Wikimedia UK Blog

Using bots to change the landscape of Wikipedia

14 January 2019

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 »

WikiCite conference 2018

11 January 2019

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 »

University College London undergraduates will create their own course text using Wikibooks

14 March 2019

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 »

Mozfest 2018 roundup: how Wikimedia UK has been engaging with other Open organisations

15 November 2018

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 »

Green Men & Gargoyles: The Dumfries Stonecarving Project

8 November 2018

Scotland Programme Coordinator Sara Thomas is working with tara s Beall, of the Dumfries Historic Buildings Trust, to support their new Stonecarving project. The project is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, Holywood Trust and the People’s Project, and runs from August 2018 to July 2019. I’ve known tara Beall for a while – our… read more »

Wikipedia’s photo competition Wiki Loves Monuments announces 2018 winners

26 October 2018

The winners of the UK section of the world’s biggest photo contest Wiki Loves Monuments have just been announced, with the judges awarding fIrst prize to this stunning image of Gloucester Cathedral cloisters taken by Christopher JT Cherrington. Chris has written a short blog post on the Wiki Loves Monuments website explaining how he took… read more »

‘Can my business have a Wikipedia page?’

18 October 2018

So you’re a business. You’ve got a company that’s number #3 in the UK at making spoons, or something like that, and you want to make sure that when people search for your company, they can see you’re legit because a Wikipedia page confers an aura of legitimacy on your noble pursuit of creating the… read more »

From Spreadsheet to Wikidata with QuickStatements

11 January 2019

By Charles Matthews, Wikimedian in Residence at ContentMine With the end of October, Wikidata’s birthday comes round once more, and on the 29th it will be six years old. With the passing of time Wikimedia’s structured data site grows, is supported by an increasingly mature set of key tools, and is applied in new directions…. read more »

How to run a Wikipedia editathon – for health information professionals at the EAHIL conference

8 October 2018

By Ruth Jenkins, Academic Support Librarian at the University of Edinburgh. For some time, Wikipedia has been shown to be a resource to engage with, rather than avoid. Wikipedia is heavily used for medical information by students and health professionals – and the fact that it is openly available is crucial for people finding health information, particularly in developing countries… read more »

Science Source seeks to improve reliable referencing on Wikipedia’s medical articles

30 August 2018

Science Source is a new project by ContentMine which builds on their previous work on WikiFactMine, which wanted to ‘make Wikidata the primary resource for identifying objects in bioscience’. This time, they want to automate the process of looking at biomedical research to identify statements that would be useful for improving Wikipedia’s medical articles. They… read more »