User talk:EdSaperia/Wikimedia UK's 2014 Strategy

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Hi Ed, this is really interesting. There's some cool stuff in there. With regards to the idea of learners as contributors, we spoke about this at the recent education committee meeting. As a group we really want to shift digital literacy and fluency back up our agenda. To this end we are going to be creating a digital literacy strategy and it would be great if you could have some input to this. I'll keep you posted. With regards to the community management side of things, some of this is within Katie's remit - although admittedly she isn't focused on a specific tech community. Could be a good one to discuss with Katie. With regards to the third idea, if this can be done in a way that is structured and doesn't create too much of an administrative burden for volunteers then I am definitely all for it. It's a sensible way of highlighting useful sources and reference material, particularly, as you say, for things like WikiProject Medicine. Thanks for sketching this out, I hope others will join the conversation. Stevie Benton (WMUK) (talk) 14:59, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

As very few people will be watching this page, I suggest you post these three ideas onto our main community notice boards. The first and last are external projects so should go to the Water Cooler. The second is more internal to WMUK and should go to the Engine Room. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 21:28, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

I'm a bit confused as to what the difference is between internal and external projects. Doesn't WMUK exist to support the work of volunteers, and to try and grow the volunteer base? You can't do either of these independently. 188.223.127.120 10:52, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
Yes, indeed. In fact all, 'projects' are external. I meant that the second point mentioned on the page (whether the charity should employ a "London-focused Technical Community Manager") does not relate to a specific external project but rather to how we are set up and operate as a charity. So, discussion on that suggestion should go to the Engine Room rather than the Water Cooler. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 11:19, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
Alternatively could a volunteer apply for a grant to do some work as a community manager? How would that work? EdSaperia (talk) 15:45, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

Thanks Ed - nice ideas - I hope you can see that our programme is now starting to take shape - will ping you the internal brainstorming link. Jon Davies (WMUK) (talk) 11:33, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

So that people know: our tech manager (to be hired soon) can play a role in bringing people together and the Education Organiser is beginning to work on ideas. We have lots of energy and enthusiasm and concrete plans are taking shape such as the Train the Trainers international special, the volunteers lounge in our basement and the 'Eve of Mania' volunteer's party. We have allocated £10K towards supporting Wikimania and a proportion of staff time, plus hired a Wikimania liaison person (funded by the Foundation) to help glue it all together. Jon Davies (WMUK) (talk) 17:51, 27 January 2014 (UTC)

Open access reader

Hi Ed, looks good. Might want to setup individual pages for the ideas(/discussion) possibly transclude these blurbs back to this page. Anyway, the reader is a nice idea, Aaron Halfaker at WMF may have interest in that kind of activity.

Btw, crawling, and the dumping of info about OA articles won't be the big problem, but recommendation for which (Wiki) articles they're associated with/proper categorisation will. Projects like CORE http://core.kmi.open.ac.uk/search (Note: This is a project from the lab I'm doing my PhD in) might be of interest in that context. Sjgknight (talk) 07:21, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

Thinking practically, I'm not sure it would make sense for us to maintain a crawler/harvester for OA material (particularly given others are working on this endeavour). Coincidentally I'm in the office today, so I just had a quick chat with the CORE guys, one of the things CORE lacks is metadata on license information - all materials are "open" in the sense that they are available, but not necessarily "open" as in under a CC license (let alone CC-By) indeed I know I have at least one chapter which the publisher was happy to release freely but it isn't under a CC license. There are efforts to bring machine readable licenses to repositories which would greatly assist harvesters like CORE, but it seems at the moment they haven't amounted to much (which is a huge pity). The (ambitious) advantage of an existing rich tool like CORE (there may be other appropriate projects) is that we could:
  1. Compare existing article refs to see if a version is freely available (ideally with license info)
  2. Use that list to seed "related articles" of possible use to either bringing into the article or just extra reading
  3. If we had license information, extract media for commons as described above
  4. If no OA sources in an article, use keywords/categories/articlename to seed possible sources
  5. Associate OA journal articles with relevant Wikipedia articles (paper 'x' might is associated with article 'y' - give it a read or even edit it)
Ideally, we don't maintain the crawler, we just maintain the metadata linking articles to projects. Which is basically what citations are anyway - this just starts from the other end, trying to find articles for sources, rather than sources for articles. And since knowledge is created by sources and not the other way round, it seems like an interesting approach. PLUS with research you're guaranteed that it's of reasonable quality (relatively speaking) and that there's a community interested in it. EdSaperia (talk) 11:06, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
Plus, Openly accessible but not openly licensed is fine for this purpose, isn't it? We just want to cite it as a source.EdSaperia (talk) 11:06, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
"recommendation for which (Wiki) articles they're associated with/proper categorisation will" - but in fact, this is the one thing that the wikimedia community is AMAZING at doing! Large scale distributed categorisation! EdSaperia (talk) 11:12, 30 January 2014 (UTC)
Ok cool, I've added another no. above then. Openly accessible is fine, but it'd be good to have the license metadata in part because it means we know whether we can scrape the content (including uploading figures to Commons). I agree the community is great at large scale distributed categorisation, but they'll need some help so thinking about semi-automation is important. This is definitely a project with cool potential though even if ambitious. Sjgknight (talk) 12:56, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

OAR links

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