Reports/2011/September

Below is the Wikimedia UK monthly report for the period 1 to 30 September 2011. If you want to keep up with the chapter's activities as they happen, please subscribe to our blog, join our mailing list, and/or follow us on Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, please drop us a line on this report's talk page.

Recruitment

CEO candidates were in attendance at the 49th London meetup to chat with chapter stakeholders.

This month we completed our recruitment of our new Chief Exec: Jon Davies will start work on 1 October. Andrew Turvey, who led the recruitment, blogged about the process of recruiting our Chief Exec; one of the last steps in this process was the presence of the final three candidates at the 49th London Meetup so that the community could provide their input.

Our new full-time Office Administrator, Richard Symonds, known as Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry on Wikipedia, started work this month to assist specifically with the fundraiser work, and also more generally with WMUK's administrative needs. His contract runs until mid-January.

Program activities

Education projects

On the 1st September, Martin Poulter and User:Martinvl ran a workshop for members of the Institute of Physics. The event was written up in a blog post.

We funded two scholarships to attend WikiSym 2011 in October 2011. The scholarships were awarded to Dr Mark Graham, and Han-Teng Liao, both from the Oxford Internet Institute. Following from the visit, they will also present about their work at the Wikimedia Foundation offices.

GLAM activities

Two ARKive project events were held in Bristol on 15 September (one in the afternoon, the other in the evening), led by Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing), details of which are at Wiki Wildlife Bristol. These were part of a larger collaboration to improve Wikipedia articles on threatened species, full information for which is available at Wikipedia:GLAM/ARKive. The events were covered by a number of local blogs and media organisations.

QRPedia saw extensive media coverage this month, mostly following from the WMF blog post about it. See below for links to the news stories.

A number of other GLAM activities also took place, including:

• 3rd - The Mayor of Derby awarded prizes by a webstream to winners in Russia, France and Indonesia for the Derby Multilingual challenge
• 8th - the first Wikipedia editing training session at the British Museum was, with nine BM people present (a mix of curators, curatorial interns and volunteers) and three Wikimedians. More details are on the Wikipedia project page.
• 14th - A workshop for GLAMs was run at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum. For more information on this, see the 'This month in GLAM' UK report.
• 27th - A presentation was given to all staff at the British Library by Fae and Roger
• 30th - Fae meet with Museums Galleries Scotland to talk about an upcoming partnership.

Other activities

• UK Wikimeets this month: London (11th) and Manchester (17th)
• 2nd-3rd - Mike Peel presented at Science Online London in the "How are wikis being used to carry out and communicate science?" session, and also the 'Micro-attribution' session.
• 8th - Steve Virgin and Roger Bamkin presented at TEDx Bristol
• 13th - Jimmy Wales uses QRpedia in Indianapolis
• 14th - Editathon in Barcelona creates articles to support QRpedia at Foundation Joan Miro
• 27th - Fiona Apps (User:Panyd) spoke about Women and Wikipedia at Manchester Girl Geek Dinner at B-Hive, Manchester. A report is available on the wiki.
• We have offered travel grants to support UK residents' attendance of WikiConference India in November.

UK press coverage (and coverage of UK projects & activities)

Press coverage of Wikimedia in UK publications this month included:

• 1st - QRpedia and Lori on Indianapolis local radio
• 8th - Wikipedia creator’s keynote speech at radio festival, JournalLive
• 9th - Wikipedia founder wows Cambridge Network audience - "Wikipedia attracts more readers than the top 20 newspapers in the world combined. ", also covered in Cabume (13th)
• 12th - Joan Collins Corrects Wikipedia Entry, Express
• 14th - Johann Hari: A personal apology, Independent. Also covered in The Guardian and Periscope Post.
• 15th - QR Codes at the National Archives: National archives news & GovernmentNews
• 16th - coverage of ARKive event:
  • Life’s wild editing Wikipedia, Bristol Wireless
  • Bristol ‘Wikipedians’ taught to edit online encylopaedia, Bristol 24/7
  • ARKive on the Road: Wiki ‘Wildlife editathon’ in Bristol, UK, ARKive blog.
• 24th - QRpedia on Spanish Discussion programme as part of 40 minute programme on Wikipedia - one of three Spanish TV interviews
• 28th - 维基百科推出可能有史以来最酷的QRpedia » 竹筱杰 QRpedia and also in two other places.
• 29th - coverage of QRPedia (a project developed by UK wikimedian and Terence Eden):
  • Wikipedia launches QR code creation service to assist museum visitors, PanArmenian
  • QRPedia: Wikipedia makes visiting museums more fun, MemeBurn
  • QRpedia creates multilingual QR codes for Wikipedia articles, The Next Web
  • QRPedia: Wikipedia launches QR code tool for museums, Australian Techworld
  • Several others that day
• 30th More coverage of QRpedia
  • How Wikipedia Is Making QR Codes Useful Again
  • 维基百科二维码移动应用 QRpedia，简单并且好用，堪称应用典范！ | TechFrom科技源 TechFrom and several others that day

Upcoming activities in October

• 1st - Herbert Art Gallery and Museum Backstage Pass
• 1st - Warwick University Freshers fair - Panyd organising stall
• 1st - Edinburgh meetup - run by Fæ and Brian McNeil
• 1st - Tom Morris attending Over the Air at Bletchley Park where Terence Eden did keynote on QRpedia
• 5th - Martin Poulter speaking on "Common pitfalls in engaging with Wikipedia" at Bathcamp #26, the Innovation Centre, Bath
• 5th - Roger Bamkin speaking at Europeana Conference at Austrian National Library on "WLM, GLAM and QRpedia"
• 7th - 13.30-17.00 British Museum internal training workshop.
• 7th - Meeting with Central Midlands Archives, Derby City Council re QRpedia
• 8th - Andy Mabbett - "GLAM and QRpedia" at Library Camp UK in Birmingham
• 8th - Cambridge meetup
• 11th - Board meeting
• 13th - 10.00-17.00 British Museum Ice Age art "Behind the Scenes" event.
• 15th - Largest Joan Miro exhibition for 20 years in Barcelona uses 17 QRpedia codes which access English articles (Oh and some in Catalan)
• 16th - London meetup
• 16th - EGM - see below
• 24th - 10.00-18.00 Wikipedia Lounge at The University of Manchester
• 28th - Meeting scheduled in Monmouth to try and launch partnership with the town

For events in November and onwards, please see Events.

Administrative activities

Board activities

We held an In-person executive board meeting on 18 September in Derby. Discussions focused on plans for our upcoming EGM (see below) and on the induction process for our new chief exec.

Draft reports from board members on their recent activities are available on the WMUK wiki in preparation for the next board meeting on 11 October.

Charitable status

Our application to be recognised as a charity by the UK's Charity Commission was significantly progressed this month. We will be holding an Extraordinary General Meeting on 16 October 2011 to pass a special resolution to change our Objects to bring them in line with the Charity Commission's view of what a charity is. See our blog post on this subject for more information.

Fundraising

In preparation for the upcoming fundraiser, we have run a series of fundraising tests this month. The tests and their outcomes are described on meta.

We received £3624.73 in paypal donations from 272 donors this month - more than twice what we received in August. We have also started accepting monthly and quarterly Direct Debits: this month we recieved eight new Direct Debit instructions, averaging £22/month. All but one of these came in during the hour-long fundraising test on 28 September.

For more information please see our monthly fundraising report at Fundraising Report - Monthly Totals 2011.