Wikimedia Commons | the Wikimedia UK blog!

Recording heritage sites in danger with Wikipedia

16 August 2018

I was scrolling Twitter when I came across a video of a fighter in Syria wasting ammunition to destroy an ancient Byzantine building. Jihadists in Idlib, Syria, destroy what’s left of a Byzantium era archaeological building in Deir Sunbul. The site is part of the “Dead Cities,” and is on UNESCO World Heritage List.https://t.co/LozBibwuIG pic.twitter.com/DE54KKOHQk… read more »

A multilingual infobox for Wikimedia Commons categories | By Mike Peel

7 August 2018

Mike Peel is a UK Wikimedian who is running a session on the development of multilingual infoboxes on Wikimedia Commons at Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town. You can see the session information here. _____________________________________________________ Wikimedia Commons is a multilingual repository holding multimedia related to all possible topics. All language Wikipedias, as well as other projects,… read more »

UK Election Maps shared on Open Licenses are added to Commons

28 June 2018

One account I follow on Twitter which produces very useful political maps is @ElectionMapsUK. I saw the account tweeting recently that after they had finished all their maps showing the changes to council seats and the makeup of borough councils after the 2018 local elections. The account announced that they were happy for other people… read more »

A look back at the 2018 hackathon in Barcelona

11 June 2018

Wikimedia UK staff couldn’t be in Barcelona at the end of May for the annual Wikimedia hackathon – we had our own events to organise with Amnesty International in London and Glasgow – but some of our friends did attend the event, and we are happy to have their help to tell you what happened,… read more »

Structured Data on Commons is the most important development in Wikimedia’s usability

28 February 2018

By John Lubbock, Communications Coordinator Wikimedia Commons is one of the most important sources of Creative Commons licensed media online. But it has a huge problem: it’s a total mess. One of the biggest complaints about Commons which discourages people from using it is that it’s incredibly hard to find what you’re looking for. People… read more »

How should journalists use Wikipedia?

14 February 2018

Wikipedia receives about 18 billion page views per month from around 1.4 billion unique devices. While many people use Wikipedia for basic research into subjects which they want a simple understanding of, Wikipedia and its sister projects also have many uses which can be useful for journalists to make part of their research process. Traditionally,… read more »

US Second World War propaganda films migrated to Commons

31 January 2018

Victor Grigas, a video producer and storyteller who has worked with the Wikimedia Foundation for a number of years, posted on the Wikimedia Video Production House Facebook group yesterday that he had migrated Frank Capra’s Second World War films from YouTube to Commons so they can be used on Wikipedia. The Why We Fight series… read more »

Talking to Creative Commons’ Ryan Merkley about CC Search and Structured Data on Commons

9 December 2017

CC Search beta was launched in February. This new tool incorporates ‘list-making features, and simple, one-click attribution to make it easier to credit the source of any image you discover.’ Its developer, Liza Daly, describes it as ‘a front door to the universe of openly licensed content.’ As a small organisation, Creative Commons did not… read more »

Increasing diverse content on Wikimedia projects with UK music festivals and labels

8 June 2017

I’ve been doing some outreach to various UK music festivals and labels to encourage them to release content on their artists and to consider giving Wikimedia community members press passes to take photographs at their events. Last weekend I did some photography at Field Day 2017, taking photos of artists like Loyle Carner, Mura Masa,… read more »

Bunhill Fields: Wikimedia, gamification and richer media content

31 March 2017

I really like Magnus Manske’s WikiShootMe tool. It visualises Wikidata items, Commons photos and Wikipedia articles on an OpenStreetMap. Wikidata items are shown as red if they have no photo and green if they do have one. For the past few months, I’ve been spending my lunch hours walking around the area near the Wikimedia… read more »