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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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Anne Nelson’s class at Columbia University

In the summer of 2011, I got an invitation to attend the Wikimedia Foundation’s education summit in Boston. The summit opened my eyes to the ways other professors were using Wikipedia in the classroom, and to the additional potential suggested by the Wikipedia community.

I came back to New York energized and determined to work a Wikipedia component into my syllabus. My classrooms are unusual in several respects. First, we study the workings of digital media projects with an emphasis on evaluation, content which doesn’t easily lend itself to writing traditional Wikipedia articles. Second, my students tend to be about half international students. Third, it’s hard for me to devote more than a single class to a given tool or platform. Students have been publishing class wikis on the Columbia platform from the course’s inception, but this material is not directly transferrable to Wikipedia content. (See http://newmediadev2011.wikischolars.columbia.edu/) Finally, I was limited by the lack of a Wikipedia Ambassador. Whatever I tried had to rely on my own stretched resources, plus the students from the class.

All of my 25 students used Wikipedia, but only one or two had ever edited. But one of them, Michelle Chahine, volunteered to spent time with Wikipedia’s instructional tools and boil down a simplified version for class use. I then asked students to write, edit, or correct a Wikipedia article in English about an area of special knowledge and expertise, and record the process.

Then they performed the same exercise on a Wikipedia article in an additional language. This was where things got really interesting. First, my students had assumed that Wikipedia content on the same subject would be similar in different languages. This was often not the case. One student from Eastern Europe had extensive experience in minority rights. She looked at the Wikipedia article on Roma (or gypsies) in English, and added a minor edit. But the entry in her native language disturbed her with its negative language. She performed an edit with full citation, but it was immediately taken down by the lead editor of the page, who had written the problematic content. This showed us how powerful the correction process could be in a large language group, but also signaled problems in in small language groups (in this case, about 10 million people) or countries with less experience in creating content.

This year, the most interesting result came from an Asian student who had grown up in a rural area, and strongly believes in the mission of Wikipedia to bring information to areas that lack printed resources. This student reviewed the entry about women who had been captured by the Japanese army during World War II and forced to sexually service the troops. My student found that the English page used accurate language to describe their plight, but the entry in his native language used a term closer to “prostitute.” He performed an edit, and at least initially, it held. But the class was struck by the importance of the terminology, given the likelihood that the victims’ grandchildren would read this version of their families’ wartime experience.

I shared student papers on these topics with the Wikimedia Foundation (with the students’ permission), and I’m eager to see where these assignments will go in the future. I can already see one major advantage: there is an absolute difference between being a passive Wikipedia reader, and performing even a single minor edit. Once a student (or a professor) gets his “feet wet” with an edit, he crosses the boundary into being a contributor, and takes the capability along wherever he goes.

Anne Nelson is a specialist on international media and an award-winning author and playwright. She teaches at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.

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:

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English

By 2007 in Argentina, the web was becoming a valuable academic resource. Students and teachers had frequent and unlimited access, and we began to find fascinating resources we had never seen before in our scholarly studies. As a teacher of history of photography and a scholar of visual arts and art history, I began to notice a qualitative difference in this access, regarding to my experience as student: many of us studying artistic careers in peripheral cities throughout the world have based our knowledge on a few reproductions of works of art, sometimes of poor quality. And paradoxically, the access to sources of knowledge about art history also significantly deteriorated when the work we wanted to analyze is from our own legacy. Old and serious problems in heritage conservation policies and their dissemination, common throughout Latin America, remind us that the web would not necessarily be the exception.

Thus, in 2007, teaching History of Photography from Argentina and Latin America presented a number of challenges, starting with building a body of valuable data for study and analysis. Looking for material, I found some valuable resources on the web. But many were hard to find (beyond the first results of Google, and absent in Wikipedia), and so I designed a research assignment for my students, based on various information sources, from libraries to the internet. I noticed then a situation that is almost impossible now: information we found in our school library was not present on the web, including Wikipedia.

Thus arose my first Wikipedia experience with my students: to summarize the findings of photographers who worked in the nineteenth century in Argentina and Latin America, writing articles for Wikipedia.

I admit I had just begun to edit, and I knew little of the dynamics of the community. The first reactions to the “experiment” were doubts from some of the students: Anyone can edit? Who controls what we write? Why did somebody delete my contribution? Why is it necessary to cite sources correctly?

That experience contributed around 20 articles on ancient Latin American photography. They are the first search results in Google today, thanks to Wikipedia, but this was a responsibility that we had not originally planned.

Editing Wikipedia is a real practice of knowledge production, useful outside of the usual school duties. The learnings students derive from working with others is now for me of a very high educational value, with multiple aspects that change with each new experience. In all cases, Wikipedia is in “writing mode”.

Wikipedia is a resource widely used in almost all educational levels, but poorly understood in its educational potential. Teachers are the key links between free knowledge and meaningful learning, and Wikipedia is a space where to work with the community of Wikipedians. While we know that there are many potential and known problems in this collaboration, it is urgent that we work to strengthen it.

Lila Pagola, Wikimedia Argentina | National University of Villa María

Español

Creando contenido local para Wikipedia

En 2007, en Argentina la web empezaba a ser un recurso académico valioso, desde que alumnos y profesores teníamos acceso frecuente e ilimitado, y empezábamos a encontrar recursos fascinantes y nunca accedidos en nuestras historias escolares. Como profesora de Historia de la fotografía, formada en Artes visuales y amante de la Historia del Arte, empezaba a notar una diferencia cualitativa en este acceso: muchos de nosotros, estudiando carreras artísticas en una ciudad periférica dentro de la periferia del mundo, hemos basado nuestro conocimiento sobre unas pocas reproducciones de obras de arte, a veces de escasa calidad. Y paradójicamente, el acceso a las fuentes de nuestra area de conocimiento además, se ve notablemente desmejorada cuando la obra que queremos analizar es de nuestro propio acervo.

Viejos y serios problemas en las políticas de conservación de patrimonio y su difusión, frecuentes en toda Latinoamérica por otra parte, nos recuerdan que la web no tendría por qué ser la excepción.

En 2007 entonces, enseñar Historia de la fotografía argentina y latinoamericana representaba algunos desafíos, empezando por conformar un cuerpo de datos valioso para estudio y análisis.

Buscando materiales entonces, encontré algunos recursos valiosos en la web, algunos un poco difíciles de encontrar (mas allá de los primeros resultados de Google, y ausentes en Wikipedia) y diseñe una tarea de investigación para mis alumnos, sobre fuentes diversas, en bibliotecas e internet.

Me di entonces con una situación ya casi imposible en el presente: lo que nosotros encontramos en nuestra biblioteca escolar especializada, no estaba presente en la web, incluida Wikipedia.

Surgió así la primer experiencia con mis estudiates: hacer un resumen de lo encontrado sobre fotográfos que trabajaron en el siglo XIX en Argentina y Latinoamérica, para Wikipedia.

Admito que apenas había empezado a editar, y conocía poco la dinámica de la comunidad. Las primeras reacciones al “experimento” no se hicieron esperar y nos permitieron responder vivencialmente las dudas de los estudiantes: ¿cualquiera puede editar? ¿quién controla lo que escribimos? ¿por qué me borraron mi aporte? ¿por qué es necesario citar correctamente las fuentes?

Aquella experiencia aportó alrededor de 20 artículos sobre fotografía latinoamericana antigua, que hoy indexan primero en Google, gracias a Wikipedia: una responsabilidad que tampoco habíamos previsto inicialmente.

Editar Wikipedia como una práctica de producción de conocimiento real, útil, con vida fuera de la práctica escolar, sumado a los aprendizajes que derivan del trabajar con otros, resulta hoy para mi de un altísimo y obvio valor educativo, con múltiples aristas que van cambiando en cada nueva experiencia. En todos los casos, se trata de Wikipedia en modo escritura.

Wikipedia es un recurso usado ampliamente en casi todos los niveles educativos, pero escasamente comprendido en su potencial didáctico. Los docentes son los enlaces claves entre el conocimiento libre y los aprendizajes significativos, y Wikipedia un espacio de trabajo donde colaborar con la comunidad de wikipedistas. Si bien sabemos que hay muchos potenciales y conocidos problemas en esa colaboración, es urgente que trabajemos para potenciarla.

Lila Pagola, Wikimedia Argentina | Universidad Nacional de Villa María 

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…)

Applying for a grant can be an intimidating process. There are forms to fill out, rationales and explanations to give, project plans and budgets to lay out. This process can be particularly intimidating for individuals who may have great ideas for exciting new projects that can improve Wikipedia or her sister sites, but who may not necessarily have lots of experience with project planning or grant proposals.

We want to find ways that make it easy to get started in the proposal process in a friendly, collaborative learning environment. We also want to create more opportunities to ask what might be the most important question for grantmakers in the Wikimedia movement. That question is not “what is the best way to spend this money,” but rather “what are the best ideas and what support is needed to turn them into action?”

IdeaLab is a new space we’ve built to help answer this question by crowdsourcing ideas, connecting projects with potential collaborators, and offering a pathway to funding in cases where financial support is needed to turn ideas into action. In the IdeaLab, Wikimedians are invited to introduce themselves and offer up their skills and interests as collaborators, to share new ideas, and to help each other turn good ideas into project plans and grant proposals.

Do you have an idea for a project that might be eligible for an Individual Engagement Grant? Need help turning it into a grant proposal? Or do you just want to help other’s ideas succeed? Wikimedia grantmaking staff are present in the IdeaLab, as are volunteers from around the world. Come visit us and let’s turn ideas into action.

The Wikimedia Foundation is currently accepting proposals for Individual Engagement Grants, due February 15th.

Siko Bouterse, Head of Individual Engagement Grants

This post is available in 2 languages:

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 post is available in 2 languages:

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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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This week the Wikimedia Foundation launched a new grantmaking program called Individual Engagement Grants. These grants support individual Wikimedians or small teams to complete projects that benefit the Wikimedia movement, lead to online impact, and serve our mission, community and strategic priorities.

In recent years, the Wikimedia Foundation has been expanding its grantmaking activities. We want to ensure that the donations made by people who rely on Wikipedia for information serve the Wikimedia movement wherever it is most needed. Most of the grants we’ve made to this point have gone to organizations – Wikimedia chapters around the world, or smaller groups hosting workshops or running editing contests and so forth – and we’ll be continuing to grow our capacity to support these organizations in the future.

But much of Wikipedia and its sister sites run off of the amazing work that volunteers do individually. Thousands of people sit at their computers each day, writing articles, fighting vandalism, teaching new editors how to get started, organizing features for the main page, resolving disputes, answering emails from readers and more. These individuals make Wikipedia work, and many of them have ideas for innovative new projects that can make Wikipedia work even better. Many of these ideas can be and are accomplished by volunteers alone – volunteerism is, after all, the wonderful core of Wikimedia’s sites. But sometimes funding for time and expenses is needed to get an initiative up and running, and this is where Individual Engagement Grants can help. These grants are intended for projects that go beyond content contribution to innovate something that benefits the community and when funding is needed to to turn good ideas into action.

We’re accepting a first round of proposals for Individual Engagement Grants from now until February 15th. We’re also seeking volunteers to serve on a committee to help select the first round of grantees. You can get involved by sharing a project idea, submitting a proposal, or joining the committee – we’re looking forward to having your participation and to announcing the first Individual Engagement grantees in March!

Siko Bouterse, Head of Individual Engagement Grants, Wikimedia Foundation