EGM 16th October – Help us become a charity!

As you all know, since Wikimedia UK was founded, one of our goals has been to become a Registered Charity. The process hasn’t been easy – our activities as set out in our Object don’t easily tick the necessary boxes on the Charity Commission’s checklist.

The Board has been doing a lot of work on this in the last two months. The advice we have received from the Charity Commission and our lawyers is that for the best prospect of success, we need to amend Wikimedia UK’s Object, and also make some minor changes to our Memorandum and Articles of Association.

To do this, we are calling an Extraordinary General Meeting on 16th October 2011, to coincide with the 50th London Wikimeet. There will only be one item of business: the amendment of the Memorandum of Association with revised Objects. The Board is unanimously supporting the amendment of the Memorandum and we hope the new Objects will not prove controversial. The intention of this motion is not to actually change anything Wikimedia UK does, just to re-define our objectives in a way that better fits in with charity law.

You can see the proposed amendment on the EGM wiki page. Members of the WMUK board are happy to answer any questions you have about the amendment; please ask them on EGM talk page.

If you are able to attend in person, please sign up here. The EGM will be at the Penderel’s Oak on Sunday 16 October 2011. We’ll be in the room downstairs (as you may remember the most recent London wikimeet got a bit crowded).

If you are unable to attend then please vote by proxy. This is particularly important to ensure that we have quorum at the EGM in order to pass the amendment. Details on how to vote by proxy are included in the EGM notice.

All Wikimedia UK members will receive an email with formal notice of the EGM. Only current Wikimedia UK members can vote. If you aren’t a member, but would like to get involved, then you can join online for just £5.

This is an important milestone in our development and we are very happy to have got to this stage. Please help us take it one step further.

WikiConference India travel grants

Wikimedia UK welcomes proposals from Wikimedians in the UK community intending to travel to join the WikiConference India. Priority will be given to those with Wikimedia experience to share, links with the Wikimedia movement in India or with credible inter-chapter proposals to discuss and implement with support of the wider community.

Details of how to apply can be found at http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_Scholarships. The deadline for submitting a workshop or presentation proposal to the India conference programme team has been extended to Sep 27 19:30 BST.

WikiConference India runs from November 18 to 20 at the University of Mumbai. The conference registration page is available at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011.

Wikimedia UK at the Institute of Physics

On Thursday 1st September, two Martins from Wikimedia UK (MartinPoulter and Martinvl) visited the Institute of Physics building in London to train IoP members in contributing to Wikipedia. This was a pilot event, with an audience of six, building towards a larger event in future.

The training is part of Wikimedia UK’s wider programme of engaging with scholarly bodies and funding councils, bringing in experts to review and improve Wikipedia and its sister projects. The collaboration with IoP also includes an article by Martin Poulter and Mike Peel in the current issue of Physics World.

The attendees were very enthusiastic about the Wikimedia mission to make physics (and other areas of knowledge) accessible to as wide an audience as possible, not just through a free, multilingual encyclopaedia but also through projects such as Wiktionary and Wikibooks. Continue reading “Wikimedia UK at the Institute of Physics”

Help us choose our Chief Executive

At the AGM in April it was agreed that professionalising Wikimedia UK and recruiting our first permanent staff would be one of our priorities this year, We are now coming to the end of the process for choosing our first Chief Executive and would like your help with this.

This Sunday is the regular monthly wikimeet in London (details & directions) and the three final candidates will be there to meet the community. We would be interested to hear your impressions of them so that this can feed into the final decision of who to employ. If you require financial assistance for travel costs to attend please get in touch as we have a small budget that may be able to help.

This has been the result of a lot of hard work. Back in May we visited three recruitment agencies to discuss our staffing needs and how they could help. We selected prospect-us, a recruitment firm that works exclusively in the not-for-profit sector, who we felt would be best suited to provide us with the step by step help we need. They helped us draft the job description and advertised on the Guardian, Charity Jobs, as well as in their own network. We also advertised within the Wikimedia community using the geonotice facility on the english Wikipedia.

Over 100 people requested the application pack and 83 people applied for the post. The trustees worked with prospect-us to longlist 16 candidates who then met our consultant for a one-on-one interview. We then shortlisted six people for interview by a panel. We are very grateful to our partner GLAM institutions who who agreed to sit on the interview panel, bringing much appreciated expertise into the process. We also benefited from the help of Sebastian Molenski, President of Wikimedia Deutschland, who have already been through a similar process. The British Library kindly donated a room for our interviews, further demonstrating the importance of such relationships for the Wikimedia movement.

This appointment is going to be one of the most important decisions Wikimedia UK makes this year. We have designed a thorough process to test candidates on all the different angles. With your help, we can ensure that our new Chief Executive is the right choice for Wikimedia UK.

Girl Geeks V. Wikimeet – An exercise in real-time collaboration

Wikipedia cake

By Fiona Apps (Wikipedia User:Panyd)

How do you get members of the public involved in Wikipedia? Moreover, how do you get women,

a relative minority in the Wikipedia world, interested in editing when the thought had not crossed their minds before? Well, the Bristol Girl Geeks Vs. Wikimedia Event was a great example in how to meet this challenge – and the feedback we gained from the event suggests that this isn’t as difficult as it seems.

The collaboration started from the off. Wikimedia UK approach Bristol Girl Geek Dinners to ask them whether they would be interested in hosting an event with a Wikipedia theme. The enthusiasm with which this suggestion was met resulted in a fantastic collaborative effort to arrange the evening. Both members of Wikimedia UK and Bristol Girl Geeks worked hard to ensure that the rooms were booked, the public were attending and a Wikipedia Logo cake was present.

The audience was seemingly disparate. Although most of the attendees were women, they varied significantly in age, race and geography – some came from as far away as London – some were even men! Addressing such a disparate crowd appeared to be quite a challenge, as how could we bring together people so diverse? Continue reading “Girl Geeks V. Wikimeet – An exercise in real-time collaboration”

Could you be Wikimedia UK’s first Chief Executive?

Wikimedia UK is hiring its first ever Chief Executive.

We are looking for a high-calibre individual who will play a key role in the growth and development of a rapidly expanding organisation. The successful candidate will work closely with the Board to shape the future of Wikimedia UK.

For more details please see the advertisement.

Second Wikipedia Training Day at BBC Bristol

Wikimedia UK Launches its University of Bristol Outreach Ambassador in the heart of the BBC Digital Village

On Monday 4th July Wikimedia UK held its second Bristol Wikipedia Training Day attended by friends from organisations such as the Knowle West Media Centre, Bristol Girl Geek Dinners, Bristol University, UWE, BBC Bristol and other groups from across the city. With the appointment of Bristol University’s Wikimedia Outreach Ambassador, Sam Knight, the aim of the day was to help participants get started as Editors on Wikipedia, get to know Sam and to discuss the ways in which Wikimedia UK is building outreach across the city and throughout the UK.  The day was run in the style of collaborative event and we covered the topics of:

  • Starting up on Wikipedia as an editor
  • Working with Wikipedia data in a collaborative setting
  • Building the highest possible quality standards
  • Growing the e-volunteer network
  • Creating outreach programmes

Our kind BBC Hosts made the day a success that everyone enjoyed. Newly skilled Wikipedians left the event motivated and enthused and ready to help Wikimedia UK develop its outreach program across what promises to be a busy summer. Many thanks to Martin, Jez and Steve Woods for leading the team across the day.

For additional information or comment contact Martin Poulter or Steve Virgin.

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”