On January 18, 2013, Wikimedia Sweden and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences launched a unique collaboration. The collaboration was so rare that we had to invent a new position – “Wikipedian in Academy” – in addition to the “Wikipedian in Residence” already prevalent at different GLAM-institutions. Now it is time to take up residency at the universities. Swedish universities have three statutory responsibilities – research, education, and science outreace (in Sweden labelled “den tredje uppgiften” [the third task]). Contributing to Wikipedia is of course the single most effective way to achieve science outreach (fulfill the third task) in higher education; there is simply no other platform which allows you to reach so many readers.

Currently, Wikipedia projects linked to universities are so far based on contributions from students and individual researchers, but to this day there is no project where researchers officially affiliated with a particular university have written about science on Wikipedia in an organized form. Since no university has taken this challenge seriously, SLU collaborated with Wikimedia Sweden to pioneer the scientific community’s commitment to Wikipedia.

This project was launched at a Wikipedia day on January 18, 2013, with invited international key note speakers and will be followed up with development of manuals, workshops, and a help desk run by a project manager (Wikipedian in Academy) during a five-month period. This project will be monitored and reported at a conference a year later with the goal of at least 100 researchers having made a substantial contribution to Wikipedia (defined as part of an article).

The intention is to have an annual Wikipedia day when researchers participate in workshops and training and/or write about their field of research in Swedish and foreign language Wikipedia. We are also initiating and developing a network of Wikipedia Ambassadors at the university, who will continue the work after the project has ended.

This project has been designed, developed and implemented by Arild Vågen and education manager Sophie Österberg from Wikimedia Sweden, and researcher Olle Terenius and head of communications Tina Zethraeus at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

Arild Vågen, Wikipedian in Academy at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

This post is available in 2 languages:

Česky  • English

In English

Not only do we have to locate a protected area. The detective work begins when we try hard to find a specific plant species that is supposed to be at full bloom…

In mid-2011, members of Czech WikiProject Protected Areas (a group of Wikipedians interested in environmentalism) were thinking: there are a lot of protected areas scattered all around the Czech Republic, and yet, few of them had been photographically documented for Wikimedia Commons, the image database for the Wikimedia projects. As a result of this, we sought a grant in July 2011 to support the Wikimedian photographers. This grant falls within the Mediagrant initiative, an overall grant scheme developed by Wikimedia Czech Republic (WMCZ) and financed by the Wikimedia Foundation. The goals of the grant were clear: to obtain pictures of protected areas, memorable trees or rare plant and animal species that can be found in these localities.

The Mediagrant itself enables all interested people to ask for funding that will help them acquire new multimedial content such as pictures, but also audiovisual records. This means that every new project has an easy path to the funding it inevitably needs; and this was the case for WikiProject Protected Areas too. Our goals were not modest at all, to tell the truth. We deciced for a long run towards photographing every protected area and memorable tree in the Czech Republic, i.e. an astonishing number of 2500 different spots and a few thousand memorable trees. It would be utterly difficult to do this with a small group of volunteers, but without a certain level of coordination and without any financial support for travel expenses.

You might wonder how this all works in practice. Actually, it is very simple. Any volunteer can find a couple of protected areas that he/she would like to pay a visit to. After arriving at the spot, he/she makes a few pictures of the area, hunting for interesting plants and animals as well. At home, one has to upload the pictures to Wikimedia Commons and them send a short and simple summary of the trip. The grant admin then evaluates the trip, inspects the uploaded results, and, if positive, gives instructions so that the travel expenses are paid to the volunteer’s bank account.

In order to involve as many people as possible, we strived to eliminate bureaucracy. Both personal transport (petrol expenses paid per km) and public transport (train or bus) can be reimbursed. The only remnant of bureaucracy – the duty to send us the corresponding bus or train ticket for the sake of accounting – could not have been eliminated because of Czech law.

Almost two years have gone by and it remains to seen if our goals materialized into tangible results. To do this, we should examine the table below,^[1] which includes data from six months of 2011, all of 2012, and the first month of 2013.

In 2012, a total number of 57 photo trips were taken, capturing 3823 pictures of 224 different areas or memorable trees. This is an average of 17 pictures per object, which is fairly good coverage, even though all of the photos were taken at one time of the year (while nature tends to change a lot during the year). In total, almost 300 hundred objects have been captured through the lenses of our 12 volunteer photographers. You can see all these pictures in a category at Wikimedia Commons.

One of the biggest successes of our grant, one that we are proud of, is that we were able to attract new contributors who had not been part of the Wikimedia community before. Variability of our WikiProject seems to be the cause of our success – we popularize protected areas in Wikipedia, but also (and primarily) in printed media and on social sites. Our Facebook ‘Protected Areas’ page certainly plays a big part; from time to time, we advertise the availability of our grant there. As you could see above, this day-to-day and often demanding work bears fruits, although we would love to see even more newbies join our efforts. A great example is user Artiplexmedia, who was able to visit 71 protected areas and take 1241 pictures in only half a year. This made him the most active member of our team by far.

What could be improved? The most challenging part of our work is really to attract more people from outside the Wikipedia movement. Objectively, it is difficult to explain how easy the process of funding is and how easily they can take their camera and go hunting for protected areas and then upload the photos to Wikimedia Commons. Editing the Wikimedia projects is still a big secret – or challenge – to many, and when you add the cumpulsory bureaucracy (no matter how simple we make it), the final “mix” is very difficult to overcome. We need to find a way to attract people to our mission on a larger scale.

We have already learned some valuable lessons about running this grant project. Mainly, we confirmed the well-known truth that bureaucracy has to be kept on a tight leash: otherwise, your chances of involving newcomers are slim. Secondly, the experienced grant leaders have to be always ready and willing to help beginners (eg. with adding descriptions to their pictures, creating categories, adding templates, etc.). This reduces the shock that the beginners would otherwise feel when starting out on Wikipedia. This way, it definitely puts less stress on them and it is also much more friendly. Actually, every new photographed object gets noticed fairly soon, as the contributors link all their uploaded content in their travel report. Grant admins can then go through the pictures and, if needed, fix the bugs.

Finally, let us have one immodest wish. We hope that our grant will do even better in 2013. Also, we wish to make the Czech ‘environmental tourism’ even more attractive, because this is the only way for us to fulfill our goals, to document all the protected areas and memorable trees. Our work can offer high-quality information to learn about the hot spots of Czech nature and landscape – for all and for free. Moreover, by sharing the free knowledge online, we also do something for a better environment. This is worth standing up and taking out your camera!

Petr Brož (Chmee2), Wikimedia Czech Republic
Translated by Vojtech.Dostal, Wikimedia Czech Republic

• read more about the grant here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_CZ/Mediagrant/Report

Gallery
Leucojum vernum in natural monument Pašínovická louka	Natural monument Drásovský kopeček, Brno-venkov District, Czech Republic
Group of five Quercus robur – famous trees near Tloskov u Neveklova, Benešov District, Czech Republic	National nature reserve Vyšenské kopce, Český Krumlov District, Czech Republic

Notes

1. ↑ Only approved tickets are counted into the number of ‘trips’. The expenses do not include trips that have been approved but not paid out. However, that is just a minor number (currently 5) all all of them are to be paid out eventually.
   The number of visited localities and number of pictures are affected by several factors: objects outside of the WikiProject Protected Areas are included into the total number in case that the trip is mainly dealing with Protected areas. Also, trip no. 242 summarizes several protected areas under one name. The overall statistics is affected only minimally and can be neglected for the sake of simplicity .

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(This is a guest post by Carol Ann O’Hare of Wikimedia France.)

The impact of collaborative writing on the quality of Wikipedia content, new methods for monitoring contributions in order to fight vandalism, how the nature and quality of content depends on contributors’ status and the area covered, etc. These topics concern the Wikimedians who write and use Wikipedia… but also more and more researchers!

By launching an international award for research on Wikimedia projects and free knowledge, Wikimédia France wants to highlight these research works, encourage them and especially, make them understandable and accessible to the Wikimedia community.

Starting in July, the first step was to ask the community of researchers that study Wikimedia projects to nominate scientific papers that they consider the most influential and important from the years 2003 to 2011. We collected more than 30 proposals, each satisfying the selection criteria: Available under open access and published in peer-reviewed publications. It is thanks to a quality jury, composed of researchers working on these topics, that we could select five finalists papers among these. You can find summaries and full texts linked below:

• Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations by Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg and Kushal Dave, published in 2004.

• DBpedia: A Nucleus for a Web of Open Data by Sören Auer, Christian Bizer, Georgi Kobilarov, Jens Lehmann, Richard Cyganiak and Zachary Ives, published in 2007.

• A Content-Driven Reputation System for the Wikipedia by Thomas Adler and Luca de Alfaro, published in 2007.

• Creating, destroying, and restoring value in Wikipedia by Reid Priedhorsky, Jilin Chen, Shyong K. Lam, Katherine Panciera, Loren Terveen and John Riedl, published in 2007.

• Can history be open source? Wikipedia and the future of the past by Roy Rosenzweig, published in 2006.

To decide the winner, Wikimédia France wishes to encourage all Wikimedians to give their opinion and vote for the paper that seems the most stimulating and relevant.

Voting will close on Monday, March 11. The announcement of the winning paper is scheduled for the end of March. The authors will receive a grant of €2,500. They can freely allocate this sum, provided it is dedicated to help open knowledge research.

Carol Ann O’Hare
Wikimedia France

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українська  • English

This is a guest post from Yevhen Buket of the Ukrainian Wikimedia chapter.

In English:

Preliminary Logo of Wiki Loves Earth

Wikimedia Ukraine is launching a new photo contest, “Wiki Loves Earth,” on April 15, 2013. The goal of the contest is to collect free pictures of Ukraine’s Natural Heritage sites, landscapes and ornamental gardening objects in order to illustrate articles on Wikipedia.

Anyone can take part in the competition; however, registration on Wikimedia Commons is required. The Organizational Committee has begun preparation work on the competition list and already has almost 8,000 possible photographic entries, including nature reserves, landscape parks, protected areas, natural heritage sites, zoological gardens and parks, flora and ornamental gardening objects.

To enter the contest, find an item or place you are familar with from the competition list, submit a picture you have taken (past or present), and upload it to Wikimedia Commons beginning April 15 through May 15, 2013. The photographers with the best pictures will be awarded prizes. The winners will be announced at the awarding ceremony in Kyiv on World Environment Day on June 5, 2013.

According to Yuri Perohanych, Wikimedia Ukraine Executive Director, this photo contest will draw society’s attention to the existing problems surrounding Ukraine’s natural heritage protection, and the contest itself will highlight green/eco tourism in Ukraine.

Contest Coordinator Yevhen Buket pointed out that the idea to hold such a photo competition came from the successful international photo contest Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine this past September. The goal of the Wiki Loves Monuments contest was to collect pictures of cultural heritage monuments in Ukraine.

Wikimedia Ukraine invited the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of Ukraine, environmental organizations, as well as donors and sponsors to help with the organization of the competition and to contribute to the contest prize fund.

Stay tuned for more details as the contest gets closer.

Yevhen Buket, Wikimedia Ukraine

In Ukrainian:

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Today the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia UK  are announcing the release of the final report and recommendations regarding the governance of the Wikimedia UK chapter. The report was completed by Compass Partnership, consultants in non-profit management based in the UK. The report was commissioned jointly by the Foundation and Wikimedia UK in October 2012 following important Wikimedia community discussions about potential conflicts of interest arising from a series of wiki outreach projects.

The Foundation and Wikimedia UK saw the potentially damaging effect of these matters and we ordered this review and report. We both expect the highest standards of governance, and this report is an effort to chart a strong course for Wikimedia UK and also thoughtful and valuable counsel for any organization in our movement to consider.

The report discusses important conclusions based on discussions with and materials provided by all of the major stakeholders. The aim of the report is not to lay blame, rather it seeks to determine if pre-existing policies and practices around conflicts of interest and governance were sufficient. Through this report we also aim to lay the groundwork for better and stronger governance for Wikimedia UK in the future and for its development as a chapter in our movement. We also believe the report may benefit the wider community of Wikimedia affiliated organizations by providing an example of best practices around governance and decision-making as applied to a chapter.

With a clear list of recommendations and timeline for their implementation, Wikimedia UK is now in a position to improve and expand its policies and procedures, related not just to the  management of conflict of interest but also its management structure. The chapter will be discussing the findings with the community and begin their implementation at their forthcoming Trustee meeting in February.

We would like to thank everyone who has supported this process over the past three months, including the authors of the report, Compass Partnership, the staff and trustees of WMUK and the Wikimedia Foundation, and Wikimedia community members who shared their insights and feedback about the whole process.

You can read the review findings here and the chronology of the events here

Questions and answers regarding the report are posted here. A community discussion page on Meta wiki has also been created.

This post is available in 2 languages:

українська  • English

This is a guest post from Andriy Makukha on behalf of Wikimedia Ukraine.

In English:

The orbit of 274301 Wikipedia

A main belt asteroid, No. 274301, has been named after Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The information became available on the Minor Planet Center‘s website recently. Its estimated diameter is about 1–2 kilometers (around 1 mile).

The decision of the Committee for Small Body Nomenclature to assign the name “Wikipedia” to the asteroid was published in the Minor Planet Circular of January 27, published online on January 30, page 82403. The name was proposed by a member of Wikimedia Ukraine. It was submitted to the Committee by the head of the Andrushivka Astronomical Observatory, Ukraine‘s only private observatory, Yuri Ivashchenko.

The official citation of the name says:
Wikipedia is a free, copyleft, collaboratively edited online encyclopedia launched in 2001. In 11 years of its compilation it became one of the largest reference works and one of the most visited web-sites on the Internet. It is developed in more than 270 languages by enthusiasts from all over the world.

The asteroid 274301 Wikipedia was discovered by the team of astronomers of Andrushivka Astronomical Observatory. At first it was observed by that team on August 25, 2008 at 22:47 (UTC). It was also observed on the next night and two weeks later on September 6. It received the provisional designation 2008 QH₂₄. The accurate calculation of its orbit showed that asteroid 2008 QH₂₄ is the same as 1997 RO₄ and 2007 FK₃₄. This asteroid had been previously spotted by observatories including Caussols-ODAS in France, and Mt. Lemmon Survey and Steward Observatory in Arizona, US. Wikipedia orbits the sun every 3.68 years – or in other words, if one were to measure age in Wikipedia years, the free encyclopedia was launched just about 3.28 Wikipedia years ago.

On behalf of Wikimedia Ukraine:
Andriy Makukha

A prior version of this story was published by the English Wikinews on January 31

In Ukrainian:

Вільна енциклопедія у космосі: астероїд названо «Вікіпедія» (more…)

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Česky • English

English

Another winter term is coming to an end at Czech universities and we can again evaluate how students of Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague, succeeded in improving Wikipedia articles about Czech protected areas this year. A total of 36 enrolled students of “Nature and Landscape Protection” (6 more students than last year) took part in the cooperation between the faculty and WikiProject Protected areas, organized under patronation of Students Write Wikipedia program and Wikimedia Czech Republic.

The benefits of cooperating with a group of third-year university students of Institute for Environmental Studies have been clear since last year, as can be seen from the last year’s report. At that time, students wrote top-quality articles accompanied by lots of pictures, aiming to document corresponding protected areas and improve the topic in the Czech Wikipedia. It was this past success that was very demanding this time: Will we be able to motivate the students enough so that their articles are at least as good as they were last year?

We did not change the overall model of the project: again, students were asked to pick one protected area, pay a visit in it, take pictures, make a 15-minute talk in front of the class (including the following discussion), and, last but not least, write a detailed Wikipedia article on the subject of this protected area. However, we put more stress on the professional delivery of the talks in front of class, including punctuality and good time management, as well as sticking to basic Wikipedia rules when writing the article. The scheme did not change because it was evaluated as satisfying enough and leading to good quality articles with lots of pretty pictures. It must be noted that this model is very demanding for the Wikipedia Ambassador who goes through all the articles, corrects them, and attends the seminar each week to evaluate the speeches.

As mentioned earlier, WikiProject Protected Areas has been the principal curator of this project; however, it is part of an official Students Write Wikipedia initiative that has been operating for two years now in the Czech Republic and has seen hundreds of articles being created about various topics and by students of several Czech universities. Apropos, ten Czech projects are running in the current winter term, including “Christianity I.“, “Sculpture in Czech Lands 1550-1800“, “Molecular Immunology” or “Essentials of Parasitology” (the list of all our projects can be found here). Recent changes in all these articles can be monitored real-time at a special page; the most interesting updates are regularly posted at the program’s Facebook page.

And how was the cooperation going this year? Let’s see the table below!

Image	Name	Before	After	Gallery on Commons
	Andělské schody
	Badínsky prales
	Barrandovské skály
	Blana
	Borkovická blata
	Černé rokle
	Drienčanský kras
	Hostivické rybníky
	Jenerálka
	Kalvárie v Motole
	Kaňon Labe
	Karlštejn
	Kohoutov
	Kotýz
	Lednické rybníky
	Máslovická stráň
	Meandry Botiče
	Milíčovský les a rybníky
	Modřanská rokle
	Motolský ordovik
	Na Čihadle
	Na Plachtě 3
	Nový rybník u Soběslavi
	Polabská černava
	Pravčická brána
	Prokopské údolí
	Prosecké skály
	Skalka
	Sokolí skála
	Starý Hirštejn
	Třemešný vrch
	U Branického pivovaru
	Údolí Kunratického potoka
	Údolí Únětického potoka
	Vrch Hazmburk
	Zbrašovské aragonitové jeskyně

As you can see by comparing the corresponding page revisions in the table, the amount of text written during the course of the project was huge, and that applies to pictures as well. Like last year, one of the articles, written by a student, achieved the status of a Good Article. Specifically, it was an article dealing with a natural monument Hostivické rybníky, which is located in the vicinity of Prague. We proved again that even someone who is a Wikipedia beginner can create a high quality article when properly motivated. We also believe that the “exemplary articles” offered to students are essential for the success, as students can easily see all the templates used and just copy/paste them into their own article. We also stressed the practice of watching the work of students by experienced Wikipedians, who fix any imperfections and mistakes in the text or student’s wrong understanding of the internal wiki-rules.

Nevertheless, something did not run so smooth this year. Although we did explain the problem of copyright and stressed the importance of original writing, two students crossed the line of this essential Wikipedia rule this year. We cannot tell if it was unfamiliarity with the rule or an effort to simplify their school job, but the truth is that we recognized these violations very soon and removed the problematic pieces. Students thus experienced efficient defence mechanisms of Wikipedia, as even without the need of an Ambassador’s action, as other users promptly flagged the articles. Students were bound to rewrite the articles and explain their fault to the teacher. We believe this was an important lesson for all the students in the class, helping them to realize how important the original work is. However, we strongly warn everyone who considers starting a similar project to check all the student texts for copyright violations – this is a ubiquitous problem.

Apart from this issue that must be addressed, I would recommend all the Wikimedia projects to try to involve students as much as possible. Their positive value is indisputable and if you dedicate enough of your free time, they sure will produce excellent results, as our students did. The Czech “Students Write Wikipedia” program has once again proved its viability and the diversity it brings into Czech Wikipedia. This is a project when otherwise non-existent articles on protected areas and pictures are created and I personally hope that the next term will be again blooming with gifted students and their beautiful articles.

I’d like to hereby thank to Mgr. Jiří Reif PhD., the Associate Professor at Charles University in Prague, who once again allowed me to cooperate with his students and join them into the development of Czech Wikipedia. Also, I would love to thank to all students, who took part in this project and gave a lot of their energy in it. Thank you all!

Petr Brož (Chmee2), translated by Vojtech.Dostal, Wikimedia Czech Republic

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(This is a guest post from Adrienne Alix of Wikimedia France. You can read the original Afripedia post here and you can read the French version of this post here.)

The Afripedia project was initiated in late 2011, and engaged Wikimédia France, the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF) and the Institut Français (IF). Kiwix also supplied technological support.

The partnership, which was signed in June 2012, started materializing in November 2012 in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.

What is the project about?

The Afripedia project aims to enable significant off-line consultation of Wikipedia and also to train contributors in French-speaking African schools and universities.

Hardware for Afripedia project.

Our starting point was the fact that, although African universities have begun to be well-equiped with computer hardware, their Internet connectivity is often poor, or at least too weak or irregular to allow frequent, natural use of Wikipedia. These issues and lack of Internet access at home are factors that prevent students and teachers from using Wikipedia as much as they might like.

It was important for us to combine the dissemination of Wikipedia with contribution trainings so that students and teachers could contribute to Wikipedia and enhance content about Africa, which is notably under-represented on Wikipedia (only 2 percent of contributors are from Africa, and most of them from North African countries). Thus, when quality Internet access comes, Wikipedia contributors will be ready.

Using Kiwix, which has been offering off-line consultation of Wikipedia for several years, we implemented a computer deployment project to broadcast Wikipedia through offline WiFi networks. This mechanism, in place in universities of West Africa and Central Africa, allows people from those universities to connect easily to the network and freely read Wikipedia without an Internet connection or desktop computer. A more detailed description is available on Wikipedia: projet Afripédia.

What have we done?

Afripédia training, Abidjan, 2012.

With the help of AUF, we hired about 15 people from French-speaking digital campuses in 11 African countries: Senegal, Benin, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Chad, Central African Republic, Mauritania, Niger, Togo, Mali and Burundi. From 5-9 November 2012, training took place at Abidjan’s French speaking digital campus, located in the Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Cocody (Ivory Coast). Over five days, we taught how to use and install the Wikipedia offline consultation tools. We also taught Wikipedia editing, explained concepts such as free licences and introduced the various Wikimedia projects. The week ended with a public lecture available to students (around a hundred people attended), and a contribution workshop animated by the people trained during the week.

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(This is a guest post from Dirk Franke, German Wikipedian)

In English:

This Monday, I – Dirk Franke – started a Community Project about the future of paid editing on the German Wikipedia. For one year, as a kind of a fellow of the German Wikipedia community and the German Wikimedia chapter, I will be exploring the risks and opportunities posed by the writing of Wikipedia articles for personal financial gain, and discussing possible policies in dealing with this.

Wikipedia articles are a way to reach many, many people. Most companies have discovered that their clients and business partners look them up on Wikipedia. Many cultural institutions have made this discovery, too. These institutions are actually being guided by several GLAM projects worldwide. Many universities now know that students not only look up their homework on Wikipedia, but also their prospective place of study. Next to the volunteers who edit Wikipedia, the number of PR people, company employees, people working for museums, cultural institutions, universities and the numbers of students working in course assignments has steadily increased. Motivations, incentives and goals of these people are vastly different. But all of their participation changes Wikipedia as we know it.

I am Dirk Franke – Benutzer/User:Southpark – Wikipedia editor since January 2004, Wikipedia admin since February 2004, former member of the board of Wikimedia Deutschland (2005 and 2012), and former member of the German ArbCom. Some of you might know me from my blog iberty.net or from my recent Wikimania presentations about Chiara Ohoven/notability or White Bags/the image filter. And I am the author of about 35 featured and good articles on the German Wikipedia about oceans or strange cultural phenomena. These articles have nothing to do with my present project, but I’m terribly proud of them.

My fellowship project, called “The Limits of Writing Articles for Financial Gain“, was approved by the Community Project Budget. This is a program where Wikimedia Deutschland gives money to the community to spend on their own projects to support free knowledge, and Wikimedia projects in particular. A committee of community members and chapter members determines on what to spend it. Luckily for me, they decided to fund my project. So right now I have a kind of community fellowship to investigate and explain, and to help the community in making up its mind. This special status also means that all opinions I state, mails and texts I write, mistakes and brilliant discoveries I make, will fall solely into my own responsibility and not that of Wikimedia Deutschland.

Opinions on how to deal with these authors differ vastly even within a single Wikipedia. Internal rules are often contradictory. The rules become even more contradictory when one looks at different language editions of Wikipedia. My project is designed to unify discussions, find and detect paid editing already there, talk to GLAMs, companies, and many many Wikipedians, to help Wikipedia to stay a neutral, balanced encyclopedia with a lively community even when facing the money challenge. The fellowship will last a year, and it will involve a lot of talking, writing, listening and most of all reading.

For a lot of reasons like practicality, insider knowledge, and community trust, my project will focus onto the German Wikipedia. But of course the challenges and risks are similar across the language spectrum. As always in wikiworld, collaboration and communication can only help. So I am happy, happy, and happy to hear from any experiences, opinions, best and worst practices or whatever you have to say about this topic.

Right now at the beginning, the acts of reading and listening are even more important. Who has experience with paid editing in Wikipedia? What are your local rules on paid editing? How do the people of your local recent changes patrol deal with conspicuous edits? How do the people of your local quality control react to conspicuous edits? What tools and help do they need? Who has already received offers to write for money? Who has agreed on such an offer? Who has an opinion about or experience with the various cooperations with GLAMs? Who has experiences or opinions about Wikipedians-in-residence at non-profit or for-profit organizations?

Links:

• My user page: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Dirk_Franke
• Project description: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community-Projektbudget/Limits
• Blog: http://dirkingofranke.tumblr.com/
• E-Mail: dirk.frankewikipedia.de
• IRC: irc://irc.freenode.net/Wikipedia-de User:dirkfranke

P.S.: I try to be as open as possible in this project and to talk in an unbiased way to anybody willing to talk to me. But of course I’m a human being and you may be curious about my own position. On an emotional level I want my Wikipedia from 2004 back and feel that paid editing is eeeeeeeevil. On a rational level I’m afraid the whole subject matter is way more complicated.

Dirk Franke (Southpark)

German Wikipedian

Auf Deutsch:

Community-Projekt zum professionellen Editieren gestartet

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English

Wikimedia Argentina, the first Wikimedia chapter in Latin America to be founded, has a long history of activities related with promoting the use of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects in education, mainly in secondary schools and universities.

In 2010, it published a booklet entitled “Wikipedia en el aula” (Wikipedia in the classroom in Spanish), aimed at teachers and other education professionals. A significant number of students in Argentina currently use Wikipedia as their main source of information, so the booklet tries to answer several questions a teacher has about Wikipedia, such as “Is it reliable?” or “What can I do if my students use Wikipedia?”. “Wikipedia en el aula” not only addresses these questions but also presents several cases of teachers who have used Wikipedia as a learning tool within their own classrooms. The booklet presents simple examples illustrating how the online encyclopedia can be used as a place to develop writing and debating abilities and to motivate participation and engagement within a community.

The booklet has been distributed to several schools in Argentina and has inspired the Argentine government to create a space about Wikipedia within its own education portal, educ.ar.

Following other of its own strategic pillars, Wikimedia Argentina developed the first edition of “Wikipedia en el aula” in an indigenous language, with the goal of promoting the usage and development of the historically displaced native languages of the current Argentine territory. In its first edition, “Wikipedia en el aula” was translated into Guarani (“Vikipetã mbo’eha kotýpe”), spoken not only in Northeastern Argentina but also in an area encompassing Southern Brazil, Western Bolivia, and Paraguay, where it is one of the two official languages. Wikimedia Argentina will publish a first edition with 500 printed copies to be distributed in schools and other educational institutions, and it expects to broaden the number of languages in the future.

Yet, Wikimedia Argentina’s Educational activities are not limited to “Wikipedia en el aula”. The chapter has already delivered in the past presentations and workshops to students and teachers. Wikimedia Argentina’s goal for 2013 is to articulate all of these activities in an Educational Master Plan. It will be created together with local and foreign experts on Education and will act as a guide for Wikimedia Argentina’s work in the years to come.

Osmar Valdebenito G.
Executive Director
A. C. Wikimedia Argentina

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