Image from an Open Access journal article, shared on Wikimedia Commons by Daniel Mietchen. Click on the image for credits.
This post was written by Dr Martin Poulter, Jisc Wikimedia ambassador
Wikipedia welcomes expert contributions, and is one of the most direct ways to promote public understanding of a subject area, but it isn’t always in researchers’ personal interest to contribute. It may seem as though any time spent writing for Wikipedia is less time to write the research papers which will advance their careers. One scholarly society, and its open access journal, have found how to do both at once. Continue reading “Publishing scholarly papers with, and on, Wikipedia”
“We are all publishers now, publishing has never been so ubiquitous” – Padmini Ray Murray
Earlier this week I was speaking at What I Know Is, an interdisciplinary research symposium on online collaborative knowledge building organised by the University of Stirling’s Division of Communications, Media and Culture, together with Wikimedia UK. It was a completely fascinating and eclectic event that covered everything from new models of academic publishing, issues of trust and authorship, non-hierarchical networks of knowledge, extended cognition, collaborative art and the semantics of open.
Trust was a recurring theme that ran through the event. Symposium chair Greg Singh touched on fundamental issues of digital literacy and trust in his opening talk and Ally Crockford, the National Library of Scotland’s Wikimedian in residence, explored these themes in a talk about tensions and anxieties that persist around Wikipedia and collaborative authoring. Issues of trust persist around Wikipedia partially due to the unfinished nature of many entries, however Ally argued that the evolving nature of Wikipedia is one of its strengths, you can see the history of everything written there. More fundamentally, Ally argued that Wikipedia democratises knowledge and teaches the value of thinking critically. Wikipedia is no longer a resource, it has become a structure for open access knowledge. Ally also picked up on continued anxiety and distrust of open access policies that lingers in academia, and in the humanities in particular, a sentiment that was echoed by many in the room. Continue reading “What I know is…”
Wikimania, the annual global conference of the Wikimedia movement, comes to London this year for the first time. The conference takes place from 4-11 August, with the main part of the conference being on the 8th 9th and 10th August.
The conference organisers are keen to receive a wide range of proposals, workshops, presentations and talks from people connected to the Wikimedia movement. There are several tracks to the conference:
Wikiculture and community
Technology, interface and infrastructure
Legal & free culture
GLAM outreach
Education outreach
Open scholarship
Open data
The team are looking forward to your submissions, but hurry! You have until 31st March to submit your proposal to the programme committee. You can submit your proposals here
If you are considering attending Wikimania then now is your opportunity to influence the programme – please click here and sign up for the six or so submissions you would be most likely to attend if they make the final programme.
If you have any questions about submitting a proposal for Wikimania please contact GLAM@Wikimedia.org.uk
This post was written by Stevie Benton, Wikimedia UK’s Head of External Relations
They say that the passage of time is relative, and I agree. The last two years have passed both extremely quickly and yet slowly.
I’ve been working for Wikimedia UK for two years now, having started on 19 March 2012. The process of recruitment happened in the blink of an eye. The advert had been shared with me by a friend, but it wasn’t until the closing date I decided to apply. A week later I was rushing over from my previous job to get to the office for an interview – not having time to even change into a suit – and three days later, I’d been offered the position.
I’ve always been an admirer of what Wikipedia represents – a great collective effort to share knowledge, for free, with everyone on the planet. My own meagre contributions to that effort had been to correct some typos when I found them, and to remove vandalism when I encountered it. I registered an account, but it seems I’d never used it, inadvertently editing as an IP. I didn’t consider myself enough of a subject expert to make other kinds of contributions, but the opportunity to support Wikipedia and the other projects in a professional capacity was exciting. Two years later, it still is.
Wikimedia UK has changed quite a lot since those days and we’ve been involved in some great successes, such as Wiki Loves Monuments. We’ve had some challenging times as well. Being involved in a growing, evolving organisation as its fourth member of staff has been a richly rewarding experience.
We are moving into a new phase of operations now. We have an agreed strategic plan that focuses on delivering impact. We are consolidating our high level partnerships, for example through our Wikimedian in Residence programme, and we are looking at ways to deliver increased impact through the projects we support. Over the next few months I expect to be able to announce some exciting and interesting partnerships and of course, we have Wikimania 2014 to look forward to in August. We’re taking steps to build closer links with other “open” organisations and beginning to take a leading role in advocating wider changes that support our vision of open knowledge for all.
It’s an exciting time for our charity and I thank all of those volunteers and staff that make my role such an interesting and fulfilling one.
Peter Murray-Rust is a chemist at the University of Cambridge and a vocal campaigner for open knowledge. He will be speaking at this year’s Wikimania conference which will take place in London on 8-10 August. He was recently awarded a fellowship by the Shuttleworth Foundation “to make a real difference to the world”. The following is adapted from a post on his personal blog and is reproduced under its CC-BY licence.
Wikipedia is one of the great and lasting achievements of this century and typifies the Digital Enlightenment. It epitomises so much – cooperation, democracy, meritocracy, innovation, challenge to authority. It represents the dream of the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. [Note – I’m using “Wikipedia” to include Wikimedia, Wikispecies , Wikidata, etc.]
Note, I’ve used Wikipedia to reference these people and their creation. They are massive. You should read the pages.
I have. I now use Wikipedia as my primary source for much of my knowledge.
What??? an academic relies on Wikipedia? Sacrilege! Disaster! You should use your library. You should buy textbooks. You should sweat to get your knowledge. Wikipedia isn’t written by academics but common people. It must be rubbish.
This was an almost universal reaction from academia when Wikipedia started. Lecturers banned students from using it and required them to read out-of-date textbooks instead. Only a few academics embraced the ideas. Here was the infrastructure for the Digital Enlightenment (I don’t know whether this phrase is in common use, but it should be).
What’s the Enlightenment? Why is it in Capitals?
Let’s look in Wikipedia. (We know it’s rubbish, but it might give us a tip). The Age of Enlightenment.
The Age of Enlightenment (or simply the Enlightenment or Age of Reason) was a cultural movement of intellectuals beginning in late 17th- and 18th-century Europe emphasizing reason and individualism rather than tradition.[1] Its purpose was to reform society using reason, to challenge ideas grounded in tradition and faith, and to advance knowledge through the scientific method. It promoted scientific thought, skepticism, and intellectual interchange.[2] The Enlightenment was a revolution in human thought. This new way of thinking was that rational thought begins with clearly stated principles, uses correct logic to arrive at conclusions, tests the conclusions against evidence, and then revises the principles in the light of the evidence.
and this applies equally to Wikipedia. When the cultural history of this century is written (the pre-Singularity bit, at least, if machines value history) Wikipedia will have the same place as the Encyclopédie. I’m pleased that I’m on record as supporting Wikipedia – See John McNaughton, The Observer [newspaper] 5th April 2009. When asked whether I trusted Wikipedia I replied:
“The bit of Wikipedia that I wrote is correct”
Now, of course that is immensely and unacceptably arrogant in the Wikipedia community and I only used the phrase to shock the complacency of academics. In Wikipedia there is no “I” but only “we”. There is no “correct” but only “as good as our energy and resources can make it at the present time”. After all most pages start as single sentences. The article on Diderot has been revised 500 times in the last 4 years. None of those is final – all are as good as possible.
In science Wikipedia is massive. Huge amounts of species, compounds, theorems, physics, stars, … up to date and in many cases pretty comprehensive. And where it’s too massive there are links to authoritative resources. What’s not so known is the growth of complementary resources:
Wikimedia Commons
Wikidata
Wikispecies
I wonder where I can find out about them?
I shan’t know what I am going to say till I stand up in front of the Wikimanians. It depends on what I do tomorrow – NO! what WE do tomorrow. August is web-years away. I’m hoping I can put demos in front of US. Get US involved in changing the world.
This post was written by Tom Morton, Wikimedia UK developer
Wikimedia UK’s main websites are now available over IPv6. For most of our visitors this won’t have any effect, as this is still new technology. However, it is a big step toward future proofing our infrastructure for the years to come.
The internet relies on Internet Protocol (or IP) addresses to function – whenever you type a website into the browser address bar it is translated, silently, into a unique IP address for the server hosting the site. Currently, most of the internet use Internet Protocol Version 4. You may have seen an IPv4 address before, it looks like a long string of numbers. For example the IP address of the web server hosting this blog is 37.188.117.184.
But in recent years there has been a growing problem! There are only a finite amount of IPv4 addresses – around 4.3 billion of them. That might sound a lot, but then the internet is an increasingly large place, and if *everyone* and *every server* needs a unique address then they can quickly disappear. This, and other problems with the protocol, meant that a replacement was needed.
So to fix the impending disaster, Internet Protocol version 6 was developed (please don’t ask what happened to version 5!). This increased the available addresses to, well, bazillions.
Implementing these sorts of technical solutions can take many years. Version 6 has been in development from the early 1990s, and is still only accounting for just 3% of the entire internet traffic.
But it doesn’t hurt to move with the times. So Wikimedia UK websites; including the wiki and this blog are now available on an IPv6 address, alongside IPv4 (for those interested, the new address is 2a00:1a48:7803:0107:ed9f:35b6:ff08:0610). It may only help one or two people a year, but it is part of the charities commitment to moving forward with robust technology.
If you are interested in helping Wikimedia UK develop exciting new technologies then why not consider joining our Technology Committee – we are always looking for fresh input and insight!
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.
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