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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Bunhill Fields: Wikimedia, gamification and richer media content
I really like Magnus Manske’s WikiShootMe tool. It visualises Wikidata items, Commons photos and Wikipedia articles on an OpenStreetMap. Wikidata items are shown as red if they have no photo and green if they do have one. For the past few months, I’ve been spending my lunch hours walking around the area near the Wikimedia UK offices, trying to turn red data points into green ones.
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How do Wikipedia editors decide what are reliable sources?
Over the past few weeks, Wikimedia UK has received a large number of press inquiries related to the Guardian’s article ‘Wikipedia bans Daily Mail as ‘unreliable’ source’. Now that the dust has settled on this story a little, we thought it might be helpful to clarify how the community of editors who create Wikipedia and its sister projects came to adopt a policy to generally avoid using references to Daily Mail articles.
Much of the coverage of this editorial decision, both by The Guardian and by other media, referred to Wikipedia at least as often as Wikipedia editors; although The Guardian did add that ‘The move is likely to stop short of prohibiting linking to the Daily Mail’, because as many Wikimedians will be fully aware, one of the Five Pillars of Wikipedia is that ‘Wikipedia has no firm rules’.
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So You’ve Decided to Become a Wikipedia Editor…
The learning curve when you start editing Wikipedia and its sister projects can be steep, so to help you get started, we decided to compile some advice that will help you navigate the complexity of the Wikimedia projects.
Check out the Getting Started page for general advice and information about how Wikipedia works before you start editing. There are a lot of written and visual tutorials as well as links to policies and guidelines used on the site. A quick look at the main editorial policies of Wikipedia, known as the Five Pillars, is also worthwhile.
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- Read more at blog.wikimedia.org.uk