Embroidery and cheese

The signing of the Magna Carta on June 15, 1215 is seen as an iconic event in the history of civil rights and liberties. The British Library will open an exhibition next May to commemorate that document's 800th anniversary. As part of that exhibition, the Ruskin School of Art has commissioned artist Cornelia Parker to create Magna Carta (An Embroidery), a 13 meter long embroidered recreation of the entire Wikipedia article on the Magna Carta as it appeared this June on the document's 799th anniversary.

In a press release (November 27), Parker said:

The work will be created with the assistance of over 200 people, ranging from prisoners to MPs. The Guardian reports (November 27) that Jimmy Wales has agreed to participate in the stitching. The Wisbech Standard profiles (October 8) one of the embroiderers, Janet Payne of Whittlesey, a professional artist and representative of the Embroiderers' Guild. Payne is stitching an image of the signing of the Magna Carta from John Cassell's History of England. The image was removed from the article on November 5.

Wikimédia France launched a campaign on the crowdfunding website KissKissBankBank to raise thousands of Euros to create images of hundreds of kinds of cheese to illustrate Wikipedia articles. The WikiCheese campaign, spearheaded by User:Pyb, will gather Wikipedians on a monthly basis in Paris to take high quality photographs of ten cheeses from multiple angles and to sample them afterwards. Photographs of the first ten cheeses are already on Wikimedia Commons. The campaign has received significant news coverage, such as this article (November 25) from The Daily Telegraph, and already passed its initial goal of €5,000. The money is for photographic equipment, books to use as sources to improve cheese articles, and, of course, the cheese itself. The top goal of €9,500 promises WikiCheese will document 365 cheeses and produce a documentary about artisanal cheese production. The Wikimedia Foundation clarified (December 2) to Business Insider Australia that the WikiCheese campaign has no relationship to the Foundation or its regular fundraising drive.

• LiveScience reports (December 3) on research into gender bias on Wikipedia.
• Muscat Daily reports on the December 3 speech by Jimmy Wales at Sultan Qaboos University.
• artnet reports (December 3) that New York Times arts reporter Carol Vogel has taken a "voluntary buyout" and resigned from the newspaper. This summer, Vogel was accused of plagiarizing Wikipedia for a July installment of her regular "Inside Art" column (see previous Signpost coverage). Vogel, who was widely read in the art world, had been at the Times since 1983.
• In Boing Boing, student Nathan Ringo discusses (December 3) his efforts to circumvent internet filters at Wayzata High School which blocked numerous websites, including Wikipedia.
• insidethegames reports (November 30) on the collaboration, begun in 2011, between Wikimedia Australia and the Australian Paralympic Committee to improve articles on Australian Paralympic history and athletes, such as Kevin Coombs. The project has produced over 800 articles and it hopes to eventually include photos in every article on the subject.
• The New Statesman reports (November 27) that an anonymous British government employee is obsessively updating statistics on Wikipedia articles about Scottish football.
• The Washington Post discusses Wikipedia's "complicated relationship" (November 25) with net neutrality due to Wikipedia Zero. This echoes concerns raised by, among others, the Electronic Frontier Foundation earlier this year (see previous Signpost coverage).

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• This article from The Guardian as alleged here? By no means; it is from The Daily Telegraph, a paper so far to the right of The Guardian that you can see the curvature of the Earth between them. Fine papers both but neither would wish to be confused with the other, me judice. Tim riley talk 01:39, 7 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  Fixed. -- Daniel Mietchen (talk) 02:54, 7 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  Thank you for the fix. With a story like this, I'll generally have up to a dozen tabs open from different news outlets before I whittle it down to the key stories which actually provide original information and reporting. I had also consulted this Guardian story, which only has a couple of paragraphs at the end about the embroidery. Gamaliel (talk) 18:12, 8 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• Culture 24 also has the embroidery story. Some of us have recently been trying to improve the Magna Carta article (which is on the vital article list for society and social sciences), in the hope of getting it to GA (or even FA) before the anniversary in June 2015, as the current 150,000+ page views per month is likely to increase before then. Any help appreciated.— Rod ^talk 10:14, 7 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• It is a total coincidence, but within a few days of each other, all of these crowdsourcing projects went live:
  • WikiCheese sought funding on KissKissBankBank so that they could take pictures of cheese
  • User:TonyTheTiger sought funding on Kickstarter to fund a range of subjects, including the 2015 McDonalds All-American game
  • Commons:User:Ryan Hodnett sought funding on Kickstarter to fund his creation of mostly nature photography
  • Friends of Commons:User:Poco a poco sought funding on IndieGogo to replace stolen camera equipment

All of these projects independently, with no contact with each other or knowledge of the other projects, decided to present their crowd funding proposals in the same week. The first crowdfunded project was

• Commons:User:Evan-Amos sought funding on Kickstarter to create the Vanamo Online Game Museum

which was done years ago, and has produced excellent content. The WikiCheese project cited Evan-Amos' project as an inspiration. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:15, 8 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]