Page 55 – WMUK

Winner of the 2012 Picture of the Year contest

This is a guest post by User:Mono and was originally published on the Wikimedia Foundation blog here

3990 votes were cast by Wikimedians to determine the seventh Picture of the Year in this yearly competition on Wikimedia Commons. A total of 988 pictures promoted to featured picture status in the previous year were included in the competition. The organizing committee is pleased to announce the results, and would like to congratulate our winners.

The complete results are visible on the POTY 2012 results page. The competition consisted of two voting rounds—the top images from Round 1 continued to Round 2, which ended on February 14th.

The Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year contest is an annual volunteer-led contest, running since 2006. This year, about 4,000 Wikimedians voted in the competition, a record turnout that shattered projected targets.

The support of the Wikimedia community made this incredible contest possible, and the organizers would like to thank everyone who participated.

Wikimedia Commons is a media repository hosting content that anyone can freely share, reuse, and remix. Wikimedia Commons editors nominate the best media for featured status in an ongoing project, and all featured pictures from the previous year are included in the annual Picture of the Year contest.

The contest is a fun and enjoyable event that not only celebrates our excellent photographers and illustrators, but everyone who contributes to Wikimedia. You are encouraged to donate your own work to the Wikimedia Commons as our library of freely licensed media files grows past 16 million files.

You can upload them yourself (details here) or email info-commons@wikimedia.org if you are the copyright-holder or maintainer of a freely-licensed media collection that you would like to donate to the Commons.

Mono, Wikimedia Commons contributor

Copyright notes: “Pair of Merops apiaster feeding.jpg” by Pierre Dalous, under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons

The British Library, Picturing Canada – and photos of cats

This post was written by Andrew Gray, Wikimedian in Residence at the British Library and was originally published here

As the Picturing Canada digitisation project reaches critical mass the Library’s Wikipedian in Residence needs your help – and has photos of Canada’s cats to share.

In 1895, an amendment to Canadian law allowed the British Museum to receive one copy of all Canadian intellectual property deposted for copyright registration. This situation persisted until 1924, when – as part of a general reworking of Canadian copyright law – the right of receipt was removed.

During these thirty years, the Department of Agriculture – who administered copyright – regularly parcelled up half their deposits and sent them to London. As well as books, maps and sheet music, the collection included a copy of every photograph copyrighted in Canada in this period. These are now held by the British Library and, despite some of the works being lost in their original transit (thanks to the sinking of the Empress of Ireland) or added to other collections (such as the Geraldine Moodie photographs held by the British Museum), they represent a significant collection of early twentieth-century Canadian photography.

The interesting – and unusual – aspect of this collection is that it’s entirely unselective. Anyone who submitted two copies of their picture, the correct form, and the right amount of money would have it copyrighted; it would be entered into the collections without any regard for its artistic merits. As a result, the collection includes some entirely unexpected material:

We don’t yet know anything about the “Globe Kittens” (1902, right), but it seems a reasonable bet that not many serious photographic curators would have bought and preserved prints of them! As well as what you might expect – portraits, buildings, scenic pictures of mountains – there are hundreds more images like this – unexpected, provoking, and quite possibly completely forgotten. So far, working through the catalogue data and the early scans, we’ve found cute animals, urban-regeneration proposals, salacious stereograms, and at least two attempts to copyright a movie.

The British Library recently got funding from Wikimedia UK and from the Eccles Centre for American Studies to digitise the bulk of the collection. We’re planning to have them released to the public by mid-April, but we’ve hit a snag. While the digitisation itself has proceeded well, and we have a veritable mountain of metadata to work with, we still need to do the final step of cropping and orienting the pictures – this part can’t easily be automated, and my fingers are getting pretty tired.

So, we’re going to run a workshop at the British Library on Monday 18th March to try and steamroller through the backlog of image processing, and we’re looking for volunteers to help. We’ll provide laptops (though you can of course bring your own) and lunch; you’ll have a chance to get a sneak preview of this collection before it goes public, as well as helping us look for interesting or significant images that we haven’t discovered so far.

If you’re interested in coming along and joining our experiment in “physical crowdsourcing”, please get in touch!

[Ed: Some of the British Library’s regular readers will recognise this collection as the one Phil has mentioned here, here and here. For those of you who would like to know (quite a lot) more about the collection and its contents a thesis on it is available here.]

Travel grants available for Amsterdam Hackathon 2013

This post was written by Richard Nevell

Applications for grants to support travel to the Amsterdam Hackathon 2013 are now being accepted. The deadline for applications is 8th March 2013.

The hackathon is being held on 24–26 May and is described by the organisers as “an opportunity for all Wikimedia community developers and sysadmins to come together, squash bugs and write crazy new features”. A grant from Wikimedia UK will allow an individual to attend the hackathon. Applicants must be:

based in the UK
able to travel to Amsterdam
willing to feature in blog posts about the conference and the scholarships.

To learn more about the scholarships please visit this page If you have any questions email richard.nevell@wikimedia.org.uk

Greyham Dawes joins the Wikimedia UK Board

Wikimedia UK is pleased to announce the co-option of Greyham Dawes to our Board of Trustees. He has also been appointed Treasurer.

Greyham is a professional financial adviser specialising in regulatory compliance, charity governance and restructuring and public accountability, drawing on extensive knowledge and experience gained as head of accountancy policy at the Charity Commission in the nineties. He provides pro bono advice in these areas to the charity sector generally, serves on a number of standing committees for best practice in charity financial reporting and is well known for his books, essays and lectures on that topic.

He is a chartered accountant, an independent member of the audit committee at SCOPE, chair of the finance & audit committee as a non-executive director of the British School of Osteopathy and hon. treasurer of the Association of Church Accountants and Treasurers.

Greyham said: “I’m delighted to be able to help take such a rapidly developing charity to the next level in all aspects of best practice as it continues to serve the Public Benefit needs of its beneficiaries within the Wikipedia and wider open-access communities.”

Chris Keating, Chair of Wikimedia UK, said: “I am very pleased to welcome Greyham to the Board, and I am sure his experience will be immensely valuable to us.”

Greyham’s term on the board will run until WMUK’s Annual General Meeting on 8 June 2013.

Looking at the next five years – a day workshop on the future of Wikimedia UK

Wikimedia UK is hosting an open day and workshops on Saturday 23 March and we’d love for you to come along.

The open day has been designed for volunteers, trustees, potential trustees and staff to get together over coffee and lunch to meet and discuss the future of our charity. This event will be especially useful for those responding to our call for applicants to join our Board of Trustees.

This is an excellent chance to come together as a community of people who all want to help the chapter achieve great things in support of free and open knowledge. In particular, it’s an opportunity for our community and potential trustees to meet and get a sense of the contributions they may be able to make to our charity and our movement.

Topics for the day will include a workshop looking at our five year plan and a session based on where we want to be in 2018. We want to know what your vision for our charity is, what you want us to achieve and how we can get there.

The event will take place at our offices in the Old Street area of London and will run from 10am-5pm. Lunch and refreshments will be provided and we will also consider meeting travel expenses for attendees.

We’re looking forward to seeing you there and making the most of this opportunity to learn from one another. If you’d like to come along please use this page to express your interest.

If you’re interested in becoming a Trustee of our charity, please call Jon Davies, Chief Executive on 020 7065 0990 or email jon.davies@wikimedia.org.uk Jon will be happy to speak with you.

Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums and Wikimedia UK to jointly appoint Wikimedian in Residence

Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, working with Wikimedia UK, have today announced they are to jointly recruit of a Wikimedian in Residence.

This is a ground-breaking partnership between one of the North East’s most important cultural bodies and the charity that promotes and supports Wikipedia, the world’s 5th most popular website.

The Wikimedian in Residence will be working on photographs from TWAM’s Shipbuilding, Maritime Trade and Science & Technology collections, digitising content and helping to improve content on Wikipedia.

Jon Davies, Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK, said: “Wikimedia UK is really pleased to be working together with TWAM. The Wikimedian in Residence will make a valuable contribution to making the museum’s materials accessible to people around the world, for free.”

Carolyn Ball, of Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, said: “The Wikimedian in Residence will be working with our shipbuilding, maritime and science and technology collections, which are Designated as being of national and international importance. They will work with TWAM staff and the research community to develop new Wikipedia articles, and improve existing articles, relating to these collections.”

To apply for the position of Wikimedian in Residence please visit www.twmuseums.org.uk/about-us/job-opportunities.html and to find out more about Wikimedians in Residence please visit this page

The closing date for applications is 12pm on Monday 4 March 2013.

Victorian-era Dictionary of National Biography digitised on Wikisource

This post was written by Charles Matthews, Wikimedian and Wikimedia UK volunteer.

The digitisation project for the Victorian-era Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) on Wikisource has reached the milestone of a complete posting for the biographies for the first edition, which was published in 63 volumes from 1885 to 1900. Wikisource is the text repository of Wikimedia, less well known than Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons (media files), but which adds value to texts with author pages, portals and categories, and light annotation and hyperlinks.

The efforts of over 30 people since 2008 have put close to 30,000 DNB articles onto Wikisource. While in the UK the text of the old DNB is available freely through library cards on http://www.oxforddnb.com, the subscription site of the modern revised Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), the old DNB is still of interest, and this digitisation makes it much easier to use for the whole world… For example the DNB contains more genealogical and bibliographical research information. This major resource has in fact not previously been available straightforwardly on search engines.

The DNB was a remarkable legacy project of the publisher George Murray Smith. Typical of the unstoppable Victorian attitude, it was authored by over 700 writers, with the first editor being Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf. It is particularly strong in areas such as naval biography and Scottish history. With a deep coverage of figures relevant to the British Empire as it then was, it was called by historian Christopher Hill “that much maligned and indispensable work”. Texts on Wikisource cannot be guaranteed perfect, but the small numbers in the left margin of the DNB biographies give access to scans of original pages allowing for checking and correction by anyone.

Wikimedia UK and Wikimedia Foundation announce the release of the Compass Partnership report

Today the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia UK are announcing the release of the final report and recommendations regarding the governance of the Wikimedia UK chapter. The report was completed by Compass Partnership, consultants in non-profit management based in the UK. The report was commissioned jointly by the Foundation and Wikimedia UK in October 2012 following important Wikimedia community discussions about potential conflicts of interest arising from a series of wiki outreach projects.

The Foundation and Wikimedia UK saw the potentially damaging effect of these matters and we ordered this review and report. We both expect the highest standards of governance, and this report is an effort to chart a strong course for Wikimedia UK and also thoughtful and valuable counsel for any organization in our movement to consider.

The report discusses important conclusions based on discussions with and materials provided by all of the major stakeholders. The aim of the report is not to lay blame, rather it seeks to determine if pre-existing policies and practices around conflicts of interest and governance were sufficient. Through this report we also aim to lay the groundwork for better and stronger governance for Wikimedia UK in the future and for its development as a chapter in our movement. We also believe the report may benefit the wider community of Wikimedia affiliated organizations by providing an example of best practices around governance and decision-making as applied to a chapter.

With a clear list of recommendations and timeline for their implementation, Wikimedia UK is now in a position to improve and expand its policies and procedures, related not just to the management of conflict of interest but also its management structure. The chapter will be discussing the findings with the community and begin their implementation at their forthcoming Trustee meeting in February.

We would like to thank everyone who has supported this process over the past three months, including the authors of the report, Compass Partnership, the staff and trustees of WMUK and the Wikimedia Foundation, and Wikimedia community members who shared their insights and feedback about the whole process.

You can read the review findings here and the chronology of the events here

Questions and answers regarding the report are posted here, and we’ve commenced a community discussion page on Meta wiki here.

Questions and Answers related to the governance review

Q: How did this report come about? Who originated the suggestion for the report?

The report was commissioned jointly by Wikimedia UK and the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) in October 2012 following community discussions about conflicts of interest concerning Wikimedia UK, specifically relating to the management of wiki-based outreach initiatives, including QRpedia, Monmouthpedia, and Gibraltarpedia.

Q: What is the conclusion of the report?

The report looks at how pre-existing policies and procedures were managed in light of conflict situations. The report also provides insight and advice on how to address any deficiencies in Wikimedia UK’s policies and practices. The report makes those recommendations and also provides a timeline for implementation.

The report was not intended to lay blame or identify any individuals nor actions who may have been at fault. The focus was on policies and how decisions and actions were carried out. Through this report we also aim to build a better future for Wikimedia UK, and lay the groundwork for stronger governance. We also believe the report may benefit the wider community of Wikimedia affiliated organizations by providing an example of best practices around governance and decision-making as applied to a chapter.

Q: Who conducted the report and how was it carried out?

The report was conducted by Compass Partnership, a UK-based management consultancy with experience conducting reviews of this kind, and advising non-profits on issues related to compliance with UK charity laws. Compass Partnerships was chosen from a list of candidates developed by both Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia UK.

The report involved collection of records (primarily minutes from meetings, emails and correspondence), interviews with officers and others involved in the projects (from Wikimedia UK, WMF, and other organizations), review of on-wiki and publicly available materials, and other fact-gathering.

Q: What was the desired outcome of this report?

WMF and Wikimedia UK jointly commissioned this report to gain an objective view into the activities that took place and the decisions made by Wikimedia UK, and to produce suggestions that address any observed issues in governance – particularly as they relate to the management of conflict of interest matters in the UK context.

We also believe the report may benefit the wider community of Wikimedia affiliated organizations by providing an example of best practices around governance and decision-making as applied to a chapter.

Q: Who paid for the report and the review?

The report was commissioned jointly. WMF covered the costs of hiring the consultancy firm; however both WMF and Wikimedia UK contributed considerable time and effort into the collection of information and in assisting with the report authors.

Q: What is the Foundation’s view on the findings of this report? What is Wikimedia UK’s view on the findings of this report?

Please see our joint statement. Wikimedia UK and WMF will also be taking part in the discussion here

Q: What are the immediate outcomes of the review? Are any actions being undertaken immediately by Wikimedia UK or the Wikimedia Foundation?

WMF and Wikimedia UK jointly undertook this review and the creation of the report with the shared understanding that the recommendations would be reviewed and adopted immediately where appropriate. The Wikimedia UK board will be reviewing the report, and the timeline for implementation of the changes proposed, at their Board meeting on Saturday 9 February. Some of the proposals will need to be discussed by the whole Wikimedia UK membership before they can take effect.”

Q: What is the status of the QRpedia project – and the other community ‘pedia’ projects

The report outlines clear recommendations for clarifying the ownership and operation of the QRpedia project. The other community projects are still active, although neither WMF nor Wikimedia UK are planning to support new projects of this nature at least until that question is resolved. Updated, 11 February: Wikimedia UK, Roger Bamkin and Terence Eden have reached an agreement about the future ownership of QRpedia. Full details of this agreement will be shared in due course.

Q: Will there be more community ‘pedia’ type projects and use of QR codes?

There are no current plans from Wikimedia Foundation to expand the number of the community projects. The Wikimedia Foundation is not planning to review nor approve any licensed uses of the Wikipedia trademarks for the purposes of community projects at this time.

The report makes recommendations about clarifying the ownership and operation of the QRpedia project. Wikimedia UK is currently in negotiations about the possible transfer of ownership and operation of the QRpedia project. Updated, 11 February: Wikimedia UK, Roger Bamkin and Terence Eden have reached an agreement about the future ownership of QRpedia. Full details of this agreement will be shared in due course.

Q: Will Wikimedia UK now be permitted to take part in the Wikimedia fundraiser?

This report was not commissioned to examine Wikimedia UK’s fundraising activities and its conclusions and recommendations are focused more broadly on governance and operational details. We expect Wikimedia UK will revisit the topic of the Wikimedia fundraiser when the time is right.

Q: Did the governance review cover any issues related to financial matters?

The focus of the review was to examine the decisions made by Wikimedia UK, as well as pre-existing policies and procedures. The report does make specific recommendations relating to the disclosure of financial information as it relates to transparency and accountability. Wikimedia UK’s finances were audited by UHY in 2012.

John Byrne stands down as the Treasurer and a trustee of Wikimedia UK

John Byrne has decided to stand down as the Treasurer and a trustee of Wikimedia UK. His resignation coincides with the end of our financial year.

John said: “Today I’m announcing, with regret, my resignation from the Board of Trustees of Wikimedia UK. I hope to pursue Wikimedia-related employment opportunities in the near future, and it is clear that in order to do so I should step down from the Board sooner rather than later.

“It has been a challenging and fascinating period for Wikimedia UK, and I have greatly enjoyed working with the staff, trustees and volunteers. I’m glad to be able to say that financial procedures and reporting are already vastly improved since I took over as (initially) Acting Treasurer last April.

“Wikimedia UK is poised to take things to a new level in the new financial year beginning on 1st February when we will introduce a new chart of accounts that will give us much better analysis and reporting, and a new version of the Sage accounting software. Of course I will continue to be involved as a volunteer in the UK Wikimedia community, and in particular with our GLAM outreach programme.”

The Wikimedia UK Board thanks John for all of his hard work as our Treasurer and we wish him well. We look forward to his continued involvement as a volunteer.