Presented by Steve Virgin at The Watershed Theatre in Bristol for the Bristol City Council event entitled ‘Green, Open & Social ‘ - March 22, 2010

Bristol & Wikipedia‘Green, Open & Social’

This presentation is CC-BY-SA except for logos and screen prints which are

Fair Use or used with permission

Wikipedia's wider objective

Worldwide unique visitors

Google Sites (includes YouTube) 831 million

Microsoft Sites 692 million

Yahoo! Sites 594 million

Facebook 350 million

Wikimedia Foundation Sites 347 million

AOL 286 million

eBay 250 million

CBS Corporation (includes CNET) 203 million

Amazon Sites 195 million

Wikipedia's reach

Source: ComScore

UK association of Wikimedia volunteers

Recognized by Foundation, but independent

Founded 2008

Objects: promote Wikipedia's projects, support Wikipedia, support free content, seek members and volunteers to build community

Who we are - Wikimedia UK

www.wikimedia.org.uk/

• Argentina, Austria, Australia, Brazil, Switzerland, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Denmark, Sweden, France, UK, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Finland, Taiwan, Ukraine, Macedonia, Serbia & Czech Republic

• One area Chapter = New York

• There are another 12 Chapters in the planning stage

• There are another 14 Chapters at the early discussion stage

One of many national chapters

Wikipedia a first port of call for many, in times of breaking news, or of uncertainty

Michael Jackson page25/06/09 – 1.4m26/06/09 – 5.9m hits27/06/09 – 2.0m hits28/06/09 – 1.4m hits29/09/09 – 1.4m hits

Swine Flu pageApril ‘09: 2,417,525May ‘09: 1,018,123

Tiger Woods ‘incident’Just under 300,000 hits in 4 days end of Nov ‘09

ONLY – the page not the site

And people go there in more than one language

Wikipedia – Encyclopaedia containing more than 13m articles in 266 languages

Page Views on a ‘typical’ dayEnglish – 8.5m per hourJapanese - 1.5m per hourGerman - 1.26m per hourSpanish – 1.07m per hourFrench – 0.74m per hour

Active Editors in English40,000 (more than 5 edits in last month)

Wikipedia has a similar impact when you have some good news locally that you want to share

Banksy page had been averaging between 1.5k to 3-4k hits per day through first half of 2009

Banksy page had 80,500 hits on the page in six days between June 12 and June 17 ‘09

157,019 people viewed his page in June87,232 people viewed his page in July

90,984 people viewed his page in August

That’s 335,235 people viewing the Banksy Wikipedia page inside three months

Banksy v Bristol Museum launches

Banksy v Bristol Museum

How many people would have seen Banksy ‘virtually’ if images from this exhibition had

been on the Wikimedia project sites as well?

Why stop at national appeal when you get international appeal?

120,000 saw Banksy exhibit in the flesh in the first month and 157,000 visited the Wikipedia page on him

“Hotels and restaurants reporting a sharp jump in local trade – by as much as 25% in some cases”

Share content with Wikipedia and the benefits do not end

And why not use the content you share with us to generate passion, commitment and interest in Bristol as a tourist or business destination too?

Share content – and it goes ‘live’ in perpetuity, not just for 3 months

Is Bristol taking full advantage of Wikipedia now?

Page viewed only 855 times in January

Page viewed only 1,089 times in January

Page viewed only 602 times in January

Page viewed only 6,431 times in

January

The Matthew page viewed only 1,523 times in January

Page viewed only 1,318 times in

January

Page hardly ever viewed 288 times

in January

Wikmedia Commons – more than 6m images that anyone can use

Tropenheim Museum is a big supporter in terms of content and has

seen web hits rise sharply after making content donations

Images tell your story – why not help shape your story by releasing content that describe you best?

• All major Bristol sites will appear on all of the Wikimedia projects at some point in time in greater or lesser detail

• These images could be snatched shots loaded by visitors to Flickr or shots from websites from other countries that do not do justice to the new look of your building or company

• Or you could shape the look and feel of what the community do by releasing images, video or audio content that they can use to tell the story

Banksy has done that – so can you

Our goal...“To aid and encourage people to collect, develop and effectively disseminate knowledge and other educational, cultural and historic content in the public domain”

• Theatre archive content

• Endangered species content Natural History Unit and ARKIVE

• BBC content

• City historical archives

• Museum – reach new audiences through events

How could we help? - Shared content will drive more hits to Bristol donor websites

Our goal…“Encourage the use of information resources for the advancement of education; and encouraging the adoption of practices and policies to widen education, participation and dissemination of information.”

• Help teachers better use Wikipedia as a resource tool

• Suggesting that content donors use their donation and get local schools involved in turning them into Wikipedia articles

• Use Wikipedia as a tool to reach out to ethnic minorities andhelp them to use it to learn new skills

• There is a need for content in non-English languages and thisis a valuable task that these communities could assist with

How could we help? - Provide guidance to teaching professionals on how to best use Wikipedia for learning

How could we help? – Any group across Bristol can use MediaWiki our free software

Why can’t Bristol take our free Open Source software and offer it to other groups + every

single one of the local Neighbourhood Partnership committees that they are

forming?

Some of you in the room are already working alongside us...you just don’t realise it

Feed is taken from Wikipedia projects

Bristol has projects such as this below – they might be similar to things we do?

The Wikinews project was launched in December 2004 with the mission to report the news on a wide variety of subjects. As of January 2008, 23 language versions of Wikinews have been launched, producing more than 48,000 news articles in total. (Some Wikinews, including the English one, can be subscribed to through RSS feeds.)

Contributors from around the world write news articles collaboratively. Reports range from original reporting and interviews to summaries of news from external sources. All of them are required to be written from a neutral point of view.

Wikinews – get volunteers contributing information about Bristol and south west to Wikinews

Wiktionary is a project to create a multilingual free content dictionary in every language. This means each project seeks to use a particular language to define all words in all languages. It actually aims to be much more extensive than a typical dictionary, including thesauri, rhymes, translations, audio pronunciations, etymologies, and quotations.

Wikiquote is a repository of quotations taken from famous people, books, speeches, films or any intellectually interesting materials. Proverbs, mnemonics or slogans are also included in Wikiquote.

Our projects are useful resources – contribute and use whenever you need to

Wikibooks aims to build a collection of free e-book resources, including textbooks, language courses, manuals, and annotated public domain books. It aims to help both (self-)instruction of students, and teachers in high-schools and universities. The project started in July 2003 and now has over 84,000 modules from over 5,000 developing books, across over 50 languages.

Wikisource is a multilingual project, started in November 2003, to archive a collection of texts that could be distributed as free and open content. It is not only a superior format for storing classics, laws, and other free works as hypertext, but it also serves as base for translating these texts.

Help shape their future by joining and working with the communities in each project

‘City’ pages comparison from 2009

The ‘Bristol’ Wikipedia Page saw 696,928 hits (avg: 58,077 per month

The ‘Birmingham’ Wikipedia Page saw 908,310 hits (avg: 75,692 per month)

The ‘Manchester’ Wikipedia Page saw 1,132,595 hits (avg: 94, 382 per month)

The ‘Leeds’ Wikipedia page saw 572,105 hits (avg: 47,605 per month)

Our challenge to Bristol

We have been speaking to many groups that are interested in the idea of releasing content to the Wikimedia projects

Why don’t we co-ordinate that City-wide?

Why don’t we organise an informal group to plan a route to achieve this aim?

Why don’t you try and put an action plan together for Wikipedia’s 10th Birthday next January and gain from being seen as innovators & pioneers in the use of social media as a City?

Wikimedia UK would love to work with you all – and we await your call

www.wikimedia.org.uk/