Wikimedia UK’s Education Organiser, Dr Toni Sant, has received professional recognition as Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. The HEA is the national professional organisation for lecturers in UK universities, and Senior Fellowships are awarded only to experienced staff able to demonstrate outstanding impact and influence in teaching and supporting the student experience, both within their departments and across their university.
This professional recognition relates mainly to work he has done in recent years at the University of Hull’s School of Arts and New Media in Scarborough, which includes his efforts to introduce Wikipedia as an appropriate learning and teaching resource within higher education.
He presented this aspect of his work at the EduWiki conference, which took place at the University of Leicester in September 2012 – you can watch a video of his presentation here – but he has gone on to assign the creation and editing of Wikipedia articles with students across arts and new media courses in Scarborough. Aside from this, he has also imparted the practice to other lecturers within the same institution who now use it with their own students.
Commenting on this prestigious professional recognition award from the HEA, Toni said: “As Wikimedia UK’s new Education Organiser I plan to share the experience I’ve developed at the University of Hull’s Scarborough Campus with others in the education sector. While I’m keen to see Wikimedia projects used appropriately across higher education, I’d also like to ensure that we provide appropriate support for the broader education sector, including school-age children, as well as those in lifelong learning environments and participants in the University of the Third Age.”
Attendees networking at GLAM-Wiki 2013. Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net).
This post was written by Daria Cybulska
The dust has settled on the GLAM-Wiki 2013 Conference that Wikimedia UK organised and ran jointly with the British Library, Europeana, Wikimedia Sweden and THATCamp, and we can now look back and reflect on the event.
GLAM-Wiki 2013 took place on 12-14 April 2013 at the Conference Centre of the British Library. From the start of the planning phase its aim was to bring Wikimedians and GLAMs together to share their experiences, and to inspire any representatives of cultural institutions interested in a partnership with Wikimedia UK. With this in mind, the workgroup (consisting of many volunteers and supported by staff) created three strands to the event:
On the Friday, we looked at the work Wikimedia and other organisations have done in partnership with cultural institutions, presenting case studies and discussing the benefits to both parties. The day included two highly evaluated keynote speeches, which you can watch here: one by Michael Edson and one by Lizzy Jongma.
On the Saturday, we focused on the more practical and technical side, looking at ways to work together and running workshops to share best practice. Valuable ideas were generated throughout the day.
Sunday was organised by THATCamp as a free unconference and hackathon, exploring the humanities and technology. We have seen some exciting creations and thoughts around free-licensing, open access and the interface between humanities and technology.
Wikipedians and GLAMs are both looking for ways of spreading their information in the widest possible way. It sounds like a perfect match, and indeed over the three days of the conference, with over 150 people attending, Wikimedia UK has facilitated an impressive ideas exchange. It was clear from the start that the conference centre at the British Library was buzzing with possible projects, case studies shared, new approaches. Such a creative atmosphere would not be possible without bringing so many dedicated people together in a physical space.
The feedback from the conference was generally positive, with attendees saying they were happy with the overall quality of GLAM-Wiki and the range of topics covered. There were many highlights, and people were especially impressed by Michael Edson’s talk on “Scope, Scale and Speed”. A recurring theme was that people felt GLAM-Wiki was a great opportunity to network and learn about what was going on in other institutions. Detailed feedback can be found here, and if you’re interested in the presentations but weren’t able to attend WMUK has uploaded videos of some of the talks to YouTube.
We will be following up on many of the ideas generated, picking up new cultural projects. I am very proud of being able to contribute to such a successful event, and looking forward to organising many more in the future.
Oldham, April 2013. I had been given my first mission – a mission to train a group of brand new editors in the ways of the Wikipedia. A crack team had been assembled, lead by me – User:Worm That Turned, we also had User:Deskana ready to control the keyboard, User:Julia W and User:Staceydolxx would be monitoring the room and User:HJ Mitchell on hand to keep an eye on things. It was true, most of us were fresh from training ourselves, but we had the knowledge and confidence in our abilities.
We met our contact early and were briefed to expect up to 14 new recruits. The room was set up, plans were made – all we needed to do was wait. It wasn’t long before we had company in the form of four trainees. Unfortunately, they were our only trainees, the training team outnumbered them!
We persevered in any case, following our training plan. Any nerves quickly disappeared and our skills shone through. We astounded the recruits with the scale Wikipedia, engaged them with the pillars it was founded on and inspired them to click that edit button. A straggler appeared, believing himself to be a few minutes late but getting the start time out by an hour, Julia W quickly brought him up to speed. We spent the morning teaching the basics of editing and by lunchtime everyone had made a few edits to their userpage.
After lunch, we discussed what could go wrong on the encyclopedia. This lead beautifully into discussions about reliable sources and our ‘Pièce de résistance‘,a discussion about reliable sources with Yes/No cards. Opinions were divided, could a rambler’s group website be considered reliable on a historic walk? Could an “official” tourism website with pictures of a different area be trusted? The debate had a lasting effect on all involved and those who led the discussion (Deskana and Julia W) should be proud.
We spent the rest of the afternoon editing articles that people were interested in, before summarising the next steps. Feedback was excellent for the most part, with a number asking for more sessions. The crack team has since returned to their day jobs, their alter egos set aside for the time being. One thing I’m sure of though, we’ll be back.
A photograph of the Aqueduct of Segovia, one of the winning entries to Wiki Loves Monuments 2012
On Friday 3rd May, the Wiki Loves Monuments photo exhibition was packed up, marking the end of their time in the country, and is now en route to Sweden.
Wiki Loves Monuments is the largest photography competition in the world, and in 2012 resulted in more than 300,000 images being uploaded to Commons. High quality prints were created of the 12 winning pictures and since January they have been exhibited in various countries. While in the UK they were shown to a varied audience of both Wikimedians and members of the general public.
The first stop was the media event with Jimmy Wales in March, where the photos formed an attractive backdrop to the event and prompted many discussions between Wikimedia UK volunteers, members of the press, and other interested parties who were at TechHub. Likewise when WMUK had an open day on the charity’s future later that month, which attracted members of the charity and members of the public who were interested in becoming trustees.
The main part of the exhibition was in April. On Friday 12th to Sunday 14th the British Library hosted GLAM-Wiki 2013, with about 200 attendees over the three days. In between talks and workshops, a mixture of GLAM professionals and Wikimedians had the opportunity to see the photographs. The final stop in the UK for the exhibition was the University of London’s Senate House Library. With more than 100,000 registered readers, the library is often busy. Installed at the entrance the library, the Wiki Loves Monuments exhibition was prominently displayed for visitors to view. During the exhibition’s time in the UK it has been viewed by a wide range of people, and helped raise awareness about Wikimedia’s activities.
Wiki Loves Monuments 2013 will be held in September, and the planning process to hold the event in the UK has begun. If you are interested in helping out, feel free to add your name to the page on Commons. And if you have a camera, keep your fingers crossed for a sunny September because we want you to go out and take as many pictures as possible! Hopefully it will be a resounding success.
My residency at the British Library is coming to an end today, and so it seemed a good chance to look back at what we’ve done over the past twelve months. It’s been a very productive and very interesting year.
The residency was funded by the AHRC, who aimed to help find ways for researchers and academics to engage with new communities through Wikipedia, and disseminate the material they were producing as widely as possible. To help with this, we organised a series of introductory workshops; these were mostly held at the British Library, with several more at the University of London (two at Birkbeck and three at Senate House) and others scattered from Southampton to Edinburgh. Through the year, these came to fifty sessions for over four hundred people, including almost a hundred Library staff both in London and at Boston Spa, and another fifty Library readers in London! Attendees got a basic introduction to Wikipedia – how it works, how to edit it, and how to engage with its community – as well as the opportunity to experiment with using the site.
As well as building a broad base of basic skills and awareness, we also worked with individual projects to demonstrate the potential for engagement in specific case. At the Library, the International Dunhuang Project organised a multi-day, multi-language, editing event in October; IDP staff, student groups, and Wikipedia volunteers worked on articles about central Asian archaeology, creating or improving around fifty articles.
At the Library, one of the most visible outcomes has been the “Picturing Canada” project, digitising around 4,000 photographs from the Canadian Copyright Collection, with funding from Wikimedia UK and the Eccles Centre for American Studies. We’ve released around 2,000 images so far, as JPEGs and as high-resolution TIFFs, with the full collection likely to be available by early June (we’ve just found enough left in the budget to do an extra batch of postcards). Other content releases have included digitised books, historic photographs, collection objects, and ancient manuscripts (pictured).
We also hosted the GLAM-Wiki conference in April, which was a great success, with over 150 attendees and speakers from around the world. Several of the presentations are now online.
While I’m leaving the Library, some of these projects I’ve been working on will be continuing – we still have another 2,000 of the Canadian photographs to be released, for example! We’re also hoping to host some more workshops here in the future (possibly as part of the upcoming JISC program). I’ll still be contactable, and I’m happy to help with any future projects you might have in mind; please do get in touch if there’s something I can help you with.
By providing Wikipedia editors with a central venue for their efforts to collect and vet such data, Wikidata leads to a higher level of consistency and quality in Wikipedia articles across the many language editions of the encyclopedia. Beyond Wikipedia, Wikidata’s universal, machine-readable knowledge database will be freely reusable by anyone, enabling numerous external applications.
“Wikidata is a powerful tool for keeping information in Wikipedia current across all language versions,” said Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner. “Before Wikidata, Wikipedians needed to manually update hundreds of Wikipedia language versions every time a famous person died or a country’s leader changed. With Wikidata, such new information, entered once, can automatically appear across all Wikipedia language versions. That makes life easier for editors and makes it easier for Wikipedia to stay current.”
The Wikidata entry on Johann Sebastian Bach (as displayed in the “Reasonator” tool), containing among other data the composer’s places of birth and death, family relations, entries in various bibliographic authority control databases, a list of compositions, and public monuments depicting him
The dream of a wiki-based, collaboratively edited repository of structured data that could be reused in Wikipedia infoboxes goes back to at least 2004, when Wikimedian Erik Möller (now the deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation) posted a detailed proposal for such a project. The following years saw work on related efforts like theSemantic MediaWiki extension, and discussions of how to implement a central data repository for Wikimedia intensified in2010 and 2011.
The development of Wikidata began in March 2012, led by Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of the Wikimedia movement. Since Wikidata.org went live on 30 October 2012, a growing community of around 3,000 active contributors started building its database of ‘items’ (e.g. things, people or concepts), first by collecting topics that are already the subject of Wikipedia articles in several languages. An item’s central page on Wikidata replaces the complex web of language links that previously connected these articles about the same topic in different Wikipedia versions.
Wikidata’s collection of these items now numbers over 10 million. The community also began to enrich Wikidata’s database with factual statements about these topics (data like the mayor of a city, the ISBN of a book, the languages spoken in a country, etc.). This information has now become available for use on Wikipedia itself, and Wikipedians on many language Wikipedias have already started to add it to articles, or discuss how to make best use of it.
“It is the goal of Wikidata to collect the world’s complex knowledge in a structured manner so that anybody can benefit from it,” said Wikidata project director Denny Vrandečić. “Whether that’s readers of Wikipedia who are able to be up to date about certain facts or engineers who can use this data to create new products that improve the way we access knowledge.”
The next phase of Wikidata will allow for the automatic creation of lists and charts based on the data in Wikidata. Wikimedia Deutschland will continue to support the project with an engineering team that is dedicated to Wikidata’s second year of development and maintenance.
Wikidata is operated by the Wikimedia Foundation and its fact database is published under a Creative Commons 0 public domain dedication. Funding of Wikidata’s initial development was provided by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence [AI]², the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Google, Inc.
Tilman Bayer, Senior Operations Analyst, Wikimedia Foundation
This is the first education-focused long term residency project that Wikimedia UK is embarking on. Both organisations share the goal of giving the widest possible access to the knowledge held or produced by UK institutions. The task of the Ambassador is to advance this shared goal and to help people engage with that knowledge. This could be done via training and co-ordination projects for the use of Wikimedia tools and techniques for educational purposes. The successful candidate will also undertake outreach work to encourage understanding and development of Wikimedia projects within the education sector.
Wikimedia UK’s cooperation with Jisc stems from the WWI editathon that the organisations ran together.
Chris Keating, Chair of Wikimedia UK, said: “I’m very pleased that we are working with Jisc on this project. Both the academic community and the volunteers who edit Wikipedia are in their own ways absolutely committed to the pursuit of knowledge. Bringing the two communities together can help demystify Wikipedia to people who work in higher education, while helping improve Wikipedia articles which form a lasting resource for students at all levels.”
Jisc noted: “With so many students and researchers increasingly using Wikipedia to, at the very least, inform further research, the need for improved accuracy is a pressing issue.”
The project will last for approximately nine months. It is jointly funded by Wikimedia UK and Jisc.
To find out more about Wikipedians in Residence, on which the project is loosely based, please visit this page on the Outreach wiki. The deadline for tenders is 12pm UK time on Wednesday 22 May 2013.
The below was originally published by Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, on the Foundation’s blog. You can see the original here.
In the Wikimedia movement, we have a vision statement that inspires many contributions to our endeavour: “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.”
We’re still a long way from realizing that vision, but we’ve recently surpassed an important milestone: as of March 2013, the combined sites hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation reached more than 500 million monthly unique visitors, according to the latest comScore Media Metrix data. Our traffic increased to 517 million in March, five percent higher than our previous record: 492 million in May 2012.
While more people are coming to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia sites, they are also staying longer and reading more. Over the past 12 months, Wikipedia monthly page requests increased from 17.1 billion to 21.3 billion, with the mobile share increasing to roughly 15 percent of the total, or more than 3 billion monthly views (data). We’re also gratified to see growth in significant target areas: in India, traffic as a percentage of our worldwide total increased from 4.0 percent to 4.8 percent; in Brazil it increased from 3.6 percent to 5.9 percent.
To reach the entire planet, we will need to not only continue to expand our mobile offerings, but also eliminate barriers to access. With Wikipedia Zero, we’re partnering with mobile providers in the developing world to reduce or eliminate data fees for accessing Wikipedia on a mobile phone. In March, we announced the fifth major Wikipedia Zero partnership, which means that the program will be available to 410 million mobile users around the world.
For those who don’t have an Internet connection at all, Wikimedia movement contributors are enabling offline access to Wikipedia, such as the work by Kenyan volunteers who travel to rural schools and install copies of the encyclopaedia on computers there. And now, there’s also an open source application for Android phones and tablets that makes it easy to download and read offline copies of Wikimedia content.
The idea of enabling every single human being to freely share in the sum of all knowledge is still as audacious as ever — but it’s also starting to look like an achievable goal, if we come together to make it happen.
Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Copyright notes: “Wikimedia Reportcard” by the Wikimedia Foundation. To the extent possible under law, The Wikimedia Foundation has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to the Monthly Report Card data and charts.
The National Library of Scotland, working with Wikimedia UK, has today announced the joint recruitment of a Wikimedian in Residence.
This is the first ever Wikimedian in Residence in Scotland and offers an excellent opportunity for a Wikimedian to help the Library explore how its collections and knowledge can be used to broaden content on Wikipedia and its sister projects, such as Wikimedia Commons. It is also Wikimedia UK’s first large-scale partnership with a Scottish institution. The successful applicant will also undertake outreach work to encourage understanding and development of Wikimedia projects.
The residency will last for four months and will be based at the Library in Edinburgh. It is jointly funded by Wikimedia UK and the National Library of Scotland.
Nick Poole, CEO of the Collections Trust and Chair of the Europeana Network
Nick Poole is the CEO of the Collections Trust, the UK-based not-for-profit organisation that works with cultural organisations worldwide to open up collections for enjoyment, learning and discovery. He is the Chair of the Europeana Network, a pan-European community of more than 600 museums, archives, libraries, publishers, broadcasters and creators working together to find solutions to the challenges of opening up content on the Web.
These are interesting times for the world’s great museums and galleries. On the one hand, the fundamental principle of public funding for the arts and culture established during the past century is coming into question. On the other, people are flocking to the rich, meaningful experiences we provide in unprecedented numbers.
These two great pressures – openness and financial viability – set the context for how museums see their role, how they operate and how they will present themselves to their audiences, both online and off. It is a tension that is playing out in policies and on websites and in conferences all over the world.
Openness, respect, shared custodianship, the values at the heart of the commons are also encoded into the DNA of museums and galleries. The right of free access to and engagement with culture is at the heart of democracy, transparency and public accountability. It ought to be an inalienable right in a free society, and it is the principle which unites the global Wikipedia community.
The principle is absolute, and the technical capability to open up cultural knowledge as open data is well-established, the challenge is how to pay for it. In the face of economic pressure, there is a temptation to swap out one business model (public subsidy) for another (commercial enclosure). But enclosure runs counter both to the principle of equal access and to the nature of the Web.
The challenge is to look out beyond the culture sector to see how other industries are establishing new models which work natively in the Web ecology, based not on enclosure or copyright but on openness and the addition of value. The prize is the creation of a dynamic, open culture sector that is seen as relevant, empowering and responsive to the needs of society. I am looking forward to exploring the challenge and the opportunity at GLAM-WIKI and to learning from the Wikipedia community how we can move forward together into this bold and exciting future.
.jpg)
.jpg)
