Water cooler

Welcome to the water cooler This is a place to find out what is happening and to discuss our external projects and activities. Feel free to suggest ideas that could help our charitable mission or ask questions about how you can help. To discuss the inner workings of the charity, head over to the engine room.

WMUK Grants programme - a piece of cake?

Applying for a grant is easy.

If Wikimedia UK can help you improve Wikimedia projects, check out our grants page.

2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

Digital Humanities Conference

Hi all, a proposal here last year for a science conference has, with great luck and the efforts of a lot of different people, become an actual thing with a venue, speakers, sponsorship and wine. Our intention has never been to focus on just the sciences, and I hope we'll eventually have a parallel conference about the humanities, although there are fewer obvious champions and so there will be less involvement at first. The contacts I make during my placement at the Bodleian Libraries will help bring this about, as will the past contacts from my stint at Jisc. I've set down some initial ideas, mainly so I can forget about the issue while organising the science conference, but additional suggestions are welcome. Edit suggestions into the page itself or create discussion threads on the Talk page. MartinPoulter (talk) 15:46, 16 May 2015 (BST)
@Richard Nevell (WMUK): since the "thank" feature is broken, I'll thank you here for adding a suggestion to the page. Cheers, MartinPoulter (talk) 14:07, 19 May 2015 (BST)

Wikipedia information literacy resources for schools

Hello everyone. There's a really interesting invitation to tender that's just recently been posted by Leicester City Council. They are looking to develop Wikipedia information literacy resources for schools. LCC have a long history of interest in OERs and the open sector generally and are very forward thinking. Could be a really good project if anyone is interested. You can see the call here. Stevie Benton (WMUK) (talk) 16:37, 10 June 2015 (BST)

‎UK Wikimedian of the Year 2015

The UK Wikimedian of the Year Awards celebrate volunteers and institutions in the UK or abroad who have particularly contributed to Wikimedia in the UK.

Nominations for this year are now open, and will close on Tuesday 12 July, so please add your nominations here. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 16:32, 29 June 2015 (BST)

We've now extended the deadline for nominations to the end of Tuesday 21st July, so get nominating! Stevie Benton (WMUK) (talk) 15:45, 16 July 2015 (BST)

Congratulations to Tim Riley on his award and to Brianboulton for the successful nomination. I'm surprised, though, that we've given an award for purely on-wiki work. I think this is the first time this has happened. I understood the awards were created for people and organisations that advance WMUK's goals. It's not that wiki contributors don't deserve peer recognition, but there are already lots of mechanisms for them to get that. Outreach, of the sort all the other winners were doing, has less scope for recognition in the on-wiki communities. I suggest we add something to the scope of the awards for the future that specify the winners "help the UK Wikimedia movement" through outreach, not in a purely internal way. If we give an award for work that would have happened without Wikimedia UK existing, then we're playing down the importance of the work we do. MartinPoulter (talk) 16:42, 12 August 2015 (BST)

One of the first winners was an editor in Russia who edited stuff about Derby Museum in Russian Martin ... in line with Wikipedia (not necessarily with WMUK) objectives. - Roger

QRpedia not working?

I have been contacted by User:Kwisha and the conversation is recorded at Kwisha's talk page and at User:Victuallers. Kwisha is concerned that QRpedia.org isn't working. I went to QRpedia.org and created a code for https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rudisha and read it with an English phone. I got two error messages. 1 - The security certificates caused very demanding security warnings, if I persevered through this then 2. I was told that there is no page for David Rudisha in English. Could someone from Wikimedia UK join the conversation at Kwisha's talk page or Victuallers talk page and advise him (and me) about the solution. Thanks in anticipation. 176.227.129.236 09:30, 16 August 2015 (BST)

update: I am still getting enquiries as to why QRpedia isn't working here. I have tested it myself and it does appear that codes created by QRpedia.org are not working. This is discussed here. I am encouraging Kwisha/Aha to contact you directly, but you please could you leave a message on one of the talk pages above to give a status for fixing this? 176.227.129.236 14:54, 20 August 2015 (BST)

Does anyone read the wiki? 176.227.129.236 15:07, 20 August 2015 (BST)

Hi, I have raised the issue on Bugzilla so that it will be seen by our developers. It would be useful if you registered on Bugzilla so that you can reply to any questions from the developers. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 15:34, 20 August 2015 (BST)

Just to add to that - I am working on it at the moment and we have it in hand. Hopefully it will be up and running again soon. Sorry for the inconvenience - the people who deal with our security certificates are in France and are quite difficult to deal with. It should be up in a few days, I hope. Richard Symonds (WMUK) (talk) 17:04, 20 August 2015 (BST)

This is not the first time that we have had problems and delays with WMUK's security certificates. Should we be looking at a different, perhaps UK-based, supplier? And/ or other remedial measures? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:59, 20 August 2015 (BST)

Anyone? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 17:10, 8 September 2015 (BST)

Creating a blueprint for project managing Wikimedia projects

I would just like to draw peoples attention to the upcoming training sessions in early January. The session scheduled for Saturday January 9th promises to be particularly interesting as one of the outcomes will be a draft blueprint for project managing Wikimedia projects. So this session will actually be taking forward the project based approach presented last July before the AGM. I would encourage anyone considering running projects to see if they can attend on the day, and I also think we need to ensure we have a way in which those who cannot attend can also contribute to this exciting development. Leutha (talk) 13:43, 14 December 2015 (GMT)

Wikimedia for schools

I was thinking recently about Wikimedia-related outreach and wondered how much we do for schools, specifically for educating teachers on how best to use Wikimedia sites in their teaching, whether as a resource for themselves or the students. I noticed there are old pages for Schools and Wikimedia for schools workshop, created by ErrantX and MartinPoulter, but I'm struggling to find if anything has been happening more recently; both these pages are marked historical. Is anyone organising or running any teacher workshops/talks/events? I'd be interested in continuing the ideas set out in the previously linked pages if not. Samwalton9 (talk) 13:07, 19 April 2016 (BST)

Hi Samwalton9 and thanks for raising this. I think this is a good time to build on the past work and get something going: feel free to add your own ideas to this wiki or to propose events. Some background: Higher Education, Adult & Continuing Education, and Secondary Education are each huge sectors with lots of institutions, themselves with lots of different departments and courses, and different potential ways of working with Wikimedia projects. So even if we want to work with them all eventually, we have to make strategic decisions about where to apply our main efforts. In the case of Higher Education, we have a number of advantages: universities are quite receptive to us, there is a strong existing Open Education community that is a natural ally, there are already successful models of Wikimedia projects in Higher Education in this and other countries, and working with universities gives us access to prestigious libraries and research centres.

There are differences of opinion about how great a priority the schools sector is, but there are likely good things that Wikimedians can do and enough Wikimedia contributors with experience in schools. I think volunteers wanting to put together an event or a network should be encouraged. I hope some of the materials I've created on this wiki or here or here are useful (but if not that's also fine!). There will be discussions about this issue at the forthcoming Wikimedia UK Education 2016 event- I hope you can get to it? MartinPoulter (talk) 01:34, 22 April 2016 (BST)

City of London image archives

I've just become aware of the "Collage" website of the City of London - http://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/collage/app?service=page/Introduction - which is being relaunched on the 21st of July. The archive contains many old image, e.g. this one from 1748. However the City of London is claiming full copyright over all the images, descriptions and metadata, so there would seem to be an opportunity for anyone with contacts to try and get them to release the content under a free license. Not all the images are public domain though - it notes the collection continues to the present day. Thryduulf (talk: local | en.wp | en.wikt) 21:42, 6 July 2016 (BST)

I remember speaking to the City of London at Wikimania 2014 in London. They had a stand, I recall. LoopZilla (talk) 14:06, 23 August 2016 (BST)

I am afraid the links are now dead. Leutha (talk) 18:54, 23 August 2016 (BST)

Find My Past & British Newspaper Archive

Both of these databases were available through the Wikipedia Library until recently but have been permanently discontinued as the companies no longer wish to support free accounts. FMP provide data drawn from census returns, electoral records, births marriages and deaths etc. The BNA is self-explanatory. I have used these extensively in article creation on Wikipedia (particularly FMP) and I suspect other members of WMUK were using them too. Is a subscription to such a service within the scope of the micro-grants facility? FMP costs £119.95 PA for British records and BNA is £79.95.

• https://www.findmypast.co.uk/pay?isfreetrialrequest=false
• https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/account/subscribe

Philafrenzy (talk) 01:02, 31 August 2016 (BST)

Certificates

Trying to open Wikipedia (and several pages round Wikimedia) get the following message:

• There is a problem connecting securely to this website.

• This organization's certificate has been revoked.

• Security certificate problems may indicate an attempt to fool you or intercept any data you send to the server.

Is the problem this end or your end? 193.132.104.10 16:04, 13 October 2016 (BST)

Thank you for bringing this up. We had some issues with the certificate recently, but they seemed to be fixed as of 11th October. What browser are you using (and did the warning give any other information)? Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 11:35, 14 October 2016 (BST)