Page 68 – Wikimedia UK

Wikipedia turns ten this week!

This week Wikipedia is celebrating its tenth birthday. To mark this momentous occasion, people all over the world are gathering at events to celebrate Wikipedia, the fifth most popular website in the world with 410 million monthly readers (comScore, November 2010).

There are three key events in the UK this week:

Thursday 13th January (12pm to 1pm): The man behind the project, Jimmy Wales, will be in Bristol speaking at an event hosted by Bristol University, HP Labs, Bristol Festival of Ideas, BBC Anchor Project and Bristol City Council. Jimmy will be talking about the key milestones over the last decade and discussing ‘what next’ for Wikipedia. Watch Jimmy’s talk live here on our Wikimedia UK blog this coming Thursday.

Thursday 13th January (7pm to 9pm): Jimmy will be hosting a party in West London where a mixture of community members, press, donors, and some. We’ll keep you posted of ‘behind the scene’ pictures and party gossip via Twiiter. Follow @wikimediauk for more information.

Friday 14th January and Saturday 15th January (9.30am to 5pm both days): An Edit-athon will be held at the British Library. The aim of the gathering is to improve the content on Wikipedia that is relevant to the British Library’s collections. Attendees will have access to the resources of the British Library and guided by the expertise of its curators. If you are interested, please sign up before Wednesday 12th January. An update from the event will be posted on here on our Wikimedia UK blog next week.

Visit http://ten.wikipedia.org/ to find events in your areas or visit http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organize to arrange a party.

Do keep us posted of your plans. You can email us on press@wikimedia.org.uk or tweet at us @wikimediauk. The hashtag for the celebrations is #wp10. We’d love to hear how you are celebrating Wikipedia’s 10th birthday…

Wikimedia UK raises £500,000 in shortest fundraiser ever

Incredible.

Every year the Wikimedia movement sets a fundraising goal that it knows will be a stretch. They have to do it, because the Wikimedia websites and movement keep growing. Wikipedia is now the fifth most-visited website in the world, but our staff, infrastructure and budget are just a fraction of that of any other top 10 website.

Every year, the world comes together to support Wikipedia and its sister sites. But this year is a little more incredible than most because this year we celebrate Wikipedia’s tenth anniversary. It’s so important that we kick the year off just like this: by fully funding Wikimedia UK’s budget to support Wikipedia and all the sister projects as we head into the next decade of our work together.

This year Wikimedia UK raised more in the United Kingdom than has ever been achieved, raising £500000 in the shortest fundraiser ever.

We’ve got a few more statistics for you:

Over 30,000 donations to Wikimedia UK.
Almost 630,000 donations to whole Wikimedia movement world-wide.
Two of the largest fundraising days in Wikipedia history.
Average UK donation size: about £18.

This fundraiser had all the ingredients of what we love about Wikimedia projects: people come together, contribute what they have, and together we do something amazing. The contribution of a technology worker in Mumbai, India joins with the contribution of a stock broker from London, and of a student in Moscow, and the result is that we’re able to sustain and support this joint endeavor for another year.

From the bottom of our hearts, and on behalf of the more than 100,000 active volunteers,
thank you.

Wikimedia UK
P.S. If you haven’t yet made a contribution, it’s not too late. Click here to donate.

Wikimedia UK welcomes new Head of Public Relations

Wikimedia UK is very pleased to welcome Gemma Griffiths to a new pro-bono position as our Head of Public Relations. Gemma will be working with us to develop a media relations strategy that will raise our profile and encourage people to use and submit content to Wikimedia projects. Priorities for Gemma include strengthen relationships between Wikimedia UK and key journalists, and supporting the promotion of up and coming activities including the Annual Fundraiser, Wikipedia’s tenth anniversary and our Annual Conference & AGM.

Gemma has six years experience in the PR industry and has predominantly worked in the technology sector. Her previous clients include Nominet UK, the national registry for .UK domain names, Sony Reader, the digital reading device manufacturer, and the mobile handset company, Motorola.

Gemma will be working for us for one day per week for an initial period of six months, up to Wikimedia UK Annual Conference in April, subject to a review after three months.

Please join us in welcoming Gemma to the Wikimedia community.

Announcing the “GLAM-WIKI:UK” conference

“Being a beloved institution will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of being an irrelevant one.” – Cory Doctorow

23 November 2010, UK: Should the cultural sector take the recent funding hit on the chin and reduce their activities – or should they seek to engage the online e-volunteer community that is already reaching over a third of the UK population every day? Wikipedia already is every GLAMs e-Volunteer program, the institutions just don’t support it yet.

On 26-27 November, the GLAM-WIKI conference at the British Museum will bring together Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums with Wikimedia for a series of hard-hitting presentations. At this conference you will hear how some museums are already leveraging the connection between sharing a part of their own collections with Wikimedia and seeing some amazing benefits – such as a sharp increase in web traffic to their site and an increase in sales of merchandising. Attendees will better understand the crossover of mutual interest that Wikimedians share with curators of cultural heritage.

National Portrait Gallery

Tom Morgan, Head of Rights and Reproductions at the National Portrait Gallery, will be presenting on “Wikipedia and the National Portrait Gallery – A bad first date? A perspective on the developing relationship between Wikipedia and cultural heritage organisations”. This will be the first time that the NPG has been able to express its perspective to an audience of interested Wikimedians since the heated debate last year.

Cory Doctorow

Blogger, scientist and online futurologist Cory Doctorow (speaking at the GLAM-Wiki Conference on Nov 26) told Wikimedia UK that “trading relevance for funding is a bad bargain”. Cuts to funding mean that the pathway to irrelevancy is now opening up in front of many as a real threat. This conference is about solutions that can stop such a disastrous thing ever happening.

Purpose

“To use the jargon of today,” says Chair of Wikimedia UK, Andrew Turvey, “There is an alternative!” It is one that the sector should consider now as spending priorities for future years are set and operational budgets for the next 2-4 years become clearer. It is working closer with the voluntary sector. Many organisations, like Wikimedia UK, have as their core objectives the diffusion of common cultural heritage to as wide an audience as possible as part of their operational objectives.

Wikimedia UK is ready to listen to the problems facing the guardians of our culture heritage. Our community wants us to work more closely with the sector to explore ways in which we can leverage our presence as the world’s fifth biggest web property – and bring it to the benefit of institutions that are bold and that release content to Wikipedia and our other projects. Having a small percentage of an institutions content on our sites will create a buzz across the online world that could lead to both cultural and perhaps commercial benefits for the donors – in terms of more hits to their website. Indeed, closer links to Wikipedia and other projects will add valuable ‘Wiki-juice’ to the search engine results online and mean that smaller bodies will likely see a rise in interest in what they do.

Follow-up – GLAM-WIKI France in Paris

Building partnerships with GLAM institutions is a worldwide effort from the Wikimedia movement. Wikimedia France has organized a GLAM-WIKI event on December 3rd and 4th along the same lines than GLAM-WIKI UK: presenting GLAM partnerships and widening the reflection about digital collaborative culture(s) by involving many players in the cultural sector. More than 50 speakers and 300 participants will come together to build this dialog, and work on the future of online culture.

Editors notes

Further information

The GLAM-WIKI UK conference schedule is available at http://www.glamwiki.org/.
The GLAM-WIKI France schedule is available at http://rencontres.wikimedia.fr.

About Wikimedia

Wikimedia is an umbrella term for the projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation and for the movement of volunteers that contribute to and maintain them. These projects are: Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikisource, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Mediawiki and Wikitionary. These projects make up one of the top five websites in the world.

About Wikimedia UK

Wikimedia UK is the local Wikimedia chapter covering the United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is an independent organisation that supports free and open knowledge throughout the United Kingdom, including promoting and supporting the projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is the US-based non-profit organisation that operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world. These include Wikipedia, one of the world’s 10 most-visited websites, and Wikimedia Commons.

Contact details:

Michael Peel, Secretary, Wikimedia UK

Email: michael.peel@wikimedia.org.uk
Phone: +44 (0)7988 013 646

Wikipedia Launches Annual Global Fundraising Appeal – UK Affiliate Sets Out Local Goals

UNITED KINGDOM, 15^th November 2010 – The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind Wikipedia, today launches its seventh annual fundraising appeal. The 2010 campaign seeks to raise the funds needed to maintain and grow Wikipedia, the world’s fifth-most-popular site, as a space for the free and open sharing of human knowledge. This year the Foundation’s goal is $16 million.

As part of the appeal, Wikimedia UK, the local affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation covering the United Kingdom, is hoping to raise £500,000 by January 2011. Donations to Wikimedia UK will continue to fund the people and technology behind Wikipedia as well as support existing community driven training programmes and start new initiatives.

These training programmes will continue to encourage and educate academia, the cultural sector and corporate entities in how to contribute and use Wikipedia and its sister sites. They teach companies and employees how to work with Wikipedia to share their knowledge with the world, and how to add their material to (and reuse material from) Wikipedia and other fast growing Wikimedia projects such as Wikimedia Commons, an online repository of images, sound and other media files.

Andrew Turvey, Chair of Wikimedia UK, says: “There is a phenomenal amount of content available through Wikimedia projects – there are 9,430 new Wikipedia articles in 270 languages added daily to the 16 million already in existence, and over 7.3 million freely licensed images available via Wikimedia Commons for anyone to use. The funding will allow us to build on this success and broaden out content available by showing UK academics, cultural organisations and public and private sector employees how Internet users and organisations can benefit, if they learn to use Wikimedia projects, especially Wikipedia, in the right way.”

Wikimedia UK has already made great strides within the culture sector with Wikimedia volunteers working with the British Museum to share knowledge of its collections online. Wikimedia partnered with the British Museum to host a GLAM-WIKI conference. The conference is on 26^th/27^th November 2011 and will showcase how some Museums are already reaping benefits from sharing their collections with Wikimedia. Advantages to organisations that have previously shared content have included a sharp increase in web traffic to the Museums’ websites and an increase in sales of merchandising.

“Our training programmes and technological improvements are key priorities for Wikimedia UK in 2011”, adds Turvey.

To make a donation, please click on the banners on the Wikipedia site.

Follow or share your thoughts on Twitter with the hashtag #keepitfree

-Ends-

About Wikimedia UK

Wikimedia UK (incorporated under the name “Wiki UK Limited“) is the local Wikimedia chapter covering the United Kingdom.

Wikimedia UK is a separate organisation from the Wikimedia Foundation, and has no control over the contents of Wikipedia or any other projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation. It exists to help collect, develop and distribute freely licensed knowledge (and other educational, cultural and historic content), which we do by supporting the charitable activities of the Wikimedia Foundation.

For further information about Wikipedia UK, please visit:

About The Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization which operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation receive 398 million unique visitors per month, making them the 5th most popular web property world-wide (Sept, 2010). Available in more than 270 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 16 million articles contributed by a global volunteer community of more than 100,000 people. Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants.

For further information, please contact:

Gemma Griffiths

Tel: +44 (0)7545 768 602

Email: gemma.griffiths@wikimedia.org.uk

Michael Peel, Secretary, Wikimedia UK

Tel: +44 (0)7988 013 646

Email: michael.peel@wikimedia.org.uk

GLAM-WIKI Schedule Announced

At the end of this month, the UK cultural sector and Wikimedia community will come together at the British Museum for the UK’s GLAM-WIKI conference, with the aim of finding our common goals and exploring the possibilities of working together to achieve those goals. The full schedule for GLAM-WIKI is now online, and we’ve highlighted below some of the sessions that are likely to be amongst the most interesting.

Spread the word

If you know someone in the GLAM sector whose ability to share cultural heritage has been affected by the government budget cuts, tell them about this conference. Wikipedia is the ally they never knew they had. The website is http://glamwiki.org and the hashtag is #GLAMWIKI – help us spread the word!

Keynotes

Blogger and author Cory Doctorow will open the conference on Friday November 26th with a presentation provocatively entitled “Being a beloved institution will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of being an irrelevant one”.

As announced, Kenneth Crews from Columbia University and Sue Gardner from the Wikimedia Foundation will also be giving keynote presentations. We believe that Wikimedia projects can be of incredible benefit to the UK cultural sector, especially in times of economic austerity. Virtually every UK cultural organisation has a volunteer program, yet very few have an e-volunteer program. Wikipedia could be that e-volunteer program!

National Portrait Gallery

One session will be being given by Tom Morgan, Head of Rights and Reproductions at the National Portrait Gallery. Many will recall the conflicts that erupted between our two organisations last year and this is why Mr. Morgan’s presentation is entitled: “Wikipedia and the National Portrait Gallery – A bad first date? A perspective on the developing relationship between Wikipedia and cultural heritage organisations”.

This will be the first time that the NPG has been able to express its perspective (and what it has learned since) on the debate to an audience of interested Wikimedians. Hard questions will be asked in both directions but this is an important forum to be able discuss our differences with civility.

Evening public lecture

On the evening of Friday 26th there will be a lecture given by Kenneth Crews, Director of the Copyright Advisory office of Columbia University and author of the groundbreaking research Control of Art Museum Images: The reach and limits of copyright and licensing on the topic of “The Free-conomy and the cultural sector”.

Following this presentation will be responses and frank discussion of the issues raised by the expert panel: director of DACS Gilane Tawadros; Director of Europeana Jill Cousins; Head of Digital at the BFI Paula Le Dieu; Presenter of BBC’s Digital Planet Bill Thompson.

Sessions

Over the two days of the event we will have presentations by representatives of GLAM institutions from five European countries about how they are working with Wikipedia. Examples of projects being discussed include (but not limited to): The Federal Archive project in Germany; The Tropenmuseum project in the Netherlands; The Regional Archive project in Sweden; The National Library project in France; and of course the British Museum project in the UK.

Technical talks include issues of: reporting metrics; mass-multimedia collaboration; mobile and API usage; practical editing guides; as well as general tours of the Wikimedia projects.

For more information this conference and to see the full schedule visit:

http://glamwiki.org/

to register click here:

Charles Matthews Appointed Office Manager

We are happy to announce that we have appointed Charles Matthews as an interim Office Manager, to provide the chapter with administrative support and in particular with the annual fundraiser.

He writes:

I’ve been asked to introduce myself, on my appointment as Wikimedia UK’s part-time Office Manager. Of course, there is no small sparsely-furnished room in which I sit, waiting for the phone to ring, and wondering quite what it is that I’m supposed to be managing. There are no office premises, but there are some back-office functions required for the smooth functioning of the chapter, and I’m being brought in to handle them.

I won’t dwell on biography, any more than on details of admin, but I have been an academic and author, parent and househusband, volunteer and Wikipedia editor under my real name since 2003, living in Cambridge. Wikipedia was not in fact my first wiki, nor my last, since I’m now very active on Wikisource. Just a couple of weeks ago I set up Wikipedia:WikiProject Dictionary of National Biography, unusual because it is “twinned” with a matching sister project on Wikisource.

I’m also going to be involved in communications for the chapter, which means dealing with some of the enquiries it gets from the outside world, press work, and publications. I’m adding time among the chapter’s metaphorical filing cabinets to time in front of the laptop, but this all will be public-facing, as they say these days. Let me just tell here the story of how the meetups in Cambridge got started. It was a bad hair day for Virgin Media, and I couldn’t get online at home. I walked round to the local cybercafé, where User:Dsp13 was sitting having a cup of something. He recognized me from the photo on my Wikipedia user page, and we got talking.

We all benefit, as UK Wikimedians, when we recognize each other a little better.

Announcing: Registration now open for GLAM-WIKI:UK at the British Museum

188 years ago today the Rosetta Stone, the British Museum’s most visited object, was translated and in so doing unlocked the secret of Egyptian hieroglyphics. In recognition of this anniversary the Feature Article of the Day on the main page of the English edition of Wikipedia will be “Rosetta Stone“.

It is therefore fitting that today Wikimedia UK is also announcing that registration is now open for GLAM-WIKI:UK to be held at the British Museum on the 26th and 27th of November.

Cory Doctorow

Sue Gardner

Kenneth Crews

At this event representatives from the UK and European GLAM sector [Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums] will come together with representatives from the Wikimedia community for a dialogue to determine how to use the two communities’ strengths to mutual advantage. The focus will be on:

why and how cultural institutions could work with Wikimedia projects; and
what Wikimedia needs to do to make collaboration easier and more effective.

The very next weekend Wikimedia France will be following up with their own edition of this conference in Paris.

Keynotes

We are very pleased to announce that the opening speaker on Friday will be author, activist, blogger and London local Cory Doctorow.

Opening the festivities on Saturday will be none other than Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation based in San Francisco.

Visiting London to give an evening guest lecture will be the director of the Columbia University copyright advisory office Dr. Kenneth Crews.

Sessions

Day One, Friday 26th, will focus on “Policy” – the legal and business aspects of collaboration.

Day Two, Saturday 27th, will focus on “Practice” – the technical and educational side of things.

For current speaker and session details see glamwiki.org, and to see the latest announcements (of which there will be many) follow @WikimediaUK on Twitter.

On the evening of Day One there will also be a special event held in collaboration with the Museum Computer Group (MCG) conference that is taking place on the same day. This will be a guest lecture by Dr. Crews followed by discussion panel on the topic of “The free-conomy and the cultural sector”.

Panelists will include: Paula Le Dieu (Director of Digital at the British Film Institute); Gilane Tawadros (Director of the Design and Artists Copyright Society); Bill Thompson (host of BBC’s “Digital Planet”) and others.

Tickets

Full Registration (all tickets include attendance to the Friday evening event):
– professional tickets, £40;
– Wikimedians, students or volunteers, £20.
Partial Registration:
– attendees of the MCG conference can register for Day Two of GLAM-WIKI at the discount price of £20.
– For the Friday evening event only; at the door for £20.

For more information visit http://glamwiki.org and to register click here:

If you have any questions or would like to propose a session at GLAM-WIKI:UK please contact me on liam.wyattwikimedia.org.uk

See you then!
Liam Wyatt
GLAM-WIKI:UK Convener & Wikipedian in Residence, British Museum

Job opportunity: support us so we can support Wikipedia

Wikimedia UK logo Wikimedia UK is growing. Since we were founded nearly two years ago we have raised nearly £100,000 to support Wikipedia and similar open content work; we have hosted an international conference and arranged a museum backstage pass event and run an event with twenty museums across the country generating free images for Wikipedia; over 80 people have become members; and we have made significant progress towards getting charity status.

All this we have managed so far with just volunteers. But now we want to employ a Part Time Office Manager to provide administrative support to our activities. We hope this will improve our capacity to run events and engage our volunteers in the things that interest and inspire them.

The post will pay £10 per hour for 8-12 hours per week and will be for an initial term of six months, starting as soon as possible. Standard holidays are paid in addition along with the necessary expenses for the role, including internet costs, telephone calls and stationery. The ideal candidate will be IT literate with a number of years of administrative and bookkeeping experience, ideally in a non-profit context.

Full details of the position are on the Wikimedia UK wiki. If you are interested in applying or would like further details you can email the chair of Wikimedia UK, Andrew Turvey or call him on 07754 881 562.

The deadline for applications has been extended to Saturday 4th September. To apply please email your CV and covering letter detailing your skills and experience in this area.

Please share these details with anyone else you think may be interested. No agencies please.

Wikimedia microgrants – now available in the UK

Need a book for your Wikipedia research?

Is there a rare book you need for your Wikipedia article research? A location that you need to get to for a vital piece of information, or to do some outreach? An essential piece of equipment that will help your Wikimedia activites? Wikimedia UK might be able to help.

Microgrants are grants of between £5 and £100 that help improve or facilitate your editing or outreach activities on any Wikimedia project. Microgrants schemes have been successfully run by several other Wikimedia chapters; we’re delighted to be able to bring them to the UK, starting immediately!

We aim to fund at least a dozen microgrants in the 2010-2011 financial year. You need to be a member of Wikimedia UK to apply for a microgrant – but if you’re not one already, then it’s easy to join. Once you’ve applied, then the Microgrants Committee—currently Thomas Dalton and Mike Peel—will give you feedback on your application and will let you know whether it’s successful or not. Once approved, you’ll be able to either spend the money and claim it back, or ask us to spend it directly for you. After the completion of the grant, you’ll need to report back to let us know how it went.

The microgrants process is designed to be very easy to use. While we do require you to write a grant application before getting the grant and a report after you’ve finished the activity the grant is for, there is no need for those to take a long time. A couple of paragraphs for each should be absolutely fine.

We’ve made some microgrant examples available to give you some ideas. Please, check out the rules and then send in your application!