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Every year Wikimedians from around the world gather in person to celebrate free knowledge and collaboration during the annual Wikimania conference, which was held in Washington, DC, in 2012. The next Wikimania will be in Hong Kong, August 2013 and the organizing committee from Wikimedia Hong Kong is very excited about it. We were also quite happy with the positive reaction from Wikipedians to our presentation in Wikimania in DC, where we showed a video about sightseeing on our tram, as well as photos of our beautiful natural environment and our impressive city, including the skyline, the Hong-Kongcrete, shopping districts, and of course our food (which we think is the most original in the world).

Wikimedia Asia Lunch at Wikimania 2012 / 2012維基媒體國際大會期間的亞洲維基人午餐

But a Wikimania in Hong Kong is not just about food and touristy things. As with every Wikimania, we have important goals we would like to achieve as we welcome the Wikimedia movement to Hong Kong. One of the biggest objectives, which we detailed in our Wikimania bid, is the development of further cooperation within Southeast Asia and beyond. There are quite successful chapters in India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and also activities and chapters in Taiwan and Macau. Beyond this work though, we see a great opportunity to organize activities and support the development of more Wikimedia communities in more countries in Asia.

During Wikimania in Washington DC, we had a Wikimedia Asia lunch, with attendance by people from Thailand, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore, who all demonstrated the desire to plan for further activities. In addition, we had Wikipedians from language communities such as Khmer , and also we have seen activities and meetups among Vietnamese Wikipedians in Vietnam.

Beyond these Wikipedia communities, we see opportunities for growth and support in Myanmar, a country with active communities of like-minded people. We have heard that 4700 people showed up in Barcamp Rangoon last year, and more than 2,000 participated the one in 2010. Imagine if we could empower a few of them to edit Wikipedia and create knowledge in their languages. It could be a huge addition to our broader community.

Coordinators General Jeromy-Yu Chan, Tango Chan
http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org

中文

2013年香港：維基媒體國際大會重臨亞洲

全世界維基人每年都會在維基媒體國際大會(Wikimania)聚首一堂，今年在美國華府，而下一次則在2013年8月的香港舉行。相信不少人都對這次年會充滿期望，而我們在華盛頓年會上展示了本地電車旅程、風光景色和美酒佳肴，相信大家都引頸以待。

Wikimania 2013 Hong Kong team members at Wikimania 2012 / 出席Wikimania 2012的香港籌辦團隊成員

但香港年會不只是吃喝玩樂那麼沒有意義，我們也有一些目標，曾在申辦期間說明過，其中一個就是促進鄰近東南亞地區的發展。

維基媒體在東南亞的發展相當奇趣，在印度、印尼、菲律賓、台灣、香港和澳門分會之間，位於歐亞大陸上的東南亞國家幾乎沒有太多有組織的活動。

雖然在今年華府的國際年會，在我們近年都有舉行的亞洲維基人午餐，有來自泰國和斯里蘭卡的維基人參與，而且有來自星加坡和馬來西亞的維基人出席整個年會，而我們曾經見過越南維基人聚會的照片，還有相當活躍的高棉語 (柬埔寨語)維基百科。

因此我們希望能通過在香港的年會，能鼓勵這些國家的維基人和全球各地的維基人接觸，特別是有些未知的地方非常有潛力，例如緬甸。在仰光去年互聯網各界聚集的Barcamp就有4700人出現，2010年據說有2000人。試想想哪怕只有一小部份人成為我們的編者，力量已經相當大。

2013年會的香港籌辦團隊，很樂意幫助這些地區的維基人和其他網界甚至其他界別的合作修橋搭路，相信區內其他分會也樂於此舉。無論你是上述那一方面的人士，我們都很歡迎你聯絡我們，直接參與我們亞洲地方分會/社群的討論的郵件列表，或者電郵給我們香港的地方籌辦團隊。
主任統籌
Jeromy-Yu Chan, Tango Chan
http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org

On July 13, 2012, I had the pleasure to present, “Translation and Transnational Scholarship” at Wikimania 2012 at  The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. In the presentation I spoke about my role as a Wikipedia Campus Ambassador in two of Professor Adel Iskandar’s graduate courses: New Media, Innovation, Community, & Dissidence (Fall 2011) and  Media and Communications in the Arab World (Spring 2012) at Georgetown University through the U.S. Education Program (WP:USEP). Each course had two Wikipedia components: article creation and in-class group edits. I became involved with the USEP  because I was eager to help students visualize news and history that had not been yet been represented as a part popular knowledge.

United States Education Program logo

The U.S. Education Program came to Georgetown in the Fall 2010 term and has since been incorporated into 14 courses university wide.  The program provides assistance to professors who want to integrate Wikipedia article creation and editing as part of a course. The support materials include not only wiki markup handouts and brochures, but also both online and offline points of contact. In the classroom, a Campus Ambassador (me, in this case) gives two tutorials, one that focuses on introducing the students to the culture of Wikipedia and one that focuses more on the technical aspects, such as how to contribute a photo and how to edit existing Wikipedia articles. In addition, the program includes the support of an Online Ambassador, who assists the students with more technical questions.

It was extremely enriching to watch the students become explorers during the course. They had to find and discover legitimate sources to not only support emerging social movements, but technologies as well. Students thus found creative ways of writing about technological phenomena as they unfolded in the Arab world, such as finding Arabic citations about the Rassd News Network (RNN), an Arabic Facebook feed, translating them, and making the topic notable for the Wikipedia community and public at large.

I would argue that the more interesting side of Wikipedia editing occurs on the article talk pages, where knowledge production takes place.  It helps students think critically about who decides what is notable or worth adding to the article’s content. It is not one person producing content, but multiple people collaborating together to decide what and how it should be said (and cited!). It is this collaborative aspect of Wikipedia editing that indirectly creates an incentive for academic research offline: What was the process of creating a Wikipedia article? Why was one source rejected and one not?  These questions help augment the following high impact learning outcomes: media and information literacy, critical thinking and research skills, and writing skills development. These outcomes help deepen student learning and engagement, both in and out of the classroom.

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Wikimania 2012 has now concluded. Following a week of pure exhilaration that drew to a close on the afternoon of July 15, the 1,400 attendees from 87 countries turned off their laptops and exited the George Washington University Marvin Center one last time.

The theme for Wikimania 2012 was “Explore. Engage. Empower.” It was borne out of the organizers’ hope that those coming to Wikimania, whether from close or far away, used this great opportunity to explore new and exciting possibilities, engaged in active discussions and dialogue, and took what was learned here back with them in order to continue to empower people around the world through free access to global knowledge.

Roberta Shaffer, Associate Librarian of Congress for Library Services, welcomes guests to the Google Opening Reception (Alejandro Linares Garcia, CC BY-SA 3.0)

With support from sponsors and partners, over 700 people attended the Google Opening Reception at the Library of Congress, where the newest Wikipedian in Residence position was announced; more than 1,200 participated in the opening ceremony, which featured keynote speeches from the Ada Initiative co-founder Mary Gardiner and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales; and our community heard over 275 speakers, many of whom are already active contributors to Wikimedia projects, including the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Sue Gardner, and the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. In addition, we met and talked with the more than 200 participants at Tech@State: Wiki.Gov, and Richard Boly of the State Department’s Office of eDiplomacy shared a letter from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton congratulating attendees on the opening of Wikimania  2012 and Tech@State.

Over the course of 5 days, our 1,400 attendees consumed 3,791 lunches, enjoyed 5,424 cups of coffee, and visited nearly every museum and monument in the Washington metropolitan area (although a citation might be needed).  On these explorations, our local Washington, DC, highlights were photographed and many are newly included in Wikimedia Commons, a database of freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.

One person in our community who is a great supporter of Wikipedia, to the surprise of some of our guests, is David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States.  In his remarks at the closing ceremony on Saturday, Ferriero discussed the important role that Wikipedia and Wikimedia Projects have for preserving history and documenting cultural heritage. After reminding the audience that the National Archives has contributed more than 120,000 digital files and pictures to Wikimedia Commons, he told the crowd, “if Wikipedia is good enough for the Archivist of the United States, then it’s good enough for you.”

“David Ferriero’s closing plenary illustrated just how inspiring the Wikipedia community can be for institutions and governments looking to become more open and transparent,” said Lori Byrd Phillips, US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation. “What was the most inspirational for me was the respect and appreciation shown by the Wikipedia community during the standing ovation for Mr. Ferriero. I’ve known that the Archivist of the United States loves Wikipedia, but last week I was reminded that the Wikipedia community returns that love to those who advocate for the movement.”

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In his “State of the Wiki” address at the 2011 Wikimania, Jimmy Wales awarded the first ever “Wikipedian of the Year” award to Rauan Kenzhekhanuly, a Wikipedian from Kazakhstan. Included with the honor was travel expenses to bring Rauan to Wikimania 2012 in Washington, D.C., next week, where Rauan is looking forward to sharing his experiences with growing the Kazakh Wikipedia and learning more about others’ outreach programs.

Rauan Kenzhekhanuly

Rauan worked in civil service in Kazakhstan for several years before jumping at an opportunity to do a one-year fellowship at Harvard University in Boston. As part of his fellowship, he took a class in fall 2010 that changed his life: Professor Nicco Mele’s “Media, Politics, and Power in the Digital Age”, part of a pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program. Students in Professor Mele’s class were required to read Andrew Lih’s book “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia” and contribute to the English Wikipedia. Rauan was hooked.

“Thanks to Nicco’s class I discovered the Wikipedia world. The influence was so profound that it brought me to a new path in my career,” he says. “While editing the article in English Wikipedia, I checked the Kazakh version as well. However, I was disappointed when I saw that Kazakh Wikipedia doesn’t have sustainable community.”

Rauan set out to change that. He recruited some friends and founded WikiBilim (bilim means “knowledge” in Kazakh), a nonprofit organization devoted to expand the availability of free knowledge on the internet in the Kazakh language. WikiBilim’s first target was the Kazakh Wikipedia, which at that point had just 7,000 articles and only 4 active editors. Rauan and his friends at WikiBilim set a target of 200,000 articles maintained by a sustainable community of 500 active editors.

“At the very beginning we were looking for messages powerful enough to engage more people in our project,” Rauan says. “We decided to change the well-known Wikipedia motto from ‘free access to sum of human knowledge’ to ‘free access to sum of human knowledge in your own language.’ The appeal to language worked out. Today we have more than 130,000 articles and more than 200 active editors.”

WikiBilim has had support from many organizations in Kazakhstan, including the printed Kazakh National Encyclopedia, which donated content to the Kazakh Wikipedia. Success of the project brought attention of Kazakh Government, in November 2011 Prime-Minister of Kazakhstan Mr. Karim Masimov announced his patronage to WikiBilim’s projects. WikiBilim has also received support from the Sovereign Wealth Fund Samruk-Kazyna and the Wikimedia Foundation in their efforts to improve the availability of information on the Kazakh Wikipedia. Rauan and the other WikiBilim volunteers have also presented their experiences to a number of other Wikimedians from the region at the Turkic Wikimedia Conference in Almaty in April 2012.

And just as Rauan got his start with Wikipedia in the classroom, WikiBilim is planning to encourage the Kazakh Wikipedia’s use in educational institutions in Kazakhstan. Four student clubs are getting started and 10 Wikipedia Ambassadors run campus-based trainings each week. Rauan sees students as a main consumer of the information they’re creating on the Kazakh Wikipedia, and he hopes to encourage them to join the community of editors and contribute to the 200,000 article goal WikiBilim set last year.

“The main thing of contributing to Wikipedia for me is that we can clearly highlight that each community will be responsible for their own language, education, and culture,” Rauan says. “At the end, Wikipedia will be most important educational project.”

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

Additional reporting by Aaron Muszalski

Wikimedians all over the world are preparing for Wikimania 2012, to be held July 12 through 14 in Washington, DC (USA). The organizers from Wikimedia DC, the Wikimedia chapter for the District of Columbia, expect more than 1000 participants.

Wikimania is the annual global conference of the Wikimedia movement, which has previously been held in Frankfurt (Germany), Boston (USA), Taipei (Taiwan), Alexandria (Egypt), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Gdańsk (Poland) and Haifa (Israel). It brings together many of the volunteers who are working all year on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, and other experts, academics, and enthusiasts whose vision is to empower people around the world through free access to global knowledge.

The theme of this year’s Wikimania is “Explore. Engage. Empower.” The schedule contains more than 100 presentations which were selected out of 400 global submissions. Presentations are divided into five categories:

• Wikis, Collaboration, and the Public Sector
• GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, & Museums)
• (Wiki-)Culture & Community
• Research, Analysis, and Education
• Technology & Infrastructure

The opening session will feature a keynote by Mary Gardiner, co-founder of the Ada Initiative, titled “Fostering diversity: not a boring chore, a critical opportunity”, and the by now traditional “State of the Wiki” plenary address by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. The main conference is preceded by the Wikimania Hackathon (July 10-11) and followed by an “Unconference” event on July 15.

The organizers would like to thank Google, Ask.com, Wikia, WikiHow, The Saylor Foundation, The Lounsbery Foundation, and the Encyclopedia of Life, who are sponsoring the event – as does Irene Lynch, a 78-year-old great grandmother from New Jersey.

Regular registration is open until June 22.

See also the press release of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Hope to see you in Washington, DC!

Tilman Bayer, Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications)

Every year, hundreds of Wikimedians descend upon a single city for an annual international conference: Wikimania. Its hackathon and presentation days are filled with workshops and discussions around Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) projects, the open source MediaWiki software, and free knowledge/content. The forum provides excellent opportunities for socialization and idea dissemination between Wikimedia groups from around the world.

It is imperative that a diverse, representative group is enabled to attend the conference, representing a variety of cultures, languages, and projects. To that end, the Wikimedia Foundation and some Wikimedia chapters offer a limited number of scholarships with the goal of making Wikimania a productive conference by enabling the attendance of a diverse group of participants in the Wikimedia movement.

As the movement continues to grow and expand around the world, it is unfortunately impossible to fund the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who have contributed, but each year we strive to support a select few who we think will both greatly benefit from the conference and contribute to the conference. A “Scholarship Review Committee” — entirely consisting of community volunteers — reviews a large number of scholarship applicants (over a thousand this time), scoring applicants on their activity in the Wikimedia projects and other compatible movements as well as their potential for future contributions in the Wikimedia movement. WMF looks at the recommendations of the committee and accounts for the diversity of the pool of candidates in order to support a diverse group of representatives from countries around the world, allocating more scholarships to global south regions, editors in smaller language projects, and women.

This year, we are pleased to announce that scholarships have been awarded to 130 individuals from 57 countries! We were able to sponsor so many people with the help of Wikimédia France, who also contributed directly to the general funds for scholarships. These representatives contribute to a variety of projects and will bring both old and fresh experiences into the conference.  Scholarships this year were awarded by region in an effort to ensure that we would have good representation from different countries. Partial scholarships were distributed based on the applicants’ indication of whether or not they could pay, and funds were distributed via partial scholarships where possible in order for the most people to attend. So for example, though North Americans make up 13% of the total scholarship recipients, they represent only 5% of the total anticipated funding because about 65% of those spots were only partial scholarships.

As always, the field was incredibly competitive, with 1113 applicants from 118 countries. The overall acceptance rate of applicants for the WMF scholarships was 12%, with Europe as the lowest at 8%. Note that the low acceptance from Europe was intentional, as a series of Chapter-funded scholarships for Europeans are about to be announced which will boost the participation numbers from this region.

While we are excited about the input our 130 scholars will provide this year to the conference, we wish that all the other excellent contributors who applied would be able to attend. The scholarships are in no way a direct reflection on one’s value in the community -it is a result of a very competitive process, where many deserving community members are unable to be funded for this year. We greatly value the participation of all in the Wikimedia projects and sincerely hope that all applicants will continue to participate in both local and worldwide conversations online outside of this event!

Jessie Wild, Liaison with the Scholarship Review Committee

As Women’s History Month wraps up, we should all remember an especially significant figure in tech: Ada Lovelace. In 1843, Lovelace became the world’s first computer programmer by writing an algorithm intended to be understood by a machine, which became what is arguably the world’s first open source code.

An illustration of Ada Lovelace. Public domain

While women are involved in tech and occasionally head prominent companies, 170 years after Lovelace’s achievements, we are still discussing the ways women are under-represented in the industry. Despite the attention that Lovelace’s legacy brought to the role of women in technology in 2009, when the first Ada Lovelace Day was declared, she would probably not be happy with the status quo of women in tech today.

Inspired by Lovelace and concerned by the scarcity of women in open source and open culture, Mary Gardiner and Valerie Aurora co-founded The Ada Initiative (TAI) in 2011. Gardiner and Aurora, both advocates and developers with a long history in open source, started the organization not only to honor Lovelace’s memory, but also to elevate the role of women in open source and open culture and to address issues that women in the open source community face.

Aurora said she realized the need for a formal organization after a mutual friend of hers and Gardiner’s was sexually assaulted, for the third time in a year, at an open source conference. After writing about her experiences on her blog, Aurora’s friend was the product of blame and derision, rather than sympathy. Aurora felt the only solution to combat this type of behavior was to substantially increase the involvement of women in tech and open source, one of TAI’s primary objectives.

“I have also been assaulted at open source conferences, as well as many of my friends,” said Aurora. “It hit me then: this problem isn’t going away, it’s just getting worse. I decided to try forming a non-profit to pay people to work full-time on the problem, since volunteer work clearly wasn’t enough to fight the tide.”

Aurora quit her job as a Linux file systems developer and threw herself headlong into TAI, and Gardiner was her first pick as co-founder. The two had been friends for more than 10 years. Gardiner, who had already been a strong advocate for women in open source, was the perfect partner.

Gardiner had previously founded AussieChix, the first and largest open source organization for women in Australia, which she later helped expand to all of Oceania as Oceania Women of Open Technology. Gardiner and Aurora recruited prominent members of the open source and open culture community to serve on TAI’s advisory board, including Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation; Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation; and John Ferlito, President of Linux Australia.

Since its founding a little more than a year ago, TAI has developed and led initiatives and programs that have solidified the organization’s role as a leader of the movement for women in open source and open culture. One of these initiatives is the “Ada’s Allies” workshops, where participants learn how to be good allies for women in open source.

“Many of us want to speak up when we see something sexist or offensive happening, but we don’t know what to say,” says Aurora. The workshop helps Allies learn how to respond to scenarios through role-playing and discussion.

TAI has also been a leader in working with open source tech and culture conferences to adopt policies to ensure a healthy and safe environment for all attendees, such as the Wikimedia Foundation’s “Friendly space policy.”

“What we’ve found over and over again is that people who behave in embarrassing and harassing ways believe that their behavior is acceptable,” says Aurora. “Ninety-percent of the battle is simply telling them how you expect them to behave in clear, specific terms.”

With Gardiner’s recent selection by the Wikimania 2012 Program Committee as the keynote speaker at Wikimania 2012 this July, she will certainly bring more attention to the issue. Coupled with the upcoming WikiWomenCamp 2012 and AdaCamp DC, 2012 will be the year to both honor the historical role of women in the tech and computer industries, and to promote their greater involvement in the future.

Nicholas Michael Bashour, President of Wikimedia District of Columbia and General Manager for Wikimania 2012
Sarah Stierch, Community Fellow at the Wikimedia Foundation, Ada Initiative Advisory Board Member

Wikimedia District of Columbia (Wikimedia DC), the organizer of Wikimania 2012, has announced that Mary Gardiner will keynote the opening session of Wikimania 2012 in Washington, DC on July 12.  Gardiner is the co-founder of The Ada Initiative(TAI) and an important advocate for women in open source and open culture.

This announcement builds on WikiWomen’s History Month, a partnership between the Wikimedia Foundation, TAI, and OCLC. It shows a commitment by the Wikimedia community to make women’s participation in tech and wikis a central goal moving forward.

“Wikimania’s choice of Mary Gardiner says that the Wikipedia community is moving on from asking ‘Is the underrepresentation of women a problem?’ to asking ‘What can we do to increase the representation of women?’,” said Valerie Aurora, a co-founder of TAI and an open source developer.

Ada Initiative co-founder Mary Gardiner. Photo: Mary Gardiner, CC-BY-SA

Aurora noted that it has taken a while for one of the world’s largest open source communities to view the issue in that light. “Many people have worked hard for several years to get the community to pay serious attention to the gender gap. Now it’s starting to look like they have succeeded, and we can start having a conversation on what to do to close the gender gap.”

Wikimania 2012 presents a great opportunity to do just that. Gardiner is the first female keynote speaker at a Wikimania. Many of the over 400 submissions we received were made by female contributors, with several focusing specifically on the role of women in the Wikimedia movement. In addition, AdaCamp DC, an unconference event, will coincide with the Wikimania 2012 Hackathon/Pre-Conference Developer Days on July 10-11.

Both Gardiner and Aurora are excited for the opportunity to connect with the global community. ”We will have quite a few experts on Wikipedia and related projects at this year’s AdaCamp,” says Aurora, “and I am looking forward to seeing what they think up.”

To top it all off, Washington DC is home to one of the most active communities of women in tech anywhere in the world, with groups such as Women in Technology and DC Web Women present in the area. All of this makes Wikimania 2012 a perfect opportunity to raise awareness of the important role of women in tech, open source and wikis.

Thank you,

Nicholas Michael Bashour, President of Wikimedia District of Columbia and General Manager for Wikimania 2012
Sarah Stierch, Community Fellow, Wikimedia Foundation and member of the Ada Initiative Advisory Board

(This is the eighth installment in a series of updates from the WikiHistories summer research fellows, who will be studying the virtual community history of different Wikipedia editing communities.)

Almost 15.000 articles since 2003 and just a few dozen active contributors: how to change the situation?

Well, looks like 2011 can be a year of change for Վիքիփեդիա- the Armenian Wikipedia, as the community, supporting organizations and even the state have started taking Wikipedia seriously.

Armenian Wikipedians and volunteers translating Wikipedia guidelines at the hackathon, April 2011

For the first time on April 3 of this year, a 1-day Wikipedia hackathon was organized for Wikipedians and their friends to come together in one place and translate Wikipedia policies and guidelines. About 50 people gathered and 17 guidelines were translated during the day. Even though many of those 50 people did not edit another article afterwards, it was an important step for the development of the Վիքիփեդիա: this in fact was the first event organized by a few interested parties such as educational – humanitarian foundations, software developing firms, IT NGOs and of course, the Wikimedia community.

It all started after Richard Stallman’s visit to Armenia. The Web2.0 activist shared his enthusiasm about open, interactive and collaborative online platforms and suggested, “Why not have another look at Wikipedia?”.

Armine, who works for the educational NGO “Instigate” says that Stallman’s enthusiasm was contagious and, soon after his visit, she and her colleagues registered on Wikipedia, tried and loved it. They thought this was something particularly useful for kids and students and they announced the start of the “Wikipedia: School and University- Armenia” project that now unifies 6 organizations and groups, including the Wikipedia community.

Apart from the hackathon, the initiators of the project visited a few schools: not all of the school headmasters greeted them with enthusiasm, but some were really open to innovations. However, it was Spring, the end of the school year, and both teachers and pupils were too busy to try something new.

15-year-old Mariam is the head of the student council at the Anania Shirakatsi National Lycee.  She is eager to take the first steps as soon as the schools open in September. She has asked some of the active Wikipedians to teach the students the basics of editing and the main principles of the Armenian Wiki community. She says that every student in the Lycee writes over 10 essays during the school year that can be suitable for the online encyclopedia. Besides, she thinks that Wiki platform can be a good place for developing and editing the articles in collaboration with classmates and teachers.

“What can be more attractive for children than the feeling that their work will be available and useful for millions of people. This will also make them more responsible and motivated”,- says Armine. She believes that the sense of collaboration is ideal for classrooms and hopes that more schools will adopt the tool.

The idea has been proposed to the Ministry of Education as well. The reaction was positive, but so far it hasn’t gone any further.

Separate from the School and University project, another Wikipedian - SusikMkr (Susanna Mkrtchyan), has started a process for establishing a Wikimedia Chapter in Armenia. “The community will not grow without a proper organization”, she says.

Susanna works at the Science Management Department of the National Science Academy Computing Institute of Armenia. Discovering Armenian Wikipedia, she was astonished to find the right tool for promoting science and knowledge but disappointed with the current situation. She registered as a Wikipedia contributor last December. Since then she has been reading the policies and studying the experience of other countries trying to find ways for developing Wikipedia. In August she took part in the WikiMania 2011 conference in Haifa and gave a presentation about the situation in Armenia, with suggestions on how to change it. Now she says she is in touch with the Wikimedia Foundation and has their full support to realize  her plan, i. e. to  increase the number of contributors and articles, and establish a  chapter for coordinating the job.

Armenian Wiki community discussing the measures of Wikipedia promotion in Armenia

 This Saturday she invited the active Wikipedians for a talk and discussion of her ideas. She says she already has the support of the Science Academy: they will provide a room and most likely some computers for the workshop and training. Also, the Academy is happy to help with the content.

“We have lots of great minds, scientists who are retired and do not know how to keep themselves busy. We also have high rates of unemployment in the country, so there are a lot of people who have the knowledge but don’t know how to share it. They do not know about Wikipedia. We need to inform and train people”, Susanna insists.

She is also up for more practical approaches: schools should incorporate Wikipedia in the curriculum, universities should take responsibility for enriching the encyclopedia with X number of articles per month, including policy translations. Also, there might be competitions for Wikipedia articles to encourage children to start contributing.

The veteran-Wikipedians, however, are a bit sceptical about these plans. Being guards of Wikipedia traditions and rules, they strongly believe in “good faith”, “openness”, voluntarism” of Wikipedia. If there is any chance that anyone will be paid or forced to contribute to Wikipedia, the community will resist.

Susanna promises not to break the rules and to discuss every step with the community and the Foundation, but one thing is clear for her: she needs to do something about the situation. For her Wikipedia is not just a tool but a philosophy that can be used in all spheres of cultural, social and academic life. 10 years after the creation of Wikipedia, Armenians want to give it another try and really make use of it.

Lusine Grigoryan

MSc Digital Anthropology (UCL), journalist

It’s that time again: Wikimedians from all over the world have descended upon Haifa, Israel for Wikimania 2011. From the conference, the Wikimedia Board of Trustees have announced the 2011-2012 Board members and elected officers which include:

Ting Chen, Board Chair
Jan-Bart de Vreede, Vice-Chair
Stuart West, Treasurer
Phoebe Ayers, Secretary
Samuel Klein
Bishakha Datta
Matt Halprin
Arne Klempert
Kat Walsh
Jimmy Wales

The decisions were made following a series of Board meetings coinciding with the seventh annual Wikimania conference, held in Haifa, Israel. The Board meets every year during Wikimania, the annual international conference, run by the Wikimedia community, and organized by a different local team each year.

This year, 650 Wikipedia editors, Wikimedians, researchers and educators from 56 countries plan to attend the conference. Keynote speakers this year include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director, Sue Gardner, Deans from the University of Haifa and Bar-Ilan University are planned speakers along with Prof. Yochai Benkler, professor of law at Harvard University, and Joseph Reagle, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and author of Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia.

Congratulations to the 115 participants who received full scholarships and the 60 attendees with partial scholarships to attend the conference. Scholarships were awarded by the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikimedia Italia, Wikimedia France, Wikimedia Poland, and Wikimedia Austria. Wikimania is celebrating its seventh year in Haifa, Israel, previously held in Egypt, Argentina, Germany, Poland and Taiwan. In 2012, Wikimania will take place in the United States in Washington, DC.

Shalom from Haifa!

Moka Pantages
Global Communications