Mike Peel

A volunteer editor since 2005, Mike Peel has been involved in many facets of the Wikimedia movement. He is an administrator on Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and the English Wikipedia. He co-founded Wikimedia UK and served as a trustee there for five years. He is also a member of Wiki Movimento Brasil and Wikimedia España. He served on the Wikimedia Foundation’s Funds Dissemination Committee for four years, and for the last year he was a member of a Northern and Western Europe Regional Grants Committee.

Mike earned his PhD in radio astronomy at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics in England before relocating to the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil in 2016 to work on a new telescope, BINGO. His work then landed him at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in the Canary Islands, where he took part in the GroundBIRD and QUIJOTE experiments. Throughout his global professional experience, Mike has regularly worked with scientists and students from all backgrounds. He has supported multilingual knowledge creation through Wikidata, where he developed the multilingual Wikidata infobox that is now used in over four million Commons categories. Mike hopes to bring these perspectives to his work as a trustee to help Wikimedia grow in regions where it has historically been undersupported.

Mike’s first committee assignments will be as a member of the Community Affairs Committee and an alternate to the Audit and Product & Technology Committees.