Wikimediauk-l August 2009

wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org

29 participants
40 discussions

London Wiki Wednesday returns
by Gordon Joly 03 Sep '09

03 Sep '09

Since it has been difficult to convene in the old format (short talks, PowerPoint, sponsored food and drink etc), Andrew Black has suggested an informal meeting. The venue is well known to the group that meets on a Sunday - it is Penderel's Oak. The date is Wednesday 2nd September (following the first Wednesday rule), and the start time is 7pm. We (looks like I am host!) have booked the downstairs - Cellar Bar - for the evening. http://london.randomness.org.uk/wiki.cgi?Penderel%27s_Oak,_WC1V_7HJ http://www.socialtext.net/wikiwed/index.cgi?london Sign up on the Facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=125806656490 I will bring a few beer tokens.... Gordo -- "Think Feynman"///////// http://pobox.com/~gordo/ gordon.joly(a)pobox.com///

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Next WMUK board meeting: Tuesday 26 May, 8.30pm BST
by Michael Peel 01 Sep '09

01 Sep '09

Hi all, The next board meeting is this evening; Tuesday 26 May 2009, 8.30-10.30pm BST, in the #wikimedia-uk-board channel on irc.freenode.net, with discussion in #wikimedia-uk. Everyone is more than welcome to attend. The draft agenda is at: http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetings/2009-05-26/Agenda Board members: please confirm whether you'll be present or not on the agenda page. Thanks, Mike Peel

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Britain Loves Wikipedia: update
by Michael Peel 31 Aug '09

31 Aug '09

Hi all, Some of you may have already noticed that I've started fleshing out the Britain Loves Wikipedia wiki pages, online at: http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Initiatives/Britain_Loves_Wikipedia I've also created a second set of wiki pages on cultural partnerships, at: http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cultural_partnerships The basis for this was that whenever I've talked to museums, they've asked for more information. It's a lot easier to point them to a single webpage than to send them a long email with lots of links in it, and I hope that it will be a lot more effective. Please take a look at these, and (if you have the time) comment and improve on them. I have a couple of queries that I'd like everyone's input on. First: The event was originally down as "London Loves Wikipedia", and focusing on museums in London only. I've been trying to broaden that, so that we have museums from across the country involved. My intention is to "cluster" these - i.e. when we have one museum in a city joining in with the event, then I'll try to focus on getting other nearby museums involved also. The logic behind this is that people can then visit multiple museums in a single day within the competition, hence staying interested in the event for longer and taking more images. Does this seem like a logical approach to take? Second: What are the other joint activities that you'd like to see with museums? At the moment, there's Britain Loves Wikipedia; content donations and tours (both in the museums and behind-the-scenes). What's missing from that list? Thanks, Mike

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Attracting Membership
by Paul Williams 30 Aug '09

30 Aug '09

Hi all! I'm trying to collate a list of ideas as to how we can boost the membership of Wikimedia UK. If you take a look at [1] you shall see a couple of ideas - but what I would love to hear / see are the ideas of the list members. While many of you on this list are already members of the chapter - please feel free to get involved too! I need two questions answered: 1) What would encourage you to become a member of Wikimedia UK? 2) What would encourage you to remain a member of Wikimedia UK (renew your membership)? Answers to the mailing list, talk page [2], or onto [1] itself! Regards, Paul Williams Volunteers Director Wikimedia UK *Email:* paul.williams(a)wikimedia.org.uk [1] http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Membership/Drive [2] http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Membership/Drive Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited. Wiki UK Limited 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. The views expressed in this email are, unless otherwise stated, personal and not those of the Board of Directors or Membership of Wiki UK Limited.

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Recording previous attempts to contact institutions
by Jarry 1250 30 Aug '09

30 Aug '09

Hey all. Though I have little aptitude for engaging cultural institutions in productive discussion myself, it has occurred to me that it would be useful to keep a register of "previous contact" with collections, museums, etc. I can only guess at the amount of personal correspondance contributors entertain, and it must be a good thing to keep track of these things, surely? As I see it, the only drawback is time (maybe five minutes every now and again?). In return, the rewards are many: a collaborative feeling; time saved in knowing whom to contact within each organisation, and which are not worth talking to; the ability to cite the examples of other similar businesses when engaging with one more easily; the ability to extrapolate from a small donation (testing the water, as it were), the ability to note the problems experienced so they can be worked on in the future... the list goes on. However, I admit that this is not an area of my own personal expertise, so am more than willing to see what everyone thinks and (if necessary) reconsider the whole idea. In the meantime I have created a placeholder page at http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Outreach . See what you think, Jarry1250

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Fwd: Y! Alert: Wikimedia UK Blog
by Andrew Turvey 29 Aug '09

29 Aug '09

Now that we've got this new blog, it would be useful if we could get the various media integrated so that the message is getting through all the different channels. I've been looking at ways to get blog posts automatically fed into the email list. I've come across Yahoo Alerts, which runs off the RSS feed and seems to work, but it doesn't give you any images and mixes in the image captions to the text. Of course there is a link to the story if anyone wants to follow up. My question: would people like, in principle to receive an alert like this to this email group whenever a blog story is published? If so, is a Yahoo Alert like below good enough? Does anyone know of any other system that is better? Andrew ---- Forwarded Message ----- From: "Yahoo! Alerts" <alerts(a)yahoo-inc.com> To: andrewrturvey(a)googlemail.com Sent: Tuesday, 25 August, 2009 18:22:23 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland, Portugal Subject: Y! Alert: Wikimedia UK Blog Yahoo! Blog Alert Yahoo! Alerts My Alerts The latest from Wikimedia UK Blog • Welcome to the Wikimedia UK blog! Welcome to the Wikimedia UK blog! Image via Wikipedia Welcome to the blog of Wikimedia UK , the chapter of the Wikimedia projects covering the United Kingdom. We’ll be using this blog to bring you news and information both about Wikimedia UK and Wikimedia projects within the UK in general. Location of UK in Europe (Image via Wikipedia ) Wikimedia UK aims to be as transparent as possible – our board meetings are held publicly on IRC, all important decisions are discussed first on our mailing list , and we have a monthly newsletter . All of our initiatives are volunteer-driven ( get involved! ) and are funded by your donations . We are kept running by our membership , which is open to all ( join now! ). We hope that this blog will let us be even more transparent, and communicate more efficiently with you (either as a member, as a user of Wikimedia or simply some who uses or takes interest in our projects or open knowledge as a whole). Please, subscribe to the RSS feed , leave comments, and get in touch if there’s something you want to post here. CREATE MORE ALERTS: Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more News - Only the news you want, delivered! Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more Weather - Get today's weather conditions You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences . To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy . Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089.

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Digitisation equipment
by Andrew Turvey 28 Aug '09

28 Aug '09

We had a discussion at a recent Wikimedia UK board meeting about potentially buying some digitisation equipment which could be used to generate content for the Wikimedia projects. This recent email to the EN-WP list sparked my interest. Does anyone have any experience with equipment like this, and could you recommend anything? Any idea what the price range and quality typically is? Also, is anyone else in the Wikimedia community currently doing this? Thanks, ---- Forwarded Message ----- From: "Steve Bennett" <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Sunday, 23 August, 2009 10:55:32 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland, Portugal Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia reaches 3 millionth article On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 11:15 PM, David Gerard<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I believe they have machines to turn pages, and something to figure > out the distorted photo of the book and render it how it would look as > a flat page. Yeah, there are videos of these machines. The book sits open, the scanner comes down and scans both open pages at once. As it goes up again, it sucks on one page, causing it to flip over. Then repeat. Oh, look, here you go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlOQuuLYavY And while we're at it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_scanning Steve _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Daily Mail on Flagged Revisions
by David Gerard 28 Aug '09

28 Aug '09

2009/8/28 Gordon Joly <gordon.joly(a)pobox.com>: > Well, Mailman is a piece of code, and all the data is raw text..... > Suggest "only list members can view the archive" if you are really worried. That'd break deep links all over the place. In this case I'd suggest not worrying about it unless and until the Daily Mail actually object - in which case we ask for the post to be deleted promptly - and to take care in posting full articles in future. - d.

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Daily Mail on Flagged Revisions
by Andrew Turvey 28 Aug '09

28 Aug '09

----- Forwarded Message ----- From: "Andrew Turvey" <andrewrturvey(a)googlemail.com> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Wednesday, 26 August, 2009 13:20:00 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland, Portugal Subject: Daily Mail (England) on Flagged Revisions Local english tabloid puts it's slant on the news. Unfortunately we didn't get any quote in there. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1208941/Free-edit-Wikipedia-appoint… Wikipedia has been forced to abandon its policy of allowing anyone to edit its pages. An army of 20,000 unpaid 'expert editors' will be drafted in to check all changes to articles on living people before the pages go online. The move is a response to the hijacking of the site by those with political or personal motives. jimmy Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. logo Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says that the change in the system is just a test Wikipedia Tory and Labour politicians, as well as 'web vandals', have falsified entries to discredit their enemies. Wikipedia was set up eight years ago as a free encyclopedia built on the work of volunteers. All contributors had the power to edit, improve and update the content and it has become one of the top ten internet sites with more than 13million entries. But well-publicised hoaxes have forced the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit Californian body that runs the site, to curb its freewheeling ethos. They hope the switch to volunteer editors will curb malicious tampering and reduce the risk of lawsuits. Wikipedia tried to clamp down on the problem in 2005 by banning anonymous users from creating entries. Experts said the latest change was much more significant and 'crosses a psychological Rubicon'. The system of 'flagged revisions' will compromise the founding principle that everyone has an equal right to edit any Wikipedia page. But Michael Snow, who is the chairman of the Wikimedia board, said it was no longer acceptable 'to throw things at the wall and see what sticks'. Jimmy Wales, one of the site's founders, said: 'We have really become part of the infrastructure of how people get information. There is a serious responsibility.' With millions of changes made to entries every month, it is thought that 20,000 editors will be needed. Modified pages go live only with their approval. Wikipedia is the first reference point for many web inquiries - often because its pages head the search results on Google and Yahoo. More than 30million visits have been made to the Michael Jackson page since his death on June 25. 'Wikipedia now has the ability to alter the world that it attempts to document,' said New York University professor Joseph Reagle. A limited number of popular or controversial pages are already protected, including those for singer Britney Spears and U.S. president Barack Obama. Wikipedia's credibility took a dent when it emerged in 2005 that a biography of American journalist John Seigenthaler, once an assistant to US Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had been altered to accuse him of involvement in the assassinations of both his boss and JFK. In one notorious case David Cameron’s aides altered the page on the artist Titian to score a point over Gordon Brown. And in 2007 it emerged one of its main contributors had faked his qualifications. Ryan Jordan, who had edited more than 20,000 pages of information, had claimed to be a professor of theology but was exposed following a magazine article as a 24-year-old college dropout from Kentucky. Last year, the New York Times worked with Wikipedia to restrict information about the kidnapping of a correspondent in Afghanistan. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1208941/Free-edit-Wikipedia-appoint…

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Flagged Revs on BBC Radio 5 Live ~6:50pm BST tonight
by David Gerard 27 Aug '09

27 Aug '09

Radio 5 Live just called, they want to do a piece on the "flagged revisions" media buzz on today's drivetime show. I'll be on by phone around 6:50pm BST (17:50 UTC). - d.

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Wikimediauk-l August 2009