Page 53 – Upcoming Events

Wiki Loves Monuments in the UK: a review of the exhibition

This post was written by Richard Nevell.

A photograph of the Aqueduct of Segovia, one of the winning entries to Wiki Loves Monuments 2012

On Friday 3^rd 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 12^th to Sunday 14^th 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.

British Library Wikipedian in Residence: conclusions

This post was written by Andrew Gray at the conclusion of his residency at the British Library. It was originally posted on the British Library’s blog here.

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.

The Wikidata revolution is here: enabling structured data on Wikipedia

The Wikidata logo

This post was written by Tilman Bayer, Senior Operations Analyst of the Wikimedia Foundation. It was originally posted on the Foundation’s blog here.

A year after its announcement as the first new Wikimedia project since 2006,Wikidata has now begun to serve the over 280 language versions of Wikipedia as a common source of structured data that can be used in more than 25 million articles of the free encyclopedia.

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

Jisc and Wikimedia UK to jointly recruit a Wikimedia Ambassador

This post was written by Daria Cybulska, Wikimedia UK Programme Manager

Jisc, working with Wikimedia UK, has today announced the joint recruitment (via a tender) of a Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador.

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 learn more and apply for the role please visit this page on the Jisc website

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.

Wikimedia projects reach more than 500 million people per month

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.

National Library of Scotland and Wikimedia UK to jointly appoint Wikimedian in Residence

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.

To learn more and apply for the role please visit this page

To find out more about Wikipedians in Residence please visit this page on the Outreach wiki The closing date for applications is Monday 6 May.

GLAM Wiki Preview – Nick Poole, Collections Trust, London

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.

GLAM-WIKI keynote preview – Michael Edson, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC

Michael Edson is the Director, Web and New Media Strategy, Smithsonian Institution, Office of the CIO. He is also one of the keynote speakers at our GLAM-WIKI conference which takes place this weekend. Here are some of his thoughts on the event.

In the eyes of tradition-bound institutions, Wikipedia has gone from an amusing pop culture sideshow, to a competitor, to a major ally and collaborator in just a few short years. This is thanks to the strength and clarity of Jimmy Wales’ original vision, careful stewardship by Wikipedia’s small staff, but mostly, the credit belongs to the integrity and commitment of thousands upon thousands of “Wikipedians” – individual Wikipedia editors and volunteer organisers. Wikipedians who work on GLAM-related Wikipedia articles are real heroes to me. Through their careful and persistent work they demonstrate the core values of every gallery, library, archive, and museum on the planet: cultural heritage and scientific knowledge belong to all of us, and everyone should be able to partake and benefit.

The Wikipedia community is encouraging and fun, but most people don’t realize how stressful it is to create or edit a Wikipedia article! Wikipedians are pretty brave: people rely on Wikipedia and they trust editors to get things right – and everything an editor does is out in the open, transparent, for all to see. When Wikipedians talk about working with GLAMs, the thing that impresses me the most is their constant, relentless focus on the quality of the articles. Wikipedia isn’t perfect, but it’s striving in that direction. I don’t know of a single museum, archive, or library project that is as dedicated to transparency and quality improvement as the GLAM-WIKI community is. For GLAM-WIKI editors, it’s personal.

Wikipedians are a terrific and intimidating audience. They tend to be well informed, independent thinkers who are hungry for big ideas and practical insights. You can’t get away with much hyperbole with this audience and you’d better have your facts in order. The conference organisers seemed genuinely surprised when I quickly and enthusiastically accepted their invitation. Perhaps they see themselves as a small band of enthusiasts in the shadow of our huge cultural institutions, but I see it the other way around. In just a few years and with a fraction of our budgets, Wikipedia staff and individual volunteer editors have done something no organisation has ever done: created a truly essential global resource for learning and self-improvement. And it just keeps getting better and better. How do they do it? Conference attendees don’t have much to learn from me, and I have everything to learn from them.

At GLAM-WIKI 2013 I’ll be talking about scope, scale, and speed. Scope is about redefining what galleries, libraries, archives, and museums need to accomplish in society; scale is about questioning our preconceptions about how much impact we can have; and speed is about responding to society’s urgent need for results. This moment in human history is full of risk and uncertainty and we need our memory institutions – all of our civic institutions – to be as effective as they possibly can be. The example of Wikipedia and the thriving GLAM-WIKI community reveal a lot about how GLAMs can change to work bigger and faster for the benefit of everyone.

GLAM-WIKI keynote preview – Lizzy Jongma, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

This guest post was written by Lizzy Jongma, Data Manager at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and is part of a series building up to our GLAM-WIKI conference which takes place from 12-14 April at the British Library, London. Lizzy is delivering a keynote presentation at 13:45 on Friday 12 April.

Amsterdam, April 2nd 2013

Tuesday afternoon and I am looking out of my office window. It is situated in one of the 8 towers of the Rijksmuseum and it is one of the old boardrooms. It’s a beautiful room with a nice view on the western part of the museum gardens. The garden gates are still closed and everything looks serene. Silence before the storm. The last days before the museum will reopen after a decade of extensive renovations. My mind wanders off. Flowers, Dutch skies, sculptures. Objects from our collections.

The Rijksmuseum is all about art, about images, about sharing the best quality. So everyone can experience, discover, enjoy, zoom in, use etc. Digitisation and the internet gave us new opportunities to open our collections to a global audience. It gave us new possibilities to share images and information with audiences that can’t access our museum. Because it’s closed, because objects are stored or because they live in another part of the world. Over the last years the Rijksmuseum worked hard to achieve digital quality and openness: high res images on our new website; sharing, downloading and reusing objects in Rijksstudio and technical access for developers through the Rijks API. And ‘en passant’ my head was filled with thousands of hidden treasures.

Amsterdam, April 5th 2013

Friday morning. The day after the press opening. Journalists from all over the world came to see the museum… And they loved it! Images and films of our new galleries were broadcast in dozens of countries. Our website was visited by 54.000 unique visitors, visiting a staggering 421.000 pages. Rijksmuseum was 7th trending topic on twitter.

I am looking out of my window again and thinking about next Friday: GLAM-WIKI UK! Where I will present our digital strategies, projects and results. Share our experiences with online friends and visitors. The new friends we were able to make over the last decade. Just one day before our queen will open the museum on Saturday April 13th at 12 o’clock.

THATCamp London – have you registered yet?

This post was written by Martin Lugton, co-organiser of THATCamp London 2013 – The Humanities and Technology Camp. It is the first in a week of guest posts related to our GLAM-WIKI Conference, which takes place this weekend at the British Library, London.

I’m excited about THATCamp London 2013 because I’m trying to understand what digital technology might mean for culture.

What are digital’s possibilities for the creation, sharing and experiencing of meaning? How might digital help us understand ourselves and our works, or allow us to challenge and transform our understandings of the world?

My academic background is in ‘non-digital’ history, so I’m still quite new to this area of thought. While I encountered some weighty work with datasets in my time as an undergraduate – for example the work of the Cambridge Population Studies Group – my course did not explore digital humanities. My primary interest was in cultural history, and reading Chartier’s Forms and Meanings started me off thinking about forms, context and meaning. So I’ll be hoping to think about meaning and culture as well as seeing examples of work with large datasets at THATCamp London 2013.

I’ve been developing my skills to better enable me to actively participate in digital culture. In the last year I’ve started learning programming (Python and C), and I hope that THATCamp London 2013 will allow me to get a better idea of the types of projects I might be able to contribute to, and the directions in which I might like to develop these skills.

In addition to participant-run seminars and workshops, as part of THATCamp London 2013 we’re also hosting a Europeana hackathon. So there’s going to be lots of creative activity around the Europeana catalogue of cultural works, using the Europeana API. I’m looking forward to seeing what sort of things people are doing with APIs – or could be doing! It’ll be my first hackathon, so I’m interested to see what sort of scope and scale of activity can feasibly be carried out in such a short sprint.

I’m looking forward to a varied, challenging and exciting day, and to making some connections with other THATCampers.

If you’d like to join us, this free one-day unconference – supported by Wikimedia UK and held at the British Library – is taking place on Sunday 14 April. This comes at the end of the GLAM-WIKI conference, which brings Wikimedians and cultural institutions together to share experience and ideas.

We’d love for you to join us. To register your free place, please head over to the THATCamp London 2013 website.

To learn more about Martin’s work, visit his website here