Pigsonthewing
— Wikimedian  —
Collecting my "Honourable Mention" award, Wikimania, August 2014. The Mac is not mine!
Collecting my "Honourable Mention" award, Wikimania, August 2014. The Mac is not mine!
Name
Andy Mabbett
 FRSA
Born
Country England
Current locationBirmingham
Time zoneUTC
Contact info
Websitepigsonthewing.org.uk
SkypeAsk!
Facebookpigsonthewing
Flickrpigsonthewinguk
LinkedInpigsonthewing
Twitterpigsonthewing
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Account statistics
First edit16 October 2003
Edit count> 256,000 (Userviews)
PermissionsAC, AP, IP, Rv, Ro, TE
This user has been editing Wikipedia for more than twenty years.

It's important to realise that our mission is not to make a website, but to share knowledge, freely available for reuse.

— Posted by me as @WeAreWikipedia, retweeted by Jimmy Wales; quoted at Wikimania 2014 by Bill Thompson.

I am Wikimedian in Residence (pro bono) at ORCID.

I have previously been Wikimedian (or Wikipedian) in Residence at Coventry University, TED, the Royal Society of Chemistry, at The Physiological Society, and at the History of Modern Biomedicine Research Group; and at Thinktank, Birmingham, at Queen Street Mill, at The New Art Gallery Walsall, at Staffordshire Archives and Heritage Service, and to ARKive (titled "Wikipedia Outreach Ambassador").

I have also set up and run backstage pass/ editathon events at the Black Country Living Museum, the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, Ikon Gallery, the Institution of Civil Engineers, University of Leicester (with the Attenborough Arts Centre) and the West Midlands Police Museum. While in Washington for Wikimania 2012, I met with senior staff at the Smithsonian's National Zoo and gave an address to staff of the National Gallery of Art and Smithsonian Institution.

In January 2013, I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts "for your work on open data, Wikipedia and social media".

I gave three presentations at Wikimania 2014, in London, where I also received an "Honourable Mention" in Wikimedia UK's annual awards. I gave two more at Wikimania 2016. Also in 2016, I undertook a four-week tour of Australia, and Indonesia, giving talks about Wikidata, and Wikipedia's GLAM collaborations in 2016 and a second four-week tour of Australia, in 2018. I taught a course on Wikipedia at the Polytechnic University of Milan, in 2016, 2018 and 2019. I delivered the same course online in 2020 (twice), 2021 and 2022.

I have attended the following international Wikimedia events:

At these events, I variously spoke about GLAM collaboration and my work as a Wikimedian in Residence; and enjoyed meeting many on-line collaborators and making new friends.

Elsewhere, I spoke and mentored at Wiki Academy Kosovo, 22-24 February 2013. I attended the ORCID Outreach Meeting and Codefest in Chicago on 21-22 May 2014 and ORCID/CASRAI conference in Barcelona on 18-19 May 2015; in part to speak about the use of ORCID in Wikipedia & Wikidata. I also spoke about authority control in Wikipedia and and its sister projects at the World Digital Library's Arab Peninsula Regional Group conference in Qatar in May 2015. On behalf of the Royal Society of Chemistry, I gave talks about Wikipedia to chemists around the UK, and at the University of Tunis El Manar, Tunisia, and to a Delegates' Assembly of the European Young Chemists' Network in Berlin. I was compère at OpenStreetMap's State of the Map 2013 in Birmingham, and spoke (about Wikidata and more) at State of the Map US 2015. I gave a guest lecture at Üsküdar University in Istanbul to mark Wikidata's 6th Birthday.

Among other things, I introduced Wikipedia's microformats (and have deployed them on sister projects including Wikimedia Commons, Wikivoyage, Wikiquote, Wikinews, Wikibooks and Wikisource; as well as the OpenStreetMap wiki), conceived {{Coord}} for our coordinates, and liaised with Google to have that template used for the Wikipedia layer on their maps. I also conceived {{URL}}, {{Start date}} and {{End date}} to emit metadata; and {{Flatlist}} and {{Plainlist}} to make our lists more accessible and HTML-standards compliant. I am accredited as a trainer by Wikimedia-UK, in all three of the available categories. I instigated the voice intro project, which asks article subjects to record a sample of their spoken voice, so that Wikipedia readers may know what they sound like, and how they pronounce their names. As part of that project, I worked with the BBC, to run a related project, uploading audio extracts from radio programmes, under an open licence; and worked with the ESA to have the first ever content made specifically for Wikipedia in space. I'm also one of the people behind QRpedia. I sometimes write about Wikipedia on my own blog and for other publications.

Why do I do all this? I couldn't put it better than Wilfred T. Grenfell:

Real joy comes not from ease or riches or from the praise of men but from doing something worthwhile.

Pigsonthewing is my unified login for all public Wikimedia projects. I am an administrator on Wikispecies. I maintain alternative accounts, User:PigsOTWing and User:PigsotWing, with default settings, which I use for testing, training and demonstration purposes. I created User:Red link example for documentation and testing purposes, but it is not used for editing. I have separate user pages at:

as well as soft redirects on various other Wikipedias. Oh, and I have permission from TBL to use the web whenever I like.

A shortcut for this page is https://w.wiki/QP - alternatively, http://enwp.org/User:PotW

Declaration of Interests

Interests

I aim to make all my edits in compliance with Wikimedia Foundation policies.

  • I acknowledge that my affiliations may create a perceived or actual conflict of interest in my Wiki contributions.
  • I commit to transparently declare my affiliations in relevant discussions and when making contributions that could potentially be influenced by them.
  • I will refrain from editing content where my contributions could be seen as leading to a direct conflict of interest, and I will instead propose changes on talk or discussion pages or through other appropriate Wikipedia channels [gnoming, the reversion of vandalism, and other permitted non-controversial edits notwithstanding].
  • My primary goal in contributing to the Wikimedia movement is to share knowledge and resources that are relevant and beneficial to the Wikimedia movement's mission of providing free, reliable, and neutral information.
  • I will always strive to strictly abide by the accepted practices on conflicts of interest, neutrality, verifiability, notability and no original research.

Accordingly, I declare that:

  • I am pro bono Wikipedian in Residence at ORCID
  • I sit, pro bono, on the BHL-Wiki working group
  • I occasionally edit or make edit-requests on behalf of freelance clients. In all such cases a talk page declaration is made. Examples include, but may not be limited to: Edge Hill University, Human Appeal, Opera Gallery, Raspberry Pi Foundation
  • I was Wikimedian in Residence at Coventry University, June 2019-May 2021
  • I was Wikimedian in Residence at The Physiological Society
  • I was Wikimedian in Residence at The History of Modern Biomedicine Research Group
  • I was a Wikipedian in Residence at TED in 2016
  • I have occasionally worked for the BBC, either directly, or via one of their suppliers
  • I was Wikimedian in Residence at the Royal Society of Chemistry, Sept 2014-Sept 2015.
  • I was Wikipedian in Residence at Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum in 2015.
  • I was the Wikipedian in Residence at Queen Street Textile Mill Museum, Burnley, in 2013 & 2014.
  • I was also the Wikipedian in Residence at The New Art Gallery Walsall, April-June 2013.
  • In 2012, I was Wikipedian in Residence at Staffordshire Archives and Heritage Service, which manages:
  • I was Wikipedia Outreach Ambassador (effectively a Wikipedian in Residence) to Wildscreen, working on their ARKive project, in the summer of 2011
  • I have worked with the West Midlands Police Museum, Institution of Civil Engineers, Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, Mitchell Arts Centre, Black Country Living Museum, Ikon Gallery and Polytechnic University of Milan in Wikipedian-in-Residence style roles.
  • My paid work includes delivering advice and workshops on and training in the use of Wikipedia and sister projects, for example [1]; [2].
  • I maintain other, legitimate, accounts:
    • User:PigsOTWing, with default settings, used for testing and training purposes
    • User:PigsotWing, with default settings and visual editor, used for testing and training purposes
    • User:PotW, defending a common abbreviation of my user name; may be used for testing
    • User:pigsonthewing-bot, a bot account, so far used only for training (and on Wikidata, where it has bot approval)
    • User:AndyMabbett, used briefly on other projects
  • I have "accountcreator" rights on this wiki, and sometimes create accounts for people I train, and others
  • I was an OTRS operator
  • I am a member of Wikimedia-UK and a past member of Wikimedia-AU
  • I am part of the QRpedia team
  • I am accredited by Wikimedia-UK as a trainer
    • Occasionally, when delivering training, I make small edits from the account of a trainee. For example, to fix quickly things that they have broken, or to show them how to do something, at their request.
  • I have attended Wikimedia-related events with funding (travel, accommodation, expenses) from Wikimedia-AU, Wikimedia-DE, Wikimedia-ID, Wikimedia-PL, Wikimedia-TN, Wikimedia-UK, WikiCite, and the Wikimedia-CEE group, in line with their published expenses polices.
  • I am a contributor to technical standards:
    • RFC 6350, (ISSN 2070-1721), the vcard 4.0 specification
    • Extended Date/Time Format Specification
    • the hAudio microformat [3]
  • I am the author of books and articles on Pink Floyd
    • I (and others) sometimes cite them as references
    • In that context, I am also mentioned in Wikipedia articles including The Amazing Pudding and Barry Miles
  • I volunteered at and ran social media surgeries
  • I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
  • I was a trustee of the West Midland Bird Club, registered as a charity in England (resigned May 2014)
  • I am a former member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation
  • I enjoy use of the Wikipedia Library accounts

If you have concerns about any of my edits, in the light of the above or otherwise, please let me know on my talk page, or by e-mail if you prefer to preserve your privacy.

These are all me:

  I'm a member of Wikimedia UK
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