Friends' Newsletter/2017/Issue 03
Welcome to the third newsletter of the year. Summers are usually a quieter time in terms of the number of events, but things have been quite busy for us. We have just come back from Wikimania 2017 in Montreal, and have now moved office from near Old Street to behind the Tate Modern on the South Bank. Our new address is:
Office 1, Ground Floor, 5-11 Lavington Street, London SE1 0NZ
We have lots of events arranged for the next few months, and are about to start the month long Wiki Loves Monuments competition throughout September, with various related events taking place. Read on and find out about everything that’s going on!
Wikimania 2017 in Montreal
Members of Wikimedia UK’s board and staff team, and many others from the UK, attended the annual Wikimedia conference from 9-13th August in Montreal. Wikimania is always a fantastic opportunity to catch up with others in the global movement, learn about developments on the projects and remind ourselves why Wikimedia and its community are so important.
It’s clear that the Wikimedia Foundation is looking to the future, as it presented a draft strategic direction for the global movement, looking forward to 2030 (see the video here). The strategic direction is a general statement of intent, which ends by saying ‘By 2030, we won’t yet reach “the sum of all knowledge”, but we will make it possible for anyone to join us in this effort.’ This direction ‘is meant to be ambitious, with a broad arc that offers plenty of room for aspiration and creativity. It should give guidance on the long term, but leave the goal setting up to interpretation.’
We agree with the draft strategic direction that healthy, motivated communities are key to achieving the overarching goal of access to the sum of human knowledge, and we are working particularly on increasing the diversity of those communities in our context. The draft strategic direction increases the movement’s commitment to advocating for free, open knowledge, and places emphasis on working with individuals and institutions to share knowledge.
There were many talks at Wikimania about the work that many chapters and other groups are undertaking with the cultural sector, which helped to provide useful examples of projects that succeeded and those that weren’t as successful. These included Melissa Highton and Ewan McAndrew from the University of Edinburgh presenting a discussion on 'The Value of a Wikimedian in Residence' which illustrated the impact a resident has made, and continues to make, on teaching and learning at the University.
The Gender Gap also received a significant amount of attention, with WikiWomeninRed presenting a panel about reducing the Gender Gap in biographies on Wikipedia.
One of the biggest projects which most of the development team at the Foundation seem to be working on is Structured Data on Commons, which they received a $3m grant for earlier in the year. It’s hoped that this restructuring of Commons will enable the Foundation to solve basic issues with uploading, searching and making use of the media on Commons. The Wikidata team are also working on a structured version of Wiktionary.
One exciting related development is that Commons will soon allow .mp3 files, which should make it much easier to do projects to add audio clips to Commons. See the Phabricator discussion here. You can also watch a presentation on some of the issues with video files on Commons here.
In community news, Wikimedians paid tribute to Bassel Khartabil, head of Creative Commons Syria, who was recently revealed to have been killed by the Syrian regime in 2015. Creative Commons announced a Free Culture Fellowship in his honour at Wikimania.
It was also announced that Ghanaian Wikimedian Felix Nartey, organiser of Wiki Indaba, was named as Wikimedian of the Year, the first person from a Global South country to win the award.
As always there are too many talks and people at Wikimania to see and talk to everyone, but the conference is a useful experience for Wikimedians to find out what is going on in other parts of our wide community and share their experiences and make friendships with people from across the world. It’s truly inspiring to meet many of these people working to expand open knowledge in some of the most politically problematic situations, and they help remind us why we are doing this; so that everybody in the world can have access to information and education free from bias and censorship.
Next year Wikimania goes to South Africa! See you there!
Other useful Wikimania links:
- You can see a lot of videos of different sessions on the Wikimedia Foundation YouTube channel,
- Learn about some of the Coolest Projects of the Wikimedia Movement from this presentation.
- The Wiki Research team presented on some of the interesting academic research on Wikimedia related things. Here's a discussion of research on Fake News.
- See all the photos and videos WMUK have uploaded so far on Commons here.
Wiki Loves Monuments 2017 begins this week!
On 1 September, the world’s largest photo competition, Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) begins. WLM is one of the Wikimedia movement’s most successful projects and often attracts thousands of new people to contribute to photographic content on Commons.
There are prizes for the top 10 photographs in the UK competition with the top photograph winning a £250 cheque for its creator. The top 10 will go on to be considered for the overall global award.
In 2016, nearly 11,000 people from 42 countries around the world uploaded a total of 277,406 images. Photos uploaded during the 2016 competition have received over 13 million views in the past year.
This total did not quite reach the 2012 peak which saw WLM achieve the Guinness World Record for the largest photographic competition.
The competition is held annually to encourage more people to share photos of their local heritage and contribute photographs to Wikimedia Commons. All the content on Wikipedia and its sister projects are hosted on Open Licenses, such as Creative Commons Sharealike Attribution 4.0. Longstanding Wikimedian volunteer, developer and contributor Magnus Manske has been developing a new tool for people to upload WLM photos, which you can take a look at here.
Photos can be taken at any time but must be uploaded during the month of September. Instructions on how to enter can be found here.
Links: