Guys, if you want to do small projects, you can always apply for a small grant from the chapter to do so, and ask for help from us. You can also write for our blog, which I am always flagging up as an opportunity. We are here to support your work, and I am always coming to meetups to talk to you and find out about your work, to see if there's ways I can encourage you to get involved. I've started a skillshare event at the office, so if anybody wants to present a talk on an aspect of your work which you think it would be beneficial to share with staff and other volunteers, why not do that? If you have ideas for a skill you'd like to share or present, please email me. It could help others to be better able to manage the WMUK wiki. I would also like to organise a day at the WMUK office where we invite volunteers to come and work with staff on improving the WMUK wiki and discuss what the community would like to see there, but for that we have to wait for some of the technical updates that are still in process.
If we want to continue this discussion on here productively, I'd suggest that we all be a bit more generous with staff and other volunteers, as we all do our best for the Wikimedia community.
John Lubbock
Communications Coordinator
Wikimedia UK
+44 (0) 203 372 0767
Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Office 1, Ground Floor, Europoint, 5 - 11 Lavington Street, London SE1 0NZ.
Wikimedia UK is the national chapter of the global Wikimedia open knowledge movement. We rely on donations from individuals to support our work to make knowledge open for all. Have you considered supporting Wikimedia UK? Donate here https://donate.wikimedia.org.uk.
The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). *Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.*
On Mon, 7 Jan 2019 at 23:41, Harry Mitchell hjmwiki@gmail.com wrote:
By the way, since I know you and I are not the only ones who feel, to be charitable to both sides, that WMUK's focus on large projects and residencies has squeezed out the smaller projects, why don't we set something else up? Not a chapter but a society of Wikimedians focusing on small projects that have a smaller but more immediate impact on editors and projects (for example editathons, field trips, events with small local history groups etc, experience-sharing events for experienced editors). There's no reason such a society couldn't dovetail with WMUK; it could even perhaps apply for some modest funding (low four figures at the very most) from WMUK or the WMF.
Wikimedians are very good at disagreeing with each other over the best way to provide and enhance open knowledge, but at the end of the day we all share that same goal. Perhaps we should make a new year's resolution to remember that more often?
Harry Mitchell http://enwp.org/User:HJ +44 (0) 7507 536 971 Skype: harry_j_mitchell
On Mon, Jan 7, 2019 at 10:09 PM Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Seems negative Harry. This is surely the outcome that everyone expected when the WMUK board was professionalised by going from volunteer led, to appointing trustees without even minimal Wikimedia project experience. Add to this a significant reduction in transparency and reducing elections, while claiming improved governance, means that volunteers are disengaged and uninformed. We all saw this happening a long time ago.
As evidence that something is amiss, the last AGM failed to be quorate, but this was spun as a great success. Underpinning this was the weirdness over membership numbers, which I guess is not important as members no longer have access to any regular reports of membership, so we cannot really make any comment about it.
WMUK is a very different organisation from the one we established, and its function appears to be mostly as a funding partner for GLAMs to set up residential programmes, with a few editathons, rather than fostering a creative community of open knowledge volunteers doing new and different stuff. If us unpaid volunteers think we need coordination rather than just acting individually, then it makes sense that we go back to the way things used to work before 2010 and coordinate ourselves as a free society, rather than waiting for a charity which no longer has those skills, and certainly will not allocate the employee time, to do it to us.
P.S. before someone sends me a haranguing email telling me what a terrible person I am, I refuse to feel bad about spending my volunteer time supporting open knowledge, or my lack of interest in covering every issue with soft soap.
Thanks, and I hope everyone is planning lots of fun stuff for the New Year, not just talking about Brexit, Fae -- faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
On Mon, 7 Jan 2019 at 20:49, Harry Mitchell hjmwiki@gmail.com wrote:
The Wikimedia UK wiki used to see a lot of activity. It was never
coherently organised, but the staff and volunteers who were running projects used it as a sort of filing cabinet for documentation of events etc, and a small group of us used to keep an eye on the recent changes for spam and other rubbish but those days seem to be long gone.
With the key functions of the wiki non-functioning, it is close to
useless as a coordination hub and discussion venue and therefore the WMUK community, such as it is (a smaller subset of the community on this mailing list with a more specific function) is essentially homeless. That this does not seem to be a high priority, much less cause for alarm, is in my opinion a reflection on the fact that there is nobody in any senior position at WMUK with any deep background on the Wikimedia projects - something it's hard to shake the feeling is a deliberate hiring decision.
Harry Mitchell http://enwp.org/User:HJ +44 (0) 7507 536 971 Skype: harry_j_mitchell
On Sun, Jan 6, 2019 at 10:09 PM Lucy Crompton-Reid <
lucy.crompton-reid@wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:
Thanks Chris, and apologies that these issues are still not resolved
- I appreciate that this is very frustrating. I'll need to look into this
over the next few days and get back to you, but just wanted to acknowledge your message in the meantime. Cheers, Lucy
On Sun, 6 Jan 2019 at 17:27, Chris McKenna cmckenna@sucs.org wrote:
This issue was raised on the wiki and this mailing list at the end of November. We were assured then that the problem, apparently also
affecting
QRpedia among other things, and action was in hand to resolve this
problem
and prevent similar issues in the future.
However, over a month later (albeit with Christmas in the way) there
is no
evidence that anything has happened (I have made two edits to the
sandbox
today, should anyone wish to do their own testing).
This leads to some questions: -Is it really the case that there is only a single volunteer who can
fix
the wiki? -If so, how and why has this been allowed to happen? -What contingency plans does WMUK have in case this volunteer dies or otherwise becomes permanently (or long term) unvailable, with or
without
warning? -If not, why has the problem not been fixed yet? In either case: -What is the timescale for fixing the problems? -What concrete actions have been undertaken since November to prevent
this
happening again? -What concrete actions are pl
Personal and confidential, please do not circulate or re-quote.anned to be undertaken in the future to
prevent this happening again (short and long term), and what is the timescale for them happening?
Chris McKenna
cmckenna@sucs.org www.sucs.org/~cmckenna
The essential things in life are seen not with the eyes, but with the heart
Antoine de Saint Exupery
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk
-- Lucy Crompton-Reid Chief Executive Wikimedia UK +44 (0) 203 372 0762
Wikimedia UK is the national chapter for the global Wikimedia open
knowledge movement, and a registered charity. We rely on donations from individuals to support our work to make knowledge open for all. Have you considered supporting Wikimedia? https://donate.wikimedia.org.uk
Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales,
Registered No. 6741827
Registered Charity No.1144513 Registered Office Ground Floor, Europoint, 5 - 11 Lavington Street,
London SE1 0NZ
The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who
operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.
Personal and confidential, please do not circulate or re-quote.
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk