Wikimedia UK volunteer
Tuesday 14th was this year’s Ada Lovelace Day, with people around the world dedicating events to Ada Lovelace, the mathematician who is often described as having been the world’s first computer programmer, as well as other women in science.
Volunteers from Wikimedia UK took part in the festivities by hosting a women in science-themed editathon at the University of Oxford (specifically at Banbury St IT Services, a boon for those without laptops). Being a woman who is interested in addressing the deficit of females working on Wikimedia projects (around 90% of Wikipedia editors are men) and in STEM fields, I thought it’d be good to come along and help out with the event.
The afternoon began with an introduction by Oxford computer scientist Ursula Martin, followed by a training session to familiarize all attendees with the basics of editing Wikipedia. One special surprise during the tea break was an Ada Lovelace cake! The break was followed by the body of the editathon. Using the reference books provided , attendees were encouraged to work on the pages of Oxford-related women in science including Rosa Beddington, Marian Dawkins, Dorothy Hodgkin, and Louise Johnson. Before I knew it, it was the end of the editathon, which was unfortunate as I’d like to have stayed for longer! It was a pleasure to meet other Wikimedians at the event, as well as to see people without prior editing experience get involved.
Hopefully there’ll be more (and longer) get-togethers devoted to improving Wikipedia coverage of women in science, technology, maths, and engineering very soon!
A 19th century painting of Monk Bar, York – just one of the diverse range of images donated during the residency
This post was written by Pat Hadley and Daria Cybulska and was written with excerpts from the final case study report
With three large, historically-important museums in their care York Museums Trust (YMT) have overwhelmingly rich and diverse collections – an incredibly exciting range of opportunities to work with Wikipedia.
From October 2013 to April 2014 York Museums Trust (YMT) hosted Pat Hadley as a Wikipedian in Residence in partnership with Wikimedia UK. The project offered Wikimedia UK a chance to work with a regionally important institution with internationally significant collections. Further weight was lent by YMT’s potential to affect several institutions in the area. Recently Pat has written up a case study for this cooperation, which gives a chance to reflect on what has been done in the six months.
Looking back on the project from the perspective of Wikimedia UK, there were several outstanding achievements:
● Content improvement. Several of the Trust’s collections were targeted after consultation with the curators. Over 400 high quality images were delivered to Commons, many have contributed to the quality of Wikimedia projects. Some of the collections were previously hardly used by the museum, so the uploads led to them being known more widely. The programme originally aimed at a more extensive upload programme, however, Pat had to adapt to technical delays and obstacles.
An example of a project worked on is the W.A. Ismay Studio Ceramic collection. William Alfred Ismay spent his life building an enormous collection of Studio pottery. It is now held by YMT and was subject to a Google Cultural Institute project in November 2013. Brand new high quality photographs were taken for this and Pat was able to upload these images to Commons. These have now been used on the biographical articles for 17 of the potters. The Ismay article was also created from scratch by a Wikipedia editor.
● External partnerships. Committed to the idea of engaging with many cultural organisations in the region, YMT was exploring the possibility of scoping the project out and reaching more than just the institutions in the Trust. This resulted in an idea of a Yorkshire wide Wikimedia ambassador linked to the Museum Development Yorkshire, a project YMT have shaped and planned to run in second half of 2014 and beyond.
● Training and advocacy. All key curators at YMT were trained to edit Wikipedia. Pat also delivered a range of external talks reaching c. 80 people, including one to the Museum Development Yorkshire.
● Outreach and events. Pat delivered 3 training sessions for staff and volunteers, and a high profile public editathon themed around the lives and works of Yorkshire’s 19th Century luminaries.
It was the idea of external partnerships that resonated especially strongly with Wikimedia UK and YMT during the cooperation, and the institutions worked on setting up a ‘phase 2’ project that would take these ideas forward.
Spreading the net: What’s next for GLAMwiki in Yorkshire?
One of the most positive elements of working at YMT was the opportunity to work in a network of museums with such diverse collections and breadth of knowledge among curators, staff and volunteers. This acted as a key inspiration in the design of a follow up project, run from July 2014 for a year. The Yorkshire Network Project with Pat Hadley as Regional Wikimedia Ambassador, is a unique chance to work with the region’s Museum Development Officers (MDOs) and offer Wikimedia partnerships and collaboration to the regions 150 registered museums.
