Logo of Czech Ambassador Program

Wikipedia has always been dependent on its contributors: highly motivated people with a specific sort of knowledge that they want to share with the readers. Wikipedia never has enough contributors; the more there are, the better Wikipedia gets. We, together with all the people from the Wikipedia Education Program, think that students are one particularly interesting group of potential Wikipedians. The Czech Ambassador Program is just one of many efforts worldwide that aim to grow Wikipedia’s use as a university teaching tool.

All started for the Czech Republic in spring of 2011 when an ambitious program was establishing itself on universities across the United States. We decided we wanted to try a similar thing in the Czech environment. The crucial steps in organizing it were: summoning as many team members as possible (still less then 10, rather about 5 active people), distributing work among them, and creating a communication channel both among them (i.e., an email list) and with the wider community and general public (a Wikipedia homepage, Facebook, Google+ and Twitter fan page).

The first success story came in the winter term 2011–12 with Ambassador activities at the Institute of Environmental Studies, Charles University, in Prague. This has been coordinated by the WikiProject Protected Areas and readers of this blog probably remember how elaborate the cooperation was, putting stress on personal contact with students and high quality of articles.

Jana Lánová giving a lecture on Wikipedia to students at Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno

Sadly, we do not have enough “human resources” to expand this way of working with students, so we decided to go for a different approach in most of our projects. We usually meet the students just once or twice, giving them a short lecture about what Wikipedia is and how one can create an article. Then, we provide the students with links to help pages both on Wikipedia and also on social sites. Also, they can always e-mail to their Ambassador and ask about the things they do not understand. In the future, we would like to put stress on an interactive e-learning program that is being developed by Derek Coetzee.

In the winter term, our students created a total sum of about 100 articles, a majority (57) of them written from the field of baroque sculpture art and baroque architecture, thanks to a project at Faculty of Arts, Palacky University in Olomouc. Ten more were concentrating on highly specific topics in immunology (a project at Faculty of Science, Charles University) and the last ~30 are the above-mentioned Institute of Environmental Studies.

Right now, a summer term is on the way, bearing a promise of 150–200 articles in total. Crucially, we work in three major cities of the Czech Republic (Prague, Olomouc, Brno) and as we try to involve the local community, ambassadorship has proven to be a promising way of outreach from the capital and engaging people from the other parts of the country. Our projects now range from Physical Chemistry and basic Algebra to Scandinavian Literature, Iconography, Histology/Cytology and Botany. See the recent changes from all our current projects.

Chmee2 talking about how Wikipedia works to students in Prague. The unique atmosphere of Brmlab proved to be a great place to interact with "Wikipedians-to-be"

A great example of our projects is “Histology/Cytology”, carried out at the Faculty of Science, Charles University, and taught by doc. RNDr. Jan Černý, Ph.D. This subject attracts more than 100 students every year. We did not want to make it a tedious duty for students, so we told them: write on Wikipedia only if you like, and if you do your job well, we will give you 5 points extra to the final exam. What followed was an explosion: a lot of students starting asking us about the project, so we were really motivated to prepare the guidelines for the students. We also made two public lectures in Brmlab (a local do-it-yourself scientific club) on how Wikipedia works. The best thing was that some students really began writing article after article, becoming real experienced and well-oriented Wikipedians. The thing that I like the most is that six out of seven students who have filled in a questionnaire so far wrote that they wanted to continue editing Wikipedia after the assignment ends for them. All in all, the Czech Wikipedia is richer by more than seventy articles on Histology and Cell Biology — and this number keeps growing.

Vojtěch Dostál, Wikimedia Czech Republic

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

cc by-sa 3.0 Dilly Boase

You’ve probably heard the saying, “In theory, Wikipedia shouldn’t work, but in practice it does.” Three of the things that contribute to make Wikipedia work are topic-specific WikiProjects (“let’s write about a town), Wikimedia chapters (“let’s organize throughout the United Kingdom”), and unique ideas (“let’s use QR codes to share content”). This week these three things successfully came together to create Monmouthpedia, “The World’s First Wikipedia Town” in Monmouth, Wales.

The idea for Monmouthpedia began at a TEDx talk in Bristol when John Cummings, an occasional Wikipedia editor, suggested from the audience that the UK Chapter use QR codes to “do a whole town.” That challenge was handed to Cummings when the Wikimedia UK chapter backed the idea. He then moved to his home town of Monmouth where he assembled an ad hoc group of supporters who wanted to participate, including the local County Council.

Click image for Monmouthpedia video

The project has taken six months of preparation, including a commitment by the town to install a free, town-wide wi-fi network (the first of its kind in Wales). On 19 May the entire town will be bedecked with banners declaring Monmouth as the first Wikipedia Town in the world.

The Monmouthpedia project uses QRpedia to allow visitors to scan QR codes that link directly to the Wikipedia article in their own language. Because of Monmouth’s efforts to provide free wi-fi and implement QRpedia, the town is likely the only place where a visitor can tour in Hungarian, Hindi, Indonesian, Welsh, or numerous other Wikipedia languages using QR codes.

A plaque on Monmouth Shire Hall

Much of the success of Monmouthpedia comes from its ability to capture the imagination of the Wikipedia community, which has embraced the town virtually. Wikipedia volunteers have contributed nearly 500 new articles in over 25 languages, as well as videos on topics such as the historic Chartists movement.

The project also has a long list of partners, including 200 businesses, several universities and nearly every school and community group in the area. Wikipedia has partnered with museums and other institutions before, as in Derby, but in Monmouth you will see over 1,000 QR codes on every school, every important building, and hundreds of shops. The County Council itself has a QRpedia code in its reception that takes you to their Wikipedia article.

Lest you think this is a passing interest, the town of Monmouth is in it for the long haul. Many of the QRpedia codes are printed on ceramic plaques that should last for decades. The information in articles is backed by the Wikipedia community and will be continually improved and expanded. Physical guides and maps will become outdated, but the Wikipedia articles will always be able to be updated. This potential for on-site access to up-to-date information in any language is what makes the Monmouthpedia model so exciting.

How long can Wikipedia defy the theory and continue to deliver free information to the planet in over 280 languages? We think the Monmouthpedia story provides a very optimistic outlook.

If you want to find out more, visit the Monmouthpedia website and take a look at the associated articles on Wikipedia.

- Roger Bamkin, Director of Wikimedia UK (Victuallers)

Campus of Médéa University

As part of the Arabic Language Initiative, I had the chance to visit Algeria in the last week of April, where I had the privilege to speak to students at Médéa University (Médéa Province) about Wikipedia and invite them to contribute to it.

With a size of almost 2,400,000 square kilometers, Algeria is the largest country in Africa and the Arab World, and the tenth-largest country in the world. Algeria has about 4.1 million internet users (12% of the total population of 35 million), however they contribute only 0.08% of the total global edits on Wikimedia projects. While the official language of Algeria is Modern Standard Arabic, French as the ”de-facto” co-official language is still widely used in government, culture, media, and education due to the country’s colonial history. This fact can be clearly noticed in the readership numbers of Wikimedia projects in Algeria: While 52.2% of Wikimedia traffic from Algeria went to French language pages in the first quarter of 2012, Arabic language traffic shared only 30.7%. Having said this, the share of Arabic language traffic has almost doubled in the past three years, from only 17.0% back in mid 2009.

In particular, I could feel the passion for reading and adding content to Arabic language Wikimedia projects during my visit to Médéa University, where I delivered a lecture about contributing to Arabic Wikimedia projects, followed by an editing workshop over two days organized by Dr. Fareh Abdelhak. The introductory lecture laid out the current situation of Wikipedia contributions from Algeria, and a few thoughts on how Wikipedia works, and why is it important to contribute new content to Wikimedia projects. The lecture ended by giving the attendants (about 130, most of them students) a homework exercise: To think of one person they respect and one of their famous quotes, in addition to translating a topic from the English or French Wikipedia or writing an article based other sources that does not exist on the Arabic Wikipedia. Later on, I was informed that the students posted a report in Arabic about the lecture, and shared the homework on Facebook, so more interested people would be able to join the workshop on the next day.

Students attending the editing workshop at Médéa University

Although Friday was a day off at the university, about 30 students managed to come in the morning to attend the editing workshop. Unfortunately, since most of the university facilities were closed, we couldn’t use the PC rooms and provide every student with a PC. However, this situation did not preclude students from joining the workshop using their private portable PCs, where each group of 3 to 4 students had to share one PC with their colleagues.

The session started by registering a user account on the Arabic Wikiquote. Wikiquote was chosen as a start for two reasons, first to raise awareness about Wikipedia’s sister projects, and secondly in order to enable students adding content directly in their first edits without much interference from the larger Wikimedia community. Most students managed to register an account smoothly, and we started adding pages with the texts that most of the students had prepared as their homework. After students had learned the wiki basics on Wikiquote, we moved to the Arabic Wikipedia to start adding new articles there.

The workshop session resulted in creating 8 new articles on Wikipedia and 10 new pages on Wikiquote. At the end of the workshop, most of the students answered positively to a question on whether they will continue to add content to the Arabic Wikipedia. Indeed, in the evening I noticed that some of the students who attended the workshop went back to the Arabic Wikipedia and Wikiquote and continued improving their previously added articles, and also added new content. Later on, I received a message on my discussion page saying “When we meet next year, I will have already created a number of pages that exceeds yours!”… I really wish you will!

Haitham Shammaa, Editor Growth and Contribution Program consultant

The Tulip Folly, Jean-Léon Gérôme, from the Walters Museum collection

‪The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, has donated more than 19,000 freely-licensed images of artworks to Wikimedia Commons. The Walters’ collection includes ancient art, medieval art and manuscripts, decorative objects, Asian art and Old Master and 19th-century paintings. The images and their associated information will join our collection of more than 12 million freely usable media files, which serves as the repository for the 285 language editions of Wikipedia. ‬

‪The project began taking shape in February 2012, as part of the GLAM-Wiki initiative (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums). During GLAMcamp DC, a three-day conference hosted by the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., the Walters Museum worked with several Wikimedians to develop a documented process for uploading images to Commons. The basic details of the upload procedure were established during the conference, and during the weeks that followed, the uploads were conducted, monitored and tested, while collaboration continued online. ‬

‪”The Walters has gone above and beyond throughout this collaboration with the GLAM-Wiki community, working alongside Wikipedians to serve as a model for our mass image upload process,” said Lori Byrd Phillips, U.S. Cultural Partnerships Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation. “The release of these images will not only improve articles in Wikipedia, but will also have the potential to be used freely throughout the web.”

‪The image donation is part of the Walters Museum’s larger initative to provide free public access to its collection, both online and offline, beginning with the removal of admission fees in 2006. In 2011, the Walters launched a redesigned works of art website with 10,000 online artwork images freely licensed under a Creative Commons license. ‬

Sarasvati image from Walters Museum

‪”By uploading our information in this way, we can share items of cultural heritage from around the globe, directly with people in those parts of the world. Already our images have been used in 48 different languages. The Walters’ collection is well-suited for this project because of its size and its breadth of topic areas,” said Dylan Kinnett, Manager of Web and Social Media for the Walters Art Museum. “By developing documentation and tools for this type of work, we hope that our upload project can serve as a prototype for other cultural institutions.”

‪Already, the museum’s images have had an impact in improving content on Wikipedia, such when they are used as illustrations in entries whose topic is not the artwork itself, but a related idea, such as a mythological figure, or a time or place. The Walters’ painting of the Hindu goddess Saraswati, for instance, has been added to five different language Wikipedia entries about the goddess.‬

We would like to thank to the Walters Museum for their donation and their commitment to promoting free knowledge on Wikimedia Commons, and to the GLAM volunteers who helped make this endeavor possible.

Matthew Roth, Global Communications Manager

Over the past two years, the GLAM-Wiki initiative (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) has grown from strength to strength, gaining the attention of cultural institutions and organizations from around the world. Due to this ever-increasing interest, a group of Wikipedians in Residence were invited to participate in the 2012 American Association of Museums annual meeting (AAM) in Minneapolis, Minnesota at the end of April. While volunteers in the GLAM-Wiki movement frequently present at professional conferences, at 4,500 participants AAM is the largest and most prestigious conference that we’ve had the opportunity to attend.

Wikipedians in Residence prepare to present at the American Association of Museums. cc by-sa 3.0 Sarah Stierch.

Because of the importance of this conference, much preparation went into bringing together five Wikipedians in Residence from around the world to represent the work of the GLAM-Wiki initiative. Liam Wyatt, Sarah Stierch, Àlex Hinojo, and I participated in both a virtual and an on-site panel titled “Wikipedia and the Museum: Lessons from Wikipedians in Residence.” Dominic McDevitt-Parks facilitated a table at the “Marketplace of Ideas” event, which focused on how museums can best share their resources with Wikipedia. Throughout the conference, the GLAM-Wiki US portal was promoted as a new tool for American museums to more easily connect with the Wikimedia community.

Highlights of our outreach included:

• For the in-person Wikipedians in Residence panel, over fifty museum professionals gathered to hear about the GLAM-Wiki initiative, the types of outreach events, the methods for connecting with the Wikimedia community and the resources for helping museums get started with a project.
• The virtual session brought together over fifty museum professionals and GLAM-Wikimedians from around the world to discuss best practices. Event organizers allowed Wikipedians free access to the event and the recorded session is now publicly accessible.
• Due to the high level of interest, all of the Wikipedians in Residence jumped in to assist with the Marketplace of Ideas table. Over a three-hour period we answered questions, shared resources and left with a number of potential new museum cooperations.

As the conference went on, it was abundantly clear that museum professionals were ready to more fully engage with the Wikimedia community. A handful of sessions independently discussed the GLAM-Wiki initiative as a model project within broader topic areas, including global partnerships within children’s museums, transparency in the future of museum ethics and “going beyond digitization.”

The AAM conference was a watershed moment for GLAM-Wikimedia collaboration. We were surprised that many people no longer needed to be convinced of Wikimedia’s relevance within their institution.  Instead, many were eager and ready to take the next step toward connecting with the Wikimedia community. As a museum professional myself, it was inspiring to directly witness the museum field wholly embracing Wikipedia as a serious tool for furthering their missions.

It has been a long time coming.

Lori Byrd Phillips, US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator

(Participation by Wikipedians in Residence in the American Association of Museums conference was made possible through the Wikimedia Participation Grants program.)

If you’re fortunate enough to have access to a computer and the Internet, you can get the sum of the world’s knowledge for free thanks to Wikipedia. But if you’re like the majority of the world that isn’t online, how can you access this amazing resource?

Alex Wafula, Wikipedian from Kenya

What if someone brings it to you by hand?

Alex Wafula, a Wikipedia editor and 3rd year student at Strathmore University, in Nairobi, Kenya, has helped start the Wikimedia Project for Kenyan Schools, where he and a team of volunteers travel to remote parts of Kenya to share offline Wikipedia with students. Wafula and the team install offline versions of English Wikipedia from a disc or memory stick in schools that have computers, and they have provide both teachers and students with tutorials on how to operate the database.

“I’ve always been fascinated in discovering new things and knowing why things work the way they do, like why’s the sky blue and not red, what makes planes fly and boats float etc. Now what’s even more fascinating for me is sharing this,” said Wafula.

Organizers of the project began by procuring a list of schools with computer labs from the Kenyan Ministry of Education. From that list they divided the schools into 3 distinct regions: Kakamega Town (Western Kenya), Nyeri Town (Central Kenya) and Mombasa City (South Eastern Kenya) with 10 schools per region and a total of 30 schools.

Project members were mostly based in Nairobi and traveled 7 hours by bus to reach Kakamega and Mombasa City, and 4 hours to Nyeri. The teams typically stay 5 days in each region. To reach their goal of 2 schools per day, the team utilize an assortment of transportation including mini-buses, tuk-tuks and motorbikes to travel from school to school, which in some cases are considerable distances apart.

In Kenyan public schools that have computers, Wafula said, students take turns in time-allotted sessions in the computer lab and share a single computer with as many as three other classmates. Wafula noted that some of the computers he dealt with at these labs were too old and needed repair before they could install the offline Wikipedia.

“In high school, I spent many hours reading encyclopedias and from the knowledge gained, I found hope of making something out of my life,” said Wafula. “It’s my hope that students who get access to offline Wikipedia will find hope of a better future for themselves and their families as well from the knowledge they gain.”

In 2003, education in public schools in Kenya became free and universal. According to Wafula, however, the number of students enrolled in the public school system has exceeded the capacity of the system, with as many 60 students (or more) being taught by a single teacher. Schools in rural areas lack enough desks and chairs to facilitate all the students and in some cases students attend class in half-built classrooms or under trees. Textbooks are shared between 2-4 students and school supplies are treasured commodities.

In this context, gaining access to hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia articles is a marvel.

“There is so much promise in these kids, despite the adversities they face,” said Wafula. “In their world full of challenges and uncertainties, I’m happy that I got to deliver one of their solutions.”

Story and reporting by Jordan Hu, Communications Intern

Washington, DC, is a global hub for culture and knowledge. This is embodied in its numerous colleges and universities, more than 30 museums and the world’s largest library, containing over 29 million books.

But there is a fourth kind of cultural and educational resource within the city that is sometimes overlooked—Washington‘s 170+ embassies and diplomatic missions. These embassies are hidden gems of knowledge, housing cultural artifacts and works of art, and hosting numerous educational and cultural events, particularly in May, which DC Mayor Vincent Gray has declared as the city’s “International Cultural Awareness Month,” in order to showcase the value these embassies bring to the city.

In an effort to capture the intellectual energy and highlight the cultural and educational resources of these international institutions, Wikimedia District of Columbia (Wikimedia DC) last week kicked off its Embassy Outreach Initiative (EOI) with an inaugural event held in partnership with the Washington European Society and the Estonian Embassy in Washington.

The event, hosted at the Estonian Embassy, featured a discussion on global Internet freedom efforts with Danny Weitzner, Deputy CTO for Internet Policy at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy; Chairman Marko Mihkelson, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Estonian Parliament; Ian Schuler, Senior Manager for Internet Freedom Programs at the US State Department; and Rebecca MacKinnon, Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation and a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board. Adam Kushner, Deputy Editor of the National Journal, moderated the discussion.

From L to R, Weitzner, Mihkelson, Schuler, and MacKinnon. CC-BY-SA

At the heart of EOI is an effort to foster an international dialogue around Wikimedia DC’s and the Foundation’s vision. In that sense, the choice of the Estonian Embassy as the debut venue for EOI was not coincidental. Estonia currently ranks as the number one country for Internet freedom by the DC-based NGO Freedom House. Not only do tech, Internet companies, startups (think Skype) and knowledge initiatives thrive in Estonia, but so does the Estonian Wikipedia. Its nearly 95,000 articles, and 8.1 million monthly page views, may seem small compared to the English Wikipedia, but considering the country’s population stands at slightly over 1.3 million, these numbers are very substantial.

The global Wikimedia community will be coming to Washington, DC, this summer for Wikimania 2012, providing the city with an opportunity to witness how the world collaborates in pursuit of free global knowledge. Before these international delegates arrive, and long after they have returned home, Washington, DC has always been and will always remain a great place to promote international dialogue in support of shared knowledge. That is the ultimate goal of Wikimedia DC’s outreach and program efforts–like EOI and LibraryLab: they utilize the potential for collaboration that is present within the city and make a positive and lasting impact on global knowledge.

Nicholas Michael Bashour, President, Wikimedia District of Columbia

Today, the Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce a new opportunity for Wikipedians to reach out to scholars at one of the world’s most prestigious educational institutions. We’re seeking an experienced Wikipedia editor for a one year, full time fellowship based at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Located at the Harvard campus in Cambridge Massachusetts, this Wikipedian will have a unique role facilitating collaboration between the faculty, staff, and fellows at the Center and the Wikipedia volunteer community, with the aim of improving the quality of encyclopedia articles.

The Belfer Center is a focal point for research on international security and policy related to science, technology and the environment. It is also part of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. While some experience with the subject matter is preferred, the goal of this fellowship is for a Wikipedian to help unlock the expertise at the Center and see that it is shared with the world. While English Wikipedia alone may have nearly four million articles, the depth and quality of our coverage of international affairs and policy — such as on global nuclear security — is not well known. What we do know is that we are still a long way from Wikipedia’s goal of the “sum of all human knowledge,” and that having a liaison to work with experts and volunteers will do much to improve the free encyclopedia.

This position is funded by a generous grant from the Stanton Foundation. This philanthropic institution has supported both the Belfer Center and the Wikimedia Foundation in the past. Apply now!

Siko Bouterse, Head of Community Fellowships Program, Wikimedia Foundation

Kristen Skogen Lund, Crown Prince Haakon, Jimmy Wales, and Minister of Development Holmas looking on as Wikipedians demonstrate editing.

On Monday, at the annual Wikipedia Academy in Oslo, Norway, Crown Prince Haakon of Norway joined with Wikimedians to promote free knowledge and to highlight the cultural institutions and businesses that have embraced Wikipedia. They focused on the Wikipedia Zero agreement between the Wikimedia Foundation and Telenor, which enables more than 135 million customers in Asia to access Wikipedia without any additional charge on their data plans.

The celebration was headed by local Wikipedians, who introduced Crown Prince Haakon, Jimmy Wales, Minister of Development Heikki Holmas, and Telenor Executive Vice President Kristin Skogen Lund. Lund opened the celebration by advocating for Wikipedia and its open source format, identifying it as the “main pillar” of Telenor’s policy of openness in Asia.

“It’s an important development we put on track together with the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikipedia movement, and we are proud to contribute to this,” said Lund

Lund then demonstrated Telenor’s commitment to the free knowledge mission by announcing that Telenor had contributed 200 photos to Wikimedia Commons with Creative Commons licensing. “There is so much work to be done globally, but we can also contribute at home,” she said. “We hope that others will do the same.”

The academy broke past participation records by attracting 99 sign-ups and 23 high school assistants, as well as the first ever royal participant. Half of the attendees belonged to GLAM institutions, mainly museums and archives. It marked the beginning of the sector’s national policy of officially acclaiming Wikipedia as a preferred channel of communicating cultural heritage.

Minister Holmas, Crown Prince Haakon, and Jimmy Wales

The 100 chairs of the academy room were all filled up, with people standing along the walls during the award ceremony for Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 and the local Wikipedian of the Year. The latter prize went to meteorologist Frode Korneliussen and the Catholic parish priest Claes Tande, who has 180,000 edits and more than 13,000 new articles.

During a course on how to edit Wikipedia, we learned that Minister Holmaas is an active Wikipedia user, and editor. Ten Wikipedia editors from the local Drömtorp High School were recruited to help teach the course. The students, with assistance from Wales, taught Crown Prince Haakon, Lund and Holmaas how to patrol, supervise RSS feeds, and recognize vandalism. The Crown Prince followed the lectures intensely and expressed admiration for the elaborate tools that administrators and patrollers use on Wikipedia.

This year’s academy coincided with the last day of the trial of Utøya terrorist Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo City court house, only a kilometer away. In the local media’s coverage of the academy, they focused on the efforts of the Norwegian Wikipedia community to keep extremists from making their imprint on articles. Jimmy Wales explained the Wikipedia model as one of openness and democratic debate, which helps the project attain a neutral point of view.

The morning after, Wikimedia Norway vice chairman Erlend Bjørtvedt appeared on the morning news, explaining how a corps of 150 norwegian patrollers and administrators on four continents, have managed to uphold the neutrality of disputed articles by a mix of patrolling, reverting and limited article blocking.

Erlend Bjørtvedt, Vice Chairman, Wikimedia Norway