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Wikimedia UK v1.0/Possible projects

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We can use this page to brainstorm ideas for Wikimedia UK. Why do we exist? What are we for? What to we want to do - if not now then in 5 years time?

  • We could do something library-like, for the benefit of researchers/article-writers? Buying out-of-copyright biographical dictionaries springs to mind. Comprehensive reference material tends to be expensive.
  • We could foster local projects in communities - see below for collaboration ideas.
  • Fundraising (grants)
  • Promoting multilingualism
  • Working with schools and other educational endeavours - creative writing, researching, media/computer literacy ...

Wikimedia Choir and Band/Symphony Orchestra

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After adding commons:Image:God Save The Queen 2007 St Giles Fair.ogg, I thought we should have a choir to record libre productions of folk songs, trade union songs, radical songs, hymns, etc. – Kaihsu 13:12, 7 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Multilingualism

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Scots Gaelic community organisations

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These are people we could either work with to access funds or get funds from. --Secretlondon

Irish language bodies

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Along the same lines as Scottish Gaelic bodies. Many provide monetary grants. --Kwekubo

Welsh Language Board

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Local History

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Local History strikes me as a hugely relevant project that could be organised through the chapters. Students, teachers, local historians etc. in an area work on Wikipedia articles or Wikibooks/Wikireaders on their area and what has happened there through time. Again there would be funding opportunities through local councils, private institutions, or even partnering university courses (linking with Wikiversity?). An offshoot of this could be Family history, partnering with agencies that trace genealogy etc. (this is also a huge business in Ireland - "tracing our roots"). Please add funding ideas below. --Cormaggio

List of local/family history agencies and institutions

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Photography

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One of the things that I find very frustrating about contributing to Wikimedia projects is how difficult British law is with regard to uploading images that can be redistributed in line with Florida law. I think that we can use this frustration as a good opportunity as a first project for Wikimedia UK in creating a photographic digital archive of British things: places in particular. This then provides a good lead-in to local history partnerships as mentioned above - I imagine local history societies and local archives would be very interested in photographic logs of their area. This could also be successfully funded by organisations like Heritage Lottery. -- Francs2000 00:40, 10 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I *very* much like this idea :-) Cormaggio @ 00:34, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I also like the idea. I have be attempting to start local history project (in the East End of London) along these lines. I am also photograping the area that will become the Olympic Village in 2012, around the River Lea, the Greenway and Hackney Marches. I doubt I would get a grant for this! LoopZilla 13:30, 16 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
You'd be surprised. Heritage Lottery might not be interested but have you tried an existing historical organisation in your local area? -- Francs2000 00:44, 17 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Please could you explain what the 'Florida Law' issue is? ScottKeir 26 November 2005
Wikimedia's servers are based in Florida, and will be for the forseeable future; we thus use the relevant legislation of Florida (ie, mostly standard US law) to determine what we can publish. This is helpful in some regards - we get lots of neat Fair Use rights we wouldn't have through Fair Dealing in the UK - but annoying in others, since public domain in the UK does not always mean public domain in the US, and vice versa. Shimgray

Inter-school collaboration

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I think it would be great to get schools to collaborate between them to write articles of common interest to both. This could be two schools in London, or it could be one school in Manchester and another in Pakistan. They could even produce a nice Wikireader to show their efforts, with photos of the smiling contributors - awww. Cormaggio @ 17:25, 18 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Other school idea

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On that note, why don't we develop a sort of editing pack for high schools? In it, we encourage them to teach the children how to look up stuff (in reference libraries and...other places that aren't Wikipedia where you look up stuff - God, I'm sad...); this is an issue my teacher is constantly complaining about, how students have no idea where to look for information. To test their newly found skills, they could chose an article (Emmeline Pankhurst), or area (Votes for Women), and edit it, using the information they had found. We would have to create a list somewhere so teachers could put up what articles they were working on so we could keep an eye on it, but children would be educated, articles would be improved, and wikipedia-hating teachers can be brought one step closer to the Wiki side... Dev920 10:58, 3 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Add more ideas

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There were more ideas mooted on the wikimediauk-l mailing list - please add some of those, or your own...

Copyright law and the e-generation - helping develop an understanding of the rights and responsibilities of the digital citizen. With the growth of wikipedia, blogs and even the BBC’s “send us your story” facility it will be increasingly important for all people to understand what they can and cannot say and how this could interact with workplace responsibilities. We could, for example, look at producing educational material for personal and social education classes (or whatever the subject is now called).

Accreditation of citizen journalists - citizen journalism is growing in the UK. Wikinews exists to provide an outlet for such efforts, the BBC actively asks for contributions and there are many blogs and other news outlets. We could consider a scheme where we provide accreditation to these people which may make it easer for them to research and report on local news events. We would not be saying that these people are “our” reporters, but we should be able to find a suitably impressive form of words that says that we think that this person does good work. If we can set this up it would be well worth having a suitably accredited journalist or two at our press launch.

Biographies of national and local politicians - wikipedia should have biographies of many politicians based in the UK. Where possible these should be illustrated with a suitable free picture. We could systematically contact all MP’s offices and ask for a picture to be released under a suitable licence. We could also take the opportunity to suggest the best way that they could correct inaccuracies in the biography and point out the importance of free content information sources. The project could be extended to MEPs, MSPs, Welsh Assembly members and members of local councils (possibly starting with the leader of each council). In order to get the information we produce into wikipedia we could think about pairing interested editors with one or more politicians.

I'm about(couple of months or so) to embark on an ambitious project to make the entire Shadow Cabinet FA status, so I'm happy to help out with this one.Dev920 11:00, 3 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Other funding opportunities

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Gift Aid

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Gift Aid is a system in the UK to allow "tax-efficient" giving, meaning that the government will top up donations so long as the individual pays tax equal to or greater than the government contributed amount.

More detail is given on the Gift Aid sub-page.

Networks and potential collaborators

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Other resources

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