Those of us who are a part of the Wikimedia movement already understand, as if by instinct, the value of the Wikimedia projects. It is not the millions of articles, nor the billions of pageviews, but the magical combination of ethos and platform that has allowed a deeper perspective on knowledge.
Now that our bid has been accepted and we’re going cap in hand to sponsors, we’ve been forced to think hard about how to communicate this value to the outside world. Our chosen theme for Wikimania 2014 is outreach, and it is fitting that it is exactly the same struggle that the movement is also facing in its outreach efforts – how can we make strangers see the value in what we are doing, and have them join us?
Every sponsor we approach asks “Who will come to Wikimania?” It’s a question that we (as a community) have always struggled to answer in the past, offering the evasive “Wikimedians”, which is no answer at all. In a change from previous years, our Wikimania has a public promotional element, and so in a way we get to choose. What groups of people do we want to attract, who don’t already consider themselves Wikimedians? People already interested in what we do, people with something to offer us back, people who will be inspired to become full blooded members of our movement.
We believe that understanding and correctly articulating who these people are is the key to not only our public marketing effort, but also our fundraising strategy. Corporations don’t sponsor because they’re kind, they sponsor to access particular audiences. That “Wikimedians” is not a recognised audience goes some way to explaining the failure of previous years to meet their targets. In order to succeed, we need to truly understand who we are.
We’ll put forward our thoughts in our keynote presentation at the WikiConference UK 2013, being held in Lincoln next weekend, where we’ll be launching this discussion on the brand new Wikimania 2014 wiki.
There are countless ways to catch a fish. It can be pursued, actively, aggressively. It can be stalked, quietly, thoughtfully. It can be trapped, methodically, patiently. It can be stumbled upon, unexpectedly, fortuitously. It can be devoured, hungrily, passionately. It can be shared, graciously, equitably. It can be released, the enjoyment of the hunt and capture acknowledged, but the object itself set free to grow and mature, and to be chased and caught again.
Knowledge is a fish, and last month I made an uncommon catch.
On 12-14 April 2013, the Wikimedia UK and then British Library hosted a three-day conference to facilitate the exchange of new technologies, innovative modes of engagement, and long-standing curatorial rigour between Wikimedians and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) practitioners.
As a history lecturer who remains completely unaffiliated with any GLAM, and who had made only very rudimentary edits to Wikipedia in the past, I was certainly not the target audience of the event. Yet, with the surprisingly low conference fee (£15/£40), and the promise of new insights into the digital humanities, I journeyed south and hoped for the best.
When I arrived, I was greeted by a gaggle of British Library and Wikimedia staff (and volunteers), handed a not unsubstantial tote-bag full of Wikimedia goodies, and directed towards some much needed tea. As I watched, dozens of men and women from around the world ran up to each other, shaking hands (and occasionally hugging). It was clear that many of the delegates were already well acquainted. After a moment or two, I began to sidle up to on-going conversations. The room was quickly buzzing with chat over the latest GLAM digitisation projects, intellectual property and copyright law, and the newest toys in the Wikimedia tool kit.
When asked whether I was GLAM or Wiki, I shyly admitted that I had registered under slightly false pretences. Having previously heard that the event had sold out, I became oddly nervous that I had somehow denied entry to a more deserving delegate; I need not have been. Both GLAM professionals and Wikimedian volunteers were extremely welcoming to the slightly clueless lecturer wandering in their midst, and did their best to let me know, in the 30 seconds which remained before the keynote lecture, the entire history of the GLAM-Wiki project.
The event began with a magnificent plenary keynote by Michael Edson of the Smithsonian Institute; it remains the only keynote I have ever attended in which the first six minutes were done entirely in verse. In the prose that followed, Edson made a compelling case for the opening of collections through large-scale digitisation projects, bringing them to a potential global audience. He acknowledged the financial constraints of such a vision, the cost of dissemination as well as the loss of revenue from licencing, but reminded us of the potential benefits. Beyond public missions to share knowledge, placing collections online encouraged licensing revenue; when Monty Python uploaded high quality clips of their programmes on YouTube, and ceased requests to remove other instances of their content, “sales of the DVD box set had gone up by 16,000% on Amazon.” The most poignant point, however, was the simplest. “You can judge a lot about an institution by what it chooses to measure, and how it measures it.”
Over the next two days, I wandered in and out of parallel sessions, hastily noting down the vital details of dozens of projects either recently completed or currently being undertaken by museums and galleries around the world. Most notable, perhaps, was the recent reopening of the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands. In her post-lunch plenary, Lizzy Jongma provided an inspiring account of the digitisation efforts of the Rijksmuseum, and their most recent efforts to make their online gallery as accessible and multi-lingual as possible. Here the question of licencing, a crucial source of revenue for cash-strapped institutions, again came to the fore. Jongma poetically deflected concerns with the problem of the ‘Yellow Milkmaid.’
‘The Milkmaid’ by Johannes Vermeer
“‘The Milkmaid’, one of Johannes Vermeer’s most famous pieces, depicts a scene of a woman quietly pouring milk into a bowl. During a survey the Rijksmuseum discovered that there were over 10,000 copies of the image on the internet—mostly poor, yellowish reproductions. As a result of all of these low-quality copies on the web, according to the Rijksmuseum, “people simply didn’t believe the postcards in our museum shop were showing the original painting. This was the trigger for us to put high-resolution images of the original work with open metadata on the web ourselves. Opening up our data is our best defence against the ‘yellow Milkmaid’.””
Likewise, Kimberley Kowal of the British Library shared her experiences of crowd-sourcing library collections. As many of you may know, this venerable institution has an expanding collection of historical maps, most of which are wholly unknown to the general public and many of which are too fragile to allow public access. In order to make these collection available, the library decided to digitise a selection of them for online access. The difficulty, Kowal explained, was that no matter how descriptive the meta data for the maps was, they would remain essentially unsearchable to a wide range of users, who were unsure of the ‘correct’ search parameters. Instead, it was decided that the maps would be georeferenced, placing them on top of modern map data, allowing for a visual search of a particular area. The problem? How to georeference thousands of maps with limited staffing resources. The solution? Allow the world to georeference it for you! The most amazing part of the story is not that the public engaged but the level of engagement. The initial batch of 800 maps, expected to take several months, was completed in just three days!
The other side of the coin, the Wikimedians, were just as engaging. Over the course of the second day, Wikimedian volunteers and Wikimedians-in-Residence explored a variety of outreach activities within the UK and around the world. Some volunteers had worked directly with GLAM institutions, coordinating on-site events and outreach programmes to encourage public engagement with their collections. One common experience was the edit-a-thon and backstage pass, where local community members were invited into back rooms of archives, museums and galleries, given a behind-the-scenes tour of the collections, and then encouraged to digitise a selection of the material (for Wikimedia Commons) or create and update Wikipedia articles related to the materials held there. Other Wikimedians improved accessibility to existing collections through the creation of QR codes that directed a user’s smartphone to the Wikipedia article on that exhibit, statue, or artwork in their own (or their phone’s) language. Rather than a plaque with the three most likely visitor languages, museums and galleries can now cater to most of the world’s languages with a single square.
Over the course of the two days, and the ThatCamp that immediately followed, I gained an almost inexpressible breadth of new knowledge regarding open-access resources and community outreach programmes. Most importantly, I have become completely enamoured with the Wikimedian volunteers. In all honesty, I have never met such a wonderfully optimistic, civic-minded, and genuinely kind-hearted group of individuals. If you have any sympathy with the idea of Open Access or the free dissemination of knowledge, I cannot recommended a finer group of people to engage with.
This post was written by Graeme Arnott (User:Oswin Oswald) and originally published here
Attendees of the first ever Glasgow Meetup on Sunday 12 May 2013.
I’ve done a little bit of editing on Wikipedia but not much. I don’t really have much confidence on it but I’ve now got a new user name I now feel better about contributing on a regular basis. (I was using my own name which increased the pressure not to publicly mess up). I’m going to do the P2P University’s School of Open course ‘Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics and Beyond‘ when it starts in July (for European times).
Anyway, getting back to the story. Whilst assembling the material for the TMA presentation I happened to find out that the very first Wikimedia meet up in Glasgow was taking place a fortnight or so before the TMA’s hand-in date, and this was too good an opportunity to miss. Eleven of us met in the Sir John Moore pub on Argyle Street on 12th May and I think it went really well, although you wouldn’t know it from my expression in this picture :-).
It transpired that the pub’s name was not insignificant. Dan and Julia looked up Wikipedia to get some background on Sir John Moore and found out that he was a Glaswegian who had first seen action for the British Army in the American War of Independence. One of his postings in the 1790s was to the West Indies under a certain Sir Ralph Abercromby. Now, bizarrely the Sir Ralph Abercromby is the pub where Wikimedia hold their meetups in Manchester. How odd is that? Was there then some strange hand guiding the choice of these pubs? If so, what was the pattern and what did it signify? Were these pubs in these similar ex-industrial cities effectively hyperlinked in a way reminiscent of psychogeographic ley lines? Were we like the people on Borges’ map only now were we living on a Wikipedia article? Was the fact that Wikimedia held their meetups on the territory of these one time opponents of liberation a tongue-in-cheek comment on web freedom? Perhaps the solution lay with a certain Richard John Blackler the gentleman after whom the Wetherspoon’s pub is named and where the Liverpool Wikimedia meetups are held. Would he also be a representative of the imperialist redcoats?
Wikimedia in Scotland
The truth in the end was rather prosaic, and a different sort of coat altogether. It transpired that Blacker is remembered for having once owned a department store in Liverpool, and so it turned out there was no mysterious hand at play after all. (This probably means in the future there will be a pub called the Sir Philip Green, although it won’t, of course, be owned by him). Even so, having read how exciting a Wikimedia meetup can be, can you possibly afford to stay away next time?
Seriously, I did actually enjoy the afternoon. Sometimes the admin talk was a little over my head but not alienatingly so, and people mingled and there certainly were no awkward group silences. For a first meeting I thought that we quickly built up a friendly welcoming atmosphere. I’m not sure that I know everyone’s name but we’re starting to think about Glasgow/2 in a couple of months so hopefully we can do it again, and build the group up a bit.
So, it was a good turn out for a first meeting and we can only hope and try to build on that. However it was noticeable that although Katie was there from Wikimedia in London, and Julia had travelled up from Manchester, there were no Glaswegian wiki women. Apparently though this is not something unusual and it seems like Wikipedia has a gender problem. (This will be another post at a later date. At the moment I don’t want to run the risk of parallel essay writing for the TMA). When I read about this edit-a-thon in the Biblioteca Salaborsa in Bologna I had the idea of doing something similar with the Women’s Library in Glasgow.
The library is currently in the process of moving to Bridgeton so this might not be possible until later and depending upon what stage the move is at. A successful edit-a-thon could achieve a number of goals, such as
an increase in women in Glasgow editing Wikipedia
an increase in articles about Glaswegian women
an improvement in the digital skills of Glaswegian women
Thinking ahead, it would be great if the Library could access funding to roll something like this out to the community libraries in Glasgow, and the suburbs of East Renfrewshire and South Lanarkshire.
Maybe this is something we could discuss at the next meetup or in the Comments below.
Arrangements for Glasgow/2 are currently being discussed here.
(and yes I know it should have a circumflex but I couldn’t get it to work for some reason and gave up trying)
This post was written by Stevie Benton, Wikimedia UK Communications Organiser
Yesterday I attended a workshop, organised by the Imperial War Museum, which focused on how to communicate the commemoration of the centenary of the First World War.
There’s an excellent opportunity for Wikimedians to lead on fascinating projects related to the centenary. To this end I’d really encourage all Wikimedians interested in doing any work around the First World War to get in touch by emailing volunteering@wikimedia.org.uk and let us know.
There’s great potential for volunteer-driven projects related to this topic over the next few years and the Wikimedia UK office is looking forward to supporting you.
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
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