GLAM/Newsletter/August 2014/Contents/UK report

This Month in GLAM – Volume IV, Issue VIII, August 2014

UK report

Wikimania and more

Wikimania

The UK's Wikimedians were proud to host the tenth Wikimania at the Barbican in London on 8-10 August, (with pre-events on 6-7 August). Around 2,000 people attended, including representatives of several of our GLAM partners, as well as Wikimedians from around the world, many of whom work on GLAM projects in their home countries - it was great to catch up, share experiences and plot future collaborations.

Naturally, GLAM featured prominently in the hackathon and the official programme, with a number of talks by UK and overseas volunteers, and several winners in the Wikimania UK annual awards (see below).

Wikimania also saw the premiere of The GLAM-Wiki Revolution, a documentary looking into the work and history of Wikipedians-in-Residence at various institutions across the United Kingdom.

Wikimedia UK awards

Jimmy Wales kindly presented this year's awards, as part of Wikimania's closing ceremony. Read at UK Wikimedian of the Year 2014.

Yorkshire

July saw the launch of the year-long Wikipedia Yorkshire Network Project. Britain's first regional GLAMwiki project. The project gives the opportunity for Yorkshire & Humber's 150 registered museums to engage with Wikipedia. Initial contact has already been made with Craven Museums, Ripon Museums, Barnsley Museums, Shandy Hall and York Minster. It would be impractical for the project to engage all 150 museums so the aim is to reflect their diversity: particularly smaller and local government museums, as these struggle to work with GLAMwiki. The project is under the wing of Museums Development Yorkshire and based at York Museums Trust. These institutional connections make it much easier to gain access to museums staff around the county and the Museums Development Officers have a very good idea of the digital capacity and needs of the museums.

Plans are afoot for an editathon in the Autumn based on 'Images of Yorkshire' and there will be training events offered to staff and volunteers at several of the museums.

Cancer Research UK

Medical Wikipedians event at CRUK – August 7th

The day before Wikimania 2014, CRUK hosted a meeting with medical editors of Wikipedia in London which was a great success, with Wikipedian attendees from 5 continents, and CRUK people from several different specialized teams – many thanks to those who attended!

The programme concentrated on using accessible language, with a presentation by Henry Scowcroft, and a discussion of some specific issues CRUK had identified with some of the headings in the recommended layout and contents for articles on medical conditions at Wikipedia's Manual of Style for Medical articles. The need for changes was readily agreed by those present, and is now being discussed by the community online – changes look certain to happen. At the meeting we also explained the different types of online information available from CRUK.

Wikimania 2014 – Henry Scowcroft and John Byrne co-presented with others for two talks, and there were a number of other good mentions of the CRUK project by other presenters. The project has strong supporters in the medical editing community, and has attracted plenty of attention more widely.

CRUK images released on open licenses

We had our first release of images on an open license a month ago – 390 diagrams from the CancerHelp pages. These have been enthusiastically received by the medical Wikipedians, and already 176 of them are used in Wikipedia articles, 14 twice, which is a phenomenally quick uptake. They are SVG format files, which means that where appropriate the text labels in the images can easily be translated for use in other languages. That hasn’t happened yet, but it will.

The Governance Panel to confirm that other images are suitable for release has had its first meeting. Only certain types of unproblematic images will be involved. The idea of releasing the images is not just to allow use on Wikipedia, but anywhere else. One advantage of this is that it will save CRUK from having to respond to the many requests for permission to reuse they already get, and allow.

Wikipedia articles

We've had the preliminary reviews for our main target articles on cancers of the lung, brain, oesophagus and pancreas. The amount of work needed varies very considerably! CRUK also did a quick review of Endometrial cancer , which en:User:Keilana has been working up, and has now been nominated at FAC.

In the news

Proton therapy was augmented. It suddenly got 7,000 views on August 31st, instead of the usual 220-odd daily count.

For Children’s Cancer Awareness Month: Childhood cancer is functional but basic, and doesn’t have the new UK figures, announced September 1st.

Royal Society

Although the term of their Wikipedian in Residence finished in July, the results continue to appear, as the Royal Society has released their official portrait photographs for all the 2014 new Fellows and Foreign Members, taken on their formal installation day (and unless they weren't present or opted out of release on an open license). These are some of the images they have released of new Fellows from 2014; for the full group see this category

Dame Sally Davies FMedSci DBE FRS
Professor Martin Hairer FRS
Professor Jenny Nelson FRS

The images are already being heavily used on Wikipedia, with the photograph of Professor Martin Hairer in use on fourteen language versions of Wikipedia within a month of being uploaded.

John Byrne who was Wikimedian in Resident at the Royal Society when the image release was planned said "I'm really pleased that 38 of the images have already been added to articles - mostly by User:Duncan.Hull. As usual, many of the new 2014 Fellows don't have articles yet, though several have already been added, and I'm sure that having a high-quality photo available will encourage new biographies. The intention is for this now to be done every year, which is fantastic." Jonathan Cardy Wikimedia UK's GLAM organiser said "we have been discussing this sort of release with various organisations for some time, and are delighted that the Royal Society has taken the opportunity to be a trailblazer here. A good quality photograph is a really important part of any biography of a living person, and we hope that other organisations will follow the Royal Society's example by openly licensing professional quality images of important people associated with their organisation."