It is my great pleasure to introduce and welcome two Community Fellows to the Wikimedia Fellows Program: Tanvir Rahman and Steven Zhang.

Wikimedia Community Fellow Tanvir Rahman

Tanvir Rahman is a Wikimedian who serves the movement locally and globally, both on- and off-wiki. Tanvir has been an active editor of Bengali Wikipedia since 2009, he holds administrator rights on multiple projects and he was elected a steward in 2011. He also volunteers on the Small Wiki Monitoring Team, the Countervandalism Network, as an OTRS agent, and is a translator for translatewiki. Tanvir helped found Wikimedia Bangladesh and is a tireless organizer of local outreach activities to raise awareness for Wikimedia and bring new editors to the projects.

In his fellowship project, Tanvir will be experimenting with on-wiki strategies to encourage and grow the editing community on small language versions of Wikipedia, with specific focus on the Bengali Wikipedia. Smaller projects have different needs and challenges than the large language communities and may require different approaches to engage with editors. By focusing on a community like Bengali Wikipedia, which has about 50 active editors per month and sees 10 new editors per month, Tanvir hopes to learn more about the basic editing infrastructure needed to encourage new editors in new or small-scale projects. We look forward to the new insights that Tanvir’s project will bring to the Wikimedia movement. Because he understands the outreach and on-wiki needs of the editing community, cares as deeply about local community as he does about the global needs of the movement, and can’t wait to share his knowledge about smaller wiki communities, we believe those insights will be great.

Wikimedia Community Fellow Steven Zhang

Steven Zhang is a Wikipedian with a passion for resolving on-wiki disputes and helping others do the same. He has been contributing to the English Wikipedia since 2008 and has been particularly active in dispute resolution forums, including the Wikipedia Mediation Cabal. Steven is studying a Certificate IV in Mediation at Open Colleges, and over the past year he has made it his mission as a volunteer to recruit more editors to join dispute resolution efforts. In 2011, he helped create the dispute resolution notice board, an entry point for mediating disputes on the English Wikipedia. Steven has noted that there aren’t enough active participants to resolve all of the disputes that arise on Wikipedian each day, and he believes that dispute resolution processes could be streamlined to make them more accessible and efficient to all editors who need them.

We admire Steven’s enthusiasm for resolving conflict and his commitment to raising awareness in the community about the issue, and we look forward to partnering with him as he embarks on his fellowship project.  He will be analyzing community feedback and dispute resolution activity in order to build a deeper understanding of what is effective and what needs improvement in the current systems. He will also be developing a guide for new editors who want to get involved in resolving on-wiki disputes.

Steven and Tanvir will be documenting their work on-wiki and here on the Foundation blog. You can learn more about their projects by visiting the Fellows page. All of the Wikimedia Foundation Fellows look forward to meeting you at Wikimania, too!

Siko Bouterse, Head of Community Fellowships

Community Fellow, Sarah Stierch

I’m pleased to announce Sarah Stierch has been awarded a Wikimedia Community Fellowship for 2012.  Sarah’s fellowship is intended to support her commitment to encouraging women’s participation in Wikimedia projects.

As a volunteer, Sarah moderates Wikimedia’s gender gap mailing list, has done outreach to hundreds of editors in order to conduct a survey of women in Wikimedia, and curates a scoop.it collection of media related to women and Wikimedia.  She also serves on the advisory board for the Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization that supports women in open-culture communities like Wikipedia.  Sarah has been an editor on English Wikipedia since 2004, and has been active in GLAM-Wiki projects since 2009.  An art historian by training, Sarah was a 2011 Wikipedian-in-Residence at the Archives of American Art in Washington D.C., organizes edit-a-thons on art-related topics, and is in the process of finishing her master’s degree in museum studies at George Washington University.

Her experience working with female editors in the community and enthusiasm for outreach makes Sarah a great candidate for what we hope will be the first of several fellowships focused on the gender gap.  Sarah’s initial project will be a new-editor support pilot where she’ll build a team of volunteers to actively reach out to promising new editors (particularly women) to offer help, mentorship and peer support, encouraging them to continue editing and become more integrated into the Wikipedia community.

Congratulations, Sarah, the Wikimedia Foundation looks forward to partnering with you!

And, as a reminder, we’re still looking for more fellows to join Sarah in 2012.  The deadline to apply for this round is January 15th, please contact fellows at wikimedia dot org with any questions.

Siko Bouterse, Head of Community Fellowships