Agenda 1Mar11/Secretary's Report
Activities to report
- dotAstronomy
Have been given a speaking slot at dotAstronomy, on "Wikipedia and Astronomy". Abstract:
Wikipedia has a huge number of Astronomy-related encyclopaedia articles, written in up to 250 different languages, that can be freely reused for any purpose. More generally, The Wikimedia projects also contains a lot of other useful information - e.g. lots of pictures of astronomical objects, all organised into hierarchical categories depending on the type of object; translations of the names of objects or astronomical concepts; and much more.
I will explain the different ways that you can access this information in machine-readable formats, such that you can make use of it in your projects, and also cover how you can help educate an audience in the millions by adding information to Wikipedia.
Registration cost (inc. accommodation) is £260; travel will be ~£50 (petrol for car). Would WMUK be willing to cover this?
Outstanding actions
- MP to respond to Simple English Wikipedia research proposal asking for further information.
Doing... - MP to bring forward a concrete proposal on corporate membership
Carried forward - AT and MP to formally sign the accounts. Carried forward (waiting for the accounts to sign)
- MP to publicise the list of BLW winners, and sort out distributing the prizes. Carried forward
- Tasks to do
- GLAM-WIKI section for newsletter
- Set up OTRS on the wikimedia.org.uk site/server
Cancelled - we need to get our own dedicated server first; this should be something that we set up before moving information onto the server. (Technical details: the installation of OTRS conflicts with the current Virtual Private Server setup, such that the two cannot easily coexist - and persuading them to coexist is beyond my technical skills and time available to investigate.) - Upgrade CiviCRM
- Work through email backlog...
- Help with Accounts information
Done - Set up a Press room Done, with the help of User:Rock_drum
