Below is the Wikimedia UK monthly report for the period 1 to 30 November 2012. If you want to keep up with the chapter's activities as they happen, please subscribe to our blog, join a UK mailing list, and/or follow us on Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, please drop us a line on this report's talk page.

Contents  

1 Program activities

1.1 Community

1.1.1 Manchester Girl Geeks

1.1.2 Microgrant outcome

1.2 GLAM activities

1.2.1 "Ice Age art: arrival of the modern mind", British Museum exhibition, 7 February – 26 May 2013

1.2.2 Nineteenth Century Books

1.2.3 Independent Wikipedian in Residence

1.3 Technology

1.4 Other activities

1.4.1 Other activities

1.4.2 Microgrants

1.5 UK press coverage (and coverage of UK projects & activities)

1.6 Upcoming activities in December and January

2 Administrative activities

2.1 Finances

2.2 Board activities

2.3 News from the Chief Exec

2.4 Communications

2.5 Fundraising and Membership

Program activities

On Sunday 25 November Manchester was the scene of a Girl Geeks training event. There were 12 attendees were introduced to Wikipedia and began improving coverage of women in science. The Manchester Girl Geeks have been getting involved with Wikipedia since 2011, and this event continued the link. They were keen to get involved in editing at a later date and it is hoped that more such events can be arranged in the future.

November saw Wikipedia's article on Operation Barras under review to become a Featured Article. The article, which details an operation in 2000 by the British Army to free five of its soldiers captured in Sierra Leone, was nominated on 23 October and promoted on 8 December. The work was the initiative of HJ Mitchell whose endeavour was supported by a WMUK microgrant which allowed the relevant books to be purchased. The drive saw the article grow from a few hundred words to its current size of 5,600 words. While Operation Barras is the marque article, there have also been improvements to other related articles.

13,000 year old engraved reindeer and ibex, with no article yet. Palart 505

We have been working on this with the BM for a long time. The exhibition has now been announced -"Ice Age art: arrival of the modern mind" BM page. It will run from 7 February – 26 May 2013. We have been given the list of BM objects that will be included, and expect the full list of loan objects, mostly from European museums, shortly, once this is finalized. There are 31 BM objects in the exhibition, of which we have Commons photos of 18, mostly from the 2011 day at Franks House, and articles on 7. Any additions are most welcome. All have the key information, and sometimes more, on the BM collections database. The Commons photos are most easily found at the Commons page: Objects in Sieveking, Ann "A catalogue of Palaeolithic art in the British Museum", which uses the same BM Sieveking "Palart" catalogue references as the BM database.

Please see the project page for more detail. Much of the exhibition will then travel to Santander in Spain, which gives us an exciting opportunity to link with Spanish (and of course Catalan) Wikipedians.

For more details, see Wikipedia:GLAM/BL/Books

Andrew Gray, the Wikipedian in Residence at the British Library, has been working with a collection of around 40,000 books made available by the British Library from a previous digitisation program. These are not yet widely available online due to their size, but can be uploaded on request to Commons or to Wikisource. All suggestions for new material are welcome - the collection appears particularly strong in local histories and travelogues.

The first fully transcribed book has been completed on Wikisource - A Journey in Khorassan and Central Asia, an 1890 travelogue by an English diplomat and his wife in eastern Persia and Russian Central Asia.

In related news, Andy Mabbett has secured a role as a Wikipedian in Residence at Staffordshire Archives and Heritage Service. This is independent of the Chapter, but very interesting. You can learn more about Andy's work here.

Emmanuel and Tom were taken on as contractors & the first development meeting was held in the Wikimedia UK offices. A plan was agreed to migrate Wikimedia UK websites, email, mailing lists and other services to a multi-server Rackspace cloud. Initial work was undertaken prior to a major push in December/January to complete the migration.

Tom and Emmanuel have been documenting their work, and the new infrastructure, at IT Development.

5th-9th - Andrew Gray ran a series of four workshops in Edinburgh for the University of Edinburgh, the National Library of Scotland, and EDINA.

6th - Stevie Benton met with Matt Jukes of the Medical Research Council to discuss Wikipedians in Residence.

19th - Robin Owain met with Rheinallt Foster-Jones (The People's Collection) and Tom Pert (Mapping Officer, for the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales) at Llanberis. Piloting 100 CC-BY-SA images etc.

19th - Andy Mabbett ran a session on Wikipedia and its relevance for local government at the HyperLocalWM unconference. He also wrote a piece advocating open licensing, for the unconference's own newspaper!

20th - Stevie visited the town of Stamford, Lincolnshire, to learn more about their project to improve local content.

20th - Andrew Gray and Richard Symonds met with the Imperial War Museum to discuss Wikipedians in Residence

21st - Andy Mabbett travelled to High Wycombe to pilot new method of Wikipedia (and OpenStreetMap) training, Tupperware Party style!

Information about microgrants that are currently running, and how to submit a microgrant application of your own, are at Microgrants/Applications.

See the communications section below.

08 - Board meeting - call

12 - Manchester meetup

13 - London meetup

13 - Oxford meetup

14 - AHRC Wikipedia training workshop at the British Library

16 - IRC office hours

20 - Reading Meetup

For events in February 2013 and onwards, please see Events.

Administrative activities

The current state of each of our budgets is outlined in a Google Spreadsheet. This details spend to date, and a rough estimate of future spending. This spreadsheet is too complex to be placed directly on a wiki. Our yearly spend is heavily 'end-loaded', partially due to the rapid growth of Wikimedia UK.

Q3's Management Accounts (covering August, September, October) are at File:Wikimedia UK Management Accounts Q3 2012.pdf. These are also available in spreadsheet format for those interested - contact richard.symondswikimedia.org.uk

The Board held a full board meeting on 17-18 November in our London office. You can see the agenda here, the minutes here and the reports here

For information on Jon's activities this month, see News from the Office.

The key area of importance in communications this month was a series of articles published in The Times about the influence and activities of some PR agencies on Wikipedia. The stories were fairly significant in that they highlighted the widespread manipulation of Wikipedia by agencies on behalf of their clients. One of the stories even made the front page. Given that the journalists from The Times were open and transparent about their research and interviewed Jimmy Wales to present a Wikipedian view, the story was sympathetic to the Wikimedia movement. The story gained relatively little traction across other outlets, although The Telegraph and The Observer both ran online pieces.

Below are links to press coverage related to Wikimedia UK in November.

This month, we received £1,810.87 in one-off donations, with 79 individual donations. The average donation amount was £22.92 - 74% of these donors have had Gift Aid Declarations made and matched with their records. If anyone would like a full (but anonymised) csv file with more information, please get in touch with katherine.bavage@wikimedia.org.uk and let her know your requirements.

There were 5,555 successful direct debits this month, bringing in a total of £22,256.49. Further figures are pending the return of one of our staff members.

Up to 30th November 2012:

141 new (membership commenced in preceding three months) and current members - with 8 new join-ups in November.

120 'grace' members (membership within six months after date membership should be renewed)

This adds up to 265 members who are eligible to vote

155 Expired members

The steep change in 'New and Current' to 'Grace' reflects the numbers of memberships taken out in previous fundraiser periods. A specific chase up email will go out in January 2013 to all grace members on top of the automated notice of grace period email.

Stevie Benton
Communications Organiser
Wikimedia UK
+44 (0) 20 7065 0993 / +44 (0) 7803 505 173
@StevieBenton

Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects).

Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.