Dear WikimediaUK, Cultural Partnerships & Foundation-l mailing lists,
On behalf of Wikimedia UK I am pleased to formally announce the second
edition of the GLAM-WIKI conference - this time to be held in London at the
British Museum on the 26th and 27th of November. The purpose of this
conference is to bring the UK and European GLAM sector [gallery, library,
archive & museum] into direct conversation with the Wikimedia community so
we can build a better understanding of our common purpose - sharing culture
- and how to assist each to best do that. After all, we are here for the
same reason, for the same people, in the same medium so we might as well do
it together :-)
As the British Museum will be generously hosting this event, and today marks
the anniversary of the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone (hence today's
Feature Article on the English Wikipedia), we thought it would be an
auspicious time to declare that registration is now open. The registration
price for Wikimedians is £20.
You can read all the details at:
*http://glamwiki.org* <http://glamwiki.org>
and the WM-UK blogpost just published:
http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2010/09/announcing-registration-now-open-for-g…
Wikimedia France will be hosting edition three of GLAM-WIKI one week later
in December at the *Assemblée nationale* in Paris, and Wikimedia Australia
hosted edition one last year at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, so
we're in good company.
Keynote speakers at this conference will be:
- Author, activist, blogger and London local *Cory
Doctorow<http://craphound.com/>
*
- Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation *Sue
Gardner<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Sue_Gardner>
*
- Director of the Columbia University copyright advisory office *Dr.
Kenneth Crews<http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/about/director-and-staff/>
*
And many other presenters besides! Some are already listed on the conference
page and many more will be announced by
@wikimediaUK<http://twitter.com/wikimediauk>
Wikimedians from the UK and further afield are invited to register for this
conference. If you are in contact with professionals in the GLAM sector,
please mention this event to them too. Moreover, if you would like to come
and moderate a session please write to me directly with your proposed
session.
If you have any questions you can write to me privately, leave them on the
event's talkpage or reply on the mailing list.
Sincerely,
Liam [[witty lama]]
Convener, GLAM-WIKI:UK & Wikipedian in Residence, British Museum
wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata
The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has commissioned a
year-long effort to clarify the roles of various stakeholders in the
movement, with the final goal of developing a "Wikimedia Charter"—a
document where the roles and responsibilities within the Wikimedia
organization are clearly defined and agreed upon by all
stakeholders—and a plan for going forward with organizational
development.
This process will be transparent, and open to input from anyone
interested. It's planned to take approximately one year, with regular
milestones along the way.
A core group of people will be tasked with ensuring that steady
progress is being made toward those milestones. Although the exact
makeup of the group may change as specific needs are reevaluated, this
working group currently comprises:
* Alice Wiegand
* Arne Klempert
* Austin Hair (facilitator and adviser)
* Barry Newstead
* Bence Damokos
* Bishakha Datta
* Galileo Vidoni
* Jon Huggett (facilitator and adviser)
* Morgan Chan
* Samuel Klein
The work is just getting started, with the inaugural meeting of the
working group having taken place on 10 September; please see the page
on Meta[0] to comment and participate. Although I expect that there
will be plenty of replies to this e-mail, it would be nice if the
project-related discussion could take place on-wiki.
This announcement is about two weeks overdue—many of you may already
know about it, since it's no secret. I apologize for that; my
computer died and I didn't manage to retype the e-mail with my thumbs
on my phone before I got the replacement.
I personally hope to see lots of participation, and am willing to
answer any questions about the process.
Best regards,
Austin Hair
[0] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_roles_working_group
We're looking to add one more list moderator for foundation-l. On
foundation-l, the main role of a moderator is to approve posts made by
moderated users and users who are not subscribed to the list. Occasionally,
a list moderator has to step in and control discussion when it gets
out-of-hand, but, thank goodness, that is generally a rare occurrence here.
Anyone interested in serving as a list moderator, please send an e-mail to
foundation-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org, no later than 23:59 UTC on September
23rd. Please include the following information:
- Wikimedia username
- Projects you are active on
- Any roles you serve in on those projects (e.g. administrator, WikiProject
coordinator, mediator, etc.)
- Anything else that might be useful - info about yourself, etc.
Again, please send your submissions no later than 23:59 UTC on September
23rd.
Thanks,
Austin Hair, list moderator
Ryan Lomonaco, list moderator
Just to let you know -- the second part of the Study of Controversial Content, with our recommendations, is available now for comment at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:2010_Wikimedia_Study_of_Controversial_C…. Look for Part 2. Looking forward to your comments, and we'll respond if need be to clarify things that might not be clear, although hopefully, there won't be too many of those.
Robert Harris
Hi all,
Danese Cooper, the "open source diva", and Wikimedia's very own Chief
Technology Officer, will be our guest at office hours on Wednesday, 22
September at 23:00UTC (16:00 Pacific, 19:00 Eastern, 01:00 Thursday
CET). This is a great opportunity to spend time with Danese and talk
about her exciting plans for the future of Wikimedia's technological
infrastructure.
You can access the chat by going to https://webchat.freenode.net/ and
filling in a username and the channel name (#wikimedia-office). You
may be prompted to click through a security warning. It's fine.
Another option is http://chat.wikizine.org.
As always, the chat will be logged and put on meta for those who are
unable to join.
Look forward to seeing you there!
Philippe
____________________
Philippe Beaudette
Head of Reader Relations
Wikimedia Foundation
philippe(a)wikimedia.org
Imagine a world in which every human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
This week the Foundation is excited to be releasing four separate videos shot at the recent Wikimania Conference in Gdansk, Poland. The first video 'Username' is now posted on the WM Commons:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_User_Name_MEDIUM.ogv
Later today the Foundation will be releasing the videos on a few other platforms as well, specifically to increase public visibility:
http://www.facebook.com/wikipediahttp://identi.ca/wikipediahttp://www.youtube.com/wikimediafoundationhttp://vimeo.com/wmfoundation/
I'll be posting more about the links on the Wikimedia blog later this morning (San Francisco time) blog.wikimedia.org
And maybe some others.
What are these videos?
They were originally produced to complement the public outreach work going on now (and in the future) and to provide a short, energetic clip for folks to use in all sorts of presentations. A very good example of that would be in Sue's keynote presentation from Wikimania, which some of you may have seen. We hope everyone in the movement may find them useful, and we're particularly hopeful that they can be easily localized and shared even more widely. They shed a new light on the passionate people behind our projects.
Who made them?
The clips were created for the Wikimedia Foundation (led mostly by Communications and Public Outreach) by a team that's been working with the Foundation over the past year. They were directed by Jelly Helm, produced by Noah Stanik, shot by DP Reed Harkness, and edited by Sarah Marcus. The music is by Portland, Oregon based musician Matt Carey. The Germany-based film production crew Living Colour was an essential partner in bringing everything together at the shoot in Gdansk, Poland, and Fenton Communications, who have been supporting the Foundation over the past year, were our agency partners in pulling this project together. We also owe the organizers of 2010's Wikimania conference a great deal of thanks for helping us sort out the production on the ground and for letting us borrow participants for short interviews.
What's next?
The remaining clips will be posted on Commons and other video sharing sites through Friday. Once they're all announced we'll share another note with all of the links. You can follow the progress and hear what the public thinks on identi.ca and twitter. We hope to see the videos make an appearance in media and other blogs too.
Hope you enjoy!
--
Jay Walsh
Head of Communications
WikimediaFoundation.orgblog.wikimedia.org
+1 (415) 839 6885 x 609, @jansonw
In a message dated 9/21/2010 12:11:09 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
peter.damian(a)btinternet.com writes:
> I brought it up because Johnson was insisting that someone
> without formal training in the humanities could write an article just as
> well as someone with formal training.
Peter I'm finding it hard to comprehend why you fail to understand my
meaning so often.
I never stated nor even insinuated that "someone without formal training in
the humanities could write an article just as well as someone with formal
training."
I would point out however that I think you mean "in their field" as well,
since a person with "formal training in the humanities" whatever you think
that implies, could not write an article on nuclear interactions as well as
someone with "formal training in nuclear science". Or wait... perhaps they
could, but that's another point isn't it?
What I actually stated or implied was that any editor could *modify* an
existing article, by adding details which are not in it, or editing the copy
for style, tense, usage. Fixing spelling errors, and so on. Any editor can
modify an article, any editor can create a stub article.
Editors with no real comprehension of what wider scope an article might
have, can still spot articles which seem to be written in a flowery or
aggressive style. That takes no "formal training in the humanities". Rather it
takes a sense of logic, balance, flow. Which applies to all writing, not just
writing on the humanities.
It's hardly fair for you to pick at an article that I was in the middle of
updating, with bits and pieces that I found here and there, in a rather
haphazard way, as is my wont when I'm *researching*, and then declare that I
don't know how to write. (How's that for a run-on sentence, Ma?)
But Peter, this is not about *me*, this is about the project, which has
rejected, and will continue to reject, the concept that experts get a "pass" on
citing their sources :)~~~ No one gets a pass, if that pisses off some
experts, then those are exactly the sort of trouble makers we do not want.
Will Johnson
Following on from my previous posts about trying to classify the scope and
coverage of humanities subjects in Wikipedia, I have a practical question:
is it possible to query the Wikipedia database in such a way as to get a
list of all articles (current version)? Even better, with a second, larger
list that indexes each article with a list of categories it belongs to.
Example
List 1
Name , ID
Thomas Aquinas, 1
William of Ockham, 2
List 2
ID, category
1, 1225 births
1, 1274 deaths
[...]
2, 1285 births
2, 1347 deaths
2, 13th century philosophers
and so on. I appreciate the second list may be up to 20 times the size of
the first, thus 60 million rows. Perhaps there is a way to limit the number
of categories, I don't know.
This would allow me to see exactly what was there under the humanities. My
hunch is that most articles in Wikipedia are obscure stubs (from using the
random article function), and that the coverage of humanities subjects,
possibly other areas, is actually no different to a conventional
encyclopedia.