Friends' Newsletter/2019/Issue 02

Welcome to the Summer Newsletter!

Welcome to the Summer newsletter!

Celtic Knot 2019

Celtic Knot 2019 video.

That's three years of Celtic Knot conferences which Wikimedia UK has organised now. Next year we are planning to take the conference to Ireland in partnership with Wikimedia Ireland. This year's conference was a great success and hopefully will encourage the Cornish language community to get more involved in improving the Cornish Wikipedia. Participants at the conference came from Norway, Finland, Catalunya, Spain, Brittany, France and Morocco. You can watch all the sessions on this playlist on our YouTube channel. We also made a general video about the conference, which you can see on the right here.

Wikimedia UK has supported people working to increase the diversity of the content and contributors to Wikimedia projects for some time, and this conference is one of the main events we organise to promote our work in this area. Wikipedia can be an incredibly useful platform for smaller language communities, and the success of the Welsh community in creating its own Wikipedia (now more than 100,000 articles strong) and integrating Wikipedia learning into the Welsh Baccalaureate, shows what can be achieved. Different language communities have unique problems, so it's vital that these communities can get together to discuss their projects and best practice, and we hope that the conference will go from strength to strength in the coming years.

You can find images from this year's conference here.

Wikimedia UK holds AGM in Bristol

Brandi Guerkink speaking at the Wikimedia UK 2019 AGM

It was a busy start to July for the Wikimedia UK staff, as the weekend after #CelticKnot2019 we all went to Bristol for our annual AGM, where we elected new trustees to the board, had a talk by Brandi Guerkink of Mozilla, discussed how to make the community more welcoming to new people and went on a photo walk of Bristol. We also awarded prizes for Wikimedian of the Year and Partnership of the Year, which were won by Dr Jess Wade and Amnesty International respectively. Andrew Gray and the Dumfries Stonecarving Project were given Honourable Mentions for their work over the year.

The following people were elected to the Wikimedia UK board:

• Sangeet Bhullar
• Lorna Campbell
• Andrea Chandler
• Josie Fraser
• Rod Ward

You can also see our video recordings on YouTube of all the sessions before the AGM.

Scotland

Young Academy of Scotland Women in Science editathon, 5 June 2019.

Scotland Manager Sara Thomas has helped release some images by Art UK of Scotland under Open Licenses, spoke at the Heritage Dot and CILIP conferences. You can hear the recording of Sara's Heritage Dot presentation here. She ran a number of editathons in June and July, on subjects like Scottish Lawyers, film in Aberdeen, Women in Science

A forthcoming booklet on the use of Wikimedia projects in education at the University of Edinburgh is due for release soon.

Work with Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities - Sara was successful in applying to have an intern placed with us in Scotland.

Wales

Robin Owain helped to release a Welsh database on liverwort mosses as part of the Llen Natur project, which will help create 300 new articles about plants in Welsh. Robin also started a WikiProject in participation with Arabic-language Wikimedians to add articles about the Middle East to Welsh Wikipedia, and has so far created 43 articles in Welsh. He also met the government's Welsh language Commissioner to discuss releasing content in Welsh on Open Licenses.

Robin wrote about Education in Wales for our blog and presented at the Celtic Knot languages conference.

Arron Morris Wici Mon project continued to train school children in Anglesey to edit Wikipedia.

Jason Evans

Jason has published a report covering his work for last month: https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/User:Jason.nlw/National_Wikimedian/Month_22

SG1

- Working on detailed Wikidata for Peniarth Manuscript Collection (540 items), which now has UNESCO memory of the world status. Nearly ready.

- Working with Wikidata for Welsh publishers in preparation for Welsh Literature project - and successfully created NLW catalogue ID Wikidata property.

SG2

- WiciPobl project impact report has been published: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Wicipobl_Impact_Report.pdf

SG3

- Submitted grant application to the Welsh Government outlining a plan for an education pilot project in Wales, aimed at improving resources for school children on Welsh Wikipedia.

Oxford and Coventry

Andy Mabbett at Coventry University.

Martin Poulter at the Bodleian Libraries Oxford and Andy Mabbett, newly appointed Wikimedian in Residence at Coventry University's Disruptive Media Learning Lab have both written about their work for This Month in GLAM. Martin has been improving the software for the Astrolabe Explorer, Collection Explorer and Sibthorp-Bauer Expedition projects, and has written a script "to find pages on Wikipedia and Commons that relate to specific collection items". This work aims at using Wikidata and other Wikimedia projects to create linked data that can stitch together the collections of various museumd and allow people to explore them in new ways.

Andy Mabbett has started his two year residency at Coventry University where he will be working with the university's staff and librarians on campaigns like 1 Librarian, 1 Reference and WikiCite, opening up collections and helping teachers integrate Wikimedia projects in their courses. Andy has written an introductory blog about his work here, and you can follow the Wikipedia project page for the residency here.

Working with the music industry

Communications Coordinator John has been working with the Association of Independent Music and helping to send Wikimedians to festivals to take photos of artists.

This year we sent a couple of photographers to Glastonbury Festival, and you can see the Commons category for the images here.