You may remember that last year, to close the Wikimedia annual fundraiser, Foundation staff and volunteers worked together to create the Wikipedia Contribution Campaign– a two-week long initiative to encourage people all over the world to become new editors.  Throughout the past few months, volunteers have continued to work together, creating the Wikipedia Contribution Team, to continue to drive the good work being done. Since January 2011, the Contribution Team has grown from 10 participants to 40, recently taking on projects such as the Backlog Drive – a project focused, six-week project to reduce the backlogs on Wikipedia, as well as in-person outreach to help encourage people to become new editors.

Supported by the Wikimedia UK chapter, the Wikipedia Contribution Team has planned a number of great events throughout the UK to support outreach and encourage people to join the Wikimedia movement. Throughout the next few months, the Team will support Wikipedia education and editor recruitment at several UK colleges and universities, including the Imperial College of London, University of Sheffield and University of Leeds.

No matter where you are in the world or how you like to work (online or IRL) there are a number of ways you can get involved to help educate people everywhere about the importance of working as a Wikimedia volunteer and how to encourage others to join!

If you’d like to join the Contribution Team, it’s as simple as signing up.

Good luck to everyone involved; we look forward to hearing more about
your successes!

Moka Pantages, Communications

Jorge Sierra ([[User:Lucien leGrey]]), Chapter President, Wikimedia España.

Congratulations to Ukrainian Wikipedia on reaching 250,000 articles! The milestone article was officially created on Tuesday, December 21 at 8:45pm, Kyiv Time by user Anatoliy-024.  Anatoily-024, a Wikipedian since 2008, has created 206 articles and made 6,000 edits to the Ukranian Wikipedia making this user the 110^th most active contributor to this language Wikipedia.

Since it started in 2004, Ukranian Wikipedia has grown at a steady rate, adding 50,000 articles in just the last nine months, making it the sixteenth largest language Wikipedia.  This year, the Ukrainian encyclopedia experienced a 64 percent increase in page views– 860,000 people have viewed 30 million articles in December alone.

The wonderful thing about this accomplishment is that each bit of information found on Wikipedia has been included by volunteers– everyday people committed to sharing free information with others.  Although Wikipedia is available in over 270 languages, only 35 language Wikipedias have reached the 100,000 article milestone.  It’s important that more people join the movement and contribute to this valuable, public resource.

We thank all the volunteers who helped Ukranian Wikipedia advance this far.  We hope that others will take the time to join them!

Moka Pantages

Communications

Each year, the Wikimedia Foundation conducts a grant making process to support the work of chapters around the world. We are happy to announce that 15 grants for ten different chapters have been awarded for the 2010-2011 fiscal year thus far. The Wikimedia Foundation is excited to help launch all of these great projects and we encourage other chapters (and organized groups of volunteers) to consider grant request as we have additional funds available.

We’d like to spotlight a grant from 2009/10 as an example of the work that chapters are doing. The Indonesian chapter ran a project Bebaskan Pengetahuan 2010 (Free Your Knowledge 2010) during 2009/10. The grant aimed to enrich the informational content of the Bahasa Indonesian language Wikipedia with the goal of increasing active contributions.

The highly anticipated competition included 10 universities on the island of Java, each appointing nine students to compete and one professor to evaluate the writing results for the largest quantity and highest quality of articles produced in the Bahasa Indonesian language. The top-five student winners received a laptop computer and free operating system. The grand-prize winner was awarded a trip to the 2010 Wikimania in Gdansk, Poland this past July.

While it is hard to directly attribute the impact of the project to the overall project growth, it is worth noting that the Bahasa Indonesia Wikipedia article count grew by over 20% to 130,000 articles between August 2009 and July 2010. In addition, page views on Indonesian Wikipedia grew by 100% in that time period – the fastest growing Wikipedia in the world.

The 2010/11 grants have been provided by the Wikimedia Foundation to further the growth of new chapters in the areas of Organizational Development, Digital Technology and Outreach Activities. This year will see chapter start-ups and kick-offs in Hong Kong, Estonia, Ukraine, the Philippines and in New York City. As a result of these grants, chapters will be able to register and host their own websites, secure government permits and non-profit status as well as pay necessary legal fees.

Organizational development is an important aspect in expanding individual chapters. Several Foundation grants have been given for materials such as laptop computers, projectors, and video equipment. This year, the Netherlands have been granted a forgiveness grant from their participation in 2009/10 fundraiser revenue sharing. These funds will be allocated towards sustainable organizational development and outreach activities.

Digital technology grants have been given to the Hungary chapter for a Free License Photo Competition, encouraging the photographer community to place their work under Free License for the Wikimedia Commons project. The Czech Republic followed up their successful photo project in 2009/10 and will continue their efforts to expand the site’s documentation of regional costumes and traditions and vernacular architectural landmarks project.

Outreach activities are an integral part of chapter work on behalf of the movement. Internship programs, Wikimedia conferences and academies, and educational programs in schools and universities are all a part of this program. New York City is setting a worldwide precedent by holding the first annual Wikipedia Day NYC 2011. In conjunction with several 10th Anniversary celebrations to commemorate a decade of Wikipedia, funds will go to logistics preparation and conference supplies for participants.

Sharing in Outreach Activities, Wikimedia Switzerland will be embarking on a three-year project to invite senior citizens into the world of Wikipedia editing. By fostering the life experience and collective knowledge of seniors, the Third Age Online (TAO) program will be used to bridge age and cultural gaps in the community. Likewise, our Hong Kong chapter will be working with a new mandatory liberal studies program in high schools, encouraging students to use and contribute to Wikipedia Hong Kong.

The grant process is open to all chapters and volunteer groups officially recognized by the Wikimedia Foundation. Proposals must be aligned with the Foundation’s shared mission statement and the core values that drive the Wikimedia project. Each of these project grants has been assessed by the Foundation for relevance based on the needs of individual chapters and the diffusion of Wikimedia language sites and Wikimedia projects worldwide. Once grants are approved, chapters are subject to reporting requirements that are then made available to the general public to enable knowledge sharing.

This year alone, the Wikimedia Foundation has awarded $82,000 in grants to international chapters and $115,000 in forgiveness funding for fundraiser revenue sharing. The Foundation is pleased to announce the availability of additional funds for the 2010/2011 fiscal year. We encourage all chapters to apply. For more information on our grant process please visit: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Index

Barry Newstead

Chief Global Development Officer

Next Sunday, 20 Israeli students will leave for humanitarian work in Africa, equipped with portable offline Wikipedia thanks to a coordinated effort between Wikimedias from Israel, Switzerland and France.

Every year, the Africa Center at BGU, headed by Dr. Tamar Golan, sends a group of students on a three-month humanitarian expedition to developing countries in Africa. This year’s group is going to the Republic of Benin and the Republic of Cameroon.

To help, Wikimedia Israel decided to equip the students with computers running free software and containing an offline (static) version of the French Wikipedia, so that the students can bring free knowledge to Africans without access to the Internet. The students also have portable installations of the offline Wikipedia, so that they may install it on any other computers they may run across in Africa

We reached out to Hamakor, the Israeli Free and Open Source Software NGO, and Hamakor helped obtain computer donations, refurbished them and installed the Linux operating system on them.

Wikimedia Israel collaborated with members of Wikimedia Switzerland and Wikimedia France to produce an up-to-date static version of the French Wikipedia (numbering about 1 million entries, and including images), French being a major language of reading and writing in Cameroon and Benin.

Incidentally, the Linux version installed on those computers is called Ubuntu Linux, ‘Ubuntu’ being an African word (in the Zulu language) roughly translated as “unity of mankind” or “mutual reliance”.

We are very excited about this project that continues the Wikimedia Movement mission of supporting and promoting the distribution of free knowledge to everyone in the world.  We can’t wait to hear an update from the students next month.

Itzik Edri

Spokesman, Wikimedia Israel

Today, the National Archive of the Netherlands and Spaarnestad Photo announced a partnership to release more than 1,000 photos of politicians and political events in the Netherlands.  This generous release will provide photos for many related Wikipedia articles that once had no image to accompany the article.

Thanks to this cooperation between Wikimedia Nederland and Nationaal Archief/Spaarnestad Photo, hundreds of articles on Dutch politics will be provided with relevant and free photos from the actual time of the event or when the person was alive.

When an article is about an ancient topic, it is relatively easy to find an image for the article, because it is usually in the public domain. When the topic is recent, finding an image is often difficult.  One of the best ways to get a good photo is through partnerships like this.

One of the example images is this photograph of Queen Juliana, the mother of the current queen, walking her dog. This photo is a clear example of the saying “an image is worth more than a thousand words”. The image is such a clear illustration of who she was – irreplaceable with words.

Another example here is the typical “bordesfoto” (photo on the landing), which is the council of ministers and the Queen presenting themselves on the stairs in front of the royal palace to the press right after the ministers have been sworn in. This photo is the bordesfoto of the first cabinet Biesheuvel in 1971.

The images are part of the project “Beelden voor de Toekomst” (images for the future), where four major institutions cooperate to conserve and digitize the Dutch audiovisual heritage. The digitized material is made available as much as possible to the educational sector and the public.

I am very excited with this cooperation, and hope that soon more institutions will follow the example of the National Archive. Maybe just as exciting is that this release took place in the very center of political press in The Hague – Nieuwspoort. The release event was accompanied by a panel of former and current politicians amongst whom the former chair of the Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal (House of Representatives/Commons), Frans Weisglas and former minister and UN high commissioner Jan Pronk.

I invite everybody to incorporate the images on their language projects as they become available in the near future on Wikimedia Commons.

Lodewijk Gelauff
Vice Chair of Wikimedia Nederland

The Wikimedia chapter in the Netherlands is organizing the photo scavenger hunt “Wiki Loves Monuments” in September. Take photos of national monuments, share them, and you may win a prize! Our sponsors have offered rewards like an iPad, an Android smartphone, WikiReaders and magazine subscriptions to a cultural heritage magazine.

Wiki Loves Monuments 2010.

With over 50,000 national monuments (“rijksmonument“) throughout the Netherlands, there are plenty of photo opportunities. These are buildings or objects of general importance because of their beauty, importance to science, or cultural history – like archeological sites in Drenthe, the canal houses in Amsterdam, and the Royal Palace in The Hague.

The Dutch language Wikipedia has worked hard to prepare for this project by building articles with lists of these monuments organized by municipality. The Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (National services for Cultural Heritage) provided additional data, such as the physical address of all the monuments. The next step is to complete every monument with one or more photos – Wikipedia volunteers already taken photos of over 12,000 monuments.

With this project, we tried to incorporate best practices from Wiki Loves Art/NL 2009 and similar projects in other countries. Uploading images will be possible both through a simplified uploading form on Wikimedia Commons, as well as with a Flickr group. Many cultural heritage organizations were contacted and asked to spread the word.

The contest is in September, and coincides with Open Monument Day on 11 and 12 of September, when many monuments open their doors to visitors which are normally closed. For more information, please visit our website at www.wikilovesmonuments.nl (in Dutch) and subscribe to the RSS feed. You can also join the Flickr group or our Facebook event if you plan to participate.

Lodewijk Gelauff
Board Member, Wikimedia Nederland

The first weekend of August, sixteen Wikipedians gathered from all around Hungary and neighboring Serbia to take part in the first multi-day Wikipedia camp. Based in Nagykanizsa, a small town in the southwestern part of the country, the editors shared their experiences through Wikipedia quizzes, lectures and movie screenings and had a genuinely good summer time barbecuing, hiking and sightseeing in the nearby nature reserves and towns.

WikiCamp 2010.

The four-day WikiCamp was organized by Wikimedia Hungary, the local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, with the invaluable help of the local Wikipedians.

We hope that the camp will become an annual event along with our ongoing projects, a conference on the tenth anniversary of Wikipedia in 2011 and various contests to improve the quality and depth of the Hungarian Wikipedia.

Bence Damokos, Board Member, Wikimedia Hungary

The Wikimedia Foundation congratulates the newest official Wikimedia chapter: Wikimedia India! The Chapters Committee has unanimously approved the formation of WMIN, an important step towards building a stronger community of volunteers throughout the country. We’re extremely excited to see their good work recognized by this milestone achievement.

Wikimedia’s 29 local chapters form a vital network of organizations that share a common mission: a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge . The Foundation has high hopes for Wikimedia India, and we look forward to working closely with the new chapter as the Foundation begins implementing a strategic, five-year plan to help grow readers and editors throughout the Global South, starting in India.

The formation of this chapter is a critical step in the Wikimedia movement– we offer our sincere congratulations to WMIN!

Moka Pantages, Communications

Earlier in June, Germany’s first Skillshare conference took place under the patronage of Edelgard Bulmahn (Member of Parliament, former Federal Secretary of Education).  The conference set new standards for community events in the German-speaking Wikimedia universe. More than 150 volunteers from free content projects met in the picturesque town of Lüneburg; the attendees included young artisans, university members, politicians, media, and Lüneburg citizens. The conference aimed to strengthen the free content community, gain attention from media, and recruit new authors to free content projects, which do not fall into the category of usual suspects for male computer scientists in their twenties. Skillshare was conceptualized as an open platform for exchanging ideas between free content communities.

The conference featured a three-day in person meeting between 34 open space workshops  on topics like OpenStreetMap, programming bots, quality management, conflict resolution,  and effective use of sources. But community building involves not only formal training, but also informal chats. Lueneburg’s pubs were brimming with excited Wikipedians chatting about the latest monobook extensions, neutral point of view in advertising cell phones, or their favorite beers. No less than 150 of the most active volunteers thus learned that there is life beyond the keyboard.

Likewise, the citizens of Lueneburg and the regional small artisans association (the event’s host) learned that real people write Wikipedia. Some even got hooked on writing Wikipedia entries about their own trade or town. More than 1400 photos and 40 old maps from the city’s archive were some of outcomes of the conference.

Big politics and the media joined the event for a discussion on New Media, attended by Kai Gniffke, chief of staff of main German evening news TV program, three members of the Parliamentary subcommittee for new media, University of Lüneburg, and Wikimedia’s own Ting Chen.

The event also broke new ground in its funding model. Wikimedia Germany and Wikimedia Switzerland covered a small part of the costs, while local businesses and associations contributed the bulk of the funds. Wikimedia Switzerland and Wikimedia Austria offered travel stipends. The funding model created effective ties to the universe outside of Wikipedia/Wikimedia, which means additional funds, but more importantly, new blood for a larger open content community. The event also strengthened connections between Wikipedians, many of whom had never met in person. It also brought together members of different free content projects like Wikisource, Wikiquote, and OpenStreetMap.

It certainly was the most effective and lively event for the German-speaking community to date, and, bar the not-invented-here-syndrome, it might serve as a pilot project for other languages.

Nadine Stark, co-organizer, Skillshare