UK Wikimedian of the Year 2014/Nomination

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To be presented at Wikimania 2014 at the Barbican.

The winners will be invited to Wikimania 14 at the Barbican in London to receive their awards from a major wiki-celebrity.

Nominations

The deadline for nomination has now passed.

UK Wikimedian of the Year

Andy Mabbett

Although there are lots of remarkable volunteers and staff who deserve recognition, I believe that this year Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing) deserves this award. This is not just because of his great volume of contributions to Wikipedia, Commons and other Wikimedia projects: I don't think these awards should be based on raw numbers. Instead the award should recognise Andy's distinctive efforts and success in reaching out beyond the Wikimedia cliques.

  • The Voice Intro Project has opened up a distinctive new way for people to contribute to Wikipedia biographies. Andy has pushed this forward, not only reaching out for voice snippets but encouraging and helping others to do so.
  • Involving celebrities, the voice intro project attracted a lot of media interest. It was a chance to articulate Wikipedia's mission and its long-term perspective. The office staff deserve thanks for their role in making a success of this opportunity, but Andy especially used the international media to convey the importance of Wikipedia's mission.
  • The BBC radio archives "Speakerthon" event was a watershed for our outreach. It involved the BBC in actively releasing some of their archive material under free licences: an important step that I hope will lead to more. The event brought together Wikmedia UK and the Open Knowledge Foundation, helping to kick off an ongoing relationship. This was primarily driven by Andy.
  • Andy has built up relations with the West Midlands Police Museum, resulting in an editathon.
  • Andy has also volunteered as a trainer or contributor at other events such as Wiki Loves European Parliament and Wikipedia Takes UCL.
  • Andy has long championed making appropriate parts of Wikipedia's content machine-readable. This is crucial to the "Wikipedia is free" principle: giving the widest possible audience the ability to use knowledge, for any purpose. Most recently this has taken the form of him championing the ORCID open authority-file system for identifying authors. Some of Andy's activities in making facts machine-readable have caused controversy on Wikipedia itself but I believe this work deserves praise as advancing free knowledge in its truest sense.
  • Andy has long pushed for extending the accessibility of Wikipedia to new users and to users with disabilities, for instance by encouraging users to respect accessibility guidelines when customising their signatures, and pushing for accessibility to be given greater weight in interface decisions. He faces an uphill battle in this, as many of Wikipedia's authors seem to think of it as being laid out in a certain way for an audience with certain capabilities, rather than structured information which can be processed in many ways by different people and interfaces.

I'm sure there's lots more in the past year that Andy has done, but I'll stop here. For me, the audio work on its own deserves this award. MartinPoulter (talk) 17:11, 13 June 2014 (BST)

I'd like to speak in Andy's favour, too. He has worked on some excellent projects over the past year, some of which I've been fortunate enough to support, and I'd like to publicly acknowledge this here. Thank you, Andy. Stevie Benton (WMUK) (talk) 17:15, 13 June 2014 (BST)
At the risk of turning this into an Andy love in I'd like to echo everything Martin has said so eloquently above. Not only has Andy's work on WikiVIP been picked up all around the world but closer to home it's helped me and others find a new way to contribute to the world of Wikipedia. LouiseBrown81 (talk) 18:24, 14 June 2014 (BST)

Works international - participation at photoproject at the European parliament. Marcus Cyron 14:28, 18 June 2014 (BST)

User:Fæ

I would like to nominate User:Fæ for the UK Wikimedian of the Year. Fæ has done a lot of awesome work on Commons for some time, and has done this tirelessly for the benefit of Wikimedia Commons and for the furtherment of free content. One such project is Commons:Commons:Batch uploading/Airliners, which has seen Fæ upload tens of thousands of aviation photos to Commons, helping to make aviation subjects one of the most well-covered on Commons. In light of WMUK paying for a membership of one site, Fæ will continue this great work throughout 2014, and we will see possibly another 100,000 freely-licenced images being uploaded. Well done Fæ, thanks for your tireless contributions and good luck with my nomination. Russavia (talk) 16:38, 13 June 2014 (BST)

Ed Saperia

I'm going to nominate Ed here. He has worked endlessly and tirelessly to lead on what will be the biggest (and I'm sure the best) Wikimania conference the movement has seen. It's really difficult to express just how much work and volunteer time Ed has devoted to the conference - it's been pretty much a full time job in itself. He's put a lot of himself into this event and you can tell he really believes in the benefits it will bring to our movement. I don't want to overdo it but it's sufficient to say that his contributions have been immense. Well done Ed, thank you. Stevie Benton (WMUK) (talk) 11:33, 27 June 2014 (BST)

en:User:Diliff

He's currently living in the UK. Produces a lot of very high quality featured pics. This year:

Geni (talk) 23:53, 29 June 2014 (BST)

Martin Poulter

I mentioned nominating Martin Poulter via email to Katie and other staff members before the deadline, but I think it's better to have the nomination mentioned here too now. Martin was the Wikimedia Ambassador at Jisc for a substantial number of months between the middle of last year and the first part of this year. Details about all that here. --Toni Sant (WMUK) (talk) 16:33, 30 June 2014 (BST)

Harry Mitchell

It is with great pleasure that I nominate Harry Mitchell for the award of UK Wikimedian of the Year, 2014. Harry Mitchell is an exceptional contributor who devotes much of his life to the Wikimedia cause. He is there to help out whenever and wherever he is needed – whether that be spending countless hours improving articles on the English Wikipedia, tidying up on Wikimedia Commons, or travelling all over the country to organize or participate in events. Given his long service, I think he is overdue an award for his efforts.

His contributions include:

He is also an active contributor and administrator for both the English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. On Wikipedia, he is a co-ordinator for WikiProject Military History and is credited for six featured articles, six featured lists, two A-class articles, nine good articles, three "selected anniversaries" contributions, twenty-nine "in the news" contributions, and thirty-three "Did you know?" submissions. On Commons, he frequently uploads Wikimedia related and other educational images, as well as helping to keep the project tidy.

Thank you Harry for all your hard work over the years. CT Cooper · talk 17:08, 3 July 2014 (BST)

GLAM of the Year

The Bodleian Libraries, Oxford

I'd like to nominate this institution, and especially Liz McCarthy (Wikipedia user Liz McCarthy), for being outstandingly forward-looking in working with Wikimedia UK. Consider in just the past year:

  • Along with the University of Oxford's IT Services, the Bodleian hosted a Women in Science editathon which was successful both in getting women to edit, getting endorsement from senior figures and getting biographies of female scientists written. Liz was instrumental to this not just with her own editing and by creating the project page, but by providing a stack of relevant books from the Bodleian collection.
  • Liz also set up the Rediscovering Rycote event which brought together historical material, Wikipedia and new contributors.
  • Liz and the Bodleian Libraries run an online learning programme for Oxford academics which recently included a section about Wikipedia educational assignments.
  • Along with Kate Lindsay of University of Oxford IT Services, Liz wrote articles for Guardian Higher Education Network and for Oxford Today (distributed to all Oxford alumni) presenting writing for Wikipedia as a positive thing for experts to do, particularly to address the gender imbalance. Naturally, I'd like a joint award for Kate and Liz, but this is an award for a GLAM.

Conflict of Interest note: clearly, I was involved in some of the activities I've mentioned above, but this has only made me aware of the enthusiasm Liz, Kate and colleagues have for improving Wikipedia and the success they've had in fostering a change in academics' attitudes to Wikipedia. MartinPoulter (talk) 16:28, 13 June 2014 (BST)

The Royal Society

Obviously as WiR (January to July 2014) I have an interest here, and the RS has also won the award previously. But this has been a great year for RS/Wikipedia cooperation, beginning before my appointment with a very successful editathon last Ada Lovelace Day (October 2013). International Women's Day this March, working in two sessions, produced another very productive training event. As well as other events, public and private, I am especially pleased that the Royal Society has agreed that the official photographs taken of each newly-elected Fellow will in future be on open licences, and added to Wikimedia Commons by default. This will begin with the inauguration of the 2014 Fellows in July. The offer of free subscriptions to the RS's range of 9 journals through the Wikipedia Library has been very sucessful, and is being set up now, after an applications period last month. (more soon) Johnbod (talk) 15:11, 15 June 2014 (BST)

NLS

I would like to nominate NLS along with its current Wikimedian in residence the fantastic Ally Crockford. Ally and NLS have worked tirelessly in the last year to grow and promote the wikimedian community in Edinburgh, Glasgow and the rest of Scotland. They gave Wikimedia great exposure with their Anybody but Burns editathon on Burns' Night, worked with the Glasgow Women's Library to increase the number of entries on Glasgow women of note and have been running a number of skills session in the Glasgow School of Art, Dundee School of Art and other Scottish Higher Education institution. Moreover, in March 2014 NLS adopted a library-wide policy that places all NLS-generated metadata under a CC-0 licence; digital content will be released under either a CC-0 or CC-BY-NC-SA licence and the first 3 batches of digital content from the National Library of Scotland’s collections have now been successfully uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. So let's give a thumbs up to Scottish GLAM this year! Elflin (talk) 13:36, 17 June 2014 (BST)

Second that, the change in the organisation towards openness is worth noting. Daria Cybulska (WMUK) (talk) 18:17, 18 June 2014 (BST)

The British Library and Microsoft

I would like to nominate the British Library and Microsoft for their release of one million images into the public domain. The community element needed to make these images more useful offers new challenges to the Wikimedia Community and new ways to collaborate with with organisations providing content. Mrjohncummings (talk) 18:28, 26 June 2014 (BST)

Educational Institution of the Year

Great Britain Historical GIS Project, the University of Portsmouth

I'd like to nominate Dr Humphrey Southall and his research group for both implementing and documenting an educational assignment that has given his first-year students a taste of open publication on Wikipedia and which has improved countless articles about villages in the North of England.

Showing great patience with the sometimes arcane and poorly-documented Wikipedia interface, Humphrey and his assistants have run assignments involving up to 100 students at a time. This has involved teaching students about Wikipedia culture and monitoring their edits. Humphrey has made changes to the assignment on successive years, learning from his own experience and from Wikimedia UK's education outreach.

As well as running this assignment, he has taken every opportunity to share his lessons learned with other academics. He has spoken or written at a grant-holder meeting and our own EduWiki conference. Humphrey's model is not specific to Geography: it could be used for all sorts of topics where there are many minor articles waiting to be created or improved.

I hope and expect that other senior academics will follow Humphrey's example of openness towards Wikipedia; in particular that they will see that, with suitable planning and care, Wikipedia can be a platform for teaching research skills.

Conflict of Interest note: I wrote the above-linked case study based on an interview with Humphrey. MartinPoulter (talk) 17:49, 13 June 2014 (BST)

Special award/Honourable mention etc

The authors of the Open Scotland Declaration

The draft declaration has been put together by a consortium of expert bodies in the Scottish education sector, driven mainly by Lorna Campbell working in a volunteer capacity. It has not yet been formally recognised and its laudable goals need to be kept high on the agenda. The declaration specifically mentions engagement with Wikimedia UK as one of the ways in which the Scottish education is changing. It calls for educational material to be made available under free and open licences, to encourage innovation, quality, efficiency, and diversity of educational opportunities. Increased engagement of Scottish content and Scottish institutions with the free knowledge movement would be a great boon to Wikimedia. I believe that all supporters of free knowledge and open education in the UK should give their support to this attempt to open up the culture of Scottish education.

Conflict of Interest note: a couple of the consortium members had previously attended my talks about Wikimedia. With Lorna's permission, I'm citing the mention of Wikimedia UK in the draft declaration as an outcome of my Jisc Ambassador residency. MartinPoulter (talk) 18:49, 13 June 2014 (BST)

The team that made Wiki Loves Monuments possible

It felt great to be in a chapter participating in the WLM 2013 - there were many people that made it possible, including convincing people that we could do it. Daria Cybulska (WMUK) (talk) 18:17, 18 June 2014 (BST)

Couldn't agree more. An excellent project which increased participation and resulted in some incredible contributions. I'm using plenty of the Wiki Loves Monuments images in this year's annual review. Stevie Benton (WMUK) (talk) 11:35, 27 June 2014 (BST)
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