Wikimedia in Higher Education Symposium in Sydney

The University of Sydney is hosting a free one-day "Wikimedia in Higher Education Symposium" 5 April 2013,  on the use of Wikipedia for teaching in universities. Speakers include Toby Hudson, School of Chemistry, (USYD),  Kerry Kilner, Research Fellow, School of English, Media Studies and  Art History, University of Queensland (UQ),  Liam Wyatt, Queensland University of Technology, James Neill, University of Canberra,  Kathryn Barwick and Mylee Joseph (State Library  of New South Wales).

Wikipedia-like Travel Guide Launched

The Wikimedia Foundation, best known for the Wikipedia, will officially launch its Wikivoyage travel guide on 15 January 2013. Like the Wikipedia, anyone can create or amend an entry in the travel guide. I was skeptical of the idea, but was impressed with the entries for Sri Lanka and Canberra.

Wikimedia Australia Education Workshop in Indonesia

Wikimedia Australia is organising LangCamp 2012 in Depok, Indonesia, 6–7 December 2012, to foster non-English wikis. This includes The "Open educational resources" (OER; Sumber pembelajaran terbuka) for universities.

In my view Wikimedia's approach to online education is far more useful than all the hype about Massively Online Open Courses (MOOCs).

ps: It happens I was at UIN Suska University of Riau (Fakultas Sains Dan Teknologi, Universitas Islam Negeri Sultan Syarif Kasim Riau), a few weeks ago, discussing an Indonesian version of my ICT Sustainability course.

2012 Australian Paralympic Team Book

John Vandenberg, President of Wikimedia Australia, has created a book collecting up all the materials on the "2012 Australian Paralympic Team". This is available free online as a PDF Download, or an ODT Word-processor File (a Printed Book can also be purchased). Wikimedia Australia's volunteers took on the task of documenting the 2012 Australian Paralympic Team and this book is one of the results of the effort of many people (who are listed in the book).

This Wikipedia book (or Wikibook) is created from a collection of Wikipedia articles and each time someone requests a book it is generated afresh from the latest version of the Wikipedia.

One problem is that Wikibooks can be large. The Paralympic book is about 90 Mb. The HTML format used for the web is usually very efficient in the use of file space and so I examined the book file to see what the problem was.

I downloaded the ODT version of the book and unzipped it to examine the source files. The images take up about 90% of the space. There are then hundreds of small images, which are flags of countries and clip art of medals. There are a few milt-megabyte images, which are photographs of the athletes.

There appears to be a problem with the book generating tool, resulting in duplicated images. As an example, each time the image of a medal is in a Wikipedia entry, a new copy of the same medal image is included in the book. But only one copy of each image should be needed.

Also the photographs of athletes are included in the book at high resolution. This is useful for high quality printing, but wastes space for on screen viewing. An option for using smaller versions of the images would be useful.

Perhaps Wiki-HQ could make some changes to the book generating software. Removing the duplicated images would seed up the book creation process on the server and download time, as well as reduce the file size for the user. As an example, image optimization should reduce the Paralympic book from 90 Mbytes to less than 15 Mbytes.

Opening Australian Archives Project

The WikiMedia Australia event today in Canberra, Wikimedia Fellow, Liam Wyatt, discussed the "Opening Australian Archives Project" he is working on with Creative Commons Australia. This could be useful for my redesign of the ANU course COMP7420 "Electronic Document and Records Management" (notes available under a creative commons licence). Also I offered to help by writing a document "How to Use The Wikipedia in Your Work and Get Promoted".

Wikimedia Australia Strategic Plan

The President of Wikimedia Australia, John Vandenberg, gave an overview of the Wikimedia Australia Strategic Plan at RCC2012 in Canberra today. Wikimedia is looking to employ some professional staff to help with outreach to the community. As well as run its own events, Wikimeida participates in joint events, such as the Meta 2011 Conference. One additional activity is to promote the creation of Wikipedia content about Australia.

Contents

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• 1 Introduction
• 2 Acknowledgements
• 3 Who we are
  • 3.1 Vision
  • 3.2 Mission
  • 3.3 Values
• 4 Programmes
  • 4.1 Part 1: Core
    • 4.1.1 Core: Improve and professionalise communications with stakeholders
    • 4.1.2 Core: Support volunteer initiatives
    • 4.1.3 Core: Professionalise WMAu operations and fundraising
  • 4.2 Part 2: Important programs
    • 4.2.1 Consolidate: Discover and keep new Australian users
    • 4.2.2 Consolidate: Organise and support "real life" events
    • 4.2.3 Consolidate: Identify and improve key Australian content
    • 4.2.4 Consolidate: Recognise contributions
    • 4.2.5 Consolidate: Take responsibility for Foundation resources in Australia
    • 4.2.6 Grow: Develop regional Australian outreach
    • 4.2.7 Grow: Digitise key Australian culture works
    • 4.2.8 Grow: Maintain GLAM momentum
    • 4.2.9 Grow: Support key Asia-Pacific language groups
    • 4.2.10 Grow: Outreach to universities
  • 4.3 Part 3: The future
    • 4.3.1 Future: Develop relationship with open government movement
    • 4.3.2 Future: Invest in local caching and archiving
    • 4.3.3 Future: Build Australian developer community