Page 60 – WMUK

Three months as a Wikipedian in Residence at the British Library

Over the past two years, Wikimedia UK has been working with the British Library. These have involved a series of editing events and tours through 2011-12, and partnerships between curators and volunteers to write about some of the Library’s most significant material. In May 2012, with the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Library recruited Andrew Gray as the Wikipedian in Residence. Below is a blog post from Andrew outlining his experiences so far.

The main focus so far has been on getting a training programme off the ground. Since the first workshop in mid-June, I’ve had workshops for 55 staff at the British Library, and for nine more at the National Archives. Another 40 people have been to university-hosted workshops at Birkbeck in London and the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. These people are from more than ten institutions and represent a wide range of backgrounds: academics, librarians, researchers, support staff and postgraduate students.

At the British Library, again, we’ve had a diverse turnout. As well as curators, we’ve had reference staff, cataloguers, conservators, technicians, accountants, archivists… The emphasis in these workshops is essentially on “Wikipedia as information literacy”, on getting the basic skills to contribute to them or engage with them – understanding the dynamics of editing and communication, how to add footnotes, how to use talkpages.

The programme continues through a series of upcoming workshops, including one at the British Library for readers and two for AHRC academics. The university programme will resume in the new term with a workshop in early October in Oxford and I’m looking at organising some more outside London to follow on from this. If your institution might be interested in hosting one, please do get in touch.

Many thanks to the Wikimedians who’ve assisted in running these sessions, and to those who’ve offered to help at the upcoming ones.

On the content side, things have been simmering gently. I’ve been working on an overview of all British Library content on Wikipedia, looking at both the projects and the collections. One thing that’s been interesting is discovering how many languages currently represent the British Library with an (admittedly beautiful) image of the British Museum Reading Room – the Library split from the Museum years before I was born!

I’ve also been working with curators and the copyright group here to identify suitable collections that can be released openly. We’ve started trialling it with the gradual release of a collection of musical manuscripts, chosen to represent a wide sample of autograph material by around a hundred composers and prominent musical copyists. The uploads of these have begun, gradually, to let me work some bugs out of the system!

We have a number of curators who are interested in working with Wikipedia volunteers to write about their collections. In September we’ll be having a workshop where we’ll be inviting editors to come and meet curators, hopefully leading to some good partnerships. When we’ve had these in the past (eg, the collaboration on the Cuthbert Gospel) they’ve been very successful, and there’s great promise for the future here.

In September, with the assistance of User:Philafrenzy, we’ll be hosting a workshop at the British Library designed to reach out to people interested in a specific topic – in this case philately – and offer them support from the institution and from Wikipedia editors to help them contribute to articles on the topic. Reaching out to groups of potential contributors like this is unusual, outside of academia, but we’re hoping it’ll prove productive.

Being a Wikipedian in Residence also allows me the opportunity of supporting work for the broader library community. I’ve been working with Max Klein and a group at OCLC to prepare and roll out authority control identifiers – the system used in librarianship to uniquely identify individuals – across the English Wikipedia, building on work already done by OCLC and by the German Wikipedia community. We expect to have these going live by the end of August, with inclusion of VIAF identifiers on well over 200,000 biographies. This will be a major step towards tying our articles into a wider ecosystem of linked reusable data, and hopefully encouraging greater integration with libraries.

What else have we done? In June, the British Library hosted a World War I editathon organised by JISC and Wikimedia UK; around thirty Wikipedians and academics attended, working on a series of articles linked to key topics around the war. This prompted a number of institutions to reach out to us about future collaboration, and to talk about the work they could do with Wikimedia, which I’ve been working on following up.

As well as the workshops above, we’ve an event coming up on 10th September – an open session to talk about what the community would like to get out of the residency, for curators to meet editors, and work on some of the digital content. There will be a tour of the current Writing Britain exhibition in the evening, led by a curator, and we’d love to see as many people as can make it.

If you’d like to get involved or learn more about this project please email Andrew.Gray – at – bl.uk.

Teaming up with Mozilla for an editathon

Mozilla UK have been supportive to Wikimedia UK since they opened their Mozilla Spaces venue in June 2012, allowing us to use their space in central London a few times for free, and continuing to do so whenever possible. This is particularly useful when the meeting spaces in our London office are fully booked (which is often!). For our part, we realised some of the Wikipedia articles relating to Mozilla, Firefox and so on are not quite of the high standard that everyone would like. Therefore, we felt it would be a neighbourly thing to do to organise a Mozilla-related editathon. This we did, and the event took place on Saturday 18 August at the Mozilla Space in London.

A group of experienced Mozillians joined forces with four Wikipedians to explore the convoluted and complicated world of Mozilla-related content on Wikipedia, correcting factual errors and updating articles. As it turned out all the Mozillians have already had some experience in editing, so we skipped the basic introduction to Wikipedia and focused on issues such as conflict of interest (keeping information neutral and declaring the COI) and some deeper arcana of editing aspects.

In such a friendly atmosphere, we were mainly working on the Mozilla article, specifically in a new sandbox. In addition, we fixed various issues including improving Mozilla Persona, Firefox OS, Mozilla Public License, Gecko (layout engine), SpiderMonkey, and Rust (programming language). We left with the feeling of success – and the realisation that much more is yet to be done.

Wikimedia UK, Wicipedia Cymraeg and the National Eisteddfod

The National Eisteddfod is Wales’ primary cultural event of the year with a history stretching back over 800 years. It includes all the major cultural institutions in Wales and this year had 135,000 visitors. The event creates Crowned and Chaired bards who are like National Laureates. Robin Owain, our Ambassador in Wales, won the chair in 1991.

The Eisteddfod has a Welsh language only rule, and in fairness – so does Wicipedia Cymraeg! WMUK, through Wicipedia Cymraeg (the Welsh Language Wikipedia), had a presence there all week in a tent set aside for a hackathon (#Haciaith). The hackathon has been running for about three years at various locations and is the only one that focuses on the Welsh language. During the Eisteddfod, Robin met with the First Minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones, raising items that the team have been discussing with the Education Minister. He confirmed that they were considering those requests. Linda Tomas from Cymal (Libraries and Museums of Wales) was there to assist.

Robin, along with our Trustee Roger Bamkin, also met Tom Pert from the People’s Collection and we discussed the success we had with getting the DigitalPast conference to Monmouth. Tom was of the clear opinion that Monmouth had only won the honour of running this convention because of Monmouthpedia (another benefit of the project).

Roger met a number of active Wikipedians who are active for our cause, not all of whom are members. For instance, they provide the Welsh translation for the fundraiser, successfully used last year for the first time. There was also a training session on Wikipedia given by one of the Admins: cy:Defnyddiwr:Ben Bore. This was part of a week of events with Wicipedia being formally presented at least once a day.

Robin and Roger are now considering how to develop this relationship further and how we can best support Wicipedia Cymraeg. As one poster on the Eisteddfod Field proudly announced: The Dragon Has Two Tongues!

Wikimedia UK is very keen to work with other non-English languages, as well as Welsh. If you’d like to find out more and get involved, drop a line to info@wikimedia.org.uk or call our office on 020 7065 0990.

Gibraltar’s biggest website is now CC-BY-SA for Gibraltarpedia

The Rock of Gibraltar with the mountain Jebel Musa, Morocco visible in the background

The discovergibraltar.com website has invited Gibraltarpedians to use its content as a resource for the Gibraltarpedia project and Wikipedia. This comes as a result of presentations made by Roger Bamkin and John Cummings last month. The recently launched Gibraltarpedia project builds on the Monmouthpedia initiative, which created the first “Wikipedia town,” with a view to making Gibraltar the world’s first “Wikipedia city.” This will create a city labelled with QRpedia plaques covering every aspect of Gibraltar and everyone is encouraged to contribute.

The website now carries the Gibraltarpedia banner and has the Creative Commons license conditions to allow information and images from the site to be used as a basis for Gibraltarpedia articles. The site has been run by history and heritage enthusiast Jim Crone, and it contains almost 400 pages relating to Gibraltar. The website is not run as a business and it does not deal with subjects such as where to stay, where to shop or eat.

“When I met the team from the Monmouthpedia project in Gibraltar, I was very impressed with the ambition to create something special in the form of Gibraltarpedia,” Jim explained. “In discussions with Roger and John I suggested that Gibraltarpedians could use information from my website. I would hope other websites in Gibraltar will consider offering the same facility to Gibraltarpedians in an effort to grow the project quickly.”

The Gibraltarpedia team said: “We are trying to meet all the Gibraltar clubs and societies and we already have a dozen new articles. Jim’s gift captures the spirit of the project. We want people to share their pictures and knowledge of Gibraltar with the world.” His web site has already been a source for an article on one of Gibraltar’s main squares.

Germans shoot Edinburgh – The Edinburgh Photography Workshop 2012, a joint UK-German venture.

Post by Peter Weis

Participating in Wikimedia’s projects is not just about editing Wikipedia. Many Wikipedia articles have images, but not many people understand how they get there. Images on Wikipedia are provided by Wikimedia Commons – the free media archive and one of Wikimedia’s many projects. The aim of the Edinburgh Photography Workshop on 1 August was to involve local photographers, share skills and show them how to participate on Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia.

The idea for this workshop was conceived last year when I met User:Brian McNeil for the first time. Photography workshops are popular in the German Wiki community – Nuremberg will have its 11th workshop this year. User:Gnu1742 of the Nuremberg workshops and Daria Cybulska of Wikimedia UK helped the two of us create the 1st Edinburgh photography workshop.

With the support of Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia Deutschland and the experience of a dozen German photography workshops, we met on 21st July at the McDonald Road Library to start a weekend of shutter speeds and aperture values. Saturday kicked off with an initial session on cameras and a photo tour to Calton Hill. After our excursion we evaluated most of the images and tried to point out mistakes and improve the general image quality. Approaching attendees on an individual level and trying different camera settings “in the field” has proven to be a suitable solution. Brian McNeil and Andrew Gray presented on Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, preparing participants for an extensive introduction the next day.

On Sunday we gathered at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh well prepared to take images of the various plants and flowers. Gladly most of the names were indicated by signs, which saved Category:Unidentified plants from being spammed. Unlike the urban photography of Saturday, the images taken at the RBGE were benefiting from dead calm and clouds. A first selection of these images was uploaded right after returning to the library. An in-depth session on Wikimedia Commons involved creating an account, image licensing, explaining the basics such as categorisation and image descriptions, as well as the actual upload using the UploadWizard. Later on, experienced Wikimedians shared tricks on how to improve the workflow and showed which next steps to take. In the end we informed participants about the follow up information to this workshop, which can be found here

We found that small events can be successful too. Six new users and 50 new images are just the beginning of a growing community of Wikimedians in Edinburgh. Participants of the local Open Street Map community offered to join forces for an unconference in October 2012. Now it’s up to the local Wikimedians to make the best of this chance.

Featured pictures is what the community considers to be the finest images available. For Scotland, there have been 18 of these excellent media files so far (there are around 300 featured pictures of Germany). The community voted for one of the images, which is now a featured picture. A future goal is to get more featured pictures of Scotland and promote both, the country and the community creating these stunning images.

If you would like to participate in a UK photography event, Wikipedia Takes Coventry is for you! User:Rock drum is hosting a one day photo scavenger hunt on 1st September in Coventry, England. Anyone can participate, regardless of photography ability.

Wikimedia UK elects a new Chair

The Board of Wikimedia UK today announced the appointment of Chris Keating as its new Chair. This appointment is effective immediately.

Doug Taylor, another leading Wikimedian with thirty years experience of the non-profit and charity sectors was appointed Vice Chair in support.

Chris has a background in fundraising and campaigning, and he is a long-standing Wikipedia editor and administrator. Elected to the Board of Wikimedia UK in April 2011, his main priority is making sure Wikimedia UK communicates well with the Wikimedia community and with our other supporters. His skills and experience will be invaluable as he leads us through a busy, productive and important period.

The Board wishes to thank Ashley Van Haeften for his excellent contributions as Chair of our charity. There is no doubt that he will continue to perform well as a Trustee and volunteer, particularly in his GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) work, where he is a leader in the field. He continues as Chair of the Wikimedia Chapters Association

This change in leadership will not affect the day to day operations of Wikimedia UK as a functioning charity. The Board looks forward to supporting the Wikimedia community as we continue to work towards our objectives.

A message from Jon Davies, Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK

This morning I have been in discussion with Ashley Van Haeften.

Ashley is keen that there should be no division in the WMUK community over his role as Chair, especially at a time when so many great things are being achieved. He has therefore resigned as Chair. A board meeting, already scheduled for this evening, will see the election of a new Chair.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Ashley for his valuable contributions as our Chair and look forward to our continued working relationship.

Jon Davies, Chief Executive

A response to The Daily Telegraph article

The Daily Telegraph ran an article online today referring to Ashley Van Haeften, Chair of Wikimedia UK. The story tells how Mr Van Haeften has been banned from editing the English language Wikipedia for a minimum of six months.

The Board of Wikimedia UK discussed this issue at their meeting last week. Minutes of this meeting are publicly available here. The meeting was not ‘secret’ although for obvious reasons the discussion regarding Ashley was held ‘in camera’, but held under normal conditions and is a matter of public record.

The Daily Telegraph has chosen its headline to create maximum impact. The reality is far, far more complex.

Following the board meeting, the statement below was sent to our mailing list.

“As some members of Wikimedia UK will know, our Chair, Ashley Van Haeften, user name Fae, has been the subject of sanctions by the Arbitration Committee of the English Wikipedia (Arbcom), the volunteer committee that exists to provide binding remedies to Wikipedia disputes. In particular, he has been banned from editing the English language Wikipedia for at least the next six months, after which he can appeal the ban.

“The Board of Wikimedia UK notes the decision of Arbcom.

“The Board is united in the view that this decision does not affect his role as a Trustee of the charity. His work at Wikimedia UK has always been enthusiastic and diligent. In particular, his knowledge of charity governance, and his ability to bring about consensus at WMUK’s board meetings, have been particularly valuable.

“The Board points out that the editing issues were fully public before, and during, the recent elections to the board, and were openly and publicly discussed. Our membership placed their trust in him by electing him as a Trustee. He was then elected unanimously as Chair of the Board. He continues to have the full support of the Board.”

Jon Davies Chief Executive, Wikimedia UK.

Working with the Welsh language Wikipedia

You may think that Wikimedia UK focuses solely on the English Wikipedia. However, we seek to support all language Wikipedias, with a focus on those that originate from, or are used in, the UK. Indeed, one of our activities that Wikimedia UK is particularly well known for in the global Wikimedia community is the multilingual challenges that we run, where we invite volunteers to write Wikipedia articles on a given topic in any language.

As a result of MonmouthpediA, we have recently started a number of projects with Wicipedia Cymru, the Welsh Wikipedia. Our point of contact, Robin Owain, is a bureaucrat in a community of about 200 editors who currently maintain over 36,000 articles in Welsh. This may sound small, but it is the biggest Welsh language website in existence, and it receives over 2.7 million visits per month.

Robin and Wikimedia UK trustee Roger Bamkin recently met with the People’s Collection of Wales, Cadw and the National Library of Wales, who have agreed to experiment with making the content they curate available on Wikipedia by releasing 150 images under a Creative Commons license. If this test works, then they may be willing to release thousands more.

Robin and Roger also met with the Welsh Education Minister, Leighton Andrews, who agreed to investigate a number of challenging objectives for WMUK such as Robin joining an education advisory panel. As a first step in this cooperation, Robin now sits on a board helping the Welsh Education Minister on Digital Technology.

Not content with just those achievements, Robin and Roger also presented a bid to the Geovation project on the 18th July on behalf of a team including Andy Mabbett and John Cummings. Out of well over a hundred ideas, they made it to the final seven, and the project was awarded £17,500 to help fund the training of editors and to create QRpedia codes on the Wales Coastal Path!

You can find out more about how we’re supporting the Welsh language by visiting the Wicipedia Cymraeg stand at this year’s National Eisteddfod at the Vale of Glamorgan on 4-11 August 2012.

If you would like to help us provide support for your language, please get in touch! You can contact us on-wiki, call our office on 020 7065 0990, or email stevie.benton@wikimedia.org.uk

Wikimedia UK and JISC join forces for World War One editathon

Wikipedians on their way to the editathon

The history of the World War One inevitably attracts a great deal of attention and interest, especially on Wikipedia. That’s why Wikimedia UK and JISC teamed up for our first WWI edit-a-thon at the British Library last month.

The editathon brought together academic experts and editors of Wikipedia (Wikipedians) to create and improve Wikipedia articles on WWI. The aim of the event was to increase coverage and make the information as accurate, consistent, wide-ranging and up-to-date as possible, as well as building bridges between Wikipedian and academic communities.

The Wikipedia page about World War One attracts approximately 7.3 million page views per year – 597,945 for the month of June 2012 alone. Other key articles attract impressive numbers of readers, such as the Treaty of Versailles (114,190, ~1.4m/year) and the Battle of the Somme (56,071, ~680k/year).

JISC note in their blog post about the event: “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 event resulted in 33 new or improved articles. This was just a start, as the process raised a debate about the content itself and the wider issue of academic engagement with Wikipedia and its educational and research benefits.

Chris Keating, Wikimedia UK trustee and World War One project lead, said:

“When the centenary of World War One begins in just two years’ time, hundreds of thousands of people will use Wikipedia’s coverage of the war as the beginning of their personal journeys of commemoration and remembrance. It’s important that Wikipedia’s coverage of the subject is as good as possible.”

“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.”

As successful as the event was, it’s just a beginning. The legacy of this event is more than accurate content on a key topic – which in itself shouldn’t be under-estimated – but wider academic engagement with Wikipedia, which can establish a model for the future.

JISC is the UK technology consortium for education and research providing leadership, advice and guidance. For more information visit www.jisc.ac.uk and view more resources put online by JISC at http://www.jisc-content.ac.uk/explore-themes. For media enquiries please contact press@jisc.ac.uk