Robin Owain and I met Leighton Andrews (today) who is the Education
Minister for Wales. The meeting arose out of the work that we are doing in
Wales. This means Monmouthpedia and the Welsh Wicipedia (yes its spelt with
a c). The meeting lasted less than 45 minutes but we covered
- Who we are? About WMUK, WMCY, Monmouthpedia. We noted especially that
WMCY is the leading web site in Welsh.
- Welsh phone. There is no phone that will switch truly into Welsh. We
had already tried getting his officials to ask and Google had said "maybe".
Leighton agreed to ask personally.
- Welsh encyclopedia. There is a bilingual Welsh and English
encyclopedia that was published in the last few years. Leighton said he
would see if the copyright could be released to grow WMCY.
- Could Wales be the leading nation for information freedom? Leighton
said he would challenge his fellow ministers with this question.
- The minister said that he was supportive of the idea that information
should be made commercially available freely. ie CC BY SA
- He would ask the Heritage minister about what could be done to free
more data.
- Note: There is an experiment currently in progress to release 150
images from multiple sources to Wikimedia Commons. The objective is to find
out why thousands more images could not be freely released. This is a WMUK
(And Monmouthshire County Council) inspired initiative.
--
Roger Bamkin and Robin Owain
01332 702993
0758 2020815
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