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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Every year thousands of people from across take part in the world’s largest photography competition. After a hiatus in 2015, the UK took part in this year’s competition. The winners were outstanding, and if you haven’t seen them yet you can do so on our blog. For the UK, 266 people uploaded more than 6,270… read more »
More than 250 people took part in the UK competition, uploading 6,200 photos of cultural heritage which anyone can reuse. Thank you to everyone who took part. The winners of the overall competition will be announced in December. Wiki Loves Monuments is a global photographic competition run by the Wikimedia Foundation and its local chapters… read more »
This article is based on a paper given at this year’s Museum Computer Group held at the Wellcome Trust on October 19th. Legacy and sustainability were two of the biggest issues York Museums Trust (YMT) grappled with when running two Wikimedian in Residence programmes with Wikimedia UK. During these residencies we made real progress and… read more »