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.

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, including:

• 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.

QRPedia saw extensive media coverage this month, mostly following from the WMF blog post about it. The coverage included:

• QR Codes at the National Archives: National archives news & GovernmentNews
• QRPedia: Wikipedia makes visiting museums more fun, MemeBurn

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
• 27th - A presentation was given to all staff at the British Library
• 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
• 27th - Fiona Apps (User:Panyd) spoke about Women and Wikipedia at Manchester Girl Geek Dinner at B-Hive, Manchester.
• We have offered travel grants to support UK residents' attendance of WikiConference India in November.

UK press coverage

Press coverage of Wikimedia in UK publications this month included:

• 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.
• 16th - coverage of ARKive event (see above)
• 29th - coverage of QRPedia (see above)

Upcoming activities in October

• 1st - Herbert Art Gallery and Museum Backstage Pass
• 5th - Martin Poulter speaking on "Common pitfalls in engaging with Wikipedia" at Bathcamp #26, the Innovation Centre, Bath
• 7th - 13.30-17.00 British Museum internal training workshop.
• 11th - Board meeting
• 13th - 10.00-17.00 British Museum Ice Age art "Behind the Scenes" event.
• 16th - London meetup

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 have now started accepting monthly and quarterly Direct Debits, in addition to Paypal, cheques and bank transfers.

We received £XX in donations from N donors this month. For more information please see our monthly fundraising report at Fundraising Report - Monthly Totals 2011.

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.