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 »
By John Lubbock, Wikimedia UK Communications Coordinator January 15 is the anniversary of the day on which Wikipedia was launched in 2001. I first got involved with Wikipedia in 2011, when I volunteered at a party organised by a friend of mine for Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary. 18, although a coming of age in many countries,… read more »
This post has been written by User:TheSandDoctor, an admin on English Wikipedia. An original version of this article appeared on Medium. A Request for Comment (RfC) is a process for requesting outside input concerning disputes, policies, guidelines or article content. As an admin on the English Wikipedia, I deal with these kind of bureaucratic issues… read more »
By Jason Evans, National Wikimedian at the National Library of Wales Imagine a world in which anyone could use an open citation database to support free knowledge, with rich information about every citable source. Any Wikipedian or Wikipedia advocate will tell you that one of the great strengths of Wikipedia is its citations. In fact,… read more »
Professor Carl Gombrich, Programme Director for UCL’s new interdisciplinary course, Arts and Sciences (BASc), approached Wikimedia UK early this year to talk about his interest in using a Wikimedia element in the Approaches to Knowledge module of the degree. This semester, the course began and 150 students are now working on creating chapters for an… read more »
Wikimedia UK has been attending Mozilla’s conference in London for a few years now, as we attempt to build deeper connections to other organisations working to promote open knowledge. This year, we presented a discussion entitled ‘Under the hood: how understanding Wikipedia’s internal structure and community can teach media literacy’. This was a relaxed hour… read more »