All,
The candidates for the 2012 AGM are now listed at
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_UK_2012/Elections.
For the Tellers,
Richard Symonds
Teller
Wikimedia UK
+44 (0) 207 065 0992
--
Wikimedia UK is the operating name of Wiki UK Limited, a Charitable Company
Registered in England and Wales, No: 6741827. Charity No:1144513 Office: 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street,
London EC2A 4LT.
Wikimedia UK is the local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate
Wikipedia, amongst other projects). It is an independent non-profit
organization with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for
its contents.
Hi,
I am running a performance review session for our CEO (Jon Davies)
with Wikimedia UK board members during our meeting in Monmouth on the
21st April (Saturday).
In line with our values of accountability and to engage our community
in improvement, if, as a reader of this list or a Wikimedia UK member,
*you* have some feedback about Jon's achievements over the last six
months that you would like to put into that process, please email me
at <fae(a)wikimedia.org.uk> using the subject line "CEO Feedback" (so I
don't miss it). It would be helpful if you were to consider both
positive and negative feedback. Please take care not to accidentally
post your feedback to this entire list. :-)
I will pass on all feedback, unedited, for the trustees and Jon to
review on Saturday. Unless you request otherwise, I will keep email
contact details confidential, but please identify in any email to me
who you are, so we avoid any potential issues of manipulation. If you
would like Jon to contact you and talk through your feedback, please
make that clear in your email, or copy him in on it up front by
emailing <jon.davies(a)wikimedia.org.uk>.
This is a formal staff review, so I would prefer not to start a thread
on this email list of speculative criticism of Jon. Please keep that
sensitivity in mind if you want to ask questions or suggestions about
the process or have more general points you would like to raise here.
The deadline for feedback will be *Friday 20th April*.
Thanks in advance for your interest!
Cheers,
Fae
--
fae(a)wikimedia.org.uk
Wikimedia UK trustee - http://uk.wikimedia.org
I do hear tell there are Wikimedians in Bristol. As of today I'm coming
across [[New World Tapestry]] which was associated with the [[British
Empire and Commonwealth Museum]]; by which hangs a long tale. Anyway, It
would be very handy to have an image of a bit of the tapestry, to
illustrate an article I'm doing (i.e. on Lewis Stukley, scene 4 of
1617-18). The website
http://www.newworldtapestry.co.uk/
links to the Wikipedia article. What with one thing and another, could be
something for someone to work on. Big object, no illustrations.
Charles
Are folks aware of the difficulties there have been with the uploading
of Geograph photos to the commons? I would encourage serious study of
the history of this effort, and the strong objections there have been,
before going ahead with this.
I've not been involved in the discussions, but my personal experience of
the early Geograph uploads is that it effectively destroyed the reasonably
good categorisation of user uploaded photos, by overwhelming existing
categories with poorly categorised, and often poor quality photos,
many of which are unlikely to be of use on any project using commons.
I personally sorted out the categorisation of many hundred geograph
photos dumped in the top level of my city's categorisation, which made
it unusable for practical purposes. It took many hours to sort this out,
moving to the appropriate sub-category for a pile of mostly not very good
photos, many really for not-so-nearby villages that should not have been
dumped in the city category.
This problem was addressed after a while by not automatically trying
to categorise within the normal hierarchy, but creating an alternative
Geograph grid-square hierarchy, that users are I believe supposed
to manually recategorise, but I think little of that has been done.
There are I think currently over 800,000 geograph photos, possibly well
over a million, in the Geograph categories awaiting an initial ordinary
category or category review:
needing category review: 589387
needing categories by date: 806653
needing categories by grid square: 50,949 subcats, unknown number of photos
Also most of the geolocation on Geograph photos is fairly inaccurate,
which is easy to see of you fire up Google Earth with the WikiCommons
layer enabled. Before these arrived most of the photos near my city had
accurate geolocation, but not any more because of the Geograph images.
(Though this will improve with new photos as GPS enabled cameras become
common.)
I was pretty fed-up with it, though I did not enter the discussions on
Commons about this, which lead to the upload effort being abandoned.
Just because there are millions of licence compatible photos out there,
I see no compelling reason to load them all into commons if that reduces
the average quality and utility. What I think we want is tools to very
easily upload individual images/files when a commons user sees a good
quality one on compatible sites that s/he wants to use.
A more minor issue is that the Geograph upload project only uploaded
640x480 versions into commons, when Geograph in many case has higher
resolution originals.
I haven't studied this issue in depth, and am only reporting my experience
with the Geograph upload. Here are some starting points for looking at
the old discussions about this:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Batch_uploading/Geograph#Indefini…http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Blo…http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Batch_uploading/Geograph#Problem_…http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Arc…http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_the_Geograph_British…http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Geograph_Britain_and_Ireland
Richard
--
Richard Wendland richard(a)wendland.org.uk
I'm not sure if you all know, but this week, thanks primarily to the hard work of User:Ocaasi, the first tranche of free HighBeam memberships were given out to active Wikimedians - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:HighBeam
I applied and got one. I've been noodling around with the database finding sources for all sorts of things. One thing that stands out: the huge quantity of local newspaper sources, and the huge deficit of sources in Wikipedia articles about British schools.
Our school articles are basically a holding pan for vandalism, often of the tediously oversightable sort ("such and such in class 9D is gay and here's his mobile number"), but they also often have almost no sources and say nothing even vaguely interesting: usually they cite their OFSTED report, the official school page, and perhaps a page on a central government or LEA website.
Due to a lack of sourcing, we have no reason to trust changes that are made on the articles: on school articles I've watched, head teachers have changed, even the name of the school has changed, and we haven't the sources to really justify or revert those changes.
With access to some decent sources, we can actually fix lots of these articles. While they may still continue to be the target of vandalism and unsourced changes, there can at least be a decent well-sourced core of useful information.
If you are a UK Wikipedian and have just been given access to HighBeam, go find your old (or current) school or the schools near where you live and fix up the sources! Same for any other community institution: libraries, pubs, scout troops, churches etc.
--
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>
Yes, many of us are aware of the issues with Geograph, above all WSC.
I agree the categorization side of it has been the real Achilles heel,
and in my experience the problem is often worse than WSC suggests. When
I filled up the Commons category for Wimbledon Common,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wimbledon_Common, I found
that a significant number of images were categorized in "West Sussex"
categories (what, 80 miles away?) and several others as "Barnes" (only 5
miles out, but that's a lot in London). But the good news was that I
was able to find these images easily enough through the basic Commons
search, as the original Geograph text info had enough detail. I've had
this sort of result doing other categories.
I understand that because templates were mostly used to record images as
uncategorized etc, and categorizing with cat-a-lot doesn't remove these,
and they are a pain to remove when you're doing bulk, these tend not to
get removed. So a good number of the images categorized with
uncategorized or category query templates are actually ok, and we don't
have any reliable numbers for what is still a problem. Many of the
ones supposed to have problems don't, and many of the ones supposed to
be ok aren't.
If you want images for a place in the UK, you should always do a basic
search as well as looking at the category. But actually that's true of
most things on Commons.
Johnbod
Was chasing up something I had heard on the radio this morning and
came to this BBC link - nice link to us
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/284382df-ae6d-4631-999a-ce6204f29c45
--
Jon Davies - Chief Executive Wikimedia UK. 07976 935 986
tweet @jonatreesdavies
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. Registered Charity No.1144513
Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street,
London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom.
Telephone (0044) 207 065 0990.
Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation (who
operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). It is an independent
non-profit organization with no legal control over Wikipedia nor
responsibility for its contents.
Visit http://www.wikimedia.org.uk/ and @wikimediauk
Friends and colleagues,
I'm running a daytime event at the Institution of Civil Engineers in
London, on 20 April:
http://blog.pwcom.co.uk/2012/04/11/wikipedia-and-the-ice/
to talk about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects in relation to that sector.
Its not an editathon, and it's not aimed at existing Wikipedians, but
a few places are still available for representatives of civil
engineering or related (architects, etc) bodies which have archives,
or students and historians of such subjects who are new to Wikipedia.
Please inform anyone in your networks, who fits that description and
may be interested.
--
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk