Steve Virgin, one of the Wikimedia UK board members, recently gave a talk at a Bristol
Social Media forum about various things happening with Wikimedia projects in Britain. The
talk was positively covered in a blog from a participant:
http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2010/02/18/discussion-group-shows-geeks-are-soc…
"How can fictional stories incorporate technology? What does the future hold for
Wikipedia’s sister projects ? And is it fair to say that social media sucks?...
...
Next up was Steve Virgin , a member of the United Kingdom chapter of the Wikimedia
Foundation, the group behind Wikipedia. After sharing some arresting statistics about the
site’s impact (347 million people — 35% of the online population –use Wikipedia, while
40,000 English speakers make at least five edits each per month) he talked about the work
that is going on with the organization’s nine other projects which cover, among other
topics, news , books , quotations and the classification of species .
The biggest growth is in Wikimedia Commons , a project to collect copyright-free media
resources such as photographs and videos. The big push this year is to encourage museums
to follow the example of the Dresden University Library which donated 250,000 images. One
tactic is to promote the potential benefits of such donations, such as releasing part of
an archive as a promotional tool to boost sales of other images. There is also work in
progress to reduce the technical hassles involved in donating images, which may include a
tie-in with Flickr ."