GLAMcamp London

On Friday 24th June we had our first UK GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) networking day.

The aim was to launch the UK network of Wikimedia e-volunteers (GLAM Ambassadors) and share our experience of institutions and Wikimedians working together. The British Library were our hosts and 24 people took part, including friends from the National Archives, National Gallery, Wellcome Trust, British Library, Open Genealogy Alliance and Open Rights Group.

Topics included;

  • QR codes – as multi-language exhibition labels
  • Metadata – a workshop through the current issues for batch uploads and categorization on Wikimedia Commons and attempting to improve the metadata fields and standardize vocabulary in our templates
  • New developments in archives
  • Growing the e-volunteer network – with parallel discussions from the Wikimedian viewpoint and the issues for cultural institutions in introducing outreach programmes

The GLAM taskforce will coordinate follow-up activities. It was generally felt that these larger networking and story sharing meetings would be helpful to repeat on a quarterly basis and it was realistic to aim for a large GLAMWIKI conference with presentations and papers for the middle of next year.

Just as importantly, some of our newer e-volunteers gained the confidence to progress with their ideas for starting relationships with favourite organizations. If you would like to get more involved or find out about the growing GLAM e-volunteer network please contact Fae or email glam(at)wikimedia.org.uk and keep an eye on our events programme.

Shaping the future of Wikimedia UK

This weekend, Wikimedia UK board members made strategic decisions about the future of the chapter, at a two-day long, face-to-face board meeting.

Steps to strengthen the team were first on the agenda as the board pushed the green button on recruiting full time staff. Currently, we are looking for a Chapter Manager to lead the organisation and work with the board of directors on strategy, partnerships, and the fund-raising campaign. Second on the list is an office manager. This person will deal with membership, finance and other general administrative tasks. We are using the services of a professional recruitment agency to make sure we are selecting from the widest possible field of qualified candidates. For further information on the jobs we are advertising, see the job description page on our Wiki.

With the start of our 2011 fundraising campaign creeping upon us, we took some time to discuss our initial steps for the 2011 UK annual giving campaign. Every year the Wikimedia Foundation hosts a fund-raising summit for all chapters to attend to offer advice and support on how to prepare for and drive their local campaigns. Two board members will attend the summit in Vienna later this week; Roger Bamkin and Chris Keating. Roger is the recently appointed chair of the Wikimedia UK board and is responsible for overseeing the campaign and Chris will be drawing on his experience as a professional fundraiser to help plan and progress the fundraiser later this year. If anyone else is keen to get involved, please contact Roger Bamkin on roger dot bamkin at wikimedia.org.uk.

Other board members also put forward plans for their proposals and training programmes. The GLAM Outreach taskforce has been extremely active and has a number of initiatives lined up. We will also be announcing a number of other activities over the next few weeks; keep an eye on our blog for further details!

As this was the first face-to-face meeting for the board since it was elected at the end of April, all who attended took the opportunity to revisit the chapter’s mission, vision and values. These were revised and are now tighter and more pertinent than ever. We will be revealing these shortly too. We welcome all feedback.

We’re really pleased with the progress we’ve made this weekend and are confident of the direction, strategy and initiatives for the rest of 2011, beginning of 2012. More information on these will be communicated over the coming months and we will be keeping everyone up-to-date through this blog, Twitter, and the community email list. We’re really excited about what is to come and looks forward to working with, and engaging with, Wikipedians, members, volunteers, partners and other individuals and organisations to achieve its common goal of free knowledge for all.

Six unorthodox ways to use Wikipedia

Printed books from Wikipedia
"An encyclopedia in the form of printed books? What kind of crazy idea is that?" Image by Jann Glasmacher for PediaPress (Own work) GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0, via Wikimedia Commons

We all know how to use Wikipedia, right? Just do a search in your favourite search engine, and the relevant article is usually among the top results. Alternatively, bookmark the front page in your preferred language, and see what’s current. Then again, some of us want to go deeper. Maybe we want to “mainline” the best  content; maybe we want to explore not a site but an abstract world of information. Below are six ways to use Wikipedia that not everybody knows about.

1) Listen to it. How do you make an encyclopedia accessible to illiterate or blind people? You read it out loud and share the sound recordings. More than a thousand articles in English, and many more in Wikipedia’s other languages, are available in spoken form, downloadable as audio files that you can listen to on a computer or portable audio player. Thus, not only disabled users but anyone on the move can learn about topics including The Order of the Garter, Norwich City FC or the Hindi language. Anyone with a good speaking voice, and access to a microphone, can contribute at the Spoken Wikipedia project. Continue reading “Six unorthodox ways to use Wikipedia”

British Library English and Drama editathon

Lewis Carroll (photo taken 1855)
Lewis Carroll, one of many authors with unique photographs, papers and publications held in the collections.

Wikimedia UK together with the British Library’s English & Drama department is inviting people to attend a Wikipedia editathon on Saturday 4 June. The aim of the day is to combine the expertise of the public, Wikimedians and the Library’s curators to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of the literary individuals and collections related to the British Library.

Fiction, poetry and drama will all be represented. Subjects highlighted for improvement include the Library’s major collections of Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde material, the poets involved in the Between Two Worlds project, and the archives of Kenneth Tynan, Angela Carter and J.G. Ballard, to name but a few.

The event is open to people with varying degrees of Wikipedia experience. It will be a great opportunity for beginners to learn how to construct entries for the encyclopaedia and to share their subject knowledge with the wider world, while experienced Wikipedians will have the chance to contribute their know-how and expertise. People who want to contribute to other Wikimedia projects, for instance Commons or Wikisource, are also welcome!

During the day there will be unique opportunities to view, up close, interesting items from the English & Drama collections. What’s more, one of the curators responsible for the forthcoming science fiction exhibition, Out of this World, will be on hand to take participants on a tour of the exhibition.

Entry is free, but places are limited – so sign up now at http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editathon,_British_Library.

Launching our new GLAM Outreach Taskforce

Wikimedia GLAM logo

GLAM – Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums.
Wikimedia – the organisation behind Wikipedia, its image library Commons and many more information projects.

In the last few months, Wikimedia volunteers have run a number of successful collaborations with cultural institutions such as the British Museum and the V&A. Based on this successful start, Wikimedia UK has set up a GLAM Outreach Taskforce to roll out the program across the rest of the UK.

Our goal is to establish a UK wide program of partnerships between Wikimedia and Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums, that will:

  • work together with cultural institutions as they open up to the digital age
  • help to freely and widely liberate the knowledge they hold
  • engage volunteers and professionals in making better use of Wikipedia and sister projects for improved public access to GLAM collections
  • link our volunteers and digital presence with willing cultural partners to mutual benefit

 

The UK GLAM task force is supported by, and reports to, the Wikimedia UK board. There are a number of free events and institution relationships in the pipeline with GLAMcamp London in June being the formal kick-off for the UK GLAM network (it’s free and open to GLAM professionals and prospective GLAM ambassadors).

Here is what is coming up in the next month:

A larger list of institutions where we have made contact or are currently working with to establish partnerships or hold events with is at GLAM events. In the context of how we started the concept of GLAM ambassadors in the UK at the British Museum only a year ago, this rapid and remarkable progress is only possible because we were pushing on a door that many institutional professionals were ready to open.

 

As well as edit-a-thons and workshops, we are establishing innovative approaches for museums. Derby Museum was not the first museum to make their collections internet enabled and smart-phone friendly by using QR codes, but they were the first in the world to use QR pedia so that their collection became automatically available in multiple languages by using Wikipedia’s Korean, Chinese, Spanish and over two hundred and fifty other language versions (see this unauthorized guerilla video).

Wike Needs You

 

Would you like to help?

  • Sign up and come to one of our events
  • Join Wikimedia UK or join our email discussion list to discuss future events and plans
  • If you work within an GLAM institution and would like to see an outreach event for e-volunteers to increase access to your collections, email Fae or glam(at)wikimedia.co.uk
  • We need your help expanding Wikimedia’s GLAM e-volunteer network, particularly for locations outside London. Drop me
    a note with your ideas if you would like to see your loved local institution be at the forefront of this knowledge revolution
  • Finally, this isn’t just for big institutions in London, we are keen to collaborate with specialist associations and local museums everywhere in the UK (and in all languages)

Join the Wright Challenge!

Wright of Derby,

For the last two weeks Wikimedia UK has been running a competition in partnership with the Derby Museum. So far, over 150 new or improved Wikipedia articles have been created, in dozens of languages.

This is the biggest multilingual collaboration between Wikimedians and the cultural sector to date, and it’s particularly interesting because it’s a regional museum taking part!

25 Wikimedians and curators attended a Backstage Pass event on April 9th. (Written up in a great blog post by curator Nick Moyes)

The “Wright Challenge” competition (named after artist Joseph Wright of Derby ) was launched on May 1st, offering prizes for improvements to articles on subjects linked to the Derby Museum – in any language, not just English. At the time we were a bit concerned we’d left it too late to take advantage of the momentum from the event on the 9th. However, the response has been simply immense, with hundreds of pieces of Derby-related content being added, updated and translated in just two weeks.

The multilingual nature of the material we’re adding is particularly interesting because of the work we’re doing with QR codes which will link the actual objects in the Museum to their Wikipedia articles (watch on Youtube). Someone scanning the QR code next to “A Philosopher lecturing on the Orrery” with a smartphone will be taken to that article on the English Wikipedia, while a visitor with a Russian smartphone will go direct to the article “Философ, объясняющий модель Солнечной системы” on the Russian Wikipedia.

The Wright Challenge remains open until Joseph Wright’s birthday on September 3rd. Come and join in!

Hello from the new Wikimedia UK Board

Wikimedia UK’s new board held its first meeting last Tuesday. There are a lot of exciting opportunities this year and the Board really wants to make the most of them.

Some of the highlights are:

  • The Board meeting on 11 June will be devoted to producing a long-term strategy for Wikimedia UK. It’s clear that as we continue to grow and professionalise, we will need a documented vision for the next few years. At the WikiConference a few weeks ago, there was a discussion about strategy and the way forward. We will be taking more steps to involve the community in this discussion – starting with an IRC discussion on Tuesday May 3rd. You’ll be hearing more from us about this soon.
  • Fae is in the process of setting up a 6-person UK GLAM Steering Committee to build our capacity to work with cultural institutions. Fae will also be attending the Wikimedia Foundation’s “GLAMCamp” in New York in May on WMUK’s behalf. If you are a Wikimedian interested in working with our cultural partners, or from a cultural institution interested in working with Wikimedia UK, please contact Fae directly on fae@wikimedia.org.uk
  • The Board also decided that the next AGM would be held in May 2012, in London. If you have suggestions for venues or possible partner organisations, please drop Roger a line.

    • The new Board, elected at the WikiConference on April 16th, is made up of:

    Roger Bamkin (Victuallers) – Chair
    Andrew Turvey (AndrewRT) – Treasurer
    Michael Peel (Mike Peel) – Secretary
    Chris Keating (The Land)
    Martin Poulter (MartinPoulter)
    Ashley Van Haeften (Fae)
    Steve Virgin (Steve Virgin)

    Gemma Griffiths continues as a pro-bono public relations consultant to the Board.

    You can find more details of the new Board on the Wikimedia UK Wiki. If there’s anything you’d like to discuss, please do get in touch with any of us – we can all be reached by email on firstname.surname@wikimedia.org.uk.

    Finally, for all the latest news, don’t forget to follow Wikimedia UK on Twitter: @wikimediauk

    Ten million free media files and counting

    A waterfowl observation platform by Lipno Lake in the Wdzydze Landscape Park

    Ten is turning out to be the number of the year for Wikimedia. First, the Wikimedia Foundation celebrated the tenth anniversary of Wikipedia in January, and now Wikimedia Commons – the library of images, sound files, and videos that constitutes an integral component of Wikipedia’s user experience – has logged its 10,000,000th file. All files on Wikimedia Commons can be used for any purpose, including commercial use, under terms consistent with the Definition of Free Cultural Works. This, together with its educational focus, makes Wikimedia Commons a media repository unlike any other.

    The ten millionth file uploaded to Commons is a photograph of a waterfowl observation platform near Lipno Lake in the Wdzydze Landscape Park in Poland.  It was uploaded by Commons user Leinad, who has been uploading to Commons since 2006. Leinad is also active on the Polish Wikipedia, and attended the 2010 Wikimania conference in Gdansk.

    What stories these ten million files can tell. The scope of Wikimedia’s ambitions has always been epic, and comparing 2006’s 1 millionth image – a pygmy hippopotamus at the Singapore Zoo – to 2009’s five-millionth upload – an article detailing democracy from an 1838 Danish newspaper – succinctly demonstrates the near-limitless capacity for sharing knowledge we’ve fostered.

    While the frequency of new articles appearing on Wikipedia may have slowed, our repository of educational media is growing faster than ever. Today’s entry marks less than a two year period during which more than five million new files have been uploaded. This is in part thanks to Wikimedia’s global volunteer building more and more relationships with cultural institutions and collection holders around the world, receiving and uploading large treasures of photographs, video and other content. And we are hoping to accelerate the project’s growth further, with a new media upload tool (login required) which we are currently beta testing, as well as improved video support.

    Our huge thanks to the tens of thousands of individuals who have contributed to Wikimedia Commons and who have helped bring the project to this milestone.  You have helped us create the largest, and almost certainly, the highest quality trove of entirely freely re-usable, education-oriented media files in history.

    Also posted on Wikimedia Foundation blog.

     

    Your Chapter, Your Say!

    Location of WikiConference 2011
    Location of WikiConference 2011

    Wikimedia UK’s Annual Conference and AGM is this weekend. This is an opportunity for all Wikimedians in the UK to have their say about the future of their local chapter.

    The prospects for next year are looking very promising: we start the year after a very successful fundraiser, with over £600k available to support and promote the Wikimedia projects in the UK. We’re building a track record of successful partnerships with museums and other “GLAM” institutions – including events at the British Museum, the British Library and Derby Museums. We have engaged with researchers at places like Cancer Research UK and the Bristol Wiki Academy.

    Press coverage of Wikimedia issues has shown been a remarkable turnaround with a large number of positive articles in the national and local press and TV. This was particularly true of the coverage of the 10th Anniversary of Wikipedia.

    This AGM will elect the fourth Board of Trustees of the chapter. We have received a record number of nominations and there are eight candidates contesting seven seats. You can ask a question of the candidates online here and read their candidate statements here.

    The members are also being asked to decide whether to extend the term for board members from one to two years, to improve the continuity around the time of the AGM. We are keen to hear members’ views on this proposal.

    If you are currently a member, you can vote on the potential board members and the resolutions by emailing tellers@wikimedia.org.uk and following these instructions:

    Here to vote on resolutions.

    Here to vote on the candidates.

    You can also come along to the AGM to hear the candidates set out their plans in person and debate the resolutions.

    If you haven’t joined the chapter yet, it’s not too late. You can join online here and then cast your votes straight away. Please note membership is subject to acceptance.

    Now’s a great time to get involved!

    Join the Wikipedia Contribution Team in their Recruitment Drive

    The Wikipedia Contribution Team was founded in 2010 to help with the Wikimedia Fundraiser and to help encourage people to edit and build community spirit. Since 2010, their numbers have increased from 10 participants to over 40 and growing! The team has begun their Backlog Drive – which aims to severely reduce the backlogs on Wikipedia in 6 weeks – and now they have started real-life outreach to help encourage members of the public to edit.

    It started with an event at Imperial College, London. On the 9th of February, six Wikipedians joined the Imperial College Wikipedia Society to hand out leaflets and encourage students to edit. They also spoke to the college’s librarian about possible collaboration in future between Wikipedia and the library. The event was a roaring success with future events planned at Imperial College over the next few weeks.

    However, the biggest success has been the amount of interest the program has garnered from other Universities. People from institutions as diverse as the Open University to the University of Sheffield have been interested in having events held in conjunction with their college. Because of this, the Contribution Team is happy to announce a series of events, funded with the help of Wikimedia UK, at various Universities throughout Britain. This includes the Universities of Sheffield, Manchester, Nottingham and Leeds.

    If you would like to take part in these events, as a volunteer or simply as someone who would like to watch, please consider signing up at the Wikipedia Contribution Team Events page. They would love to have you!