Now Monmouthshire Council have agreed that we can document a whole town. Monmouthpedia has already led to over 40 new articles on the small Welsh town of Monmouth. We intend to have 1,000 QRpedia codes installed by April and many of you have helped already – Thank you!

Over the last few weeks, the Wikipedia community has been discussing proposed actions that the community might take with relation to proposed legislation in the United States called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives, and the PROTECTIP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate. If passed, these would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia. With more than 2,000 Wikipedians commenting on this legislation from all over the world, and a clear majority in favour of taking action, this was the first time the English Wikipedia has ever staged a public protest of this nature, and it’s a decision that wasn’t lightly made.

It was felt that both SOPA and PIPA are pieces of clumsily drafted legislation that are dangerous for the internet and freedom of speech. It provides powers to regulatory authorities to force internet companies to block foreign sites offering ‘pirated’ material that violates U.S. copyright laws. If implemented, ad networks could be required to stop online ads and search engines would be barred from directly linking to websites ‘found’ to be in breach of copyright.

However, leaving to one side the fact that there are more than enough adequate remedies for policing copyright violations under existing laws, in most jurisdictions, these draft bills go too far and in the framing SOPA and PIPA totally undermine the notion of due process in law and place the burden of proof on the distributor of content in the case of any dispute over copyright ownership.

Therefore, any legitimate issues that copyright holders may have get drowned out by poorly-framed draconian powers to block, bar, or shut down sites as requested by industry bodies or their legal representatives. Copyright holders have legitimate issues, but there are ways of approaching the issue that don’t involve censorship.

Wikipedia depends on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. This needs other sites to be able to host user-contributed material; all Wikipedia then does is to frame the information in context and make sense of it for its millions of users.

Knowledge freely shared has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it.  Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikipedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or, if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, will mean that the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to

All around the world, we’re seeing the development of legislation intended to fight online piracy, and regulate the Internet in other ways, that hurt online freedoms. Our concern extends beyond SOPA and PIPA: they are just part of the problem. We want the Internet to remain free and open, everywhere, for everyone.

As I am sure you know, the English version of Wikipedia will be taken down for 24 hours from 0500 UTC tomorrow in protest at the US SOPA and PIPA bills.

Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of the Wikimedia movement. We regard the SOPA and PIPA legislation in the United States as a threat to the current operation of Wikipedia. This could also affect Wikimedia’s other projects, which operate under U.S. law.

The members of the Wikipedia community have been balloted to determine whether they wish to blackout Wikipedia on Wednesday and agreed that this should happen. Wikimedia UK is an independent British charity that defends the decision of our community.

For more information contact our office on 0207 065 0990, or read the press release from the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco.

This year, we’ve achieved charitable status, raised over £1 million in our annual fundraiser, and run a bigger-than-ever programme of outreach work. However, we have also started to go through a major change. While before we were a purely volunteer organisation, our work is now supplemented by a growing number of staff.

The new Board of Trustees elected in May will need to build on these successes. It will also need to overcome the challenges that come with continuing growth and professionalisation. To this end, the current Board will soon be starting to advertise for expressions of interest in becoming a Trustee.

Presently, the Board is mainly composed of people who are active editors of one or more of the Wikimedia projects. However, we would particularly like to encourage new trustees who have valuable skills and experience – regardless of whether they are currently involved in the Wikimedia movement. The only essentials are commitment to our vision of making the world’s knowledge freely available to all, and an understanding of the dynamics of a charity that relies on a community of volunteers for its impact. We value increasing Board diversity and in particular encourage female candidates to apply.

The Board currently holds four weekend meetings a year and four evening phone conferences between those meetings. All Board members are expected to attend these meetings, and work in between meetings is generally a minimum of five hours a week. Trustees are currently elected for a period of one year, though there will be a motion at our AGM to increase this to a two-year term.

Anyone interested is invited to look at our website for further details of our work, and to contact either Roger Bamkin (Chair) or Jon Davies (Chief Executive) for an exploratory discussion. Potential candidates are invited to our Board meeting on 10th Feb in London to observe, and for a discussion about future growth and the role of Trustees. The AGM will be in May.

This is our highest ever fundraising total – a truly remarkable 81% increase on the £560,000 raised in Autumn 2010. Over 43,000 people contributed.

This year also saw the widest variety of fundraising messages. Alongside fundraising banners featuring Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, we shared the stories of over a dozen men and women from all over the world who help create Wikipedia articles.

We are really grateful to everyone who has donated. More and more people believe Wikipedia is a cause worth supporting, and there is growing awareness that Wikipedia is a volunteer movement supported by a network of charities worldwide. The global fundraising campaign has raised over $20 million, with donations in more currencies than ever before.

We became a registered charity on November 3rd, just in time for the start of the Wikimedia fundraising season, and so were able to benefit from Gift Aid. We expect to be able to claim about £88,000 of Gift Aid back on the gifts we received, and by the end of the fundraiser, 60% of donations were being Gift Aided.

Also for the first time, Wikimedia UK offered donors the chance to donate by Direct Debit, with nearly a third of the total being donated in this way. The generosity of our Direct Debit donors will help keep us on a strong financial footing for years to come.

The donations we received range from £1 to several thousands. The average cash gift was £16 and the average Direct Debit £43. A number of supporters also pledged their support in ways we haven’t seen before, for instance by offering to leave a gift to Wikimedia UK in their will.

Once again, many, many thanks to everyone who has supported us in this year’s fundraiser. We are also looking forward to building on our successes in future. The Wikimedia movement continues to grow in size and impact every year and we look forward to playing a major role in raising vital funds to support this work in future.

Richard supports Jon Davies, our Chief Executive, in preparing financial reports and budgets as well as managing office processes in our drive to professionalize in line with charity best practice and our values. He will be responsible for developing relationships between the chapter and community as well as reporting on the outcomes of projects and funding.

He is a regular long-term figure at social meetings (wiki-meets) and chapter events and has held significant positions of trust within our Wikimedia community. He is passionate about the mission and values of Wikimedia UK and is established as a driving force in our outreach activities.

Wikimedia received and reviewed 343 applications for the position with six outstanding candidates making the final interview. With his experience and commitment, Richard offers a firm and stable hand on the tiller for the coming year.

Links

• You can read more about Richard at his Wikipedia user profile
• Read the published Office and Development Manager job specification
• Find out more about Wikimedia UK at http://uk.wikimedia.org, where you can read our Vision and Values and our calendar of events

My presentation paraphrased the German saying, “People who enjoy sausages or legislation should not watch them being made.” I contrasted this with scholarship: it is better to have a closed system of publication and review, or an open, wiki-based process which lets us see the sausages being made before we eat them?

For the topics of rights, connectivity, creativity, digital policy, and digital literacy, I argued that the Wikimedia perspective comes down to openness and freedom (in the sense of free content). Free content guarantees users’ rights: it treats them not as passive consumers of a finished product, but as active editors and re-users. Free content lets people build something together that they couldn’t on their own, hence it supports creativity. Freedom and openness are crucial to bring about the volunteer effort that makes Wikipedia a success: like most volunteers, I donate time and money to Wikimedia because it is a charitable project serving the widest possible public, not a commercial operation serving shareholders. Policy (whether in a country or an institution) can make openness either straightforward or difficult.

As a Wikipedia author, I’m very concerned that people understand the site’s limitations and biases as well as its strengths. To me, “digital literacy” means seeing digital resources as the result of a process, and understanding the implications for quality and reliability. Wikipedia educational projects are a low-cost opportunity to do this. If open publishing is like letting people see the sausages being made, then an educational assignment is like setting students loose on the machines to make their own sausages.

During questions, David White of Oxford University mentioned his own research into the use of online resources in schools and universities, which is feeding into the JISC ‘Developing Digital Literacies’ programme. While many schools in the UK and USA forbid children from even looking at Wikipedia, the site’s page views confirm that it is by far the most frequently-consulted source (nearly half a million hits on “Henry VIII of England” in one month, for example).

Wikipedia emerged as a topic in other discussions through the day, including the way it allows a natural division of labour: people who follow a topic obsessively can summarise it on Wikipedia for the benefit of people who are interested but less obsessive. In his round-up at the of the seminar, Matt Chilcott of University of Wales, Newport pointed out that the Wikipedia article on Digital literacy is still quite basic, and urged all present to improve it.

Wikimedia UK has given four scholarships to attend the conference from the UK, all four will give presentations to share their experiences and knowledge. They are:

• Dr Toni Sant, Director of Research at the University of Hull’s School of Arts and New Media in Scarborough, UK, talking about Embracing Wikipedia as a Learning & Teaching Resource
• WereSpielChequers, a long-time contributor to Wikipedia and Wikimedia UK’s activities, talking about experiences of Wikimedia-GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) partnerships in the UK
• Dhaval Vyal, currently the only active administrator on the Gujarati Wikipedia, talking about Growth of Gujarati Wikipedia and possible aspects of dissemination
• Vinesh Patel, founder of the Imperial College Wikipedia Society, talking about Wikimedia and student societies: present and future

The scholarship recipients will be putting together public reports of their experiences which will be posted to the Wikimedia UK wiki over the next few months.

Gaining Charitable Status

British Library Editathon participants standing outside the British Library

Over the last year, Wikimedia UK has begun an innovative program of outreach activities that have included partnerships with cultural sector organisations including the British Library, the British Museum, Derby Museum, the National Archives, Coventry’s Herbert Art Gallery and Museum and the National Maritime Museum. There have been a number of Wikipedia training academies with organisations such as Cancer Research UK, the Medical Research Council and a workshop at the Institute of Physics. The University of Bristol partnered Wikimedia UK with a UK Outreach summer internship, and there was also a Wikipedian in Residence working with the leading global biodiversity organisation ARKive.

Contact details