Below is the Wikimedia UK monthly report for the period 1 to 30 September 2011. If you
want to keep up with the chapter's activities as they happen, please subscribe to our
blog, join our mailing list, and/or follow us on Twitter. If you have any questions or
comments, please drop us a line on this report's talk page.
This report is also available, complete with pictures, on our website at
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reports/2011/September .
Contents
1 Recruitment
2 Program activities
2.1 Education projects
2.2 GLAM activities
2.3 Other activities
2.4 UK press coverage (and coverage of UK projects & activities)
2.5 Upcoming activities in October
3 Administrative activities
3.1 Board activities
3.2 Charitable status
3.3 Fundraising
Recruitment
This month we completed our recruitment of our new Chief Exec: Jon Davies will start work
on 1 October. Andrew Turvey, who led the recruitment, blogged about the process of
recruiting our Chief Exec; one of the last steps in this process was the presence of the
final three candidates at the 49th London Meetup so that the community could provide their
input.
Our new full-time Office Administrator, Richard Symonds, known as Chase me ladies, I'm
the Cavalry on Wikipedia, started work this month to assist specifically with the
fundraiser work, and also more generally with WMUK's administrative needs. His
contract runs until mid-January.
Program activities
Education projects
On the 1st September, Martin Poulter and User:Martinvl ran a workshop for members of the
Institute of Physics. The event was written up in a blog post.
We funded two scholarships to attend WikiSym 2011 in October 2011. The scholarships were
awarded to Dr Mark Graham, and Han-Teng Liao, both from the Oxford Internet Institute.
Following from the visit, they will also present about their work at the Wikimedia
Foundation offices.
GLAM activities
Two ARKive project events were held in Bristol on 15 September (one in the afternoon, the
other in the evening), led by Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing), details of which are at
Wiki Wildlife Bristol. These were part of a larger collaboration to improve Wikipedia
articles on threatened species, full information for which is available at
Wikipedia:GLAM/ARKive. The events were covered by a number of local blogs and media
organisations.
QRPedia saw extensive media coverage this month, mostly following from the WMF blog post
about it. See below for links to the news stories.
A number of other GLAM activities also took place, including:
3rd - The Mayor of Derby awarded prizes by a webstream to winners in Russia, France and
Indonesia for the Derby Multilingual challenge
8th - the first Wikipedia editing training session at the British Museum was, with nine BM
people present (a mix of curators, curatorial interns and volunteers) and three
Wikimedians. More details are on the Wikipedia project page.
14th - A workshop for GLAMs was run at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum. For more
information on this, see the 'This month in GLAM' UK report.
27th - A presentation was given to all staff at the British Library by Fae and Roger
30th - Fae meet with Museums Galleries Scotland to talk about an upcoming partnership.
Other activities
UK Wikimeets this month: London (11th) and Manchester (17th)
2nd-3rd - Mike Peel presented at Science Online London in the "How are wikis being
used to carry out and communicate science?" session, and also the
'Micro-attribution' session.
8th - Steve Virgin and Roger Bamkin presented at TEDx Bristol
13th - Jimmy Wales uses QRpedia in Indianapolis
14th - Editathon in Barcelona creates articles to support QRpedia at Foundation Joan Miro
27th - Fiona Apps (User:Panyd) spoke about Women and Wikipedia at Manchester Girl Geek
Dinner at B-Hive, Manchester. A report is available on the wiki.
We have offered travel grants to support UK residents' attendance of WikiConference
India in November.
UK press coverage (and coverage of UK projects & activities)
Press coverage of Wikimedia in UK publications this month included:
1st - QRpedia and Lori on Indianapolis local radio
8th - Wikipedia creator’s keynote speech at radio festival, JournalLive
9th - Wikipedia founder wows Cambridge Network audience - "Wikipedia attracts more
readers than the top 20 newspapers in the world combined. ", also covered in Cabume
(13th)
12th - Joan Collins Corrects Wikipedia Entry, Express
14th - Johann Hari: A personal apology, Independent. Also covered in The Guardian and
Periscope Post.
15th - QR Codes at the National Archives: National archives news & GovernmentNews
16th - coverage of ARKive event:
Life’s wild editing Wikipedia, Bristol Wireless
Bristol ‘Wikipedians’ taught to edit online encylopaedia, Bristol 24/7
ARKive on the Road: Wiki ‘Wildlife editathon’ in Bristol, UK, ARKive blog.
24th - QRpedia on Spanish Discussion programme as part of 40 minute programme on Wikipedia
- one of three Spanish TV interviews
28th - 维基百科推出可能有史以来最酷的QRpedia » 竹筱杰 QRpedia and also in two other places.
29th - coverage of QRPedia (a project developed by UK wikimedian and Terence Eden):
Wikipedia launches QR code creation service to assist museum visitors, PanArmenian
QRPedia: Wikipedia makes visiting museums more fun, MemeBurn
QRpedia creates multilingual QR codes for Wikipedia articles, The Next Web
QRPedia: Wikipedia launches QR code tool for museums, Australian Techworld
Several others that day
30th More coverage of QRpedia
How Wikipedia Is Making QR Codes Useful Again
维基百科二维码移动应用 QRpedia，简单并且好用，堪称应用典范！ | TechFrom科技源 TechFrom and several others that day
Upcoming activities in October
1st - Herbert Art Gallery and Museum Backstage Pass
1st - Warwick University Freshers fair - Panyd organising stall
1st - Edinburgh meetup - run by Fæ and Brian McNeil
1st - Tom Morris attending Over the Air at Bletchley Park where Terence Eden did keynote
on QRpedia
5th - Martin Poulter speaking on "Common pitfalls in engaging with Wikipedia" at
Bathcamp #26, the Innovation Centre, Bath
5th - Roger Bamkin speaking at Europeana Conference at Austrian National Library on
"WLM, GLAM and QRpedia"
7th - 13.30-17.00 British Museum internal training workshop.
7th - Meeting with Central Midlands Archives, Derby City Council re QRpedia
8th - Andy Mabbett - "GLAM and QRpedia" at Library Camp UK in Birmingham
8th - Cambridge meetup
11th - Board meeting
13th - 10.00-17.00 British Museum Ice Age art "Behind the Scenes" event.
15th - Largest Joan Miro exhibition for 20 years in Barcelona uses 17 QRpedia codes which
access English articles (Oh and some in Catalan)
16th - London meetup
16th - EGM - see below
24th - 10.00-18.00 Wikipedia Lounge at The University of Manchester
28th - Meeting scheduled in Monmouth to try and launch partnership with the town
For events in November and onwards, please see Events.
Administrative activities
Board activities
We held an In-person executive board meeting on 18 September in Derby. Discussions focused
on plans for our upcoming EGM (see below) and on the induction process for our new chief
exec.
Draft reports from board members on their recent activities are available on the WMUK wiki
in preparation for the next board meeting on 11 October.
Charitable status
Our application to be recognised as a charity by the UK's Charity Commission was
significantly progressed this month. We will be holding an Extraordinary General Meeting
on 16 October 2011 to pass a special resolution to change our Objects to bring them in
line with the Charity Commission's view of what a charity is. See our blog post on
this subject for more information.
Fundraising
In preparation for the upcoming fundraiser, we have run a series of fundraising tests this
month. The tests and their outcomes are described on meta.
We received £3624.73 in paypal donations from 272 donors this month - more than twice what
we received in August. We have also started accepting monthly and quarterly Direct Debits:
this month we recieved eight new Direct Debit instructions, averaging £22/month. All but
one of these came in during the hour-long fundraising test on 28 September.
For more information please see our monthly fundraising report at Fundraising Report -
Monthly Totals 2011.
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Wiki UK Ltd is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered
No. 6741827.
The Registered Office is at 23 Cartwright Way, Nottingham, NG9 1RL, United Kingdom.