UK Wikimedian of the Year 2015/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 nominations is Tuesday 21 July.

Nominations

UK Wikimedian of the Year

Brian Kelly (User:Lisbk)

Brian has been using his professional connections with the librarian, researcher, and web communities to promote Wikipedia in various ways over the past year, actively promoting the kind of cultural change that Wikimedia UK's GLAM, Education, and Expert outreach activities try to bring about. Some examples (not by any means a complete list):

• He attended the first Altmetrics conference to present a poster titled "Wikimedia and Metrics" showing how Wikipedia can be used as a source of data about how well-popularised a piece of research is. I worked with him on some of the text of the poster, but this was his work and his initiative. In getting the bulk of the research community
• He has run multiple talks and workshops about Wikipedia for librarians, including a workshop at the LILAC conference with Nancy Graham and Andrew Gray.
• As part of a continuing interest in "Wikipedia as the front matter for all research" (a theme inspired by Cameron Neylon at Wikimania), he has researched the links from Wikipedia to the repositories of the UK's top research universities, and urged universities to consider Wikipedia links as a way to promote these repositories, but to act ethically, respecting Wikipedia's policies and ethos.
• He entered an essay "Librarians and Wikipedia: an Ideal Match?" to a blog competition run by CILIP. This makes a persuasive case that librarians should actively engage with Wikipedia, and that they are the ideal people to do so, sharing the ideal skills and values. He wrote a guest article on the topic for a CILIP newsletter, which he has subsequently released on the open web.

MartinPoulter (talk) 18:22, 30 June 2015 (BST)

James Heald (User:Jheald) and Owen Blacker (User:OwenBlacker)

I jointly nominate James and Owen for this award because of their outstanding efforts throughout the campaign to save freedom of panorama. Although they have been active in other ways throughout the Wikimedia projects, I'm not altogether familiar with their work there, so prefer to focus on something I have experience of.

I first became aware of the work of James and Owen through the Open Rights Group but it's over the last two months or so really that I've really seen their drive, determination and intelligence come to the fore. Not only did they both work on the Wikimedia side of the campaign, taking great efforts to raise awareness to the point that banners were activated on the English Wikipedia, they were both extremely active in communicating with MEPs and other agencies.

I don't think it is a stretch to say that their efforts on the campaign were pivotal. Stevie Benton (WMUK) (talk) 15:56, 16 July 2015 (BST)

Jane Doe

Because she's great! ~~~~

Partnership of the Year

The Bodleian Libraries, Oxford

I think the Bodleian deserve an award - for reasons why, see my nomination last year - but now I'm a paid employee I'm probably not the ideal person to do a full nomination. MartinPoulter (talk) 18:40, 30 June 2015 (BST)

University of Edinburgh

This nomination is in respect of the record-breaking four-day editathon organised in February by Melissa Highton (User:Melissa Highton) and led by Ally Crockford (User:ACrockford). The theme was "Women, Science and Scottish History" and the week's events made great progress on the gender gap in a short time, both in terms of content and the demographics of users. Going by the tweets from participants, this event was great fun while also very welcoming and encouraging for staff who had not edited Wikipedia before. Melissa has used her post as Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services to advocate for academics and related staff to take Wikipedia seriously, continuing work she was doing in her previous job at the University of Oxford.
MartinPoulter (talk) 18:34, 30 June 2015 (BST)

Cancer Research UK

For working with Wikimedia UK to secure an external grant for a Wikimedian in Residence, and for continuing the engagement with Wikimedia movement since their first experience in 2011. During the WIR project, the institution worked to change its internal policies to become more open, which was not without hurdles. Now open sharing of cancer information diagrams is included in the standard workflows of the organisation, giving an example to follow for other institutions. Daria Cybulska (WMUK) (talk) 14:19, 2 July 2015 (BST)

Honourable Mention

User:Example

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