User:Wiki at Royal Society John/January 14 Report

January Report My role is on a one-day per week basis, so January involved 4 full days plus a shorter visit for the staff meeting, where I was briefly displayed to all 100+ staff. The Royal Society is planning complicated office refurbishments over April and May, so I won't be the only one with no regular desk!

In fact I spent far more time than that working at home, in particular pulling together customized presentations for the Royal Society staff. We had decided to offer training to the three most immediately relevant departments: the Library, Policy and Publications departments. The training took the form of a two-part presentation, with two sessions of 90 minutes each, a week or two apart. The first session was without laptops for the participants, and had a quick overview of Wikimedia and Wikipedia, followed by an "under the bonnet" section showing the different namespaces, page histories, and discussing how Wikipedia works in practice, with a look at links in from the Royal Society websites, and other issues of special relevance.

The second session was hands-on editing practice, concentrating on basic techniques using a list of articles with issues. Many thanks to User:Serendipitous (twice) and Jonathan Cardy (user:WereSpielChequers) who came in to help with the editing sessions. January was largely taken up with these sessions, and at the moment we are not planning further ones, though I would like to offer a version to other RS stakeholders/audiences in the future. If you are interested in my Powerpoint slides let me know.

Apart from that I had a series of meetings with several departments, planning what else we might accomplish in the 6 month period. I had already come in for a planning meeting in November, so we had the bones of an events plan already, including slots at various sorts of RS events already in the calendar - see the main page.

I can't announce many of the things we are hoping to do just yet, but I'm very positive about the project. One of the fascinating things about the RS is the very wide range of audiences or stakeholders they have, everybody from school students to Fellows of the RS and government. I'm especially keen to engage with their early and mid-career researcher audiences, and February events booked include two with Research fellows.

Timetable edit

  • January 8, Inductions (RS and WMUK), introductory meetings around RS departments
  • January 15, two presentations on Wikimedia to RS staff, library tour, planning meeting
  • January 22, two presentations on Wikimedia to RS staff
  • January 28, staff meeting, introduced to the whole staff
  • January 29, two presentations on Wikimedia to RS staff, the last for now, 3 internal meetings

New editors edit

From the 2nd sessions.

pm 22 jan Policy 1 edit

am 29 Jan Publishing and Library edit

pm 29 Jan Policy B edit