The Wikimedia Foundation continues to build momentum around activities focused on the Arabic language region. At the end of March, Barry Newstead visited the region and Moushira Elamrawy (Consultant, Arabic Language Initiative) conducted a number of outreach activities in various Arabic speaking countries. The Arabic Language initiative is a strategic priority for the movement and the Foundation. The visit sought to establish relationships with potential partners and to begin a dialogue on the importance of building Arabic Wikipedia as part of regional efforts to expand Arabic language content on the Internet.

The first stop was at the Dead Sea in Jordan.  Moushira was invited by the e-mediat program to conduct a workshop for participants from more than 20 NGOs from Lebanon and Jordan.  Several Lebanese and Jordanian NGOs working in the areas of history preservation, video blogging, and human rights showed interest in organizing Wikipedia sessions for their members and incorporating their up-to-date, sourced data from their research into Wikipedia articles. According to a recent study, Jordan’s contribution to online content is mainly in Arabic, and the country is one of the main contributors to the 3 percent of global online content that is in Arabic, an interesting fact which opens doors to fruitful activities.

Session about Wikipedia in Tetouan

Next Moushira traveled to Morocco, which, despite its reputation as a francophone country, is the 4th largest content contributor to the Arabic Wikipedia. Her first stop was Tetouan, in northern Morocco, where she hosted a session at The National School of Education, a government-funded higher education institute. It included a talk about Wikipedia by Fayssal, a local of Tetouan and a longtime Wikipedian (formerly a member of the English Wikipedia’s arbitration committee), and Zack, a significant contributor to the Arabic Wikipedia from Meknes, who led a workshop on how to edit Wikipedia. The attendees asked rich and diverse questions, e.g. on neutrality, fundraising, and how the Arabic Wikipedia could be improved. The school administration was excited about hosting more sessions and about considering how Wikipedia could be efficiently incorporated in their curriculum.

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The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the national public broadcaster, turns 80 this year. To celebrate it has launched a new website called “80 Days That Changed Our Lives“, giving 80 pieces of audio visual content from the ABC archives a new lease on life. Today, the ABC has also announced that it has gone a step further by releasing some of these historical news reports to Wikimedia under a Creative Commons free license. This release of highly encyclopedic audiovisual history is not only a first for Australia, it is a first for Wikimedia.

1940s Mobile studio caravan, provided by the ABC

While this is the first collection of broadcast “packaged” footage released to Wikimedia Commons under a free license, the leader in the field for several years has been Al Jazeera, which has been sharing some of its contemporary footage on its own Creative Commons portal. With the Open Beelden project, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision has also shared online many historical newsreels. Both of these collections have since been copied into Wikimedia Commons. The ABC is also following in the footsteps of Radio y Televisión Argentina, which has previously released some of its archival recordings and parliamentary speeches.

You can view the collection of files on Wikimedia Commons – all are available to be used, remixed and shared — at Category: Files from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Some of the important pieces of Australian history that now have freely licensed multimedia for the first time include:

• The “Tampa affair” (2001)
• The “Waterfront dispute” (1998)
• The release of Lindy Chaimberlain from prison (1986)
• The floating of the currency (1983)
• The introduction of World Series Cricket (1977)
• Intriguingly, an interview with Arthur C. Clarke predicting the Internet in 1974.
• and, the first ever broadcast from ABC Television (1956).

You can check where these files are already being used within Wikipedia articles on the toolserver project. You can also read the press release by the ABC about this project and the blog post by Creative Commons Australia (which is hosted by CCi).

As a non-profit operated collection of educational and freely-licensed media,  and as the repository that serves the 283 language editions of Wikipedia, we believe that Wikimedia Commons is a perfect place for broadcasters and other GLAMs to share their archival content. Hopefully this release from the Australian public broadcaster will be the beginning of an ongoing relationship with the Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia community,  and will encourage other broadcasters – especially those that are publicly funded – to join us.

Sincerely,
Liam Wyatt / Wittylama – Project officer, ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi)

Wikipedians at the San Francisco WikiWomen's History Edit-a-thon. Photo: Matthew Roth CC-BY-SA

Wikimedians are gathering all around the world this month in honor of International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month. At meet-ups, workshops and edit-a-thons, in-person and online, new editors are joining with seasoned Wikipedians to improve coverage related to women’s history and encourage more women to contribute to Wikimedia projects. Supporting social editing events like this is one way we hope to narrow the Wikipedia gender gap and double women’s participation on Wikimedia projects by 2015.

This past Saturday, the Wikimedia Foundation and partners at the Ada Initiative and OCLC  hosted the San Francisco WikiWomen’s History Edit-a-thon at the WMF office in San Francisco. Many of the 40 attendees were women, and many had never edited Wikipedia before. We sat around tables with laptops and reference books,  sandwiches and coffee in hand, adding and improving content in the world’s largest repository of knowledge. We laughed and talked while a few kids with barnstar buttons played nearby.  And in four hours, we created 12 new accounts, started 10 articles, and improved over 20 more.  Overall, it was an incredibly fun and successful event!

In pairs and small groups, experienced Wikipedians partnered with attendees who had never before used wiki markup, nor heard of a talk page. In no time, they were confidently improving Wikipedia articles on topics like Sexism, Peggy Yu, and the Women’s Library and Information Centre Foundation. One group waded into the world of copy-editing, fixing spelling errors and punctuation problems in articles on everything from the JFK assassination conspiracy theories to Buddhist descriptions of Brahmans from early texts. Others edited entries in Wiktionary and Commons.
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Students are widely using Wikipedia as a source for their school projects and as a learning tool. However, what happens if we change this procedure of just “using Wikipedia” and also engage students in writing Wikipedia? This is the main idea behind the worldwide spreading of Ambassador programs on Wikipedia projects all over the world. One promising method for an Ambassador program was tested by students who participated in cooperation with Czech WikiProject Protected areas.

The Czech WikiProject Protected areas represented by Chmee2 ran in winter semester 2011/2012 in cooperation with Jiří Reif, university teacher at Institute for Environmental Studies, Faculty of Science at the Charles University in Prague. For the project, 30 bachelor’s students participated in writing articles on the Czech Wikipedia. Students had to visit one protected area of their choice, take several pictures of the area, write an article for the Czech Wikipedia and give a public presentation for other students in the class. The presented task was comprehensive, varied and focused on individual work of participating students. We did not just want to attempt to enrich Wikipedia projects with new articles and images, but we also wanted to prepare students for future scientific work and give them the opportunity to try creative writing and critical work with references. This knowledge will soon come in handy when they start writing their bachelor’s work and prepare the defense of their bachelor’s academic degree.

Natural monument Břestecká skála, one of chosen protected areas. Students documented damage by growing tourism at this location.

The project enjoyed high popularity among students, according to the results of a survey. A full report with results from this cooperation is available on Czech Wikipedia in English. Here we present only a short summary of this cooperation and main lessons that we learned.

Unlike other ambassador projects where ambassador is supporting students mainly virtually in the Wikipedia environment, our ambassador was personally present at each class. This gave us the opportunity to directly interact with students, easily giving feedback about articles and answering their questions about Wikipedia. And of course, the ambassador was active also on Czech Wikipedia, correcting student’s edits. We realized that this in-person approach is more time-consuming for an ambassador than virtual assistance is. But it is better for the community on Wikipedia and for students. The ambassadors are able to help students understand all standards and rules of Czech Wikipedia without relying on the greater Wikipedia community. As a result, Wikipedia was enriched with high-quality articles containing references with only minor effort from the community. And students were able to directly and easily ask questions and get their answers.

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Susan Hewitt of WikiProject:Gastropods. Photo by Susan Hewitt. CC-0 1.0

At the Wikimedia Foundation, we’re developing a number of tools to improve editor retention, from a dramatically simpler editing interface to improved article feedback tools. But what if keeping new editors and helping them become productive long-term contributors were simpler than all that?

Susan Hewitt believes fostering a little wiki love and a sense of camaraderie will go a long way toward increasing new-editor retention. She is the informal den mother to WikiProject:Gastropods, one of the 2,000 WikiProjects on English Wikipedia organized by editors who share an affinity for a particular subject area and want to see the quality of those articles improved.

“[Wikipedia] is a very big place,” said Hewitt, who lives in New York City. “You start editing, it’s like you walked in off the street — it’s as big and echoey as Grand Central. It’s like an enormous hospital or an enormous high school, where you don’t know what’s going on, and you don’t know where you’re supposed to go, and you’re disoriented by it.”

According to Hewitt, technological tools are vital to improving the editing experience and she expressed gratitude to MediaWiki developers, paid and volunteer, who consistently improve the editing experience. But the question of human interactions remains even after the code is deployed. We should approach each other on Wikipedia, she said, “with this attitude which is kind, considerate, warm, appreciative, thankful and gentle. It’s just like everyday life. This is a really amazing project, there’s a lot of people working on it, and in a sort of vague way they know you’ve got to try to be polite.”

She has developed a system for welcoming new editors to the project and she has become adept at marshaling their strengths for improving Wikipedia. She uses AlexNewArtBot to monitor new articles related to gastropods, one of the largest taxonomic classes on the planet and better known as snails and slugs. When she sees an unfamiliar new editor, she drops by their talk page with a colorful template and words of encouragement. She invites editors to participate in the WikiProject using an array of pictures and barnstars, like a deep water sea snail in the genus Guildfordia or the luminous Janolus fuscus.

Her methods are paying off.

“To me, the moment Susan came to me and invited me to the project was crucial, essential,” said Daniel Cavallari, a biologist living in São Paulo, Brazil. “If I hadn’t been welcomed and helped when I joined in, perhaps I wouldn’t be editing at Wikipedia presently.”

Hewitt and Cavallari have never met in person, and maybe never will. They are thousands of miles apart, but they share a mutual respect for the project and they improve it constantly. Cavallari noted that he has had a much different experience editing on his native Portuguese language Wikipedia, where some editors have not been as kind to him.

A photo of Chromodoris willani, by Alex Jenner, Wikimedia Commons

Another member of Hewitt’s circle of wiki love is Alexander Jenner, an astrophysicist living in Tokyo, Japan. Just like Cavallari, Jenner has never met Hewitt in person, but he is grateful she welcomed him. Given his interest in scuba diving and underwater photography, Hewitt encouraged him to contribute his photos to Commons.

“Susan, she was doing other areas of Gastropods and she said ‘Nobody’s doing nudibranchs, so we’re happy to have somebody doing it.’” Jenner noted. “I guess I got a buzz when I was the first person to add a high definition photo of a species that didn’t exist [on Wikipedia]. It was like, ‘I did that photo.’”

Jenner said he had a much different experience on another WikiProject, where there is no welcoming committee and there are often heated arguments. If he had joined the other project before Gastropods, he said, “I doubt I would have edited nearly as much. That early phase before one becomes accustomed to the ways of Wikipedia is very important.”

“Susan most certainly made a difference in my case,” he added.

(To get involved with WikProject:Gastropods, feel free to contact Susan Hewitt on her talk page or reach out to any of the members of the project. For more information, read this excellent piece from the Wikipedia Signpost WikiProject series.)

Matthew Roth
Global Communications Manager

When you click the “edit” button for the first time on Wikipedia, you might be surprised to find a screen full of wiki markup, the language used to format text, images, and references in Wikipedia articles. Once you’ve mastered the technical bits, you’ll then need to navigate your way through the policies, guidelines and common practices that the community has developed over 11 years of collaborative editing.

You may be dismayed if you find that what you thought was a small change to an article turns into a lengthy or heated debate with strangers. Although you are encouraged to “be bold,” (one of the 5 pillars of Wikipedia is that editors should ignore all rules and not worry about making mistakes!), learning to do things the “Wikipedia Way” can mean having your contributions removed and your user talk page covered in warning messages within hours of clicking that “edit” button.

If you’ve found yourself confused or discouraged by the editing process, we’d like to invite you to sit down, kick off your shoes, and join us for a proverbial cup of tea in our beautiful new Teahouse.

The Wikipedia Teahouse is a forum on Wikipedia that aims to foster a feeling of community for new editors from the outset by introducing them to peers and experienced Wikipedians in a many-to-many support space designed specifically for new users. At the Teahouse, you will be able discuss issues and get answers to questions about the editing process, hopefully helping support you on the journey from your first edit to your 1000th edit.

While the Teahouse complements existing support systems for new editors on Wikipedia– such as help desks, welcoming committees, and mentorship programs — it is specifically focused on addressing the scarcity of female editors throughout the Wikimedia projects. According to recent data, only 9 percent of active Wikipedia editors are female. In surveys and conversations with women, some common reasons given for not editing Wikipedia include being discouraged by having edits reverted, not feeling confident in their contributions, not enjoying argumentative or confrontational tones of discussion, and a preference for experiences on other sites that emphasize social relationships and a welcoming tone.

The gender gap and editor retention in general are particularly important for the Wikimedia Foundation. By 2015, we have set a strategic goal to more than double both the overall number of active editors on all Wikimedia projects and the percentage of female contributors. If the Wikimedia movement is to succeed in providing free access to the sum of all human knowledge, we think the projects must include more active female editors.

With this project, we’re experimenting with a support system that may appeal to editors (of both genders!) who would be better served by a more social learning experience. The Teahouse is meant to be visually warm and welcoming, so the design incorporates color and pictures of participants to convey the feeling of a populated, friendly community space. We’ve tried to make it easy to use and easy to navigate, because new editors already have a lot of documentation to read elsewhere on Wikipedia. And we’re using the power of invitation in our approach: we’re reaching out to new editors to personally invite them to a place just for them and encourage peer support for those who might otherwise feel alone.

Wikimedia Community Fellow Sarah Stierch and Research Fellow Jonathan Morgan are leading the 3-month pilot with help from Fellowship Program staffer Siko Bouterse, designer Heather Walls, and 23 experienced volunteer Wikipedians who serve as Teahouse hosts. We’re also grateful to volunteer developers Kaldari and Werdna for some technological magic. During the course of the pilot, we’ll be working with the existing community and new editors to refine the experience and measure any effects on new editor retention. For more information on the Teahouse, see our FAQ. We’ll keep you updated with what we learn!

Meanwhile, the Wikipedia Teahouse is full of hosts who can’t wait to welcome you and answer your questions about editing Wikipedia. Calling all new editors and anyone who has ever wanted to edit: please stop by for a cup of tea, introduce yourself, and visit our Q&A board.  We’re looking forward to meeting you!

Thank you,

Siko Bouterse and Sarah Stierch

From February 6-12, the fifth Campus Party Brasil took place, hosted in São Paulo, and we (the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Brasil) had the great opportunity to represent the Brazilian Wikimedia community through our attendance. Fifteen volunteers from the community got tickets to attend and worked alongside Kul Wadhwa, Pats Peña, and me (Jessie Wild), who came in from San Francisco. We had and accomplished a few specific goals:

• Motivate Brazilians towards collaborative knowledge! Kul gave a keynote presentation which highlighted the importance of asking why you are choosing the direction of your life.
  

  Wikimedia Brasil @ Campus Party

• Determine the plausibility of a MediaWiki Hackathon in Brazil! The verdict: we should do it! There is obviously a lot of interest across communities in Brazil, and Pats, Mateus, Jonas, and others helped network with key organizations and development communities which were also present at the event. They got many tips, formed some collaborative partnerships, and raised awareness for the upcoming event. So get your hacker-hands ready and stay tuned for details…
• Recruit new editors and member for Wikimedia Brasil! The volunteers led a “Mutirão,” or an activity designed to teach people how to set-up a user account and do a quick one hour editing sprint. As a result, we had three winners who contributed to articles which are part of the “Grand Prix” editing sprint currently taking place on the Portuguese Wikipedia, and were awarded T-shirts.

In addition to the above, we were all able to make a lot of new friends! We had the privilege of sharing a table with the Mozilla community and the Garoa Hacker Club community (we also adopted one Angry Bird). This led to great connections for us all, and we are excited about the potential to work together more, as compatible communities going forward.

Sleepy

There are certainly things we can improve on. Primarily, though we had a lot of volunteers sign up for tickets, unfortunately not all came or did not participate in the outreach event. Next time, it may help us to be more explicit in the different roles each of us can have in supporting Wikipedia/Wikimedia while at the conference, so that everyone knows how they are to be involved in promoting Wikipedia.

But – all in all, another great event in São Paulo (although very exhausting)…

Jessie Wild, Special Projects Manager, Global Development

Yesterday, we wrapped up our visit to Tunisia, which comes as part of our Arabic language initiative that WMF launched earlier in October 2011 with the Doha convening. Our initial outreach activities mainly rely on meetings with the small Wikipedia community scattered in Arabic speaking countries and exploring the possibilities of expansion of those communities, by connecting them to like-minded groups/communities that can help facilitate on ground activities and workshops in their geographies. Our first stop in this tour was Tunisia. Our first day included a lecture that was hosted by the national school of engineering. A Wikimedia staff and two Arabic Wikipedia volunteers (Ciphers and OsamaK) were part of the lecture organized by WMF on open licenses, free acess to knowledge and the use of Wikipedia in education. It was a good chance to answer questions and misconceptions related to the use of Wikipedia in education and the general status of the Arabic Wikipedia. It was also a great opportunity to meet with students of open source clubs who will form a starting point of Wikipedia clubs in their schools. Tunisia has an internet penetration of nearly 35%; with 3.5 million people having access to the internet, the country contributes 1.4% of Arabic Wikipedia content, which comes as the 3rd most viewed language after French and English. The current numbers aren’t high, however, with regard to support of open source policies (such as opengov) and the expansion of open source and open content activities that have grown recently (thanks to the revolution!), it looks like Tunisia has a good potential to increment Wikipedia contributors on Arabic and other languages, especially on mobile, which has 105.5% penetration rate.

Our visit was promising on many levels: In addition to kicking off the start of Wikipedia awareness activities in universities and other independent spaces (thanks to Nawat that agreed to host Wikipedia workshops), and helping connect current editors with new enthusiasts, we also met with the managers of the national library of Tunisia and agreed on a numbers of steps, including releasing the collection of digitized old books, periodicals, postcards and magazines to Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons, adopting a system on all their public computers that displays Wikipedia as the default search option, and on a longer term, release all their collection of digitized Arabic books (nearly 3000) to be used as sources for Wikipedia articles. In line with adding content to Commons, we also met with a consultant to the president for cultural affairs who is excited about releasing the presidential photography collection under a CC license, however, still pending digitization of the material themselves.

Wikimedia’s visit was recognized by Radio Maliss, which interviewed our WMF staff (interview is in Arabic)

Tunisia came first in our tour, and it was a good start with lots of promising steps that need our follow up, which we will keep you updated with. Coming up next will be Jordan then Algeria, please drop us a line if you will be there. :-)

Moushira Elamrawy
Global Development Team

The Wikipedia Education Program has grown by leaps and bounds since its inception last year, as part of the Public Policy Initiative. In 2011, the program ventured beyond the United States into Canada and India, making the measurements of the program’s impact even more important. We want to use these metrics (some of which are outlined below) as tools that help us understand and improve the Wikipedia Education Program as a whole, while also understanding individual pieces of the system better.

a. Fall 2011 Numbers and Growth

b. Gender Representation

c. Wikipedia Education Program Metrics and Activities Meeting

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Professor Jonathan Obar

I was never a fan of Wikipedia. In fact, I was quite skeptical when I first heard about the Wikipedia Global Education Program. How things have changed.

About a year ago, I remember hearing that some folks from the Wikimedia Foundation were planning to visit our College of Communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University to try to recruit faculty for the Wikipedia Education Program. I remember walking to the meeting thinking, hmm, well I guess as a professor in a communication school it’ll be cool to meet some people who work for a major social media site. I’m not a fan of Wikipedia though, I don’t trust it… (puff up chest here) I’m an academic after all; my work is well-researched, credible, trustworthy, not like that amateurish stuff on Wikipedia. Just let me find one of my students citing Wikipedia in a paper so that I can write on their submission in big, red letters YOU DO NOT CITE WIKIPEDIA IN MY CLASS.

The dirty little secret of course was that I was using Wikipedia all the time. Whenever I would begin a research project I would type a concept into Google and of course a Wikipedia article would come up. I’d take a quick look, check out the references, begin to map the concept in my mind, all the while feeling unsure that I could trust what I was reading. I did this all the time. As an academic, this was my dirty little secret.

One year later and how things have changed. I am now a Wikipedia Teaching Fellow as well as a volunteer member of the Wikipedia Education Program’s outreach team helping to connect universities in Canada to the initiative, determined to change the minds of skeptics all over the world who see Wikipedia as I once did.

So what’s changed? Look, I’ve used Facebook in the classroom, I’ve used Twitter. I’ve used closed wikis, blogs and other new media technologies and I am convinced (and I don’t think I’m overstating things here) that Wikipedia is among the most innovative tools for e-pedagogy and e-learning currently available.

This “Wikipedia in the classroom” project begins where most “traditional” research assignments leave off. Students are still researching topics related to course content, they’re still synthesizing sources, they’re still writing; that’s where most “traditional” research projects leave off. What the Wikipedia project then adds is new media literacy development. Students learn the technical and social skills needed to work with wiki-technology, they’re pushed to collaborate and engage with Wikipedia’s social network, they are thrust into a thriving open-source movement, and they are exposed to a growing and increasingly relevant wiki-culture. Students experience all of this, while simultaneously learning course content.

That’s just the beginning.

As I teach my students about new media literacy, I often refer to new perspectives that I’ve been exposed to while working with the Wikimedia Foundation. Lessons about what it means to understand the nature of the evolving information source, how knowledge is generated through debate (some would go so far as to say that we’re working with a dialectic process here… perhaps an overstatement) and most importantly, how it is essential the we be critical of our information sources, no matter what they are or where we find them. You are not safe anywhere when it comes to information sources. There is bias everywhere. There are mistakes everywhere. No information source is the source. Research widely and research often. Be an informed consumer of information.

Wikipedia is so many things. It’s an encyclopedia, it’s a social network, and it’s also an idea. When I first began using Wikipedia in the classroom as a tool for innovative e-pedagogy, I quickly realized that not only was I teaching students new media literacy, not only would I be providing them with a unique opportunity to collaborate online and receive feedback from a multitude of individuals, forcing them to reflect on their work from a variety of perspectives. Not only would students be leaving something behind, contributing to the amount of information available online about their area of interest – have you heard about the Georgetown student’s Wikipedia article – National Democratic Party (Egypt) – that’s received more than 100,000 hits since the “paper” was turned in? Not bad for a term paper that would in years past end up in the file cabinet or the garbage, seemingly lost forever. When we introduce Wikipedia into the classroom as a teaching tool, not only do our students enjoy these benefits, we provide them with a space to reflect and learn about the nature of knowledge, how it is created, built, shaped, learned, and how it evolves. Taken a step further, perhaps we are also providing them with a place to question the normative ideals of participatory, direct democracy, and how our information sources contribute to our societal system of knowledge.

I’ve gotten ahead of myself. What is this Wikipedia project anyways? How does it work? Well, for more information, have a look at the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia Global Education Program outreach page. To put it simply, professors replace “traditional” writing assignments with the Wikipedia assignment, requiring students to research and write material that then gets placed in Wikipedia articles. At the same time that students conduct research and edit Wikipedia (learning the social and technical components of the site), students also learn about wiki-culture as they connect to Wikipedia’s social network. This all happens while professors simultaneously teach course content. It’s two-courses in one in many respects.

Clearly I’m gushing, clearly my views have changed, and for good reason. As an educator I’m being given a tremendous opportunity to offer my students something relevant, cutting-edge, intellectually challenging and fun. Oh and by the way, did I mention that it’s free?

Come check out what the Wikimedia Foundation has put together, I promise that you’ll never feel dirty about your Wikipedia use again.

-Jonathan Obar
Michigan State University