Hi all,
I'm trying to figure out where the best place to do the online organisation of wikimeets is. I can think of four different places, each with pros and cons, which I'd appreciate others' views on.
1) English Wikipedia
Pros: visibility, 'standard place', likely to be a wiki that most wikimeet attendees will use to some degree, can add to list of upcoming meetups and be encouraged by meetup plans in other countries.
Cons: English Wikipedia-specific, whereas wikimeets are much more general.
Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Manchester_8
2) Meta
Pros: Neutral ground for all different Wikimedia projects. Not associated with a specific real-life organisation.
Cons: Few other meetups are organised here. No connections to other activities. May be a new wiki for some people when signing up
Example: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/London/47
3) Wikimedia UK wiki
Pros: Encourages involvement in different types of activities happening in the UK. Wikimeets would be listed amongst other UK-events more easily.
Cons: Makes it more difficult to find out about other wikimeets. May make it harder for UK people to find wikimeets in other countries when abroad. May make it seem like WMUK 'owns' the wikimeets, which may discourage people to organise them.
Example (not yet used): http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Wikimeets
4) External website, e.g. Facebook, meetup.com
Pros: May bring in a different crowd of people. Easy to use for newcomers.
Cons: Will not be as visible as a wiki to most Wikimedians
Example: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=148137338550494
I'm leaning towards using the WMUK wiki for organising the Manchester wikimeets (and in a bit of a different format from the standard - keeping a single wiki page rather than creating a new one each time), but I'm less sure about how this would be received. Input/comments would be very welcome.
Thanks,
Mike
Dear all,
After just having completed my exams and an academic year lasting 366 days, I am back to being active at Imperial College Wikisoc as their president for the coming year! However, I will also be studying for the final year of my course beginning in two weeks and so need to finish most of my personal activity by around Jan/Feb 2012, and will be incredibly busy. Therefore it is imperative that we in the society work hard for new recruits, but also that the board and the chapter generally invest appropriate amounts of the various resources we have in the near future. Otherwise the society will falter, because to be honest I have carried it thus far without much support from busy colleagues currently part of the society.
We have great leads in the society and need to grow them slowly enough to mature well. But in order to attract people and make our projects a success, we need to be imaginative to ENSURE our success. Wikipedia should start creating a brand in the UK that it provides higher education resources and opportunities of the very highest quality (while recognising our place), and we need to figure out how that can be made with both top down and bottom up insights - so I urge all UK Wikipedians to join in with relevant thoughts. and then we will have to make some decisions about how we go about this.
We will be focussing on our Campus Ambassadors program (two of us having been trained), for which we have two interested professors already, but also doing work on creating a network of editors and furthering the discussion of the relationship between Wikipedia and higher education.
Concerning this debate, Stephen Colbert of all people came up with one of the most pithy objections that I have read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_in_culture#Wikiality. I think more of this kind of talk needs to be done. What may be needed is a meeting of interested parties - librarians, universities etc. to really nail this issue (or suggest what kind of research needs to be done), in a bigger meeting than simply the London Wikipedia Academy that we previously organised http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/London_Wikipedia_Academy.
That's much information not perfectly organised, but I hope it gets out where the society is at - the purpose being that we and new student societies need to plan our structure and place in universities.
Vinesh Patel
The public catalog foundation has been busy digitising the nation's
art. All those paintings held by government institutions and local
councils. Pretty nice. Their website is here:
http://thepcf.org.uk
and the paintings can be found here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/
Some very nice stuff there.
Unfortunately they claim copyright. My favorite example is this. It's
a Fayum mummy portrait about 1700 years old:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/portrait-of-a-lady-31089
And yet if we open up the meta data:
"Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum / Supplied by The Public
Catalogue Foundation This image is copyrighted."
The artist for this painting
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/the-launching-of-hms-roya…
died 1873 and yet we open up the meta data and
"Copyright Hampshire County Council Museums Service / Supplied by The
Public Catalogue Foundation . This image is copyrighted."
The rest of the text runs:
The Public Catalogue Foundation is committed to respecting the
intellectual property rights of others. The copyright in paintings and
images reproduced by the Public Catalogue Foundation belong to a
variety of organisations and individuals including the collections
that own the paintings and third party rights holders. Permitted Use
of This Image: This image and data related to the image may be
reproduced for non-commercial research and private study purposes. For
ALL other uses other than those outlined above, including commercial
uses, users should contact, in the first instance, the contributing
collection using the contact information provided on the Your
Paintings website. Where the underlying painting is in copyright,
further permissions will also be needed. Protection of Image
Copyright: This image is protected with a secure invisible digital
watermark that allows the Public Catalogue Foundation to identify
unauthorized use of the image. Further Information: Any queries should
be addressed to copyrightofficer(a)thepcf.org.uk
Lovey. We could just ignore this and let the Americans take care of
matters but it might be smarter to stage an intervention before we get
NPG mark 2.
--
geni
Evening all,
What's your Wikimedia story?
Last year the Foundation gathered loads and loads of stories about why
people were involved in Wikipedia or why they donated to last year's
fundraiser. Sadly, they seem to have hardly got any from the UK - there are
a few but not many!
It would be really helpful if you could let us know why you care about
Wikipedia/Wikimedia. This is an important input into this Autumn's
fundraising efforts: first because it'll help us understand why people are
involved a bit better, and secondly, I'm on the lookout for people with
compelling stories who might be willing to be a face of the fundraiser...
Please fill in this simple form:
http://bit.ly/k8p6a8
Many thanks,
Chris
Wikimedia UK Board member for Fundraising
Tom is absolutely spot on.
For instance 'girl geek dinners' is a nationally franchised group with meet ups in most cities.
It ought to be easy to include them.
Most cities have 5 or 6 recognisable 'tech groups'. My own has brrissm social media. Bristol wireless, bristol cooperative, pervasive media studios.
If we had a 'key person' in a city they should be reaching out to these groups every time.
So multi-faceted outreach is more important than 'which wiki'.
One 'wiki'. And several other places too facebook, twitter etc. On twitter let's get everyone using #wmuk on all relevant messages. That way we can all know how to find this stuff easily.
------Original Message------
From: Tom Morris
Sender: wikimediauk-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
To: wikimediauk-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
ReplyTo: wikimediauk-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Wikimeets - best place to organise them online?
Sent: 2 Jul 2011 10:39
On Sat, Jul 2, 2011 at 10:31, James Forrester <james(a)jdforrester.org> wrote:
> I think meta is a good place (but then, I did move the London ones
> there after a complaint from a non-enwiki-er, so I'm biased ;-)). I
> also think the real value now we have SUL is not in the home but in
> the advertising for them.
>
For most WMUK events I try and list them on Lanyrd which is used by
the tech crowd. It'd be good if we could list them on Facebook as
well. A multi-pronged strategy works best.
It'd be good if we could try hard to work with local geek event
communities as well: for the last Manchester meetup, I told my friend
Ian Forrester (@cubicgarden on Twitter) and he promoted it to the geek
community in Manchester and got it on the Twitter account of some kind
of social media thing in Manchester. Let's do more of this.
We should be getting more non-Wikipedia people involved and attending
events: because in-breeding isn't healthy.
--
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>
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