A call to action: Wikidata-fy your Commons photos
By Martin Poulter, Wikimedian in Residence at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford
The speed at which Wikidata is acquiring descriptions of paintings, sculptures and other museum holdings is impressive, but there is much further to go. It’s ironic that at the same time, we already have an enormous art database hiding in plain sight.
The Commons index of Indian art may be the largest digital collection of Indian art ever created. Its collection of Cities of France in art may be the biggest such index in the world. No institution has collected as many pictures of astrolabes as are in the Commons astrolabe category. The superlatives go on.
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What are WikiJournals?
This article was jointly authored by Thomas Shafee and Jack Nunn from the WikiJournals board, and edited by John Lubbock of Wikimedia UK.
The WikiJournals are a new group of peer-reviewed, open-access academic journals which are free to publish in. The twist is that articles published in them are integrated into Wikipedia. At the moment, there are three:
www.WikiJMed.org (the original medical journal)
www.WikiJSci.org (science, technology, engineering and mathematics)
www.WikiJHum.org (humanities, arts, and social sciences)
WikiJournals are also highly unusual for academic journals, as they’re free for both readers and authors!
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How Wikipedia infiltrated academia
Blog John Lubbock, Communications Coordinator of Wikimedia UK
It was about 2007 when Wikipedia hit the mainstream. Millions of students were using one website to get an introduction to their new course subjects, and many, of course, were not particularly careful about their use of copy and paste.
In a way, Wikipedia was the victim of its own success. It expanded rapidly and gained a place in the public consciousness before the community and organisations that support it had a chance to catch up. Wikipedia is supported by a network of charities, with the Wikimedia Foundation – which owns Wikipedia– based in San Francisco, and local Wikimedia chapters set up in other countries where big editing communities existed and had begun to organise themselves. Wikimedia UK wasn’t formally established until 2009.
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WikiCite Conference 2018
Blog by Jason Evans, National Wikimedian for Wales
Imagine a world in which anyone could use an open citation database to support free knowledge, with rich information about every citable source.
Any Wikipedian or Wikipedia advocate will tell you that one of the great strengths of Wikipedia is its citations. In fact, a Wikipedia article is only as strong as its citations. They provide evidence for the statements made in an article but they also provide a gateway to reliable secondary sources for deeper learning.
In recent years Wikipedia has been overtaken as the fastest growing Wikimedia project by Wikidata – a linked open database of facts – or the Wikipedia of data, if you like. Wikidata has grown at a tremendous rate, as people and institutions use it as a hub for their data, joining up the world’s open data in an interconnected web.
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Science Source seeks to improve reliable referencing on Wikipedia’s medical articles
Science Source is a new project by ContentMine which builds on their previous work on WikiFactMine, which wanted to ‘make Wikidata the primary resource for identifying objects in bioscience’. This time, they want to automate the process of looking at biomedical research to identify statements that would be useful for improving Wikipedia’s medical articles.
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Celtic Knot 2018!
Celtic Knot provides a stage and a meeting place for contributors to small and minority language Wikipedia’s from all around the world. You can now submit a paper and register for this years conference, which will be held at the National Library of Wales in the Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth.
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A message from Josie Fraser, new Wikimedia UK Chair
I am delighted to have become the new chair of Wikimedia UK at today’s AGM. I was initially elected to serve as a trustee in July 2015, and re-elected to serve a further term last year until 2019. Over the last two years I’ve been privileged to be able serve the organisation through both the formal duties of a Trustee and as a volunteer. In addition to my main Board duties, I’ve been a member of the Governance Committee and the Partnership Advisory Board, and have helped organise education conferences.
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- Read more at blog.wikimedia.org.uk
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