User:Pigsonthewing

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
Birmingham
Country England
Current locationBirmingham
Time zoneUTC
Contact info
Websitepigsonthewing.org.uk
SkypeAsk!
Facebookpigsonthewing
Flickrpigsonthewinguk
LinkedInpigsonthewing
Twitterpigsonthewing
YouTubepigsonthewinguk
Account statistics
First edit16 October 2003
Edit count> 256,000 (Userviews)
PermissionsAC, AP, IP, Rv, Ro, TE
My voice
A recording made in February 2013, for the Voice intro project which I founded.
This user has been editing Wikipedia for more than twenty years.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Andy Mabbett.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Works by Andy Mabbett.

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 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