UK Wikimedian of the Year 2014/Nomination

To submit a nomination, please specify who you're nominating along with a brief description on why you think they should win the award. Please no comparisons ("Bill is so much nicer than Mary" would be better phrased "Bill is very nice"). The deadline for nomination is Sunday 29 June.

Nominations

UK Wikimedian of the Year

Andy Mabbett

Although there are lots of remarkable volunteers and staff who deserve recognition, I believe that this year Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing) deserves this award. This is not just because of his great volume of contributions to Wikipedia, Commons and other Wikimedia projects: I don't think these awards should be based on raw numbers. Instead the award should recognise Andy's distinctive efforts and success in reaching out beyond the Wikimedia cliques.

• The Voice Intro Project has opened up a distinctive new way for people to contribute to Wikipedia biographies. Andy has pushed this forward, not only reaching out for voice snippets but encouraging and helping others to do so.
• Involving celebrities, the voice intro project attracted a lot of media interest. It was a chance to articulate Wikipedia's mission and its long-term perspective. The office staff deserve thanks for their role in making a success of this opportunity, but Andy especially used the international media to convey the importance of Wikipedia's mission.
• The BBC radio archives "Speakerthon" event was a watershed for our outreach. It involved the BBC in actively releasing some of their archive material under free licences: an important step that I hope will lead to more. The event brought together Wikmedia UK and the Open Knowledge Foundation, helping to kick off an ongoing relationship. This was primarily driven by Andy.
• Andy has built up relations with the West Midlands Police Museum, resulting in an editathon.
• Andy has also volunteered as a trainer or contributor at other events such as Wiki Loves European Parliament and Wikipedia Takes UCL.
• Andy has long championed making appropriate parts of Wikipedia's content machine-readable. This is crucial to the "Wikipedia is free" principle: giving the widest possible audience the ability to use knowledge, for any purpose. Most recently this has taken the form of him championing the ORCID open authority file system for identifying authors. Some of Andy's activities in making facts machine-readable have caused controversy on Wikipedia itself but I believe this work deserves praise as advancing free knowledge in its truest sense.
• Andy has long pushed for extending the accessibility of Wikipedia to disabled users and to newcomers, for instance by encouraging users to respect accessibility guidelines when customising their signatures, and pushing for accessibility to be given greater weight in interface decisions. He faces an uphill battle in this, as many of Wikipedia's authors seem to think of it as being laid out in a certain way for an audience with certain capabilities, rather than structured information which can be processed in many ways by different people and interfaces.

I'm sure there's lots more in the past year that Andy has done, but I'll stop here. For me, the audio work on its own deserves this award. MartinPoulter (talk) 17:11, 13 June 2014 (BST)

Jane Doe

Because she's great! ~~~~

User:Fæ

I would like to nominate User:Fæ for the UK Wikimedian of the Year. Fæ has done a lot of awesome work on Commons for some time, and has done this tirelessly for the benefit of Wikimedia Commons and for the furtherment of free content. One such project is Commons:Commons:Batch uploading/Airliners, which has seen Fæ upload tens of thousands of aviation photos to Commons, helping to make aviation subjects one of the most well-covered on Commons. In light of WMUK paying for a membership of one site, Fæ will continue this great work throughout 2014, and we will see possibly another 100,000 freely-licenced images being uploaded. Well done Fæ, thanks for your tireless contributions and good luck with my nomination. Russavia (talk) 16:38, 13 June 2014 (BST)

GLAM of the Year

The Bodleian Libraries, Oxford

I'd like to nominate this institution, and especially Liz McCarthy (Wikipedia user Liz McCarthy), for being outstandingly forward-looking in working with Wikimedia UK. Consider in just the past year:

• Along with the University of Oxford's IT Services, the Bodleian hosted a Women in Science editathon which was successful both in getting women to edit, getting endorsement from senior figures and getting biographies of female scientists written. Liz was instrumental to this not just with her own editing and by creating the project page, but by providing a stack of relevant books from the Bodleian collection.
• Liz also set up the Rediscovering Rycote event which brought together historical material, Wikipedia and new contributors.
• Liz and the Bodleian Libraries run an online learning programme for Oxford academics which recently included a section about Wikipedia educational assignments.
• Along with Kate Lindsay of University of Oxford IT Services, Liz wrote articles for Guardian Higher Education Network and for Oxford Today (distributed to all Oxford alumni) presenting writing for Wikipedia as a positive thing for experts to do, particularly to address the gender imbalance. Naturally, I'd like a joint award for Kate and Liz, but this is an award for a GLAM.

Conflict of Interest note: clearly, I was involved in some of the activities I've mentioned above, but this has only made me aware of the enthusiasm Liz, Kate and colleagues have for improving Wikipedia and the success they've had in fostering a change in academics' attitudes to Wikipedia. MartinPoulter (talk) 16:28, 13 June 2014 (BST)

Awesome GLAM

I like visiting them! ~~~~

Educational Institution of the Year

Special University

I studied there! ~~~~

Special award/Honourable mention etc

User:Example

For his tireless work as the example user on all Wikimedia projects. ~~~~