By John Lubbock, Communications Coordinator of Wikimedia UK It was about 2007 when Wikipedia hit the mainstream. Millions of students were now 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 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 »
Professor Carl Gombrich, Programme Director for UCL’s new interdiscipliniary course, BA Arts and Sciences, 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Co-authored by Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian In Residence at the University of Edinburgh and Jemima John, 4th year undergraduate student at the University’s School of Law and Digital Skills intern Since the early 2000’s, Wikipedia has acquired somewhat of a negative reputation for being unreliable. Educators are normally wary of allowing Wikipedia as a source that anyone… read more »
By John Lubbock, Communications Coordinator If I was a music industry promoter, I would make sure the artists I worked with had accurate Wikipedia pages, because those pages will come at the top of the Google rankings when you search for the artist’s name. In practice, this doesn’t happen, largely because they don’t understand how… read more »