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Wiki-Concert on 15 May 2013. O. Dondyk and A. Bondarenko on a stage. Photo by Jbuket

There is a lengthy tradition of translating the lyrics of renowned classical music to Ukrainian. Its early beginnings may be traced to the late 19th century, and subsequently throughout the 20th century: Rylsky, Lukash, Starytska-Cherniakhivska, and Borys Ten. However, because they haven’t been published, these translations continue to remain relatively unknown. It is exactly for this reason that Wikimedia Ukraine aims to popularize their Ukrainian translations through the publication of scores, through the performance of the works themselves and through the release of the audio recordings of these. A first step in this direction was the publication of Bortniansky’s opera Le Faucon (1786) within the World Classics in Ukrainian Project, with its Ukrainian translation by Strikha (1990).

The concert on May 15th encompassed a wide range of styles and genres. Most of the works (songs of Schubert, Schumann, Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, Puccini and Rachmaninoff) were performed in the poetic translation by Yuri Otroshenko. The concert featured several contemporary works by Oksana Yevsiukova, based on poems by Tetiana Cherep and Marina Popova, and a work by Andriy Bondarenko, based on lyrics by L. Carroll (translated by V. Korniyenko).

The soloists were “People’s Artists of Ukraine” Mykola Koval and Stepan Fitsych, “Honored Artists of Ukraine” Natalia Krechko, Oksana Dondyk and Oksana Yevsiukova. Andriy Bondarenko (piano), Andriy Diomin (clarinet) and Vasyl Babych (cello) were accompanists. There was much applause from the audience, and after the final “Drinking Song” from Verdi’s opera “La Traviata,” audience enthusiasm prompted the performers to repeat the song as an encore.

One of the concert’s organizers, Andriy Bondarenko, a member of Wikimedia Ukraine and the Ukrainian Composer’s Union, said that the concert was unique. “After the Kiev Opera House rejected the Ukrainian translations in the early years of independence, there was virtually no performance of classical music in our native language. Exceptions have been rare: the only opera you could hear in Ukrainian in the National Opera theatre is Rossini’s “Barber of Seville.”

In 1994, Ukrainian singer Anna Kolesnyk performed songs in the Ivan Franco theater, Kiev. Meanwhile, the results of the concert were fascinating – not only because the singers performed well, but because the audience was able to understand what they were singing about!”

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Wikimedia Deutschland, the official Wikimedia Chapter in Germany, is the largest chapter fundraiser in the Wikimedia movement. This report of the 2012 fundraiser in Germany expands on the Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser report published this week on the Wikimedia Blog. The original blog post in German can be found here

In this video appeal a number of Wikipedia readers speak up. Pavel Richter, CEO of Wikimedia Deutschland, also explains why donations are important for spreading free knowledge.

In his thank you message to donors, readers, authors and staff, Pavel Richter gives a summary of the fundraising campaign and stresses what is important for Wikipedia and the future work of Wikimedia Deutschland.

The Numbers

Wikimedia Deutschland has experienced continued support from Wikipedia readers and the 2012 fundraising efforts again demonstrated how much people value the free encyclopedia. Even though this campaign was three days shorter than the previous year, we were able to increase the total result by 32 percent: 5,273,374 Euros were donated for Wikipedia and free knowledge during the last weeks via our fundraiser.

The online encyclopedia rests on many shoulders. It not only relies on the contributions of thousands of volunteer editors and supporters of free knowledge, but also on the 233,813 people who were inspired to donate. To look at this strong current of continuing support another way: We received a donation every 20 seconds over 49 days, between November 13 and December 31, 2012 (compared to 160,000 donors in the previous year). The average donation was 22,50 Euros. With many people giving to Wikipedia by means of small contributions, we’re not overly reliant on large donors and we can maintain our independence.

Wikimedia Deutschland is particularly happy about the many German Wikipedia readers who were willing to make recurring donations. Once again, we were able to increase the number of recurring donors by almost 50 percent compared to the previous year. During the fundraiser, more than 7,300 people opted for supporting Wikipedia on a regular basis.

Apart from asking for support in the form of donations, during this campaign we specifically asked Wikipedia readers to become members of Wikimedia Deutschland as well. Right after after they finished their payment, donors were able to fill out an online form in order to become a member. This simplified process was a sweeping success. We activated 2,376 new members, which means that, over the course of a few weeks, we almost doubled the number of Wikimedia Deutschland’s members.

The Campaign

Even though we were thoroughly prepared for the fundraiser, its start always marks the beginning of great activity for us. From the moment we switched on the fundraising banners on Wikipedia, we began to receive high volumes of e-mails and phone calls. That is why we now have some back up in our team. We know now that this was a wise decision. We were able to answer more than 100 e-mails during every day of the campaign (4,267 in total) and we answered all inquiries by the end of the campaign for the first time.

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Statue of Gustav II Adolph in Stockholm. Photo by: Lars (Lon) Olsson.

When we first looked at organising Wiki Loves Public Art (WLPA) in Sweden, together with Europeana, we figured that it wouldn’t be much different from how we had organized Wiki Loves Monuments in previous years. We would just need to get lists of all the public artworks in Sweden. As there is a government agency called The National Public Art Council Sweden (Statens konstråd), we thought all we’d need to do was contact them and get the data from them.

We soon found out that the situation was quite different. Although Statens konstråd does have lists of public artwork, they are limited to fairly recent art and only that art which the agency itself has purchased. The vast majority of the works of art are the responsibility of the individual municipalities, along with the agencies and companies charged with the maintenance of public buildings, such as train stations. There also isn’t a standardized format for how to record the works of art, nor a requirement to record them at all. Fortunately, Public Sector Information (PSI) legislation in Sweden is such that we can request this data from each of the public bodies holding the information.

Sjöormsfontänen by Axel Ebbe. Photo by: Hedning.

After receiving a grant from Sweden’s Innovation Agency (Vinnova), we set out to build a database that could hold all of the information we were going to collect. We also added an API to allow developers easy access to the data and to enable them to build other applications with it. We are also working on connecting the database to Wikipedia and Wikidata. This is similar to how the lists work in Wiki Loves Monuments, which provide a natural place for viewing the information and putting it in a larger context. It also allows the information to be further improved: volunteers can add coordinates, create descriptions and fix typos.

The project has also had the added benefit of making any municipality we contact aware of open data and the PSI legislation. Many of them have said that they’ve had internal discussions regarding best practices for handling requests for open data, which has spread awareness of the importance of open data within the organisations. Several municipalities were also delighted to find out that there is an interest in the public art they maintain. They have sometimes used this as an opportunity to update their own records or have expressed an interest in sharing the user-generated information that will be added to the works of art. By the time the preparations for Wiki Loves Public Art 2014 get started we expect to have a decent proportion of all public art in Sweden in the database. The generated lists should be able to serve our needs as a basis for the competition.

If we were going to run Wiki Loves Public Art 2014 the way we had originally envisioned running it in 2013, we need a centralised source of standardised information. The need for, and usefulness of, such a database goes beyond the WLPA contest. Schools can use an open database to identify local art or art elsewhere in Sweden by a local artist. Researcher could use it to look at trends in public art. Reporters could use it as an investigative tool when looking at local government spending. Adjoining municipalities could pool their resources when negotiating services, such as restoration and maintenance of works of art.

And these are just a few of the use cases we quickly thought of. The true benefit of an open database is that it can be used by anyone for any idea they might have.

Municipalities of Sweden colored based on their status in the Database. See image page for key. Image by: Lokal_Profil.

So if your country is in a similar situation where the relevant information is fragmented between many parties, perhaps this is the solution also for you. All code developed for this project is open source, making your life much easier. So the main thing you would need are volunteers to request the information and to then pre-process it into a usable form (don’t underestimate the time needed for either of these two steps!). You might even be able to find external funding for a similar project in your country.

Of course we’d be happy to share the lessons we have learned, so if you are interested just get in touch!

André Costa
GLAM-technician / Developer, Wikimedia Sverige

For more information and updates see the project page on our wiki.

A quick glimpse of some of the database features

From an early point we knew that we needed a way of clearly marking which content came from an official source and which had been user-generated. The solution was to build the database in two layers, giving you three choices in how to view the information:

1. Strict view, with official information only;
2. Normal view, which makes no distinction between user-generated and official information;
3. Enhanced view, which is similar to the Strict view, but displays user-generated information for the fields where official data is missing.

In addition to this, we added a mechanism that exports all of the changes to the official information from a given source. This allows an interested municipality to import some, or all, of the corrections or enhanced information. If these are then incorporated by them, the changes are upgraded to official status.

The database is also designed to keep a record of the copyright status of the artwork as well as whether it is inside or outdoors. The result of this is that we can build lists that detect whether images of the artwork are allowed on Wikimedia Commons, and also whether these should be marked with a Freedom of Panorama template. Just what we need for running Wiki Loves Public Art in 2014!

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Logo of the “Association of Honorary Citizens, Mentors and Gifted Young People”

The Gallery of Honour of Southern Russia and Eastern Ukraine is a public organization that holds the Gallery of Honour competition, an important event for supporting youth talent and for strengthening connections between generations. The competition is dedicated to the people and history of Southern Russia (Southern and North Caucasian Federal Districts) and Eastern Ukraine (Lugansk oblast and Donetsk oblast). In the first two tours, the participants were expected to use sites like YouTube; the third and final tour will feature cooperation with Russian Wikipedia, the best way to accumulate and distribute the knowledge.

The first two tours attracted more than 600 people from Rostov oblast, Volgograd oblast, Astrahkan oblast, Krasnodarskiy kray, Stavropolskiy kray, Ingushetia, Dagestan, Northern Ossetia-Alania, Chechnya, Kabardino-Balkaria, Kalmykia, Adygea, Moscow and Ukraine.

The Gallery of Honour of Southern Russia and Eastern Ukraine and Wikimedia Russia (the official Wikimedia chapter here) hope that the final tour will be attended by even more people, as editing Wikipedia is open to everyone. The competition is unusual for Wikipedia; article writing competitions don’t usually yield such big prizes (250,000 rubles, or roughly $8000 US).

The competition is taking place from May to October 2013; scientists, artists and some of the best-known Russian Wikipedia article authors will be invited to enter the jury.

On June 3rd, 2013, at 14:00, Interfax (Rostov-on-Don, Budennovskiy 60Б, 11th floor) will hold a press-conference about the competition’s start. Full rules will be available at Википедия:Галерея Славы Юга России и Востока Украины soon. Webinars will be organized to make participation easier for those who haven’t edited Wikipedia before.

There will be several categories for competition: best articles about biographies, human settlements, and historical and cultural events. Authors and uploaders of the best images will be encouraged. There are also special prizes for teachers and mentors of younger Wikipedians. An odd prize, “The smartest,” will be awarded to the city that has the highest participation rate (per 1000 inhabitants).

Anastasia Lvova, Wikimedia Russia

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On Thursday, 23 May, just one day before the big Wikimedia hackathon in Amsterdam, Wikimedia Israel held its first hackathon in Tel-Aviv.

Israel has a thriving software industry, as well as a healthy Wikipedia editing community. Despite this, there are relatively few software developers in Israel who work on Wikimedia-related projects, so the primary purpose of this event was to show new people who are skilled in programming and web design how they can contribute their talents to our free knowledge projects.

Wikimedia Israel already organized a hackathon as part of the Wikimania 2011 conference, which was held in Haifa, but this was the first time that such an event was produced in Israel independently of other events.

Google Israel kindly gave us the venue – the hacking space in their Tel-Aviv Campus building, which is perfect for such events: cozy, simple, with comfortable tables, a lot of power strips and good wifi. About thirty people showed up for the event. Their skills were varied and quite surprising. There were not just PHP and JavaScript developers – these languages being the most important in MediaWiki – but also experts in DevOps, integration testing, Python scripting, data visualizations and design.

In the best hackathon style, the event focused less on talks and more on code, but I was very happy to host one guest talk by Mushon Zer-Aviv, a developer of the freely licensed Alef font, designed as a modern Hebrew and Latin typeface for the web.

So, most importantly, what did the event accomplish? Among other things: fixes for two MediaWiki bugs, both made by new developers; improved automatic tests for JavaScript components; a prototype for a script that enriches Wikipedia with data from Open Knesset, a database of information about the Israeli parliament based on open-source technology; and a new template in Lua, also made by a developer who is completely new to the language. I had the feeling that most of the participants became genuinely interested in joining the community of MediaWiki developers.

I want to use this opportunity to give my very sincere thanks to the people who helped me organize the event: Chen Davidi, Itzik Edri and Dorit Shafir-Diamant, who were instrumental in organizing the event’s logistics; Michal from Google Israel for providing the venue; and also to Yair Talmor, Chezi Reshef, Yael Meron, Elad Alfassa, Oren Held, Moshe Nachmias and Yair Podemasky, who very kindly volunteered to help with setting up the venue, handled the registration and cleaned up at the end of the day.

The event was very satisfying, and we hope to have another one soon!

Amir E. Aharoni, Wikimedia Israel

Jewish cemetery at Rabí Castle

The Jewish Monuments grant project aims to gather freely licensed photos of all existing Czech Jewish monuments, with particular focus on synagogues and cemeteries, whether those are still in religious use or are used for different purposes. The grant is part of Wikimedia Czech Republic’s Mediagrant project (see earlier blog post). It was launched in August 2011 and was inspired by projects documenting Czech municipalities, protected Natural Areas and Memorable Trees throughout the Czech Republic.

When we started planning, there was a wiki page containing a list of Czech Jewish cemeteries, some of which had articles about them; there were also several articles on major Czech synagogues and the portal of Judaism (Hebraistika). However, no records about the buildings of Czech synagogues were available for the photographers to check when planning a trip. Therefore it proved essential to put together all Czech Jewish monuments to show which had been documented sufficiently and which of them were still lacking any photographic documentation.

The first step was to make lists of the monuments by region, including the names of each (e.g. Synagogue in Slatina), the town and district they were situated in, their GPS location, a brief description commenting on the position, availability and usage of the building these days, and any photos already taken. When the 2012 Wiki Loves Monuments competition was about to start, and lists of Czech cultural monuments were being put together, the charts became a useful source of information on available photos. Logically, one of the grant rules is to fill in any newly photographed places in the charts to keep the information current and ready-to-use by other photographers.

Jewish cemetery in Klatovy

Obtaining the GPS data proved to be one of the most difficult columns to complete, as some cemeteries and synagogues were hardly ever mentioned in online or printed materials. As a result, their position often had to be checked with the local authorities. Some municipal officers were so helpful they offered to provide pictures of their own or even take new ones. Unfortunately, some of the monuments still lack exact positioning.

Several photographers expressed surprise at seeing how the original purpose of many buildings had changed over the years. While some former synagogues are used as concert halls and museums, other synagogues, in particular those in rural areas, have been turned into houses, fire stations, shops or even discos. Many of the cemeteries have also been long forgotten, so that even some locals have no idea of their existence; others are looked after well, with caretakers routinely restoring the fallen gravestones and remodeling the stone fences. Alas, there are some cemeteries that do not get any attention at all, presenting the lonely visitor with a scene of broken gravestones scattered all over the place, nettles flourishing in places where gravestones have been stolen, and unpruned trees casting shadows on the pebbles that visitors had placed on the tombs long before.
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On May 18th, 2013, we gathered for a big WikiParty in Moscow, Russia. It was dedicated to three important events: the millionth article in Russian Wikipedia, the twelfth anniversary of Russian Wikipedia, and the traditional WikiAwards for achievements of Russian Wikipedia’s contributors during 2012.

Russian University of Economics was the main venue, however the event began in the Sokol district with a tour by Wikipedian Andreykor, who wrote good and featured articles about this area. In addition to the celebration, Wikipedians Vladimir Soloviev and Sergei Vladimirov held workshops and the university held an Open Day. The university’s event organizers even enriched the celebration with a master class in carving lemons, a pun and symbol of the million articles.

The day of the celebration happened to also be the countrywide Russian day of planting forests. On this day, people planted 27 million new trees in the area of 8700 hectares during various events, setting a record in Russia. Among these trees were Alley of Free Knowledge oaks, planted by Wikipedians from the Russian Economic University, and Wikipedia Avenue pines, which will become a part of a forest destroyed by fires few years ago near the town of Roshal, in the Moscow region.

In addition to these celebrations, on May 22 we celebrated the fifth anniversary of the Sakha Wikipedia at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in St. Petersburg. Sakha Wikipedia is a project in one of the many languages spoken in Russia.

The celebrations took place amid increased public attention to the government’s attempts to blacklist several Wikipedia pages about drugs and suicide. Earlier, the Russian Wikipedia went on strike against the legislation that enables such decisions; however, what’s more important is Wikipedia’s achivements and the possibility to hold such diverse celebrations.

Anastasia Lvova, Wikimedia Russia

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Wikiexpedtion logo

A Polish national railways class EU07

Wikimedia Polska, the Polish Wikimedia Chapter, is about to organize a Railways Expedition in collaboration with the Polish Railways Company. The photography expedition is devoted to train infrastructure in Poland and will give participants unprecedented access to sites they wouldn’t otherwise see so closely.

Polish Railways has offered the opportunity to teach Wikipedians to navigate the railway premises, after which they will receive ID cards entitling them to enter and photograph objects normally inaccessible to the public. Polish Railways will provide us with free monthly railway tickets for all participants and special passes to legally enter and photograph rail tracks, workshops, rail yards, cargo railway stations and museums belonging to Polish Railways. Wikimedia Polska will cover the costs of accommodation and food (travel to Poland is not covered).

We are looking for people interested in this form of Wikiexpedition. We want to form 2-3 person teams, with Polish-speaking leaders and participants from other countries. We’d like to underscore the fact that you will not need to speak Polish to participate; we’re happy to help you navigate the language. Teams would be moving independently, both in terms of time and location. We think it would be useful to organize several teams that could work in different areas of Poland. The Wikiexpedtion will take place this summer, sometime between June and September, 2013.

If you want to join the railways expedition, just add yourself to the list on the Wikimedia Polska wiki. Basically, the only requirements are that you a) have an obsession with trains and railways and b) that you are excited to spend around a week (or more) traveling in slow trains that stop at all manner of tiny stations around Poland.

Tomas Ganicz, Wikimedia Polska

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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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(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: