Page 57 – WMUK

Training for Trainers session confirmed for Newcastle

This post was written by Daria Cybulska, our Events Organiser

Wikimedia UK is committed to supporting our volunteers. To encourage them to teach others how to edit Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, we are running a weekend training workshop. This will take place on the weekend of 23-24 February in Newcastle, and we would particularly encourage anyone from the North East and Scotland to attend.

The workshop will be delivered by a professional training company and aims to improve delegates’ abilities to deliver any training workshop. It’s especially relevant to anybody who already runs Wikimedia-related training, or is very interested in doing so in near future.

The workshop is a chance to:

Get accredited and receive detailed feedback about your presenting and training skills
Get general trainer skills which you can then apply when e.g. delivering specific Wikipedia workshops
Share your skills with others
Help design a training programme that serves Wikimedia UK in the long term.

The course will run from 9:30 am-6:30pm on Saturday and 9am-5pm on Sunday. A light breakfast and lunch will be provided. We should also be able to cover travel and accommodation if you let us know in advance.

If you are interested in attending, please indicate your commitment by signing up on this UK wiki page but please note that places are limited.

If you are not able to attend this time but would like to take part in the future, please let me know by email to daria.cybulska@wikimedia.org.uk – we will be offering more sessions in the future.

Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions. I can also put you in touch with past participants who will be able to share their experiences with you.

Virtual Learning Environment making good progress

We’re in the process of developing a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) to support teaching new editors how to edit Wikipedia. This will be a particularly useful resource for those training new editors, such as those people who have progressed through our Training the Trainers programme Work is progressing well, so now seems like a useful time to provide an update.

The system has been built using the open source platform Moodle, which is especially popular among universities, colleges and professionals with an interest in the field of continuous professional development. Moodle allows for bespoke course structures to be designed by those creating and teaching the course. Much thought was given to the structure and design of the course and we’ve taken an approach which breaks down the content into three distinct levels. For now, we’ll call these Level A, Level B and Level C.

Level A is the level for absolute beginners and will cover the basics, such as what Wikipedia is and how it works. Level B is the intermediate level and touches on some of the finer points of editing and also looks at some of the principles of Wikipedia in more detail. Level C is for more advanced users of Wikipedia. As well as the three main levels of the course, over time a database of case studies will evolve and serve as a vehicle for further study.

Much of the structure of the course and its written content has been completed and will soon be ready for testing. There are areas of work which remain ongoing, such as the implementation of a theme to improve the system’s accessibility and look & feel. A companion manual which provides course instructions and other useful resources is also currently in development. We’re also investigating ways of writing a modification to Moodle to allow HTML to be imported from wiki pages to directly, providing a transclusion function.

We’ll share more information about the VLE as work progresses further.

Join us! Wikimedia UK is recruiting

In order to support our ambitious programme of work over the next year and beyond, Wikimedia UK is recruiting people to fill three key roles within our growing team – a Volunteer Support Organiser, a GLAM Organiser and an Education Organiser.

The Volunteer Support Organiser will perform a key function for us. The Wikimedia movement is driven by volunteers and we are entirely dependent on them – without volunteers, Wikipedia and our other projects would not exist. This role will involve managing the engagement and development of volunteers in our work and our programme of activities. You can see full details of this role and information about how to apply here.

The GLAM Organiser will work to develop and maintain excellent relationships with GLAM institutions of all sizes – galleries, libraries, archives and museums. The role will involve supporting our Events Organiser by developing and delivering a range of large and small GLAM activities throughout the UK and encouraging volunteer participation. You can see full details of this role and information about how to apply here.

The Education Organiser will support the expansion of our activities in the field of education. The role will involve supporting the Events Organiser by developing and delivering a range of large and small education activities throughout the UK and encouraging volunteer participation. You can see full details of this role and information about how to apply here.

The closing date for each of these three roles is 5pm on Friday 8 February. For an application form please email Richard Nevell, our Office Support Assistant, at richard.nevell@wikimedia.org.uk

High profile keynote speakers confirmed for GLAM-Wiki 2013

Wikimedia UK is delighted to announce that we have confirmed our keynote speakers for our GLAM-Wiki 2013 conference. The conference takes place at the British Library on 12-14 April this year. It builds on the success of GLAM-WIKI 2010 and is aimed at Wikimedians and cultural institutions alike.

Michael Edson is the Director of Web and New Media Strategy at the prestigious Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. Michael will be doing a lot of work focusing on scale this year – how to encourage GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) to deliver more impact in society for the resources, attention, mind share, real estate, reputation and trust they consume. His presentation will encourage GLAM leaders and practitioners to focus on helping Wikipedians succeed, giving specific examples of how success for Wikimedians is success for everyone.

Lizzy Jongma is the Data Manager at the world-famous Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. She has specialised in digitisation and online presentation of cultural heritage and has worked as developer, adviser and project leader in this field since 1998. She will be speaking about her current work on projects to share, structure and link digital information. Take a look at the new Rijksmuseum website with its high resolution images that everyone can download for reuse, and Rijksstudio, the remix-friendly area of the new website which allows users to create their own collections from the museum’s resources.

“We’re really excited at securing such impressive keynote speakers for GLAM-WIKI 2013,” said Jon Davies, Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK. “Both Michael and Lizzy make excellent contributions to the sector internationally and I’m looking forward to welcoming them to London.”

Our thanks go to Liam Wyatt, formerly both a Wikipedian in Residence at the British Museum and Cultural Partnerships Co-ordinator at the Wikimedia Foundation, for his efforts in securing our speakers.

Further details of the conference programme will be available in due course. In the meantime you can find more details of the conference here and register for tickets here.

If you have any questions about GLAM-WIKI 2013 please email Daria, our Events Organiser at daria.cybulska@wikimedia.org.uk

A happy New Year to everyone from Wikimedia UK

This is a message in two parts. Take a look at the video made by Wikimedia UK’s staff, then read the text from Jon Davies, Wikimedia UK Chief Executive.

2013 is set to be an important year for Wikimedia UK. Having opened our office we are maturing into a leading chapter in the global Wikimedia family.

Thanks to our amazing community we have greatly expanded our range of activities, including Train the Trainers courses, themed editathons, a major education conference and an inspiring Glamcamp at the British Library. Our plans for this year are equally ambitious and include:

Developing even more partnerships with galleries, libraries, archives and museums,
Delivering two conferences, one for GLAM topics and one addressing the use of our work at schools and further education.
Training more volunteers to become trainers themselves
Supporting a range of Wikipedians in residence developing wiki content in association with a broad range of UK institutions
…and most of all inspiring people to become editors for the first time.

Our principal aim must be to support and grow our volunteer community – only in that way can we carry out all the work we need to do.

There will be challenges ahead. Delivering our ambitious programme will take a lot of energy.

We also await the report of the independent governance review we commissioned with the Foundation, which is likely to recommend changes to the way we operate.

It is important that we learn from this, but also vital that we do not throw away our commitment to openness and transparency.

And in 2013 we must become direct fundraisers again, so that we can effectively participate in the annual fundraiser appeal. This is vital if we are to take advantage of the gift aid we can gain from donations and build close contacts with our donor community.

If you are in London you will always find a welcome in our offices and staff look forward to attending events all over the country.

In the meantime on behalf of everyone at Wikimedia UK have a prosperous and peaceful new year.

New editor training in “the finest stone town in England”

The training event in Stamford, Lincolnshire

That’s how poet Sir John Betjeman once famously described the picturesque town of Stamford, Lincolnshire. Wikimedians recently had the chance to put that claim to the test.

Wikimedia UK received an email a short while ago from Dave Sones of the Stamford Civic Society expressing an interest in learning how to edit Wikipedia. Dave’s idea, along with the Civic Society, was to get together to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of Stamford while creating a digital archive of notable encyclopaedic resources, such as historical documents and images. This drive was given impetus by the recent closure of the local museum and there was a real sense of enthusiasm around the town to share the wonderful resources on their doorstep.

That’s how on Monday 17 December some staff and volunteers from Wikimedia UK arrived at the local college to train a diverse group of local residents, including a sizeable contingent from the Civic Society, on the finer points of what it takes to create and edit content for the largest reference work ever created.

After a light lunch, trainers Katie, Edward and Tom took the group through topics including a background to Wikipedia and its sister projects, how to write and edit content, how to include references, creating user accounts, talk pages and how to add images.

The training was well received and there was a definite determination to put some energy into the freshly-updated project, which you can see here. WMUK will continue working with the Stamford team into the new year. We’re looking forward to seeing the content evolve over the coming months.

And as for Betjeman’s claims? Perhaps you should pay Stamford a visit and judge for yourself!

Wikimedia Commons reaches 15 million files!

You may have heard that Wikimedia Commons, the media file repository which makes available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content, recently reached the landmark of 15 million files donated. To celebrate this achievement, we asked Commons contributor Deryck Chan to write a guest blog about his experiences of using the site. This is below.

I grew up in a densely populated residential district in eastern Hong Kong. When I first stumbled upon Wikipedia in 2004, coverage about my own district was almost non-existent.

So I started writing about my home district. I found that I could also contribute pictures, so I strolled around, took some pictures, and uploaded them too. Other editors then moved them to Wikimedia Commons and told me Commons is the correct place to upload original pictures which I want to contribute to Wikipedia. That’s how I started contributing to Commons.

Over the next two years or so, I filled many more gaps on Wikipedia by uploading my own photographs and drawings onto Commons. Wikipedia was also becoming saturated, and some of my pictures are gradually replaced by higher quality pictures by others, so my contribution tailed off.

Then in 2009 I had the privilege to begin my undergraduate studies at Cambridge University. It soon occurred to me that many people I meet in real life there have Wikipedia articles which lack pictures. So, I started taking pictures of them at whatever social occasion I get to see one of them. The list grew and grew: Duncan Robinson, Lulu Popplewell, Bishop Simon Barrington-Ward, Sir Fred Catherwood… and most recently, 2012 Nobel Laureate John Gurdon. When I tell them I hope to put the picture onto Wikipedia, some of them even told me about mistakes in their articles, which I would promptly amend.

I’m not a Commoner in the sense of making lots of edits to help curate Wikimedia Commons. I simply drop by to contribute the occasional picture. Nevertheless, it is the casual many and the confluence between Wikimedians of different backgrounds that makes Wikimedia Commons so successful as the universal repository of freely licensed media for educational use. I’ve contributed my part to it, and I think you should too.

Wikipedia’s Visual Editor comes one step nearer

The VisualEditor logo

James Forrester of the Wikimedia Foundation made the below announcement about the first stage implementation of a visual editor for the English language Wikipedia. We’re happy to share this announcement with you.

Today we are launching an alpha, opt-in version of the VisualEditor to the English Wikipedia. This will let editors create and modify real articles visually, using a new system where the articles they edit will look the same as when you read them, and their changes show up as they type enter them — like writing a document in a word processor. Please let us know what you think.

Why launch now?

We want our community of existing editors to get an idea of what the VisualEditor will look like in the “real world” and start to give us feedback about how well it integrates with how they edit right now, and their thoughts on what aspects are the priorities in the coming months.

The editor is at an early stage and is still missing significant functions, which we will address in the coming months. Because of this, we are mostly looking for feedback from experienced editors at this point, because the editor is insufficient to really give them a proper experience of editing. We don’t want to promise an easier editing experience to new editors before it is ready.

As we develop improvements, they will be pushed every fortnight to the wikis, allowing you to give us feedback as we go and tell us what next you want us to work on.

How can I try it out?

The VisualEditor is now available to all logged-in accounts on the English Wikipedia as a new preference, switched off by default. If you go to your “Preferences” screen and click into the “Editing” section, it will have as an option labelled “Enable VisualEditor”). Once enabled, for each article you can edit, you will get a second editor tab labelled “VisualEditor” next to the “Edit” tab. If you click this, after a little pause you will enter the VisualEditor. From here, you can play around, edit and save real articles and get an idea of what it will be like when complete.

At this early stage in our development, we recommend that after saving any edits, you check whether they broke anything. All edits made with the VisualEditor will show up in articles’ history tabs with a “VisualEditor” tag next to them, so you can track what is happening.

Things to note

Slow to load – It will take some time for long complex pages to load into the VisualEditor, and particularly big ones may timeout after 60 seconds. This is because pages have to be loaded through Parsoid which is also in its early stages, and is not yet optimised for deployment and is currently uncached. In the future (a) Parsoid itself will be much faster, (b) Parsoid will not depend on as many slow API calls, and (c) it will be cached.

Odd-looking – we currently struggle with making the HTML we produce look like you are used to seeing, so styling and so on may look a little (or even very) odd. This hasn’t been our priority to date, as our focus has been on making sure we don’t disrupt articles with the VisualEditor by altering the wikitext (correct “round-tripping”).

No editing references or templates – Blocks of content that we cannot yet handle are uneditable; this is mostly references and templates like infoboxes. Instead, when you mouse over them, they will be hatched out and a tooltip will inform you that they have to be edited via wikitext for now. You can select these items and delete them entirely, however there is not yet a way to add ones in or edit them currently (this will be a core piece of work post-December).

Incomplete editing – Some elements of “complex” formatting will display and let you edit their contents, but not let users edit their structure or add new entries – such as tables or definition lists. This area of work will also be one of our priorities post-December.

No categories – Articles’ “meta” items will not appear at all – categories, langlinks, magic words etc.; these are preserved (so editing won’t disrupt them), but they not yet editable. Another area for work post-December – our current plan is that they will be edited through a “metadata flyout”, with auto-suggestions and so on.

Poor browser support – Right now, we have only got VisualEditor to work in the most modern versions of Firefox, Chrome and Safari. We will find a way to support (at least) Internet Explorer post-December, but it’s going to be a significant piece of work and we have failed to get it ready for now.

Articles and User pages only – The VisualEditor will only be enabled for the article and user namespaces (so you can make changes in a personal sandbox), and will not work with talk pages, templates, categories, etc.. In time, we will build out the kinds of specialised editing tools needed for non-articles, but our focus has been on articles.

Final point

This is not the final form of the VisualEditor in lots of different ways. We know of a number of bugs, and we expect you to find more. We do not recommend people trying to use the VisualEditor for their regular editing yet. We would love your feedback on what we have done so far – whether it’s a problem you discovered, an aspect that you find confusing, what area you think we should work on next, or anything else, please do let us know.

Communications Data Bill under threat

Wikimedia UK notes that Nick Clegg MP, Deputy Prime Minister, has today spoken out against the draft Communications Data Bill. Mr Clegg has said that the plans need a “fundamental rethink” and that he would block the Bill and pursue plans that ensure “the balance between security and liberty”.

Wikimedia UK, as part of a coalition of groups interested in open access and open source, and backed by Jimmy Wales, called for a review of the Bill. You can read our submission to the public consultation on the Bill here.

It seems that parliament has listened. The committee investigating the Bill has stated that it showed “insufficient attention to the duty to respect the right to privacy” and went “much further than it need or should for the purpose of providing necessary and justifiable official access to communications data”.

But the Home office remains unconvinced of these arguments. We’ll be watching for further developments on the Bill with interest.

Manchester Girl Geeks help to share the world’s knowledge

This post was written by Daria Cybulska, Wikimedia UK’s Events Organiser

“It’s easier than you think!” “We can do it!” It’s self regulating and doesn’t need interventions from a site owner.”

Those are just a few comments from a Manchester Girl Geeks Wikipedia training event held on Sunday 25 November, very kindly hosted by MadLabs. The event brought together experienced Wikipedia editors and 12 Girl Geeks with two aims: to learn how to edit Wikipedia and to improve articles about female scientists, building on the progress made during our Ada Lovelace Day event.

Over the course of the afternoon, many articles were improved and lots of tea enjoyed. There was a really exciting feeling that everyone in the room was learning something new, trainers included. We’re confident that many of the people who attended will continue editing Wikipedia and make valuable contributions to the encyclopaedia. A lot of the participants were also keen to look at future opportunities to work with us, so I am sure we will be taking some exciting co-operations further.

If you’re interested in hosting a Wikipedia training and editing session, or want to help at any future events, please email Daria Cybulska – daria.cybulska-at-wikimedia.org.uk