Starting 31 January and during the entire month of February 2010, participating museums in Great Britain are joining with people from all ages, backgrounds and communities to celebrate Britain Loves Wikipedia.  The public is encouraged to photograph the multitude of national treasures contained in Britain’s collections, releasing them under a free license to be used to illustrate Wikipedia articles and much more.

The initiative is being spearheaded by the volunteer chapter based in the United Kingdom, Wikimedia UK.  Wikimedia’s volunteer chapters (which now number at 27 and continue to grow) support the movement by carrying out fundraising, public outreach, and relationship building in their respective territories.

You can read more about Britain Loves Wikipedia on the Wikimedia UK blog here. If you’re in the UK through the coming month, join up and help grow Wikimedia’s collection of freely reusable images and media!

Cary Bass, Volunteer Coordinator

Wikimedia UK is celebrating “Public Domain Day,” this Friday, January 1, 2010.  The first day of every year in the United Kingdom, copyright expires on published works by individuals who died 70 years prior–this year in 1939.  Works by these individuals fall into the Public Domain in the UK. This year, the poetry of W. B. Yeats, the early works of Sigmund Freud, and Arthur Rackham’s classic children’s book illustrations will be released and made available.

You can read more about Wikimedia UK’s plans for Public Domain Day here.

Wikimania is an annual event devoted to Wikimedia projects around the globe. The conference is a community gathering, giving the editors and users an opportunity to meet each other, exchange ideas, and collaborate on the future of the Wikimedia projects. The conference is open to the public
and is a chance for educators, researchers, programmers, and free culture activists who are interested in the Foundation’s projects to learn more and share ideas about the Wikimedia projects.

This year’s conference will be held from August 26-28 in Buenos Aires, Argentina at San Martín Cultural Center.

We are accepting submissions for presentations, workshops, panels, posters, open space discussions, and artistic works related to the Wikimedia projects or free content topics in general. Without submissions from people like you, Wikimania wouldn’t be nearly as fun!

Submissions are due April 15, see the Call for Participation for more information.

For further information on Wikimania, please visit the official Wikimania 2009 site at wikimania2009.wikimedia.org.

I am very much looking forward to seeing your presentation at Wikimania! :-)

Cary Bass, VOLCO

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Following up on the success of last Fall’s Wiki Takes Manhattan, the project goes National with Wikipedia Loves Art, taking place all month.  As you can find on its page on Wikipedia:

Wikipedia Loves Art is a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest among museums and cultural institutions worldwide, and aimed at illustrating Wikipedia articles. The event is planned to run for the whole month of February 2009. Although there are planned events at each location, you can go on your own at any time during the month.

The event opened up last Sunday at London’s  Victoria and Albert Museum, and is coordinated by the Brooklyn Museum, with the participation of the V & A, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Jewish Museum (New York), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Historical Society, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Taft Museum of Art. There are totally 15 different museums and cultural institutions participating.
Fred Benenson of  Creative Commons spoke with Jimmy Wales about the event, and produced this quick video where Jimmy explains how excited he is about the event.

For details, and to see if a museum near you is participating, see the Wikipedia page devoted to the event.

Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator<

Hi all,

I wanted to give our New York City Wikimedians a heads up for the following event, Wikis Take Manhattan, a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest aimed at illustrating Wikipedia and StreetsWiki articles covering sites and street features in Manhattan and across the five boroughs of New York City. The event is based on last year’s hugely successful Wikipedia Takes Manhattan, and the event organizers have evolved it to include StreetsWiki this year.

Participants begin the hunt from one of two locations: Columbia University (at the sundial on college walk) and one at The Open Planning Project’s West Village office:

349 W. 12th St. #3
Between Greenwich & Washington Streets
By the 14th St./8th Ave. ACE/L stop

Cary Bass,
Volunteer Coordinator

Update!: Interested parties can join the Wikimedia NYC email list at Wikimedia NYC.

Haisan Station, the three millionth image, uploaded by Wikimedian Mailer Diablo, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

 

It’s always a pleasure watching when projects of the Wikimedia Foundation reach milestones.  Three of Wikimedia’s projects have now achieved new and wonderful numbers.

The Hungarian Wikipedia, celebrated 5 years on 8 July 2008 with its 100,000 article, Erdődi Simon, an entry about a Catholic Bishop in the medieval times.  This makes the Hungarian project the 21st Wikipedia with over 100,000 articles.

The Japanese Wikipedia has also achieved a remarkable milestone by being host to 500,000 articles, on June 25, 2008, with one of the following articles: フランク・ラザフォード (Frank Rutherford)、‎国際チャレンジデー (International Challenge Day)、‎ウエストバージニアの水運 (West Virginia Waterways)、南阿蘇鉄道MT-2000形気動車 (Motorized Rail MT-2000), articles which were created at the same moment the project achieved the milestone.  This adds Japanese to the list of 5 Wikipedias with over half a million articles (the other four are English, German, French and Polish).

I’m especially pleased to announce that Wikimedia Commons has uploaded 3 million files, as of July 16, 2008.  The three-millionth file is a photo of a subway station in Taipei, uploaded by Singapore Wikimedian Mailer Diablo, especially interesting as the millionth file uploaded in November 2006 was also a Wikimedian in Singapore, Terence Ong.

Cary Bass, Volunteer Coordinator

Wikimania is an annual conference put together by a team of local volunteers for Wikimedians around the globe.  The original conference, hosted in Frankfurt in August 2005, was put together as an opportunity for members of the growing communities to meet and talk with each other and those involved in wiki software development.

This year’s Wikimania is being held in Alexandria, Egypt, in the prestigious Bibliotheca Alexandrina.  The venue chosen was built both as a tribute to the Library of Alexandria of antiquity and as a center of knowledge and learning, which nicely compliments the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation.   The event, featuring a variety of presentations, panels, and workshops from wide ranging topics of interest to Wikimedians, educators, the free-culture community at large, tech geeks, and the public at large, runs from Thursday, July 17 and continues to Saturday, July 19, 2008.

I am looking forward to seeing everyone there.

Cary Bass, Volunteer Coordinator

The voting in the 2008 elections for the Board of Trustees is currently being held through June 22.  This summer’s election is to fill the seat currently held by Board Chairperson Florence Devouard.   This is the first Trustee election to take place under the Board restructuring approved by the board in April 2008.

Why are we having board elections?  The Wikimedia Foundation is a unique entity in the fact that our projects are managed by a great number of people around the world, volunteers who create and edit the content on the Wikipedia sites and our other projects like Wikinews and Wikimedia Commons.  The volunteers are members of related project communities from which members have agglomerated to form a meta-community of individuals interested in the Wikimedia Foundation and having a voice to participate in determining how Wikimedia fulfill its mission both short-term and in the years to come.

Who is eligible to vote?  The 2008 Board Election Committee has provided guidelines as to which members of the community are eligible to vote in the election.  It effectively covers anyone who is presently active on at least one Wikimedia project, has a history with some edit contributions.

Is Florence Devouard running again?  It saddens me to say that Florence has chosen to pursue other endeavors in lieu of returning to her position as Chairperson of the Wikimedia Foundation.  Florence has overseen the board during a period of rapid growth and maturity of the Wikimedia Foundation and left a legacy that will be difficult for subsequent board to follow.

Is the candidate running for board chairperson?  Although Florence is vacating the position, the election is only for a board seat.  The board then determines among them who they want to perform the duties of Chair.

Who is running for office?  Candidate presentations are located here.  Each candidate for board has provided personal details and a statement as to how they believe they can benefit the Wikimedia Foundation.  There is also a question and answer section where community members have asked candidates a number of questions pertaining to how they see their roles as board members.

Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator<

Greetings from Maker Faire 2008 here in San Mateo, California! This busy event is attracting hordes of people from all over the Bay Area and beyond. The Wikimedia booth, manned by volunteers and staff alike, is getting a constant barrage of persons interested in all of the Wikimedia sites.

A number of people are shocked when they find out they can edit themselves, and for a few, their first experience in editing is taking place today, right here at the Wikimedia booth.

I’ve included a few photographs to demonstrate a bit of what took place. More photos are available at the Maker Faire gallery on Wikimedia Commons.

Cary Bass, Volunteer Coordinator.

This is not a very exciting title for a post, granted, but this little file contains quite a bit of power, especially on the Wikimedia websites. The little lines of command found in this file tell us what pages should not be included when search engines like Google or Yahoo! spider Wikimedia content.

Many of the commands in robots.txt are there for technical reasons. For example, we do not want search engines to index dynamically-generated pages, such as the Search page, because this would put too much of a load on our servers.

However, we have also included some discussion pages in robots.txt. The issue here is not so much article content but rather all the bickering, flamewars, and name-calling that we often find on discussion pages.

Consider this one aspect: Search engines are used constantly by employers hunting for information about prospective employees. Imagine a candidate being rejected because of an unanswered late entry to a year-and-a-half old conversation telling Joe Q. Lastnamehere that he is a liar and con man and his authority is fraudulent. You may believe that such an employer would be legally wrong to base a hiring decision on such a frail source, but people make these sorts of decisions all the time by using search engines.

Robots.txt already keeps search engines from spidering several types of discussion, including page deletion discussions on several wikis. By excluding those pages from search engines, we can keep the discussion on-wiki without broadcasting “non-notable” or “spammer” on every search. This has dramatically reduced the number of complaints our OTRS volunteers have received about these discussions.

As some of our users have discovered, though, there is another hazard of search engines: user discussion pages. These pages often contain users’ real names, and often call those people “vandals” or “plagiarists” or “biased”. These can be as bad as deletion discussions, if not worse.

All projects should be aware of the potential hazards of not including these pages in spidering. It may be time to coordinate your language namespaces so that you may be able to prevent any hazardous issues resulting from non-mainspace discussions about people. You can request that the developers add items to the robots.txt file by filing a bug at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org.

Very truly yours,

Cary Bass, Volunteer Coordinator