I accepted a partial scholarship for Wikimania from the Foundation, but I am
not aware of anybody else from the UK receiving one. They made clear from
the outset that special consideration was to be given for those from the
"global south" (see
http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships#Scholarship_Selection),
so people from the UK were rightly or wrongly at a disadvantage in the
selection process. I actually needed a full scholarship, and I had to get
funding from other sources in order to accept the partial one which I was
offered. The list of attendees while likely incomplete lists just four
people from the UK
(http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Attendees/100). I agree
that a scholarship programme for next year from the WMUK would be a good
idea in boosting attendance, as other chapters are doing. In the
longer-term, the chapter would benefit greatly if the UK hosted the
conference, of which it has not yet done so.
Regards,
Christopher Cooper (CT Cooper)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CT_Cooperhttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:CT_Cooper
>
>> It doesn't look like there is much of a UK contingent going to
>> Wikimania - we didn't even make the top 5 countries list. There's also
>> no mention of WMUK sponsoring anyone despite there being ?10k in the
>> budget for Wikimania sponsorship. Could someone on the board let us
>> know what that money is being spent on?
>
> I understand we're financially supporting seven or eight people (most of
> them not from the UK). Not sure why that is on the list.
Make sure you get on the list - you want the chapter to look good!
It's excellent publicity for the chapter within the Wikimedia
community.
> Your email is written as if you expect "number of people from the UK
> attending Wikimania" to be one of the metrics of the Chapter's success -
why
> is this, out of interest?
I think it is self-evident that more people from the UK attending
WIkimania would be a good thing. The chapter is in a position to help
that. The WMF's sponsorship programme typically doesn't give many (or
any) sponsorships to people in the UK, so it would be good if the
chapter did instead.
This will be announced with a bit more fanfare, and detail, shortly, but
already has a page at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM/Bronze_Age. We have had
a drop-out from our initial meeting (otherwise Fae & myself) at the BM
this Thursday lunchtime. We have a possible back-up, but if anyone has
suggestions of people who might be willing to make a good contribution,
and ideally have some expertise, please let me know asap.
Thanks,
John
BTW, thank you for your recent help with the Tamil version of Tipu's Tiger.
Our contacts at the Victoria and Albert Museum were awed at how this was
done on the day of the Wikilounge and it has helped their internal
discussion about making large numbers of official images and video available
available to support further multi-language collaborations.
* Tipu's Tiger on
http://ta.wikipedia.org<http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%A4%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%AA%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%AA%…>
Cheers,
Fae
--
http://enwp.org/user_talk:fae
Guide to email tags: http://j.mp/faetags
On 20 July 2011 09:25, Bala Jeyaraman <sodabottle(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I can help with the tamil translation. let me know where to do the
> localisation/translation.
Just to let you know that we are currently running the first fundraiser test
in the UK this year.
Currently non-logged-in users on all Wikimedia projects who are geolocated
to the UK will be seeing a fundraising banner. This will last about one
hour. We've turned it off for anyyone logged in.
This is just to make sure all our systems are working smoothly and is a
preparation for other tests we'll hold later in the summer.
Chris
I think those are the only addresses ones he has had (apart from Fae),
from various e-mails. They have used the budget up pretty quickly, but
there is a lot of research time required to understand us adequately.
Hopefully there will now be fewer hours involved as they have worked out
their basic approach. I could ask for an estimate to complete the
process, but since they can't realistically judge how much this will
involve, this risks us getting locked into a figure that is higher than
actually needed. The handover/duplication for Tom's holiday period
(soon to end) has obviously contributed to the costs, which is
unfortunate, but rather inevitable when something needs doing quickly at
this time of year.
John
On 18/07/2011 18:39, steve virgin wrote:
> Seems odd they only mailed the ones below
>
> For the sake of neatness here is what they said
>
> This obviously needs review as we will go over budget here
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jonathan Burchfield [mailto:JonathanBurchfield@stoneking.co.uk]
> Sent: 18 July 2011 18:34
> To: 'John Byrne'
> Cc: steve virgin; Michael Peel; Chris Keating; Tom Murdoch; Reema Mathur
> Subject: RE: Fundraising agreement / draft letter
>
> Many thanks John, will do.
>
> We shall be very interested to hear comments on the draft Charity Commission submission.
>
> On the costs side, now that the Charity Commission has required a submission in advance of any meeting (which may even not now be necessary), I should let you know that we are now above the top range of our initial £3,000-£5,000 initial estimate for stage 1 of this exercise. This covers:
>
> - 3.6 of non-chargeable research and reading-in time;
> - 8.6 hours of my work, at my rate of £295 per hour; and
> - 19.1 hours of time for the detailed work carried out by both Tom and Reema on the submission, which will all be charged at Tom's rate of £185 per hour (rather than Reema's £195 per hour), since Tom would have done all this work if he had not been on holiday.
>
> That works out at a total of £5,589.50 (plus VAT) chargeable to date. One would hope that we are not far off completing the submission, which may turn out to represent the bulk of our work, depending on the way in which our friends at the Charity Commission respond.
>
> I hope you agree that the time has been well spent, but wanted you to be aware of this position as soon as possible after completion of the initial work. This cost will be invoiced towards the end of this month, plus the cost of any additional work carried out.
>
> Kind regards
>
> Jonathan
>
> Jonathan Burchfield
> Partner, Charity& Education Team
> Direct: 44 (0) 20 7324 1736
> Ext: 3008
> Please consider the environment - is it necessary to print this email?
>
> -----Original Message-----
>
>
I think in fact all the points mentioned in Charles' and Lodovik's were
messages were before the GLAM task force, in at least some form, when we
discussed the matter. The term and concept of a "National Monument"
does not exist as such in the UK, as opposed to other countries, in
itself something of a problem. I believe the Netherlands has a single
list, some 30,000 strong, covering all types of sites, buildings, and
things. That is certainly not the case in the UK where (I forget the
exact figures) when you add listed buildings to Scheduled Ancient
Monuments and other types, you get well over a million, but for the most
part without easily accessible listings. As Andrew rightly points out,
these are not all centralized - listed buildings are by local authority
and SAM's under different bodies for the constituent counties of the UK.
The time available to assemble such listings, which seems to be a
very large task, although in theory the information is available, was
probably inadequate.
As well as photos, many Dutch NMs received WP articles, (also in
English) apparently on the basis that NM's were inherently notable, but
there are several precedents for eg UK listed buildings being held not
to be notable, and the same would be true of the lesser sort of SAMs
which form the majority (hut circles, medieval moats etc). We felt a
rash of deleted articles as a result of a NM project might have a
negative effect.
Overhanging all this was the 80,000 (is it now) mostly good quality,
photos that are already on Commons from Geograph, that are still
unsorted, or incorrectly categorized. Bearing in mind that many of the
326 photos in
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_Loves_Art_at_the_Victo…
from February 2009 are still otherwise uncategorized, or not well
categorized, we thought that pressing on with digesting the Geograph
material was a priority.
In the light of this, and the number of other projects the chapter has
taken on, and the lack of anyone pressing to lead the iniative, we
decided not to involve trhe chapter this year, and I still think we made
the right decision.
John
Dear all,
Today Wikimedia UK placed an advertisement for a Chief Executive. You can
see the advert here: http://bit.ly/mU1USs
As you can see from the advert we are looking for a top-calibre individual
who will play a key role in the future growth and development of a rapidly
expanding organisation.
We are very pleased that we've reached this point. Getting to this stage has
not been easy - you will probably be aware that this post has been talked
about for getting on for a year. Managing the recruitment process has, and
will continue, to take up a significant amount of time for the Board
(particularly Roger and Andrew), even aided by the advice of professional HR
consultants. However I hope you will agree that getting the right person
filling this role is of vital importance for the future.
We've invited community input into our hiring strategy at several stages,
including at the AGM. We are still committed to involving the community in
this and if you have views on the Chief Executive's role or the further
development of our staff structure please do let us know either on or off
list.
Also, if you know anyone who might be interested, please do point them
towards the advert!
Chris
WMUK Board
Hi all,
Because of my tangential involvement with WikiProject:Historic Sites I
spotted a note about a Europe wide contest "Wiki loves Monuments" (see
http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu/ ).
The UK is included on the map but there is not link to the UK chapter and I
wondered if this was a deliberate decision for some reason?
There is a wikiproject page
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2011 - which
seems to have lots of broken links) and more detail on Commons
(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2011 )
They say "Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 is a public photo contest around
monuments, organized by Wikimedia chapters." And aims to improve the
quantity and quality of CC licensed images of cultural heritage sites and
objects. It may be too late for 2011 (it seems to run in September but
unclear) but what about the UK participating in future years?
Rod
Below is the Wikimedia UK monthly report for the period 1 to 30 June 2011. If you want to keep up with the chapter's activities as they happen, please subscribe to our blog, join our mailing list, and/or follow us on Twitter. You can find this report online at http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reports/2011/June . If you have any queries, please leave a comment on the talk page.
Board activities
The Board met in person on 11-12 June in Birmingham. The first day was spent on strategy discussions, and included the writing of a vision statement - "free knowledge for all" - and a mission statement. The second day was spent on formal business, particularly our charity status application, our plans for recruitment of full time staff, the upcoming fundraiser and reallocation of budget holders. Key decisions included the decision to proceed with hiring a 'chapter manager' and office manager, and to participate in the fundraiser this Autumn/Winter.
A summary of the meeting was posted on the Wikimedia UK blog.
Education
Mike Peel spoke at the Impact of Social Sciences conference, hosted by the London School of Economics, talking about Wikipedia as an innovative approach to academic impact. A podcast recording of the talk is available.
A call for applicants was put out for a Wikimedia Outreach Ambassador position at the University of Bristol. Samuel Knight from the University of Bristol was selected, and is due to start in July.
Additionally, Campus Ambassador training event took place in London on 18 June, where four people from three different universities were trained to support the use of Wikipedia in higher education.
GLAM
Several GLAM events happened this month, including:
4th, British Library English and Drama behind-the-scenes, which had around 20 attendees, saw the creation of 24 new Wikipedia articles and improvement of various other articles - full details are at Editathon, British Library#Output.
22nd, National Railway Museum Wikimedia workshop - the agenda and participants of which are listed on
24th, GLAMcamp London had a range of Wikimedian and museum representatives meeting to discuss approaches to taking UK Wikimedia-GLAM relations forward in new and innovative ways.
The latter two events were written up in the GLAM newsletter and a Wikimedia UK blog post
Press coverage
1 June, Hundreds of GPs admit to using the website Wikipedia as a medical research tool, BBC News
10 June, Mystery of the Wikifixer: who is the secret image-cleansing agent?, The Independent
For a summary of this story, see the Wikipedia Signpost write-up.
Miscellaneous
There were 4 UK Wikimeets this month: Birmingham (Sun 12 June), Edinburgh (Mon 20 June), London (Sun 12 June) and Manchester (Sat 25 June).
A UK Community IRC meeting was held on the 14th June.
Steve Virgin spoke at the Mashable Social Media Day Bristol - info about which is on facebook and mashable.
Martin Poulter wrote a blog post on "Six unorthodox ways to use Wikipedia".
Upcoming activities in July
2011-07-01 - Medical Research Council Workshop
2011-07-04 - Bristol Wiki Academy 2
2011-07-05 - Fæ in BBC Radio Scotland interview for Culture Cafe
2011-07-06 - 6-8 July, Johnbod part of Wikilounge team for "Communicating the Museum" conference, Dusseldorf
2011-07-07 - 7-9 July, Martin Poulter attending the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit
2011-07-09 - Executive board meeting
2011-07-10 - London meetup
2011-07-11 - 11-12 July, Wikipedia stand at the CILIP conference, Hatfield
2011-07-16 - V&A Wikilounge
2011-07-21 - Steve Virgin talking about 'What is your Wikipedia Business Strategy', Business West event at Cheltenham Racecourse & Gloucestershire Cricket Club
2011-07-25 - Board meeting
2011-07-26 - Steve Virgin talking about 'What is your Wikipedia Business Strategy', Business West event at Cheltenham Racecourse & Gloucestershire Cricket Club
For events in August and onwards, please see Events.
Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited.
Wiki UK Ltd is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827.
The Registered Office is at 23 Cartwright Way, Nottingham, NG9 1RL, United Kingdom.
Below is the Wikimedia UK report for the period 1 January to 31 May 2011. We will be making future reports available on a monthly basis from now on. If you want to keep up with the chapter's activities as they happen, please subscribe to our blog, join our mailing list, and/or follow us on Twitter. You can find this report online at http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reports/2011/May . If you have any queries, please leave a comment on the talk page.
WikiConference UK and AGM
We held the first WikiConference UK, which included our 2011 Annual General Meeting, at the Watershed Media Centre in Bristol. The three main themes of the conference were Wikipedia and GLAM; Wikipedia content; and Wikipedia in Education (including two keynotes). Slides from the presentations are available online.
At the AGM our members elected the Board for the coming year. 8 members stood for the 7 available seats, and it was a very close-run election. The new Board consists of Roger Bamkin (Chair), Andrew Turvey (Treasurer), Michael Peel (Secretary), Chris Keating, Martin Poulter, Ashley Van Haeften and Steve Virgin. The new Board put out a blog post announcing their appointment and the first board meeting.
The AGM also included the formal business of the outgoing Board's report, approval of minutes from the 2009 and 2010 AGMs, and voting on resolutions. 5 resolutions were put to the members. The first was on extending board seats to 2 years, which failed to receive the required 75% support. The other four - on setting membership fees; appointing board members; approving the 2008-2010 annual accounts; and appointing auditors - were unanimously approved. Preliminary minutes for the AGM are online.
GLAM
The event summary below excludes events and new relationships under current negotiation which includes 5 new institutions as well as continuing programmes with at least 4 current institutions.
British Library - As part of our 10th Anniversary activities and partially inspired by our successes with the British Museum collaboration, on 14-15 January 2011 we held a editathon at the British Library. At the event, Wikimedia UK volunteers alongside the employees of the British Library created Wikipedia content related to the British Library - 8 new articles were started and infrastructure on the English Wikipedia related to the new GLAM/BL project was developed. See Editathon, British Library/January 2011 and the event announcement for details.
Derby Museum
Backstage Pass - 9 April, the event established a model for high engagement with smaller museums and included the innovative use of QR codes to enable an multi-language interactive exhibition at almost no cost.
Wright Challenge - April/May - Gaming has been a great success in order for the collaboration to deliver articles in 100 languages. Further press interest should probably be encouraged for this achievement, particularly considering relationship to multi-language use of QR codes. Victuallers leading.
UGC4GLAM Vienna - 16-17 May Victuallers was invited to join this conference and presented on the topics of BM, Derby, QRpedia and the Wright Challenge and gained an insight into the GLAM work and logistics for other Chapters.
GLAMcamp NYC - 20-22 May, the workshops arranged by Liam Wyatt were successful in pushing forward interchapter relationships and advanced a number of international GLAM related projects. This included revising the :outreach website, sharing and publicising the Wikimedian in Residence experience, proposing a GLAM metrics programme and proposing a European GLAMcamp to be hosted in Utrecht late this year. The entire event (with around 30 participants) was funded with $10,000 from the WMF. Travel cost concerns limited UK involvement to Fae and Rock Drum.
In May a GLAM task force was established to help drive the expanding programme forward and establish the UK GLAM network of e-volunteers. The current GLAM task force members active are Fae (director and budget holder), Leutha, WereSpielChequers, Tom Morris, Johnbod and Andrew Davidson.
Education
An Imperial College Wikipedia Society has been officially recognised by Imperial College, the first Wikipedia student organisation to be established in the UK. The society hopes to feed teaching assignments and outreach on campus and hopes to encourage the use of Wikipedia on campus and to seriously question its position in the academic community. It has already run two contribution team events: wikipedia:Wikipedia:CONTRIB/Imperial & wikipedia:Wikipedia:CONTRIB/Imperial2 - as well as the London Wikipedia Academy. It was covered by the BBC, Care2 and Sify News.
The ongoing survey into Expert barriers to Wikipedia caught the attention of the Guardian, who ran an article on Tuesday 29th March. Mike Peel sent the Guardian a variety of suitable contacts, and the paper chose Mike's own photo and interview to lead the article. The article mentioned a number of ways in which Wikimedia is reaching out to academia, including Wikipedians at Imperial College (see above). Wikipedia's detractors piled into the online comments, as did some veteran editors. The article caught the attention of the BBC World Service, who ran an interview with Rod Ward, who lectures at the University of West of England, Bristol. The interviewer seemed taken aback when Rod explained that Wikipedians are not paid for their contributions. The Guardian later ran an editorial column "In praise of academic Wikipedians".
Martin Poulter spoke at the Open Educational Resources 2011 conference at the University of Nottingham on "Wikimedia and Higher Education: Beat them or join them?" This urged the UK's Open Educational Resource community to learn from, and engage with, the Wikimedia projects.
Wikipedia Workshops
Wikimedia UK ran a 'Wikipedia Workshop' at Cancer Research UK's London offices. Cancer Research UK's staff explored how their unique expertise can benefit Wikipedia, improving existing cancer-related pages and sharing new information about cancer and health. The 'Wikipedia Workshop' was split into two sessions. The first took place in early February and consisted of a two hour comprehensive introduction to Wikipedia, including what makes a good Wikipedia article and how to interact with other contributors. The second session, on Monday 28th March 2011, was an all-day 'hands-on' session where the Wikipedians guided attendees through their first edits to Wikipedia. Kate Arnold, director of patient information at Cancer Research UK, said: "Wikipedia is a key source of information for people looking for information about cancer. Either they go to the site directly or they Google a term and Wikipedia links appear high in the search rank. We believe it is vital for the information available on these pages to be accurate and easy to understand." The event received a mention on the BBC web site, as well as extremely favourable coverage in The Times. This included an editorial which praised CRUK's bold step in engaging with Wikipedia, and a double-page spread on the information available to cancer sufferers, mentioning Wikipedia as one of the resources that will save lives by helping people make informed decisions. The event was also covered by New Scientist, AccuraCast and DigitalJournal
As a result of the Cancer Research UK event, the UK's Medical Research Council requested a workshop at its London offices, which is set for July. The Institute of Physics, an educational and scholarly charity, is exploring shared activities with Wikimedia UK. As part of this, the IoP will host a workshop at its London headquarters in September.
Saturday 19th March saw a one-day event at the University of Bristol, jointly branded between Wikimedia UK and the University, and organised by Steve Virgin and Martin Poulter. Attending were representatives from potential partner organisations and the local Somali and Bengali-speaking communities, as well as some students from the city's two universities. After Martin's overview, Alex Stinson explained the Five Pillars, GLAM sector partnerships and the Ambassador programme. Rod Ward spoke about article quality and WikiProjects (see Rod's blog). William Avery demonstrated image uploading. Steve Woods gave a non-technical intro to MediaWiki (see Steve's blog). Roger Bamkin made a very persuasive case for QR codes, placing examples around the room. Jezhotwells was on hand to provide one-to-one help to new users. Martin spoke to BBC local radio in the morning to promote the event. Matt Jukes of the Medical Research Council blogged favourably: "I think if more people were aware of just how tough the Wikipedia peer-review system was then there would be a lot less nay-sayers. The focus not only on getting things factually correct and well cited but also on the quality of the copy (and even layout) was really impressive."
Wikipedia's 10th birthday
Wikimedia UK hosted two events in Bristol in honour of Wikipedia’s 10th Birthday. Wales spoke to an audience of 700 at the University of Bristol's Victoria Rooms, with 3000 more watching the live video stream, and about 25,000 on watching the recorded videos after the event. Local user Jezhotwells had made it his ambition to get the article about the event's venue to Good Article status beforehand, and managed it at 3am on the day of the talk. After an introduction from Guy Orpen, the University's Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research, Wales gave a prepared speech and answered selected questions. His comments about Net Neutrality & HP Labs led to a large number of news stories about the event the following morning. The BBC Anchor Project recorded and edited the talk: a six minute video has been uploaded to Commons. Earlier in the day, Wales had spoken at the Bristol Cathedral School, from which a YouTube video is available. Throughout the day, Wales gave interviews to local, national and international media, including a lengthy interview with the New Statesman while en route from Bristol to London.
After the Bristol events, Jimmy threw a celebratory party in London, attended by many Wikimedia contributors and public figures. Jimmy was introduced by Richard Dawkins, who said that if he had been told about Wikipedia at its outset, he would have bet a large sum of money on it failing. Video of the party is available on the Reuters site. See summary of events. The Editathon at the British Library (see above) was also a 10th anniversary celebration event.
Miscellaneous
We put out a blog post on Wikimedia Commons reaching the 10 million multimedia files milestone.
A major media story at the end of April was regarding the disclosure of information subject to UK injunctions, which was covered by the Guardian and Daily Mail, and which Jimmy Wales criticised to the BBC (also covered by The Independent). Additionally, in May The Guardian covered a high court order regarding defamation on Wikipedia.
Back in January, a big news story was about the gender imbalance on Wikipedia, which was covered in the UK by The Telegraph in two articles.
Mike Peel attended the Chapters meeting 2011 in Berlin on behalf of WMUK. Documentation from the meeting is available online, and Manuel Schneider wrote a summary of the conference. WMUK provided sponsorship of €4,000 to hire the facilitators for the event.
Minutes of board meetings are available for 4 January, 5 February, 1 March, 8 April, 16 April (pre-AGM), 16 April (post-AGM), 26 April (full board) and 20 May (Exec).
Wikimeets happened in London on 9 January, 13 February, 13 March, 10 April and 8 May; in Cambridge on 27 February and 21 May; and in Manchester on 24 April.
UK Community IRC meetings were held on 3 May and 17 May.
Upcoming activities in June
4 June - British Library English and Drama behind-the-scenes
11-12 June - Board meeting, Birmingham
12 June - London meetup
22 June - National Railway Museum (provisional date, details under discussion)
24 June - GLAMcamp London
For events in July and onwards, please see Events.
Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited.
Wiki UK Ltd is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827.
The Registered Office is at 23 Cartwright Way, Nottingham, NG9 1RL, United Kingdom.