Page 53 – WMUK

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

Open Educational Resources – Some reflections on OER ’13

The Communicate OER logo

This post was written by Dr Martin Poulter, Wikimedia UK Associate

OER13, a two-day international conference about Open Educational Resources, took place last week in the University of Nottingham. As well as providing a focus for new developments and findings in open education, it addressed overlapping issues such as open access to research, student perspectives and digital literacy. Wikipedia and Wikimedia had a very strong presence.

I attended on behalf of Wikimedia UK, to deliver a presentation, set up a little stall, and offer the How Universities are Using Wikipedia case-study brochure, which went like hot cakes. The presentation explained how Wikipedia and its sister projects can be used as educational platforms. Its main example was the Wikipedia Education Program in which students improve Wikipedia articles for course credit. According to a blog post by Terese Bird of the University of Leicester’s Institute of Learning Innovation, the presentation “made a compelling case” for including Wikipedia-based assignments in formal learning.

Phil Wane, a Nottingham Trent University lecturer and previous speaker at the EduWiki Conference, gave both a paper poster and an electronic poster about the Wikipedia Book Tool and how lecturers can use it to create and customise lists of articles.

The gold star, however, must go to the Communicate OER project, which is bringing together Wikipedians, educators, and support staff to improve articles about open education. The project’s Pete Forsyth and Sarah Frank Bristow attended the conference, and thanks to them all delegates got a copy of the Welcome to Wikipedia booklet. They had a stall, a poster, and two sessions to introduce their project and invite participants to School of Open’s new online course on Writing Wikipedia Articles. As if that weren’t enough, they also ran a post-conference editing session.

The open education genie is well and truly out of the bottle. Open Educational Resources are not a new idea, but there was a sense at the conference that we were all part of a movement that is only just getting started. One discussion group argued that it is now within our reach to have public, open education on the model of the National Health Service: available to everyone, life-long without charge, with both rights and responsibilities for citizens who need it. Wikipedia was mentioned not just as an example of this free global service, but as a way for citizens to contribute back to the common good.

We covered recently on this blog how some educators are resistant to the educational potential of Wikipedia, yet our warm acceptance from the OER community shows that the shared goals between Wikimedians and formal education are impossible to ignore.

Announcement – QRpedia donated to Wikimedia UK

Wikimedia UK is pleased to announce that Roger Bamkin and Terence Eden are transferring ownership of QRpedia to Wikimedia UK.

As a donation from Roger and Terence, the intellectual property in QRpedia and the qrpedia.org and qrwp.org domains will be transferred to Wikimedia UK, which will maintain and support the development of the QRpedia platform for the future for the benefit of the Wikimedia community. Roger and Terence will act as honorary advisors to Wikimedia UK in this, as well as retaining their moral rights of attribution, but will not receive any financial consideration for this. The transfer of the domains will take place as soon as the remaining legal details have been resolved.

QRpedia is a web tool that uses QR codes placed on or near objects or locations to link mobile users to Wikipedia articles about those objects or locations in their language. The agreement was made as a result of negotiations at our board meeting on 8 February 2013.

Wikimedia UK is grateful for this donation which will allow ongoing technical support for a number of Wikimedia-related outreach projects where QRpedia is already in use, including Wikimedia UK’s work with the Derby Museum and Monmouthpedia, and many others worldwide.

Chris Keating, Chair of Wikimedia UK, said: “I am very pleased that we have reached agreement with Roger and Terence and that Wikimedia UK will support, preserve and improve QRpedia for the benefit of the whole Wikimedia community. QRpedia is a great innovation and already plays an important role in Wikimedia outreach projects not just in the UK but worldwide. I look forward to working with Roger and Terence to develop QRpedia further in future.”

Roger Bamkin, co-creator of QRpedia, said: “Terence Eden and I are thrilled to see the projects in Monmouth, Johannesburg, Gibraltar, Sayada and Fremantle that have inspired volunteers to write about different towns in dozens of different languages. Who would think you could tour Monmouth in Hungarian or Gibraltar in Punjabi?”

John Cummings begins work as Wikimedian in Residence

Wikimedia UK is very happy to report that John Cummings, a long-standing and well known Wikimedian, has begun his work as Wikimedian in Residence at the Science Museum and Natural History Museum.

This is a ground-breaking partnership between two of the UK’s most prestigious cultural institutions and the charity that promotes and supports Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in the UK. His role with the museums will last for four months.

John said: “It’s a real privilege to work with institutions with such important places in the history and public understanding of science. I hope I will be able to help the museums in their goals.”

John is the co-founder and project leader for MonmouthpediA and Gibraltarpedia, the world’s first Wikipedia town and city, and he is a Wikimedia UK accredited trainer for communities and institutions.

He is also technical lead for Leaderwiki, a collaborative education resource for emerging leaders from all over the world who want to make a positive contribution in their communities.