Just to note: WMUK doesn't own the geonotices; any admin can change them in the usual Wiki fashion. ;-)
Also: to be honest, it's a little difficult to see how WMUK can give much support to meetups. They're volunteer-led, advertised on-wiki, and don't really need anything to support them to make them successful as far as I can see. The London wikimeets have never asked for anything from WMUK (despite me prompting them to occasionally ;-) ). There are things WMUK could provide: for example, room hire (but most wikimeets are in a pub or cafe, without room hire costs), transportation costs for a speaker (but most wikimeets don't have speakers), internet access costs (but I know the London wikimeet pointedly avoids having internet access) or Wikipedia posters (not too useful in a pub, though?). I'd love to see us supporting the establishment of many more wikimeets, but we need some input in to how we could usefully do that.
Thanks, Mike
On 17 May 2011, at 09:26, Charles Matthews wrote:
On 16/05/2011 14:39, Chris Keating wrote:
I have implemented my own suggestion and restricted the notice to a box more defined by Lincoln and Southend - I hope that is OK with people, I'm just a bit conscious that watchlist notices are quite intrusive and we should be careful not to tell the whole of the UK about every event happening in the whole country.
I'm actually a bit concerned about this approach. What other major channel is there for me to publicise a meetup? And are you justified in assuming meetups are only of interest "locally!? At the recent London meetup I met a Wikipedian who lives in Lancashire.
I've also tweeted about it: http://twitter.com/#!/wikimediauk/status/70119179818242048 http://twitter.com/#%21/wikimediauk/status/70119179818242048
There is a good match between the profile of Wikimedians and that of Tweeters, so Twitter is a very useful tool for us as an organisation. If there's ever anything that we can usefully tweet about please feel free to email me, or do a reply to @wikimediauk.
Well, I would say that the profile of those who actually come to meetups is a bit more middle-aged than that.
On the general situation: there are few meetups outside London in a year. Meetups are a way of drawing those who "only" edit into other things. I'd like to see WMUK give the running of more meetups maximum support.
Charles
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