User:John Cummings

My work focussed on relationship building, finding shared goals between organisations and designing projects that benefitted all partners. This work involved developing proposals and running my own projects with UN agencies. I also supported many other Wikipedia staff to work with the UN through introductions, information, running events and using connections to navigate bureaucracy. I know many of the heads of publishing across the UN well.

I have planned most of the work Wikipedia has done with the UN, I’ve planned multi year projects with several UN agencies, convinced them to fund them and have written several formal partnership agreements. I came up with the idea of Wikipedian in Residence at UNESCO (the first Wikipedia position in an Intergovernmental Organisation) and found the funding to run the project for 6 years. My grant was the most Wikipedia community supported funding application of any project they have funded. I also wrote part of the Wikipedia 2030 strategy for partnerships.

I have a lot of experience working with large international communities to help them solve problems. I have written much of the user documentation for Wikidata (Wikipedia’s database) through research and working with experts to explain complicated concepts and solve structural issues. I’ve been a staff member for the youth leadership charity WYSE International for 10 years, a very large international network of young people who are working towards global goals. I have produced several communication campaigns, including social media campaigns with UN agencies.

I have written 100s of articles on a wide range of topics including developing ways to generate articles from data from reliable sources. I've written on topics including; Plants, environment, people, organisations, companies, products, animals, places and concepts.

My work in detail

During the first wave of COVID 94% of students worldwide had their schools and universities closed and in most countries governments were providing very little education even if students had internet access.
I worked on a project matching curricula around the world with educational resources available to reach the learning goals. I worked with the head of education for the Wikimedia Foundation to:

1. I facilitated all the introductions for the project to take place.

2. I wrote all of the original description of the concept.

3. I wrote the descriptions for how the technical aspects of the project would work in practice and did all the community organising and feedback to improve the process of adding the data:

• Wikidata:Requests for comment/How to model curricula and link them to educational resources? (written with Nav Evans)

• Wikidata:Requests for comment/Mapping and improving the data import process (written with Nav Evans)

• Requests for comment/Wikidata to use data schemas to standardise data structure on a subject (written with Nav Evans)

I created all the documentation, community consultation and technical work to allow open licence text from any source to be used on Wikipedia and understand how many times it was viewed. I also created a process to systematically scrape information from any blog or other large source of text and include that information in Wikipedia. Several UN agencies and others have used this work to add their knowledge to Wikipedia. Over 50% of these Wikipedia articles are the first result on Google Search and there was no drop in publication downloads meaning a new audience was created for the work.

1. UNESCO text added to over 300 Wikipedia articles,
   

   • Step 1: The original publication

   • Step 2: Copying the text into Wikipedia to reach a large audience

   • Step 3: The information from Wikipedia is also shared on Google, Siri, etc.

The UN produces 100,000s of images, many of which are unique. After I worked with several UN agencies to openly licence their content I was able to make the images available on Wikipedia so they could be used in articles. I did the technical work, set up all the metrics tools, uploaded all the initial content and worked with a developer to upload the bulk of the images.

• UNESCO: I’ve shared around 3000 images which appear on articles that have been read 550 million times in 6 years including 50 different language versions of Wikipedia.

• UN Food and Agriculture Organization I trained staff members to share graphics from publications which are seen around 10 million times per month on Wikipedia.

• WIPO: I shared images which are viewed 7.2 million times a year.

• WHO: I shared images which are viewed 6 million times a year.

• UN Women: I shared images which are viewed 1.2 million times a year.

I worked with several agencies to share their data on Wikidata, (Wikipedia’s database) including:

1. UNESCO

2. UN Environment Programme

3. WIPO

I wrote the central collaboration portal between the UN and Wikipedia. It was the first ‘Wikiproject’ to span multiple different sites, allowing a wider range of projects to be done.

The site serves two audiences:

1. UN staff: I provided information explaining Wikipedia and the kinds of work that can be done with it.

2. Wikipedia contributors: pages to help them find and use UN content on Wikipedia.

Myself and Dr Lucie Kaffee were contracted by ActionAid to create a stakeholder map, analysis report and recommendations for their community education website Reflection-Action. The research project examined how to organise their field knowledge online to better educate their staff to deliver their work.

• Workshop slides

• Final report

I’ve worked with senior staff in many UN agencies to design project plans for working with Wikipedia based on their goals. These plans were funded by the European Investment Bank, WIPO, UNDP South Africa, UNESCO and the UN Office for Human Rights to recruit staff to run projects. I helped design the job description and was on the interview panel for a number of them.

• An overall plan for work possible between Wikipedia and the UN.

• WIPO: Wikimedian in residence, Planned out a programme, and built prototypes,

• WHO: plan of collaboration

• FAO: project plan carried out by their staff

• UNEP: plan of collaboration

• UN Human Rights Office: project plan

• UN Women: project plan

• International Energy Agency: project plan

• Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter: job description, interview panel

I was one of 8 people in the Partnerships Working Group for the 2030 Wikimedia Strategy, many of our recommendations were taken forward into the final 10 recommendations, including the one I wrote the majority of, Identify Topics for Impact.

I’ve drafted formal partnership agreements with UNESCO and others. This formalises and provides stability in the relationship, so it doesn’t rely on individual staff interests. It also opens opportunities to attend conferences and at higher levels provides funding for projects.

• UNESCO and Wikimedia Foundation

• Wikimedia Sverige and UNESCO archives

• UNESCO staff loan agreement

I created the website for the youth leadership charity WYSE International. I collated all the materials and built the site, wrote much of the text and produced most of the photos. I worked with staff to fit the website into the long term strategy for the organisation including partnerships and fundraising.

I worked with UNESCO’s social media team to promote Wiki Loves Africa, Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Earth who create over 400,000 open licence images a year. The messages reached over 10 million people across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

I have successfully applied to the Wikimedia Foundation three times for 1 year grants for my work, the grant applications received the most community votes of any grant they have given. I also wrote part of the EU ‘Youth in Action’ funding application for WYSE International for 80,000 euros.

1. Wikimedia Foundation application 1
2. Wikimedia Foundation application 2
3. Wikimedia Foundation application 3
4. WYSE International application to EU Youth in Action programme

I have been a staff member on the WYSE International, International Leadership Programme 10 times, organising the programme and delivering sessions. This has given me access to a very large international community of young professionals working on projects related to the Sustainable Development Goals.

I’m a trained coach, I received a EMCC Coach Practitioner qualification from The Performance Coach. I have a lot of experience being a coach through the WYSE International, International Leadership Programme.

• Explanation of coaching and the qualification

I created Wiki Loves Earth Biosphere Reserves: A worldwide competition to photograph nature in Biosphere Reserves, it ran for two years and was promoted by UNESCO social media accounts. 6800 photographs were entered in total.

• Website screenshot (website no longer active)

• UNESCO webpage about the competition

A major barrier to Wiki Loves Earth is a lack of lists of sites people could photograph in each country. I worked with UNEP to make their data on protected areas available and write documentation so that now almost all countries in the world have a list of sites for WLE.

I created the worlds first ‘Wikipedia town’ a community project to write Wikipedia articles about as many things as possible in the town of Monmouth in Wales and connect the information to the physical places through QR codes.

The project was covered widely including the BBC, Guardian, The Verge, Telegraph, Engadget, ABC News, Wall Street Journal, Washington Times and TomoNews (Taiwan). It was also copied by many other towns and cities around the world.

I created much of the Wikidata documentation and processes for new users to help solve community problems by lowering barriers to entry including; guides for partner organisations, guides for basic tasks, guides for importing datasets, how to use data and how to keep it standardised.

I created a series of basic guides for potential partners organisations explaining what Wikidata is, the value of working with it

• Wikidata Data Donation (written with Nav Evans)

• Wikidata Open Data Publishing (written with Nav Evans)

I created much of the documentation for importing data from external sources to help improve the quality of data on Wikidata.

• Wikidata Import Hub (written with Nav Evans and Chris Schilling)

• Wikidata Data Import Guide (written with Nav Evans)

• Switched On: Working with experts to collate a worldwide database of sexuality topics

• Collating data sources of Icelandic women on Wikidata (written with Nav Evans)

I created much of the basic documentation for new users to expand the community, which is small and very technical meaning many decisions are taken without understanding a topic or being inclusive.

• Wikidata:Tours (written with Nav Evans)

• Wikidata:How to create Wikidata Tours (written with Nav Evans)

I worked with technical people to write simplified instructions for the most powerful features of Wikidata which were poorly documented.

• Wikidata in Wikimedia Projects (written with Nav Evans)

• Wikidata:Map data (with Simon Cobb and Nav Evans)

I wrote much of the documentation for keeping data standardised across Wikidata. When data is inconsistently structured it becomes very difficult to access the correct information.

• Wikidata Schemas (written with Nav Evans)

• Wikidata Schema proposals (written with Nav Evans)

• Wikidata Model Items (written with Nav Evans)

Blog posts communicating technical topics to a lay audience (I wrote all text for all blog posts listed)

• Mapping content gaps on Wikimedia

• Wizards, Muggles and Wikidata: The Room of Requirement for structured knowledge

• How Wikipedia’s women were made more visible on International Women’s Day.

• UNESCO and Wikimedia collaborate to promote built cultural heritage

• Looking back on World Book and Copyright Day

• Collaboration guide for Wikipedia contributors

• I designed the formatting and layout for this page

Guidance

• Using photos from Wikimedia Commons

• Wikipedia Sandbox Organiser: A planning tool for Wikipedia contributors to help keep their work organised.

• Technical guide for extracting graphics from publications and uploading them to Wikipedia.

• Photo competition essay template

• Page design and formatting

• Guide for creating 3D models for Wikipedia

• Flickr2Commons User Guide

• Extracting Graphics from Open License Publications