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Wikipedia en español supera el millón de artículos

Este 16 de mayo de 2013, la comunidad de Wikipedia en español anunció un nuevo récord de edición, cuando «La enciclopedia libre» superó la barrera del millón de artículos.

Wikipedia es la enciclopedia más grande, más actualizada y de más rápido crecimiento en todo el mundo, caracterizada por ser libre, multilingüe y escrita únicamente por voluntarios de todo el mundo, que trabajan en forma colaborativa. Actualmente cuenta con más de 25 millones de artículos en 271 idiomas. Solo Wikipedia en español recibe cerca de 2 millones de visitas por hora, y es la segunda versión de la enciclopedia con más usuarios: hoy cuenta con 16 590 usuarios activos. Es uno de los sitios más visitados de Internet, con lectores que van desde estudiantes y docentes, hasta periodistas, políticos, científicos, artistas y gente de la comunidad civil.

La tecnología wiki es lo que permite que sus artículos pueden ser modificados por cualquier persona mediante un navegador web. Sus contenidos están bajo la licencia libre Creative Commons Atribución-CompartirIgual 3.0, que posibilita a los usuarios copiar y modificar el trabajo de terceros, basándose en un principio conocido como copyleft. La base de datos, además, puede ser descargada gratuitamente. Pero el proyecto no se trata solamente de tomar la información necesaria. La enciclopedia funciona gracias a que millones de colaboradores dedican incontables horas de su tiempo libre a mejorar el contenido disponible en la web, desde corregir errores tipográficos, gramaticales y ortográficos, hasta extender artículos y crear nuevas entradas sobre personajes, lugares e hitos históricos desconocidos.

Es en este espíritu de colaboración que, a pocos días de cumplir 12 años, Wikipedia en español ha superado el hito del millón de artículos. No se trata solo de un millón de entradas diferentes, sino del trabajo conjunto de cientos de miles de personas en todo el mundo de habla hispana que, con su contribución individual, aportan a la creación de un proyecto colectivo que está en permanente actualización. Los editores provienen de diversos puntos del globo, de las más variadas profesiones, edades y culturas. Muchos de ellos ya no editan más, otros permanecen como colaboradores pero, invariablemente, todos dejan un poco de sí mismos como legado para la humanidad.

Wikipedia es fiel reflejo del dinamismo del saber y del mundo moderno, uno de los mayores logros de la sociedad del conocimiento. Es una enciclopedia viva.

Millars, Wikimedia España

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Muscovite Aliona Bogdanova’s path to editing Wikipedia came circuitously through her vegetarian diet, a diet, she said, that was at odds with the way most Russians view nutrition.

“When I was a child, I found out that where meat comes from. I decided that it’s not fair to kill animals to get meat,” she said. Her decision was not viewed favorably. “My family, they wouldn’t let me not eat meat because in Russia, people generally believe that it’s impossible not to eat meat and if you stop eating meat, you die!”

Aliona Bogdonova and her son

When she was 20, Bogdanova researched online how to create a proper vegetarian diet and became a vegetarian. She has, however, met resistance along the way, especially when she started her family.

“When I got pregnant, lots of people asked me questions, how can you possibly carry a child and not eat meat because you’re pregnant and you must eat meat?” said Bogdanova. “So I had a breastfeeding consultant who advised me to eat a little piece of meat at least once a week. I didn’t do it because I would, you know, poison myself.”

Bogdanova said she was able to find useful information in Russian about vegetarianism and animal rights on sites like Wikipedia, but, “there’s in general very little information about breastfeeding in Russia, and that has to do with the Soviet school stopping with how people have thought about this.”

Bogdanova has taken passionately to sharing what she’s learned about health and parenting with people seeking information on Russian Wikipedia.

“I wrote several articles about food, about vegetarianism. I edited some articles about parenting, natural parenting,” she said. “But I remember, my first big article is about marzipan because I’m a fan of marzipan. There was only a few words about it and maybe no article at all, and I just knew what I should write.”

To fill the time while at home during her pregnancy, Bogdanova took up soap making as a hobby. Before long it turned into a business. “When you make soap, eventually you end up making too much and eventually comes a point where…you can’t possibly use so much and you can’t find enough friends who you could give it as a gift,” she said. “I use Wikipedia as a research tool (it has so many useful links) and I share things that I learn from my business on Wikipedia, so that everyone can learn.”

Bogdanova is also translating a book about homeschooling, the Teenage Liberation Handbook, into Russian. It’s her first serious translation effort.

Natural curiosity and research drew her to Wikipedia years ago and she credits her upbringing with keeping her in the community of contributors.

“I can’t, you know, pass by something that I can improve,” she said. “Because I grew up in the family of teachers, I was raised on the idea that talking like an encyclopedia is an important scholarly work, and so when I wrote in Wikipedia, I had the sense that I had contributed to this.”

She added, “Once in a while, I find out that somebody has come across this article that I have created about homeschooling, for example, and then I am really proud.”

Profile by Donna Peterson, Communications Volunteer, Wikimedia Foundation

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The Spring 2013 semester was a busy one for Wikipedia projects at ITESM-Campus Ciudad de México in Mexico, building on the success of prior work and starting new activities.

Medical English class

Two classes of Medical English, an advanced-level English as a foreign language course for medical professionals, worked with Wikipedia in Spanish and English as well as Wikimedia Commons. The Commons project was first, with students uploading more than 60 photos related to their future professions, including photographs of hospitals, campus classrooms, and laboratory activities for their other courses. The next project was to translate medicine related articles from the English Wikipedia to the Spanish Wikipedia. Not only is this process a good way to introduce Wikipedia writing style, formatting and technological requirements, but it is also helpful to the Spanish Wikipedia, which has fewer medicine-related articles than the English version. Twenty four articles were translated including Artificial pancreas, Amaurosis Fugax, Binge drinking and Abdominal pregnancy. The final project was to create a new article or augment an existing article in English Wikipedia, preferably one with a topic related to Mexico. This effort resulted in 29 articles created or expanded including Dorsal nexus, Embryology of the heart, Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Médicas y Nutrición Salvador Zubirán, the Mexican Red Cross, and the History of smallpox in Mexico.

International Baccalaureate CAS

Students from the International Baccalaureate program at the high school level have now been working with Wikipedia for three semesters to fulfill hours needed for the CAS (Creativity, Action and Service) hours, working on various projects. Participating students for the this semester were Xibsuarz, MichiKiske17, Salcedo95, Piskysama4, Aerozt, and EdmundoGuadarrama.

They have continued to work on articles related to the ongoing project with the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, translating articles on artists such as Álvaro Zardoni as well as creating articles in English. Following their own interests, other articles were translated from English to Spanish, such as Incidente de la colina Flagstaff, Antojito (expanded), Cheonggyecheon, Laima, Abrahadabra (Thelema), Aeon (Thelema), Tsundere, and Fujiko F. Fujio. In addition to creating content on their own, students assisted with the judging of the Holy Week in Mexico photo contest and the descriptions and uploading of the donation of 2,100 images from ITESM campus archives into Wikimedia Commons (both detailed below).

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English

What happens when a WikiWoman meets a WikiLibrarian? An editathon on women’s biographies, of course! Or at least this is what happened on May 4th at Biblioteca Salaborsa, one of the most well-known libraries in Bologna, Italy.

Wikimedia Italia organized its first event at Biblioteca Salaborsa on April 20th, an introductory workshop led by wikipedian Piero Grandesso. Thanks to the work of the librarian and wikimedian Virginia Gentilini, it was possible to renew the collaboration and organize a second event.

We had thirteen participants, some of whom came after attending the first workshop. We created five new articles and improved two existing pages, paying homage in this way to seven amazing Italian women (and also a French one!) who didn’t have the space they deserved on Wikipedia.

It is always a little shocking to discover how many relevant women are missing from Wikipedia. Amongst the pages we created was one about Hortensia, a late Roman Republic orator and one of the very few women who at that time challenged men’s authority by giving a speech in the Forum. She lived during the civil war that took place after Julius Caesar’s assasination, a period when the Roman Republic was struggling with many war expenses. Hortensia debated in the Roman Forum against a tax imposed on wealthy Roman women, arguing that it was not legitimate to demand that women’s properties finance a war in which they had no active role. Eventually the number of women affected by the tax was reduced.

As one can imagine, we study a lot of Ancient Roman history in Italy. Latin literature and language are also compulsory teachings in some secondary schools. But Hortensia’s page, already in other language versions, was not yet on Italian Wikipedia.

Beside the creation of content on Wikipedia, the editathon was also an occasion to put together and share the different skills and competencies of the organizers. The team was composed of Virginia Gentilini, Wikimedia Italia member Ginevra Sanvitale and Commons and Italian Wikipedia sysop Elitre, who worked together, each one according to her area of expertise. We also had a chance to learn and confront a number of related Wikimedia topics.

Finally, the role played by Salaborsa as a center of cultural creation and knowledge circulation was very important.

In 2012, Wikimedia Italia reached out to Italian librarians and libraries for the first time, discovering many possible ways of collaboration. Wikipedia workshops for patrons of libraries are one of these, and they are particularly interesting because of their cultural and social implications. Working on Wikipedia in libraries can bridge the gap between print, traditional resources of information and the lively and active community of Wikipedians. But it can contribute to bridge the Wikipedia Gender Gap too: public libraries in Italy are traditionally used by women more than men, and they can therefore be a perfect place to find women interested in connecting their love of reading to a more participative and empowering way to enrich their cultural life. More women attended the editathon indeed, showing enthusiam and asking for further opportunities to work in this direction.

Librarians in Italy are traditionally mostly women too. It will be interesting to see how many successful ways of collaboration we’ll manage to find, both working directly with patrons inside the libraries, and at a more general level of interaction between bibliographic data held by National Libraries and Wiki Projects. There is such a large amount of useful work to do!

Ginevra Sanvitale, Wikimedia Italia. With the collaboration of Virginia Gentilini
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So, what has the Swedish education programme been up to since its founding in October last year? What’s been going on past these around 180 days? Well, let us look at some of the things that has been going on!

But hey, perhaps we should initially look at the overarching aim of an education programme in Sweden. The overall goal is to have Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia projects) accepted as learning tools among teachers at various educational levels in Sweden.

Employment

On 1 October, Sophie Österberg was employed as Education manager as to initiate and lead the education programme in Sweden. Then, the world’s first Wikipedian in Academy was employed the spring of 2013 by a Swedish University, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. We’ve recently spoken to another university here in Sweden who is quite interested in the idea of employing a Wikipedian. So we might see another Wikipedian in Academy this autumn.

Funding

The education programme managed to get funding for a quarter of the manager’s salary from an internet fund for a specific educational project. The project is a collaboration with an educational institution where we offer Wikipedia training to teachers of immigrants who are learning Swedish. When they’re on a more advanced level, a possibility is to translate a Swedish Wikipedia article about something typically Swedish and hence learn about a historical person or phenomenon, and writing this article in their native language on their Wikipedia language version. So far we’ve found, and had to meet-ups with the interested teachers who will engage their students in this the coming fall. Look at the list of examples of what to write about which is arguably typically Swedish. (What might a list look like on your language version? What are typical German, British, Spanish, Arabic articles?)

Invitations (at least a few of them)

The education programme has kindly and generously been invited to various events around in Sweden, mostly in Stockholm and Gothenburg, our two largest cities. We’ve been talking at large conferences, exhibiting the education programme at various events, held seminars and co-hosted teachers evenings and various workshops. At the Internet days here in Sweden we participated in a panel discussion regarding digital resources in education. At SETT (yes, it’s like BETT and is the Swedish version of it) we held lectures on both the days of the huge exhibition. We were also invited to have a seat at the jury for a well-established school competition in April. These are a few of the events we’ve been invited to, and the invitations keep on coming! (It must be due to the amazingly gorgeous t-shirts!)

Collaborations

The education programme is supporting a network of teachers in Sweden who are using the flipped-classroom idea. There has been a lack of a good place to store these movies so Commons seemed as a rather splendid alternative. The dialogue was initiated between the education manager and one of the most engaged flipped-classroom teachers in Sweden, Karin Brånebäck, in the end of March, and the first movie is now up after a page has been created for this purpose on Commons.

Moreover, the Swedish Educational broadcasting radio (which also does TV) has had its largest ever TV production aiming at immigrants learning Swedish and the teachers engaged in their education. Through the Wikipedia education programme, a part of the production is to have teachers share their experiences, knowledge and ways to teach Swedish via Wikiversity which is promoted by the Swedish Educational broadcasting radio. They will also create a short movie about Wikiversity and how one may contribute to the project.

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(Lee la versión en español aquí)

When Melisa Parisi began contributing to Wikimedia in 2007, she was only 15. Parisi, a native Argentinean, started by translating articles about the long-running cartoon The Simpsons from English Wikipedia to Spanish Wikipedia.

Melisa Parisi

Her first article was deleted because it didn’t have the correct formatting. That setback didn’t deter Parisi, however, and with the assistance of an even younger Wikipedia editor, she learned the the ins and outs of editing guidelines. “He helped me a lot, I was ready to quit when a sysop deleted my first article, I wanted to quit because it was so frustrating,” said Parisi. “Thanks to his help, I kept going.”

Once she got her footing, she began writing articles about American TV shows. With The Simpsons, she translated roughly 300 articles from English to Spanish, covering the many characters and episodes. “I was interested [in writing about The Simpsons] because we didn’t have a lot of articles about this program,” she said. “There were in the English Wikipedia but not in the Spanish, so I decided to bring them all, and I did — I brought absolutely everything to Spanish Wikipedia.”

As of 2012, she’s written more than 800 articles — including 40 Featured articles — and has made more than 27,000 edits. All that experience has helped her improve her writing and language skills. “Wikipedia helped me a lot because I learned how to write better,” she said. “It helps me in my professional career.”

Being a Wikipedia contributor even helped Parisi get a job. Since she didn’t have any professional experience at the time, she added that she edits Wikipedia to her resume and said that got her the gig. She’s now a professional text editor and translator, and is also pursuing a career as a flight attendant.

After years of contributing her own time and skills, Parisi hopes more young people will also contribute to Wikipedia. To encourage others in her community, she has taught classrooms full of students how to get started editing Wikipedia. With any luck, she’ll create a new generation of editors and contributors for Spanish Wikipedia and beyond.

Parisi is the first to tell anyone that all that’s required to contribute to Wikipedia is the desire to do so. You don’t need to be a genius or an expert on a topic, she said, you just need to have the drive to make a contribution. It helps if you love what you write about, but even the smallest changes in an existing article can make a difference.

“I realized that many people do not participate in Wikipedia because they don’t know they are able to do useful contributions,” she said. “By correcting a comma, an accent or a misspelled word you are improving an article and helping the reader who will consult it.”

Sarah Mitroff, Communications Volunteer, Wikimedia Foundation

(This is a guest post by Carol Ann O’Hare of the French Wikimedia chapter.)

Wikimedia France is pleased to announce the first winner of the Wikimedia France Research Award:

Pete Forsyth, an early designer of the Wikipedia Education Program, is now teaching a free online course on Wikipedia and Open Educational Resources, along with Wikipedian and education researcher Sara Frank Bristow. The six-week course, “Writing Wikipedia Articles,” recently concluded its first run, and will be offered again starting 14 May (Americas)/15 May (Asia/Australia). You can enroll here.

The course was born of Communicate OER, a project that seeks to activate the Open Educational Resources community to improve and update Wikipedia articles relevant to its field. Accordingly, as students learn about the technical and social aspects of Wikipiedia, they are encouraged to improve such articles as open educational resources, open content, MOOC, and free license. Students successfully completing the course earn the WikiSOO Burba Badge, which is based on English Wikipedia’s “service awards” and Peer to Peer University’s badges. The course is offered through the Peer to Peer University’s recently launched School of Open.

“This course has allowed us to bring together several communities that are passionate about the same things, but not always closely connected,” Forsyth said. “The OER community brings the values and practices that brought Wikipedia into existence to formal and informal learning around the world. The School of Open provides the perfect environment for a course like ours, allowing us to work alongside colleagues from free culture organizations like Creative Commons and Mozilla.”

Students are welcome to enroll regardless of their background; while some familiarity with wikis or OER can be helpful, it is not required.

“The WikiSOO course is exactly the kind of work serious Wikipedians need to be doing not only to make their encyclopedia better, but to make their community a more sane place to collaborate,” said Christine, a student who earned the WikiSOO Burba Badge in the course’s first run. “This course provides a solid primer of the skills needed to navigate the syntax, discourse, and guidelines you will encounter if you want to make substantive contributions to Wikipedia’s audacious mission.”

Enrollment in the course’s second run is open through next week. (The first class will be held Tuesday/Wednesday.) See the course’s page on the School of Open for more information, or to join the 60 students who have already enrolled!

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

Over the next couple of years, the Wikimedia Foundation will be building capacity among program leaders around evaluation and program design. A better understanding of how to increase impact through better planning, execution and evaluation of programs and activities will help us to move a step closer to achieving our mission of offering a free, high quality encyclopedia to our readers around the world.

With this in mind, we are pleased to announce the first Program Evaluation and Design Workshop, on 22-23 June 2013 in Budapest, Hungary.

We have only 20 slots available for this workshop and the application deadline ends on May 17th. This two-day event will be followed by a pre-conference workshop at Wikimania 2013. Ideally, applicants would commit to attending both events.

The first Program Evaluation & Design workshop will be held in the shadows of the Buda Castle, Budapest, Hungary

Our long-term goals for the workshop are:

• Participants will gain a basic shared understanding of program evaluation
• Participants will work collaboratively to map and prioritize measurable outcomes, beginning with a focus on the most common programs and activities
• Participants will gain increased fluency in common language of evaluation (i.e. goals versus objectives, inputs and outputs versus outcomes and impact)
• Participants will learn and practice how to extract and report data using the UserMetrics API
• Participants will commit to working as a community of evaluation leaders who will implement evaluation strategies in their programs and activities and report back at the pre-conference workshop at Wikimania 2013
• …and participants will have a lot of fun and enjoy networking with other program leaders!

We will publish a detailed agenda for the event in Budapest soon on Meta-Wiki.

During the workshop in Budapest, we will only have a limited amount of time. Therefore, we will be focusing on the some of the more common programs and activities:

• Wikipedia editing workshops where participants learn how to or actively edit (i.e. edit-a-thon, wikiparty, hands-on Wikipedia workshop)
• Content donations through partnerships with galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) and related organizations
• Wiki Takes/Expeditions where volunteers participate in day-long or weekend events to photograph site specific content
• Wiki Loves Monuments, which takes place in September
• Education program and classroom editing where volunteers support educators who have students editing Wikipedia in the classroom
• Writing competitions, which generally take place online in the form of contests, the WikiCup  and other challenges – often engaging experienced editors to improve content.

Contributors who play an active role in planning and executing programs and activities as described above in the Wikimedia community are highly encouraged to apply. Your experience and knowledge will make this workshop a success!

Hotels, flights and other transportation costs will be the responsibility of your chapter; the Wikimedia Foundation will provide the venue, handouts, breakfasts, light lunches, and a dinner for all participants on Saturday. If you’re not affiliated with a chapter and cannot afford to attend the event, please email me after you apply – we have a small amount of money set aside for those cases.

Remember, applications are open until May 17. You can apply via this Google Form.

Thanks for your interest, and I look forward to a great group of participants!

Sarah Stierch, Program Evaluation and Design Community Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

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(This is a guest post by Wikisource volunteers Andrea Zanni and David Cuenca)

English

There was an Indian librarian who once wrote five laws on what libraries should be. The fifth and last law read: “A library is a growing organism.“ Wikisource is a wiki digital library that doesn’t grow by itself. Volunteers like you, like us, make it grow everyday, digitizing books from the public domain, proofreading OCR text and recently also transcribing sheet music.

Almost 10 years have passed since Wikisource started, on November 24, 2003. It began as a support project for Wikipedia. While we cannot tell you what dreams are made of, we know that the Wikipedia dream is nurtured by many of the sources, books and first-hand knowledge that populate Wikisource.

Wikisource users Andrea (Aubrey) and David (Micru) were recently named recipients of a Wikimedia Foundation Individual Engangement Grant, and we intend to periodically keep you updated about the progress of our work. We are sharing the progress we have made during the month of April and we invite you to participate defining the Wikisource vision for the future with us.

During the first month of work for the grant, we have been focusing on writing the first draft of the Wikisource values and ways of applying them. The suggestions are based on a Wikimania meeting last year, on our experience with the wiki, and on volunteer wishes. If you expect more of Wikisource, help us expand our list and comment on the suggestions.

That is not only a “wishlist,” but a list of specific proposals that can be transformed into action. As part of this commitment, we are giving support and formally endorsing the GSoC^[1] proposal: Book upload customisation (candidate 1, candidate 2). The reason for this endorsement is the high importance that such a project could have for the Wikisource community, enabling users to import external book metadata and spread it to the relevant pages to avoid redundant work.

There are three other candidates that are additionally applying for the Outreach Program for Women with proposals that, if accepted, will also be of paramount importance:

• Refactor proofread extension: to integrate the Visual Editor into Wikisource.
• Improve support for book structures: a long expected and needed feature.
• Prototype inline citations: combining the wonderful OKFN Annotator with Mediawiki.

We expect that once we have reached an agreement on what the other important tasks for Wikisource’s future are, we can keep offering more volunteer projects.

Another task we are tackling is the relationship with external organizations. It is useless to have an amazing digital library if it is not well connected with other libraries, websites, users and the world. It will take time to develop partnerships with other related organizations, like the Open Library, or free knowledge organizations, such as the Open Knowledge Foundation. We have started developing these connections and exploring possible ways of collaboration.

And finally there is Wikidata, a new member of the Wikimedia family that will also be a key for resolving one of Wikisource’s long standing issues: book metadata management. As a first stage of this ongoing work, we have started the Wikidata books task force to define the necessary properties for having reusable data about books in Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia and Wikisource.

In May, we are looking forward to interviewing core users from the different language Wikisources. Special thanks to Haitham for his aid in visualizing the activity data in Gephi.

If you have any suggestions, requests or feedback, please reach out either via email or our talk pages. All Wikimedia users are invited to join and build a better Wikisource together. It’s your call too.

Andrea Zanni and David Cuenca, Wikisource

Note

1. ↑ Google Summer of Code 2013: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2013

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