Today is the 25th anniversary of the founding of the world wide web. The BBC reported that Sir Tim Berners-Lee has used this landmark to call for a bill of rights for the world wide web.
Wikimedia UK is in favour of this idea. In 25 short years the web has become so inextricably intertwined in our lives that it can no longer be seen as a separate entity. It is a global network which belongs to everyone.
In his interview Sir Tim draws a comparison between human rights and the need to protect the rights of web users. The world wide web is where many people live a significant part of their lives. It’s where we communicate with each other, where we express ourselves creatively, where we learn and teach, where we shop. Our vision is “open knowledge for all”, and fundamental to that vision is the removal of barriers to accessing, and contributing to, the sum of human knowledge.
Wikipedia has worked hard to remain independent and free on a web increasingly dominated by commercial interests. In 2011 Wikipedia went dark for a day in protest against the proposed SOPA / PIPA laws. In 2013 there were large scale revelations of web surveillance by the NSA and GCHQ. In 2014 we need to remain vigilant. Once freedoms are lost they are very difficult to regain. Web users should continue to fight for their online freedoms and protect those freedoms from those who would take them away. A Bill of Web Rights, created by web users and endorsed by governments and international bodies such as the United Nations, would be an excellent start.
The strategy sets out not only our mission (‘to help people and organisations create and preserve Open Knowledge, and to help provide easy access for all’) but also the way in which we aim to achieve that in practice.
To ensure that our day-to-day activities are closely focussed on attainment of our mission, we have committed to record and publish a wide range of measured outcomes which will indicate, on an ongoing basis, how we are performing against a range of strategic goals. These measured outcomes will build up over time into a comprehensive picture of the practical impact the charity has been able to make.
In preparing the strategy we consulted widely with the Wikimedia UK community, the Wikimedia community at large, other chapters, the Wikimedia Foundation, and interested individuals. The draft strategy documents were open for public consultation during the month of February, and feedback received was taken into account along with staff and board contributions. We have replied to the community feedback on-wiki.
We are confident that as the end result of this process we have a robust strategy that will serve us well in the years to come. It will enable us to maintain and track challenging but achievable targets while retaining operational flexibility to focus our day-to-day efforts on whichever individual activities and initiatives will best help us achieve practical impact.
We would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the process, and we look forward to continuing to work with the community with renewed focus and vigour.
Wikipedia is meant to be a starting point, not a final source of knowledge. It is permanently incomplete and evolving, with continuous formal and informal review. Delving into that process, learners can explore critical reading, digital literacy and deep questions of knowledge. Dr Martin Poulter, Jisc Wikimedia ambassador, gives us his top ten tips for educators using Wikipedia…
1. Discuss and review
Discussion is central to Wikipedia. Click on “Talk” at the top of an article to see discussions, sometimes very extensive, about the article’s problems and how it could be improved. This link will also show the quality rating that Wikipedians have given the article. These formal and informal reviews are an opportunity to promote critical reading: get learners in the habit of reading these discussions and weighing in with their own comments.
2. Question the policies
Wikipedia requires originally-worded statements of fact with a citation to a reliable, published source which is independent of the thing written about. Each aspect of this definition can be explored and challenged in class discussion: why are many sources not “reliable”? What makes an article “neutral”? Why not just copy text from other sites? These questions can frame a discussion of general information literacy or of how scholarly values apply to a subject area.
This post was written by Jon Davies, Wikimedia UK Chief Executive
A few months ago I wrote a critical review about a hotel I stayed in for Trip Advisor. I wanted to share my experience and warn off others. I posted and thought no more of it. I was surprised a few weeks later to receive a ‘Thank you’ email explaining how important by little piece of bile had been, and how many people had read it. I was chuffed. A month after that, and a couple more reviews, I was thanked again, given an update on the surprisingly large number of people who had read the reviews, and was awarded the equivalent of a ‘gold star’.
OK, so it was a bot but it occurred to me how sad it was that we don’t do something similar for our contributors. Barnstars are great but from what I observe many people never look at their user pages. Wouldn’t it be great if every time one of my uploaded photos made it onto a page I got some sort of alert or just a ‘thank you’ for every twentieth edit?
When I started working for Wikimedia UK I was warned that I was entering a culture that didn’t ‘do thank yous’. I think that we are missing out here and if we want to encourage and retain editors a few words of thanks from time to time would be a powerful tool.
This post was written by Dr Martin Poulter, Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador
To influence education institutions, we need to speak their language and we need to put information in the places where they are looking for it.
The Jisc infoKits are online booklets for management, technologists and other staff in Higher and Further Education. This is where such people come for advice about Programme Management, Learning Spaces, Cloud Computing and many other topics. Today there is a new infoKit that I’ve written as part of the Jisc/Wikimedia UK partnership. “Crowdsourcing: the wiki way of working” shows how professionals and volunteers can collaborate to produce reference materials for education and research.
Like all infoKits, “Crowdsourcing” can be read from beginning to end or dipped into for short, self-contained examples and case studies. It culminates in a discussion of how collections of photographs and other digital media can benefit from sharing on Wikimedia Commons. Each section ends with a succinct summary of the lesson learned. Continue reading “Crowdsourcing: the wiki way of working”
This post was written by John Byrne, Wikimedian in Residence at the Royal Society
I’m now a month and a half into my six months as Wikmedian-in-residence at the Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s National Academy of Science, though as the role is supposed to be one day a week only, that in theory amounts to less than two working weeks. In practice I’ve been much busier than that.
So far everything I’ve done has been internal to the Royal Society staff and parts of their wider scientific community, but on Tuesday March 4th we are having the first public event with an editathon celebrating (slightly in advance) International Women’s Day. We’re trying what I think is a somewhat novel structure, with the room booked between 2 and 9 pm, and places booked for the afternoon or evening, but with fewer available for the evening so that if some afternoon people want to stay on they can. If lots of people want to stay it could get interesting! Apart from the training presentations, we are fortunate that Dame Athene Donald, FRS, Professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge will be with us for a while in the afternoon and will introduce the afternoon session with a short talk on diversity in science, and the work the Royal Society is doing in this area. She also serves on the University of Cambridge Council and is their Gender Equality Champion. Both sessions will have a short tutorial presentation on editing followed by getting stuck in. See the piece in last weekend’s Observer.
All 36 places have now gone, but people can join the waiting list (currently empty) as we may have cancellations. Of course online participants will be very welcome – see the event page on Wikipedia here. The next public event will be on Tuesday March 25th, an editathon on the broad theme of diversity in science in gender, culture and geography. That is planned to have the same structure, as adjusted by the lessons of March 4th. There are also other events the week of International Women’s Day offering basic editing training, including the Women Archaeologists editing event at the Petrie Museum and the Women’s Arts Practices editing event at Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths, on the day itself, Saturday March 8th — see the Wikimedia UK events page.
The March 4th event is held in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Engineering, two doors down in Carlton House Terrace, who have been making a big push in the media recently about the need for more women to enter engineering. The Royal Society held very successful editathons for Ada Lovelace Day in 2012 and again in 2013, which was my first own real introduction to the Royal Society, as one of the trainer team.
In January I gave a series of customized presentations for the Royal Society staff. We had decided to offer training to the three most immediately relevant departments: the Library, Policy and Publications departments. The training took the form of a two-part presentation, with two sessions of 90 minutes each, a week or two apart. The first session was without laptops for the participants, and had a quick overview of Wikimedia and Wikipedia, followed by an “under the bonnet” section showing the different namespaces, page histories, and discussing how Wikipedia works in practice, with a look at links in from the Royal Society websites, and other issues of special relevance.
The second session was hands-on editing practice, concentrating on basic techniques using a list of articles with issues. Many thanks to User:Serendipodous (twice) and Jonathan Cardy who came in to help with the editing sessions. January was largely taken up with these sessions, and at the moment we are not planning further ones, though I would like to offer a version to other Royal Society stakeholders/audiences in the future.
Apart from that I had a series of meetings with several departments, planning what else we might accomplish in the 6 month period. I had already come in for a planning meeting in November, so we had the bones of an events plan already, including slots at various sorts of RS events already in the calendar. I can’t announce many of the things we are hoping to do just yet, but I’m very positive about the project. One of the fascinating things about the RS is the very wide range of audiences or stakeholders they have, everybody from school students to Fellows of the RS and government. I’m especially keen to engage with their early and mid-career researcher audiences, and February and March events include three with the Royal Society Research Fellows, early-career researchers who receive grants from the Royal Society.
Wikimedia Serbia (WMRS) is organising an EduWiki Conference which will be held in Belgrade on Monday 24 March 2013. A Learning Day, a meeting between members of the WMRS education project and Wikimedians from other chapters will also take place on Sunday 23 March, the day before the conference.
Brian Kelly will attend the conference and the learning day and will report on educational developments taking place in the UK. In this guest blog post Brian describes his involvement with Wikimedia, how it relates to his work as Innovation Advocate at Cetis, University of Bolton and his suggestions for enhancing the work of Wikimedia UK. Brian also invites feedback on related educational use of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia services taking place within the UK.
Background
About Myself
In December 1992 I saw a demonstration of the World Wide Web for the first time. Convinced of its importance, in January 1993 myself and colleagues at the University of Leeds set up a Web server for the University, the first institutional Web service in the UK. At that time Gopher was growing in popularity as a freely available tool which could be used for providing information services and its simplicity helped its appeal. However I felt that the Web, even at a time before inline images were available, had the potential to be of strategic importance to higher education and delivered a series of talks and seminars about the Web across the UK.
In 1996 I began work in a new post as UK Web Focus, an advisory role based at UKOLN, a national centre of expertise in digital information management located at the University of Bath. That position enabled me to continue in my advocacy work, promoting the benefits of the Web for the higher and further education sectors. After over 16 years in UKOLN in November 2013 I began work at Cetis, the Centre of Education Technology, Innovation and Standards based at the University of Bolton. As Innovation Advocate at Cetis I will be continuing my work in promoting the benefits of innovative technologies and practices. An area of particular importance is open education and open educational practices (OEP). This is an area in which I feel that Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects will have a role to play. Continue reading “Preparing for the Wikimedia Serbia EduWiki Conference”
Wikimedia UK is the Wikimedia chapter covering the United Kingdom. We exist to help collect, develop and distribute freely licensed knowledge and other educational, cultural and historic material. We do this by bringing together the Wikimedia community in the UK, and by building links with UK-based cultural institutions, universities, charities and other bodies. We also represent UK-based Wikimedians to the Wikimedia Foundation and the global Wikimedia movement.
Wikimedia UK is seeking individuals or organisations to deliver our ‘Train the Trainers’ programme over the next two years.
The aim is to train active Wikipedians and educators to deliver consistent and high quality training to a range of audiences throughout the UK. These audiences will include volunteers hoping to edit for the first time, passing on new techniques to experienced Wikipedians as well as archivists and museum curators who will be working with users and editors of Wikipedia and all points in between.
If you would be interested in delivering this programme in cooperation with Wikimedia UK please send your tender to jon.davies@wikimedia.org.uk. It must include:
Details about yourself and your organisation including references that can be taken up regarding work of a similar nature you have undertaken in the past.
Examples of similar work you have undertaken in the past.
An explanation of your approach to working with volunteers.
A detailed description of the approach you will take with a timetable and success criteria. This should include teaching and assessment methods, and using the web to reinforce and extend learning.
The number of Wikimedians (i.e. those who regularly edit and contribute to the pages of our websites) you would be able to train.
How your work fits in with the open access ethos of Wikimedia UK.
An agreement that the training materials produced will be open access under a CC-BY-SA licence.
A detailed list of your tender amount and what it does and does not include.
The closing date for applications is Monday 7th April 17.00 hours UK time.
This post was written by Dr Martin Poulter, Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador
What are the building blocks or “atoms” of Wikipedia? A Wikipedia article can have many elements, but at its core is it built of originally-worded statements of fact with a citation to a reliable, published source which is independent of the thing written about. When a contribution is removed, it has usually broken at least part of this definition.
Taking each part of this definition, and asking “why?”, is a way to structure a discussion about the reliability of information found online. This briefing gives some examples of “why” questions that can emerge (or be elicited) and some pointers for discussion that will illuminate each point.
This could be used with a very wide variety of learners, depending on how you frame the discussion and on your examples. The discussion could be directed to focus on critical thinking, understanding of digital resources, knowledge of a specific subject, or even abstract questions about the nature of knowledge. Continue reading “One sentence on Wikipedia: a microcosm of information literacy”
Which Outcome Measures we should be using against which to measure our impact, and also what targets we should aim to meet by the end of January 2015.
Given we will be associating our activities – including volunteer led activities – with the aims and measures given, are you happy the strategy represents a structure you can work with as a member of our community?
These plans are important because they establish a framework for our work over the next five years and present ways for us to measure the success of our activities.
The community consultation period is open until 28 February 2014 so please do have your say before then.
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