Page 41 – WMUK

Wikimedia UK microgrant leads to Wikipedia Featured Article

At the beginning of 2013, User:WormThatTurned applied for a Wikimedia UK microgrant for resources to improve a host of articles related to the Cornish coast. One of those articles, about Doom Bar, is now a Featured Article on Wikipedia and one the best on the encyclopaedia. He wrote this piece about his grant application last year.

One afternoon in February 2009, I was sitting in a pub with some friends and drinking Doom Bar, a beer I had started drinking ten years earlier because I found the name amusing. I’d been editing Wikipedia for a little while, but nothing big. Idly, I glanced at the back of the beer mat, which said “Where the River Camel meets the Atlantic on Cornwall’s ocean scarred North Coast, a bank of sand, centuries old, known as the Doom Bar protects and calms this beautiful estuary. Legend links the birth of the Doom Bar to the final curse of a dying mermaid who had rejected a sailor’s love only to be shot with an arrow from the spurned sailor’s bow.” It was just the inspiration I needed, and I was writing the article within a week.

One book I found as I was taking the article to good status was Brian French’s ‘Wrecks & Rescues Around Padstow’s Doom Bar’, in the local library. There were also many smaller books on the topic. I gleaned some information from them, wrote it all up and forgot all about them. Fast forward three years and I got it into my head that I’d love to see Doom Bar as a featured article. As part of this, I wanted to go back over French’s book, but struggled getting hold of it as it was out of print and produced by a local publisher at the other end of the country.

I thought I’d give a microgrant a go, to see if it was something that WMUK could help out with. The process was simple, just a few questions which I could answer without hesitation and a link to the book I was after on Amazon. It was approved before the day was over and after a quick email to the office, I received the book.

It’s helped me immensely, reminding me how interesting the topic is and how much information there is out there on paper. I’ve always found it difficult to come back to an article once my passion has waned, so I really appreciate the boost that WMUK has given to me.

To read the microgrant application see here – if you would like to apply yourself to support editing or outreach then read more here

Six weeks in at the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol

This post was written by Marc Haynes, Wikipedia Co-ordinator at the Coleg Cymraeg. You can read this post in Welsh here

In March, after several years on both the Welsh and English Wikipedias under the moniker Ham, I started an exciting new chapter in my Wikipedia career as Marc (Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol). It was the start of six months as Wikipedian in Residence at the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol, an institution that supports teaching and study through the medium of Welsh in universities across the country. This is the first residency programme in Wales, which is a particular honour, and one of the few residencies in a higher educational establishment rather than a GLAM – though as I was to discover, the Coleg has quite an archive of educational content in the Welsh language. My main work so far has been to explore the possibilities for releasing this content under an open licence, with the aim of enhancing coverage on the Welsh Wikipedia.

The appointment came at a particularly auspicious moment as, later that month, the Welsh Government issued a report encouraging the country’s universities to adopt open educational resources. So there is considerable institutional support at the Coleg for open culture, something it has in common with other national institutions in Wales which have been making progress in this direction – perhaps most notably the National Library of Wales, who have uploaded over 4,000 19th-century photographs from the John Thomas collection to Wikimedia Commons.

It’s now six weeks into the residency and I’ve found content that would significantly boost the Welsh Wikipedia’s coverage of topics such as geography, film, television and theatre. What I’ve found mainly consists of text suitable for transferring to the Welsh Wikipedia, in addition to some media files which would be appropriate for Wikimedia Commons. These additions, once permission for them has been secured, will become visible on the project page on the Welsh Wikipedia as they’re made.

In the meantime, the most important part of a Wikimedian-in-Residence’s job remains to be done: holding the events that will bring in new editors and establish a long-lasting relationship between the Coleg’s students and academics, on the one hand, and the Wikimedia Movement. It’s a daunting task, but one I’m looking forward to.

Wikimedia UK welcomes new starters for Wikimania

Wikimedia UK is delighted to welcome three new staff to support the delivery of the Wikimania conference.

John Cummings, Chris McKenna and Fabian Tompsett will be working with the charity until the end of August to support the volunteer conference team. All three are Wikimedians with a good understanding of the movement and the charity.

Chris has been a Wikimedian for nine years under the username Thryduulf. He’s an administrator at the English Wikipedia and English Wiktionary, and also active on Commons and WIkidata. He will be working to ensure that both the community and Wikimania benefit from each other.

John was the Wikimedian in Residence at the Natural History Museum and Science Museum, he also started MonmouthpediA. He’s a Wikimedia UK accredited trainer for communities and organisations.

Fabian has been a Wikipedia editor for over ten years, active on Wikiversity for over three years and ends up editing all sorts of articles. He is really excited to be working for Wikimedia UK as part of the team making sure Wikimania is a resounding success.

Their contributions over the coming months will be very important in helping to ensure that Wikimania London runs smoothly and makes a real contribution to the global Wikimedia movement. You can contact Fabian, John and Chris either by email (first name.surname@wikimedia.org.uk) or on 020 7065 0990.

What happens when you release photos on Wikimedia Commons?

This post was written by Mike Peel

I started making my photographs available on Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons licence in 2006. Since then, I have uploaded over 3,500 photos to Commons, and I plan to upload many thousands more in the future. The main reason I started to upload my photos was to illustrate Wikipedia articles, and that’s still a big reason why I have continued doing so. However, only 16% of the images I’ve uploaded are currently used on the Wikimedia projects. So, why am I continuing to upload so many images?

My hope is that, in the long run, my photos will help preserve history. I hope that they will provide a record of the state of things today to others looking back at this time in the future, in a similar way to how we look at 50-year-old photos today. I want to make sure that those looking back on our history don’t have to worry about the copyright of those images, but can freely use them in their own projects.

However, there is a great shorter-term outcome that keeps me motivated to continue uploading my photographs: how people have been making use of my photos today in ways I never anticipated when uploading them. Some examples of this (amongst many others) include:

In December 2007 I took a photo of the London Eye; I uploaded it to Commons a month later. I was taken aback in August 2008 when I got an email out of the blue from a couple who had recently gotten engaged on the London Eye – they’d found my photo and loved it so much that they had it printed on canvas. Due to a mistake by the delivery company, they accidentally received two copies of it – so they got in touch with me and sent me the extra copy! To this day this print acts as a focal point for my flat.
At Science Online London 2011, which took place at the British Library, I took a photo of Michael Nielsen. The photo was subsequently published by the New York Times, with Michael Nielsen letting me know that this had happened.
More recently, I was contacted by Nature Cymru who wanted to let me know that they had used one of my photos in their latest edition – a picture of seagulls nesting in Conwy Castle. I uploaded this photo as part of a series of photos I took of Conwy Castle, and this was the photo I expected to be of least use – but it turned out to be the first of this set of photos to be reused.

One of the lessons I’ve learnt throughout this is that, realistically, no-one respects the licence that your photo is licensed under – they’ll simply use it for their purposes. If you try to keep full copyright of your photo and deny people the use of the image, then you’ll be ignored – but if you release it under a free license then you’ll be able to reasonably ask for proper attribution. Also, people will generally go out of their way to let you know that they are using your image under a free license, if you ask them to, but if you restrict the use of the image then they’ll simply use it without letting you know.

Responding to recent news about vandalism to Wikipedia

This post was written by Stevie Benton, Wikimedia UK’s Head of External Relations

Last week a story broke in the Liverpool Echo about vandalism to Wikipedia from the government’s computer network. In particular, the story examined edits to the article about the Hillsborough disaster.

I don’t want to focus on the story itself here. Instead, I’ll be looking at how we dealt with it from a communications perspective.

Within hours of being reported in Liverpool, the story was being picked up by media outlets on a national scale, especially by the BBC, and requests for comment and interviews began to pour in.

The first thing we needed to do was look at exactly what was being reported. Reading the coverage from the Liverpool Echo, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, it became clear that the focus was on two points:

Vandalism of the Wikipedia article about the Hillsborough disaster
The vandalism came from computers connected to the government network.

The most important aspect of the story from a Wikimedia UK perspective was the first of the two and this was where we focused our response. Many thanks to Doug Taylor who uncovered the facts about these edits in record time.

There were three key messages we wanted to convey in our response:

That the vandalism to the articles was horrible but was limited to a few edits a long time ago
That the vandalism was removed very quickly by volunteers
That we show appreciation to the thousands of Wikipedians who work to create and curate Wikipedia.

With those messages clear, we could begin responding to the requests for comments while giving brief holding responses to requests for interviews, giving us time to find volunteers willing to speak on the radio. Step forward David Gerard and Joseph Seddon, who managed the possibly unique feat of speaking at the same time on two different BBC radio stations about two different topics.

We were also fielding requests from journalists about how easy it would be to find other edits from the same IP addresses, so an explanation of how Wikipedia works was offered, along with invitations to visit the Wikimedia UK offices. In particular, David’s excellent summary on Radio FiveLive explained to hundreds of thousands of people the basics of editing, some of whom may be intrigued enough to give it a try.

As the story continues to develop and more journalists explore the wonders of edit histories, more coverage of the topic is emerging. However, by engaging with the media effectively and openly, our key messages are continuing to be shared. If there is some good to come from this story, I hope it is a wider understanding of how Wikipedia works and especially that it’s written, edited and organised by a diverse and wonderful group of volunteers.

World Book and Copyright Day: Why copyright laws in Europe need revising

This post was written by Emily Sorensen, Wikimedia UK volunteer, writing in her personal capacity.

We live in a unified Europe (i.e. EU) that is part of a global economy. We do business with organisations, companies, and people from all over the world. We use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and many other social media which connect people from all over the world. We don’t need obstacles that get in the way of these developments. We need rules that complement our needs and make interactions and transactions run as smoothly and fairly as possible to reduce the likelihood of complicating the technological and scientific developments that are already complex as it is. Times change and so do our needs. So what has this got to do with copyright laws?

Firstly, many people ignore the legality of their online behaviour because we are used to being served what we want at the point of a simple Google or Bing search. Downloads are a useful example.. It’s copyright infringement to download many films, songs, books, and so on for free, but that’s not stopping many (usually) lawful citizens from doing it anyway. Why? Because the availability of information online has increased expectations for what we can have for free. This is not a trend that can likely be reversed, or should be reversed. It’s a change of mindset that seems to be here to stay, and the proof of this is the way companies have changed their business models over the last 15 or so years. Many entrepreneurs and start-ups, for example, market themselves initially providing free services and products in order to generate sales leads. Even well-known companies such as Spotify lure potential customers into paying monthly fees by giving them a free subscription month initially. It works, because those companies have found ways to make it work, taking into consideration the tendencies and needs people reflect online.

What hasn’t changed in line with developments brought about by the internet, however, is the copyright legislation in the EU. For example, some EU countries have taken a more liberal approach to rightsholdership of photos taken in public. In the UK and Germany, there is freedom of panorama, meaning that any photos taken in public spaces can be freely used and shared as desired. In France, Italy, and Iceland, however, there is no freedom of panorama, meaning you can’t use photographs taken in public spaces for anything other than private displays (not Facebook, mind you).

The lack of uniformity of copyright rules across European countries is confusing to people and can cause unnecessary financial harm to snappers who infringe on laws they didn’t know even existed. According to one review, 73% of UK users are perplexed by the copyright rules in Europe. This is a consequence of vast variations of copyright laws within countries instead of a unified law across Europe. If only we had the same legislation applicable in all countries of the EU, we would have greater clarity regarding what we are allowed to do, resulting in a much higher level of adherence to the law that we have now. Boundaries are blurred between countries with the presence of the internet, so legislative differences between countries are only going to complicate matters in creative and information sectors rather than help potential copyright holders.

Another area that needs improving is the public domain status of publicly funded works. Cultural and scientific works funded by the taxpayer do not currently belong to the public by default across all of Europe. In effect, this means that if you need to use or investigate sources of information relevant to your field of research or industry, you may have to pay to access it, even if the public has financed the research already for the sake of “benefiting the public” (i.e. you). Such “benefit” is limited only to the few who can access the content freely. Some of this content may lead to societal improvements – some of it may not. If it was freely distributable, however, we would more rapidly develop our public knowledge base, ultimately supporting the potential of more fluid societal improvements. Knowledge should not be for the privileged few. It should be for all, because as anyone in the creative or scientific professions knows, progress tends to happen sporadically and sometimes where you least expect it. If you set information free into the public sphere, you may find that people from corners of our society where you least expect it may use to information in ways that can truly make a difference to our lives. But obstruction of access to culture and knowledge most certainly won’t aid this development. On the contrary, it may be making us ignorant to changes that could have happened in a Europe with more liberal copyright laws.

At Wikimedia UK, we have gathered support from four political parties (Liberal Democrats, Conservatives, Labour, and the Scottish National Party) for our arguments for the harmonisation of copyright laws in the EU. You can make a difference too by participating in your own way at the World Book and Copyright Day on Wednesday the 23th of April, or by contributing to the online debate about our copyright rules in the EU. All public debate in this area is currently laying the foundation for potential legislative changes in the EU, so your voice can make a real difference. You can also contact your local MEP to ask them for their views on copyright reform and encourage them to support change.

A report from the EduWiki Conference in Serbia

The photo shows a group of around 15 people gathered together in an office space — Selection of the participants at the Eduwiki Serbia learning day event

In a post entitled Preparing for the Wikimedia Serbia EduWiki Conference published on this blog on 20 February Brian Kelly described how he would attend the Eduwiki Serbia conference and learning day and report on educational developments taking place in the UK. This post provides his reflections on the events.

Background

The Eduwiki Belgrade conference was organised by Wikimedia Serbia and held at the Belgrade Youth Centre on Monday 24 March 2014. The conference provided an opportunity for sharing of experiences of educational use of Wikipedia in Serbia which was complemented by summaries of similar activities in the US, UK, Germany, the Czech Republic and the Ukraine. Prior to the conference a learning day event was held in the Wikimedia Serbia offices.

The Learning Day

The Learning Day event provided an opportunity for Wikimedia Serbia staff to outline education activities taking place in Serbia and receive feedback from those working or involved with other national Wikimedia chapters (the Wikimedia Foundation and chapters in Germany, the Czech Republic, the Ukraine, Macedonia and the UK).

The learning day was structured so that feedback was provided for a number of areas, which helped to provide focussed attention and helped to ensure that the day was valuable for all participants. The topics covered were project metrics; leadership; target groups; quality and quality of articles; attracting new editors; feedback on the educational projects and opportunities for cooperation across Wikimedia chapters.

As can be seen from the accompanying photograph of a slide which summarised plans for the future, the Wikimedia Serbia organisation is ambitious, with the intention that “in 3-5 years Wikipedia [will be] a part of the Serbian educational system“.

The Eduwiki Conference

The Edukwiki conference provided a series of presentations about Wikipedia and related activities. Following the welcome to the conference from Rod Dunican, Wikimedia Foundation and members of Wikimedia Serbia the morning session provided an overview of Wikipedia, details of the education programme and examples of the educational projects which are taking place in schools and colleges. The morning session also included presentations on Creative Commons and open access. The afternoon session provided details of activities taking place beyond Serbia. Following an overview of the Wikimedia Education Programme given by Rid Dunican, Director of Global Education Programs at the Wikimedia Foundation, details of national activities were provided from speakers from Germany, the Czech Republic, the Ukraine and myself who summarised activities in the UK.

I had previously written a blog post on Open Education and Wikipedia: Developments in the UK which went into some detail of some of the key activities I would describe in my presentation: highlights from the EduWiki UK 2013 conference, the Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador post and the forthcoming Wikimania conference, to be held in London in August 2014. However after I submitted my slides I discovered that I would only have 15 minutes for my presentation, rather than the 45 minutes which the layout of the conference timetable suggested! I was able to provide an edited summary of my slides (which are available on Wikimedia Commons) although the original slides are still available and are hosted on Slideshare.

Reflections

The Eduwiki Serbia conference only attracted small numbers of participants, many of whom were speakers at the event. It would seem that the value of Wikipedia in education is not yet being appreciated beyond the early adopters. It seems to me, therefore, that there is a need to explore outreach strategies which go beyond the early adopters and appeal to the early mainstream community who may be willing to make use of Wikipedia if they see benefits for their mainstream activities.

Such approaches may require use of communications and outreach channels which go beyond use of mailing lists, blogs and wiki resources which are managed by Wikimedia chapters. I found it interesting to observe how Wikipedia Serbia has a Facebook page and makes use of this Facebook page for its outreach activities, with 678 current ‘likes’ of the page. Might monitoring metrics of social media uses by Wikimedia chapters provide useful insights into potentially valuable outreach channels., I wonder?

Further Information

A large number (currently over 130) of photographs about the EduWiki Conference Belgrade 2014 have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons with an additional 110 photographs about the Learning Day also available.

I also created a Storify summary of the two events. I decided to do this after making use of Storify to provide a report on the WIKIsymposium which took place in the University of Stirling a few days before the events in Belgrade. As I described in a blog post on Emerging Best Practices for Using Storify For Archiving Event Tweets Twitter has the potential to enable discussions and ideas shared at events to be made available with a wider community and if there are enough people tweeting at an event a useful summary of the event can be produced. Perhaps this might be a useful approach for raising the visibility of Wikipedia events within the Twitter community? I’d welcome your thoughts.

Thoughts on the Wikimedia Conference

This piece was written by Stevie Benton, Wikimedia UK Head of External Relations, and is one of a series of reflections on the Wikimedia Conference 2014 in Berlin

As I write it’s the final day of the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin. It’s been a very busy but incredibly worthwhile few days. It is my first time attending a Wikimedia Conference and having also never attended Wikimania I wasn’t at all sure what to expect.

The reality of the conference is that it’s hard work. From the outside looking in this may not be obvious but I can promise you this is the case.

The conference featured a very full programme of presentations, workshops and discussions alongside plenty of opportunities to meet with people from across the chapters and the Wikimedia Foundation. I was fortunate enough to be personally involved in the delivery of one of the sessions, a panel about advocacy. This proved to be a very helpful session and there was a strong consensus that achieving favourable reform to copyright should remain a focus of movement advocacy.

It was extremely useful to meet with so many people that I have worked with for the last couple of years that I’ve only encountered online. I was very encouraged by the diversity of the conference and its very international nature. There are so many intelligent and motivated people, both volunteers and staff, working to share the sum of all human knowledge and I was inspired by them all.

Our movement is in great shape. The progress made by chapters and the Wikimedia Foundation would be difficult to overstate. Wikimedia UK is no exception to this. There is admiration for the progress our chapter has made in terms of governance, strategy and measuring our impact and the lessons that we have learned are being widely shared across the movement.

The strongest message I have taken away from the conference is that the future looks very bright indeed, albeit with much work to be done. I’d like to say a huge thank you to the volunteers and staff that made this conference such a success – they did a remarkable job of keeping things organised, helping people get to where they needed to be and welcoming so many people to their office. Without their efforts the conference wouldn’t have been such a productive, useful and enjoyable experience.

Conference scholarships

Group Photo, WikiSym+OpenSym2013, Hong Kong — Group photo of participants of WikiSym+OpenSym 2013 in Hong Kong

As a part of Wikimedia UK’s continued efforts to support the Wikimedia community the the UK, we regularly offer scholarships to enable attendance at international conferences and meetings. Past scholarships have enabled members to attend previous years’ Wikimania, WikiSym and Wikimedia Hackathon events, such as the 2013 Hackathon event in Amsterdam. This year, as a result of our support, Wikimedians in the UK have been able to attend the European Parliament in Strasbourg to take photos and videos of European Parliament members and attend the EduWiki conference in Belgrade, Serbia to share Wikimedia UK’s experiences from our education-related outreach activities.

Two further scholarship opportunities are now available, the first for Open Knowledge Festival and the second to OpenSym. OKFestival, run by the Open Knowledge Foundation is an open data and open knowledge conference that will bring together over 1,000 people from more than 60 countries in a bid to encourage innovation in the open sector through sharing experiences and skills. Furthermore, the event is a celebration of the open movement itself and what it has already achieved. OpenSym, previously known as WikiSym, is the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration where researchers from all over the world gather to present their latest research and practice on “open access, open data, open education resources, IT-driven open innovation, open source, wikis and related social media, and Wikipedia”. Both of these conferences are being held in Berlin, Germany with OKFestival on 15th-17th July and OpenSym on 27th-29th August.

To qualify for either scholarship, you must be based in the UK, be able to travel to Berlin and attend all days of the event, and agree to produce a public report (which may be published on the Wikimedia UK blog and in our newsletters) summarising the key things that you have taken from the event. Applicants for OpenSym must also be engaging in research about Wikimedia or other free content projects. The scholarship will cover conference registration fee, travel, accommodation, along with a per diem allowance to cover local expenses.

Complete this online form by Sunday 20th April to apply for a scholarship to OKFestival. The deadline for OpenSym scholarship is Sunday 30th April, and you can apply here.

Improving Wikipedia coverage of women artists

This post was written by Althea Greenan of the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths College

How did the Wikipedia editathon come about with regards to women artists? There have been a number of editathons that led to the session I held here recently.

I organized a modest follow up (8th March) of a much bigger event (1 Feb 2014) organised with Wikimedia NYC. This major event in the US inspired satellite events elsewhere including an event that took place at Middlesex University. The event I organised for the Women’s Art Library to celebrate International Women’s Day, was not only a follow up to this initiative from the librarians in the US, but is something I’ve been wanting to do ever since I became aware of the Wikimedian community and the GLAM projects that connect with collections in Galleries, Libraries and Museums. I have also been in discussions with artists groups such as conversation to be had from which emerged the awareness that women artists are not represented adequately in Wikipedia. It demonstrates the bias of content resulting from a lack of women writers, scholars and content creators.

I am the curator of the Women’s Art Library which was originally set up in the late 1970s as a slide registry building a centre of documentation and arts activities that raised awareness of women’s art practice. This organisation operated over several decades and the collection, now in Goldsmiths, continues to act as a centre for research and new art projects, and a space for interventions promoting the work of women, such as the Wikipedia workshop. The charity Wikimedia UK provides trainers, volunteers, who demystify, but also set standards on how to contribute good quality articles to Wikipedia, and it seemed like a very obvious thing to set up and see if it flies.

It was a very successful, exciting debate regarding the feminist strategy, born of necessity, that we need to write our own histories, set in the context of a rapidly expanding global resource that is seeking to be inclusive and yet maintain high, impartial standards of knowledge sharing. It is absolutely necessary to take up the challenge this opportunity brings and the important result from my first workshop is that everyone would like to follow it up with more to build on the knowledge and confidence to create records.

Pages are set up in Wikipedia relating to these events that might list records created etc (like this one), but it takes time to generate these, and to track down images that can be licensed to Creative Commons. The fact that an image can only be used if you relinquish aspects of copyright, allowing unrestricted use, can feel like an obstacle to some artists, but museums and others are increasingly putting images online, and allowing photography in public displays that acknowledge a different cultural approach to image-sharing.

In the past the Women’s Art Library has ‘tackled gender equality in the arts’ through publications, especially a magazine that was distributed globally by the time the funding came to an end in 2002. It is a strategy that creates a context for contemporary and emerging artists to see themselves alongside each other, and historical women artists, and the powerful resonances that perspective gives is something that remains not only in reading back over those articles (an anthology is forthcoming in 2015 from IB Tauris), but also in the articles that now appear in a different publishing setting: the Internet.

The workshop was attended by a multi-generational cross-section of artists, students, lecturers, a trainee archivist and a musician, and all felt welcome into the conversation. I think that’s not only because I invited them to the Women’s Art Library to take a place at the table, but because, yes, I think Wikipedia is a good place to start redressing the balance. There is a very rich world of women’s art practice that we are aware of but which should become part of our shared knowledge too.