By Jeff Sanders, Project Manager for Dig It! based at The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. AN ANCIENT SOCIETY (WITH FRESH IDEAS) 1780: a time before the USA had gained its independence, before the first hot air balloon flights, and before Robert Burns had penned Auld Lang Syne. Also the year in which the Society… read more »
We are very pleased to announce the recent appointment of three new trustees to Wikimedia UK’s board. Sangeet Bhullar, Jane Carlin and Marnie Woodward bring a range of skills and experience to the board including financial management, strategic partnerships and digital literacy. Sangeet Bhullar joined the Wikimedia UK board in January 2019. She is the… read more »
Wikimedia UK has started running events to encourage long-time Wikipedia editors and those interested in becoming technically proficient at more complex tasks to gain skills that will allow them to improve Wikimedia projects. In November we ran our first event on how to write a Featured Article. On May 7th, we will be running our… read more »
By Richard Nevell, Wikimedia UK Project Coordinator Shortly before 7pm on April 15 in Paris a devastating fire broke out in one of France’s most iconic buildings. The fire was extinguished after more than 12 hours, and while the stone walls still stood and movable artwork had been removed, the spire and roof had collapsed,… read more »
By Jason Evans, National Wikimedian for Wales. In April 2019 the Basque Wikimedians User Group hosted the first Wikimedia + Education conference in Donostia. Using Wikipedia, and other Wikimedia projects in education is nothing new. There is a vibrant and well established community already engaged in a diverse range of projects from Wiki Clubs in… read more »
By Martin Poulter, Wikimedian in Residence at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford The speed at which Wikidata is acquiring descriptions of paintings, sculptures and other museum holdings is impressive, but there is much further to go. It’s ironic that at the same time, we already have an enormous art database hiding in plain sight. The Commons… read more »
This article was jointly authored by Thomas Shafee and Jack Nunn from the WikiJournals board, and edited by John Lubbock of Wikimedia UK. The WikiJournals are a new group of peer-reviewed, open-access academic journals which are free to publish in. The twist is that articles published in them are integrated into Wikipedia. At the moment,… read more »
This article is by Wikipedia administrator User:TheSandDoctor Early this past December, I was reviewing article submissions on Wikipedia and noticed that some included templates, pages created to be included in other pages, that were inappropriate for pages that are not yet articles. This got me thinking, how widespread is this misconception? A search led to… read more »
By John Lubbock, Communications Coordinator of Wikimedia UK It was about 2007 when Wikipedia hit the mainstream. Millions of students were using one website to get an introduction to their new course subjects, and many, of course, were not particularly careful about their use of copy and paste. In a way, Wikipedia was the victim… read more »
By Magnus Manske, MediaWiki developer and longtime Wikimedian The new year is just over two weeks old, but the WikiVerse already celebrated a joyous event: Wikipedia’s 18th birthday! 50 million seems to be the number of the day – 50M articles across Wikipedia editions, 50M files on Commons, 50M items on Wikidata. But all this… read more »