The first week of September saw the first EduWiki Conference at the University of Leicester, England, bringing together educators and Wikimedians for two days to talk about the Wikipedia Education Program and other ways we can support each other.
The keynote speakers were Annie Lin from the Wikimedia Foundation; Leigh Thelmadatter from ITESM Mexico; and Amber Thomas, a programme manager for the JISC, a publicly-funded body for information technology in education and research.
The topics included assessing student work on Wikipedia, using Wikipedia’s corpus of 4 million English articles for language learning, creating customised reference books using the Wikipedia book tool, and Wikiversity. Video and slides are being added to the conference programme.
Both the Wikimedians and the external speakers were surprised at how much we shared a common vision for the future. Amber Thomas created an infographic (see right) to express how Wikipedia fits into the opening up of research and education. There was much less agreement about how we should accredit the informal learning that goes on in online communities. Doug Belshaw of the Mozilla Foundation prompted a vigorous debate when he introduced Mozilla’s Open Badges project.
Audience reaction to EduWiki has been very positive: “I wasn’t sure what I was expecting when I signed up for this conference, but looking back it was easily the most thought-provoking event I have been to for some time,” writes AJ Cann on the ”Science of the Invisible” blog. Sarah Currier, who runs a national repository of open educational resources, titled her post-conference blog post “how this skeptic was won over” and wrote in praise of “brilliant, reflective and committed Wikipedians everywhere”.
The conference has started off a number of working relationships, including training workshops and joint events that we will carry out over the coming months. Wikimedia UK is planning to do a similar conference for pre-university education in the coming year, as well as regional workshops for campus ambassador training in universities.
Martin Poulter is a Wikimedia UK volunteer Associate who works on building relations between Wikimedia and academia. He was the convenor of the EduWiki Conference.
First prize winner: Man’s Struggle by Team Mattley
This blog post was written by Wikimedia UK volunteer and event organiser, User:Rock drum
On Saturday 1 September, local Wikimedians organised the first “Wikipedia Takes…” event in the UK, in the city of Coventry (which, contrary to popular belief, is home to many historic or otherwise interesting buildings and structures).
In the latest event in Wikimedia UK’s ongoing partnership with Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, 51 photographers, almost exclusively non-editors, descended upon the city for the one-day photo scavenger hunt. Over the course of the five and a half hours, over 2,000 photographs were taken and uploaded, making an invaluable contribution to open culture and the historical record about the key areas of Coventry.
Many articles to do with the history of Coventry and the surrounding area are now illustrated by lots of high-quality photographs.
Prize-winners
There were five prizes on offer for participants; for best photos, most points and a “judges’ choice”.
Best photo
The three best photographs, as chosen by the judges, were all printed on canvas and presented to the winners.
Second prize winner: Allesley Walled Garden by Phil Radbourne
The first prize winner was the photo called Man’s Struggle by Team Mattley. The judges said: “A masterpiece that captures the mural beautifully and makes it somehow more real, like a Picasso painting come to life.”
The second prize went to Phil Radbourne for his photo of Allesley Walled Garden. Here’s what the judges thought: “A quirky, playful photo that has colour, depth and texture. Good composition and it made us smile.”
A photo of the Reconciliation Statue, Coventry Cathedral, taken by Julia, was awarded the third prize. In the view of the judges: “This photo that shows what you can do when you have a feel for your subject. We felt that this image of the Reconciliation statue in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral successfully captured the spirit of the city.”
Most points
Every target on the list was given a points value based on its distance from the starting point and how important it was. The prize for most points was won by Team Wormova with a stunning 167 points.
Judges’ choice
The final prize on offer was the “judges’ choice”, the winners of which would be given a selection of Wikimedia merchandise. This prize was won by the Nicholson Family. The judges said: “The Nicholson Family win the judges’ choice award. They approached the event as a fun day together as a family, captured some excellent photos and got involved in the event with smiles on their faces – and to us, that’s what it’s all about.”
Third prize winner: Reconciliation statue in Coventry Cathedral by Julia
The organisers would like to thank all those who participated for making the day fun and memorable. All photos uploaded from the event can be found here on Wikimedia Commons.
Wikimedia UK is sad to announce that Joscelyn Upendran has stepped down as a Trustee.
“It is with great regret that I have accepted Joscelyn’s resignation.” said Chris Keating, Chair of the Wikimedia UK Board of Trustees. “I would like to thank her for her important contributions on the Board and look forward to her continued involvement as a member of the charity.”
The constitution of Wikimedia UK allows the Board to co-opt a Trustee to fill Joscelyn’s place until the next AGM, when an election for 3 trustees will be held. The Board will make a decision about how to proceed at its next meeting on September 9th.
Stamford Hall, University of Leicester, venue for the EduWiki Conference
There’s excitement in the air in Leicester this morning as our EduWiki Conference gets under way. Academics from three continents are meeting with Wikipedians and opinion-formers to discuss the use of Wikimedia projects, such as Wikipedia, in higher education.
As well as universities, organisations represented include JISC and the Mozilla Foundation. Delegates will be examining the impact of open educational resources and looking at the lessons from previous case studies.
Follow the event on Twitter across the two days by using the hashtag #eduwiki and keep an eye on this blog for more updates.
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.
Wikipedians and Mozillians enjoying their 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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