Barry Newstead and I (from the Foundation’s Global Development Department) had the thrill of going to visit our friends in Brazil over October 7-10: what an awesome country and community! We had two stops this time: Rio de Janeiro, to participate in an all-day event at the Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), and São Paulo, to participate in a community meet-up (WikiSampa10) and present at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP). The trip centered around two key themes from our end: research and university outreach.

Research regarding Portuguese Wikipedia
During the trip, we were able to present some preliminary analysis regarding the Portuguese Wikipedia (PT-WP) and brainstorm about some causes for its current state. PT-WP shows a high turnaround, with about 40% of editors in a given month
consisting of newcomers, and in addition scored lowest on the Wikipedia Editor Satisfaction Index” (for more information on the index, see past blog post).  Daniela Feijo – a researcher out of Porto Alegre, Brazil – has been working with WMF for the past month and lead the discussion on some preliminary thoughts regarding possible reasons for this.

Conversation is ongoing and following WikiSampa10, it continues on the PT-WP Village Pump. Moreover, research is ongoing and can be tracked on the Meta Wiki as well as PT-WP.

Beginnings of Global Education Program – Brazil
It has been clear that the youth of Brazil will be the catalysts for growth in the country at large, and we want Wikipedia to benefit from the passion and intelligence of this demographic as well! To that end, we are thrilled at the Education Program currently occurring at UNIRIO, which involves the incorporation of editing Wikipedia into the class syllabus for two different courses: Roman History and Multimedia Systems.

In addition to supporting the work of the currently ongoing courses, we were eager to present the idea to new schools, and we spent Monday afternoon under the hospitality of USP. We are excited about the potential of working with them in the future.

Further work
Though the work was pushed forward, there is still much to do! As mentioned above, we are pushing forward on the research and Education Program support, but the Brazilian community is working on some really cool initiatives themselves, including the development of a chapter and conducting an Editing Sprint! Stay tuned for the exciting things to come…

Wikimedia Foundation to Launch Arabic Catalyst

As many of you know, the Wikimedia movement strategy that was finalized in February 2011 re-emphasized the importance of Arabic Wikipedia to the achievement of the Wikimedia vision. The Wikimedia Foundation team has started in the past month to work on plans to support the growth of Arabic Wikipedia in the coming months and years. We want to learn about the region and the Arabic Wikipedia community and we would like to start some initiatives in the region to create new enthusiasm for Wikipedia and close the gap between Arabic Wikipedia and larger projects, such as English Wikipedia. There are close to 400 million people who speak Arabic and we want them included in our vision.

Our plans came in line with a common interest of Qatar Foundation’s computing research institute – QCRI team which was researching possible ways of supporting Arabic Wikipedia. They feel that the Arabic language community needs to have a great Wikipedia and they want to help us to build on your work in the community to attract new editors and try new approaches. We asked them to host a small working session with us, a group of leading contributors to Arabic Wikipedia and some outside advisors as a way for us to start making plans for the near future. We will be holding this working session in Doha on 20 and 21 October. While we will only have a few people there in person, we would like to hear your thoughts on the opportunities and challenges and have set up a space on Arabic Wikipedia; for discussion before, during and after the session. We will also capture notes to share the results of the discussion. We are excited to create the first of hopefully many opportunities for Arabic Wikipedians to get together in person.

Beyond the working session, the Wikimedia Foundation is in discussions with the Qatar Foundation the joint collaboration of a pilot and then a broader launch of our Global Education Program in the region. This initiative which has been launched in the United States and India presents a real opportunity to bring new forms of contributions to Arabic Wikipedia. We plan to support outreach activities you might want to plan locally as well as regional initiatives. We are taking another look at translation work reflecting on the experiences with Google’s translation work and experiences in other parts of the world. Finally, we want to hear from the community and like-minded groups about new and innovative ways to support the growth of the Arabic Wikipedia community.

This is bound to be a long journey together and we look forward to getting to know the Arabic Wikipedia community, to learning from you and to partnering with you to achieve our shared vision. We will have an IRC hour on Thursday, October 13 2011 at 20:00 UTC in #wikipedia-ar, to listen to the community suggestions and respond to any inquiries around the initiative. The conversation will be in English and Moushira will assist with translation if required.

Barry & Moushira

Barry is the Chief Global Development Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation based in San Francisco, USA. Moushira is a consultant to the Wikimedia Foundation based in Alexandria, Egypt.

Torre de Belém, Portugal. Photo: Joaomartinho63

Wiki Loves Monuments was a crazy idea: ask people to get out of their houses and take a picture of the cultural heritage around them, of monuments and buildings!
In September 2010, however, the idea proved far from crazy – 250 people participated in the Netherlands and submitted 12,500 photos. Last month, during the pan-European 2011 contest, we crushed that number.

In the past few months, volunteers throughout Europe have worked hard to organize this public photo contest in 18 countries throughout Europe – from Portugal to Estonia – and with great success. More than 5,000 people participated, submitting an amazing 165,000 photos– all available under a free license, and usable on Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia and other places on the internet. As a comparison, the current record for the largest photography competition according to the Guinness Book of World Records stands at 126,501 images.

This project has been a success in so many different ways already. Not only 5,000 people participated, but an estimated 4,000 of these are ‘new users’ to the Wikimedia projects and through this contest they made their very first contribution to Wikimedia as a registered user. Now it is up to the community to cherish and welcome these people and help them find their way on the projects, supporting them and encouraging them to further contributions.

In 14 cities, related ‘Wiki takes the City’ events have been organized, and two of those are most interesting. Thanks to Wiki takes Andorra (a very small country between Spain and France) and the work of Amical Viquipèdia, we have now over 1,000 images of Andorra’s cultural heritage – covering 100% of the listed buildings! And in Wiki takes Cologne the organizational skills of the German chapter and volunteers were once again proven; the event was highly successful with more than 70 participants.

A young participant of Wiki takes Cologne. Photo: Elke Wetzig

Wiki Loves Monuments is not finished yet – it’s a continuous project, but the contest that ran through the month of September is now over. The national juries will deliberate in the coming month over the best photos from their countries, and submit 10 winners to an international jury by the end of October. By the beginning of December, the winners of the European contest will be announced, and the 2011 edition will come to an end. But the volunteers who have been working so hard on this will keep working to check, categorize and use the images in Wikipedia, write the articles, improve the monument lists and do all the other work that still lies ahead.

I would like for all of us to take a minute and thank all the people who have worked so hard to make Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 a success. Our partners on both the national and European level – cultural heritage organizations, chapters, sponsors and others – have worked hard to enable us to pull this off. But even more importantly, all the volunteers who have worked so hard to connect with the partners, create the monument lists, write background materials, write manuals, prepare contest rules, find jury members, find sponsors, prepare press releases, answer press enquiries, help with technical challenges, set up the wizards and banners, help the uploaders where necessary, check the incoming files and make sure that everything keeps on going – they deserve a big cheer and hug.

I really  hope this has not worn you out, and that you consider helping to organize and support this crazy idea again next year.

Lodewijk Gelauff – international coordinator of Wiki Loves Monuments

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

The first Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit was held last week on the campus of Simmons College, a women’s college that participated in the Public Policy Initiative in the spring. More than 125 professors, students, and Wikipedia Ambassadors gathered for 2 1/2 days to talk about their experiences and plans going forward for using Wikipedia in the classroom.

Advanced editing workshop at Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit.

The Public Policy Initiative is a 18-month pilot program to bring Wikipedia editing into university classrooms. Participating professors assign their students to write articles in place of a paper for the course, with assistance from Wikimedia Foundation-trained Campus Ambassadors (in class) and Online Ambassadors (virtually). In the 2010-11 academic year, we worked with 47 classes whose 821 students added more than 8.8 million characters of quality content to the English Wikipedia.

Attendees

The conference brought together 33 Campus Ambassadors, 11 Online Ambassadors, 49 professors, 9 students, 15 local professors, and 12 WMF staff/board members. About half of the professors had used Wikipedia in their class in the past, and the other half were interested in using it in the future.

It would be hard to underestimate the energy in each session for the use of Wikipedia in higher education. We even scrapped a planned icebreaker in the agenda because everyone was already excitedly chatting with their new Wikimedia friends.

Sessions

Wikipedia Governance workshop at Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit.

The full agenda is available online, but sessions at the Summit focused on making connections among attendees and documenting our learnings from the pilot academic year. Speakers included Archivist of the United States David Ferriero, Public Policy Initiative team members, and Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner. Chief Global Development Officer Barry Newstead talked about plans for the global expansion of the higher education program, and our Regional Ambassadors led sessions with attendees from their region.

We at WMF learned a lot about the experiences of the various participants in our program. You can read more about the event in The Signpost, Inside Higher Ed, and one attendee’s blog, or check out photos at Wikimedia Commons. Full documentation, including links to photos, videos, and presentation slides are also available.

The Future

Preeti Mulay will be using Wikipedia in her class in Pune, India, next term.

The Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit really crystalized for the team that all the work we’ve put in to making Wikipedia and academia blend has been incredibly useful. We’d invited representatives from Canada, the U.K, Germany, Brazil, and India, who were all there to talk about how they will be using Wikipedia in classrooms in their countries in the next term. But while we were there, we also had professors approach us and say they wanted to be the liaison between the WMF’s global university program and other parts of the world, including the Middle East, North Africa and Chile.

If you’re interested in using Wikipedia in your classroom or joining the program as an Ambassador, reach out to a Regional Ambassador in the United States or consult the Education Portal for more information. The whole team is very excited to see where the global university program heads — one thing is for certain, there is a lot of enthusiasm for Wikipedia in higher education!

–
LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate – Public Policy Initiative

To celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Wikipedia, and its impressive growth in content, quality, diversity, and readership, the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym) and the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) are jointly launching WikiViz 2011 – a call for data/information visualization experts, computational journalists, data artists and data scientists to create the most insightful visualization of Wikipedia’s impact.

WikiViz 2011 is about visualizing the impact of Wikipedia using open data. We want to see the most effective, compelling and creative data-driven visualizations of how Wikipedia impacted the world with its content, culture and open collaboration model. Potential topics include: the imprint of Wikipedia on knowledge sharing and access to information; its impact on literacy and education, journalism and research; on the functioning of scientific and cultural organizations and businesses, as well as the daily life of individuals around the world. In addition, we want to see visualizations of areas of knowledge, geographical regions, organizations and people Wikipedia has not been able to reach or has impacted less than one would have expected. In summary, the main goal of this competition is to improve our understanding of how Wikipedia is affecting the world beyond the scope of its own community.

Awards

The WikiViz 2011 Awarding Ceremony will take place on October 4, at WikiSym 2011 main venue, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley campus (Mountain View, California). The ceremony will open with keynote speaker Jeff Heer (Stanford University), on the impact of emerging visualization techniques to understand open collaboration today.

Three finalist teams (1 winner, 2 runners-up) will be invited to present their work at WikiSym 2011, in Mountain View (California). Travel expenses and registration fees will be covered for one delegate per finalist team. The submissions from these three teams will be showcased at the WikiSym 2011 exhibit, presented during the WikiViz awards ceremony and featured by our Knowledge and Media Partners (Unidad Editorial, Periscopic, Information Aesthetics, Visualizing.org and Flowing Data).

Furthermore, Spanish media group Unidad Editorial will run a voting process in September, among the visitors of El Mundo.es, (the largest digital newspaper in Spanish by readership worldwide), to select the “Public’s choice” visualization among the top 10 submissions received. The winner will be featured in the digital edition of El Mundo.

Jury

The finalists will be selected by a jury composed of world-class experts in data visualization and social computing:

• Moritz Stefaner (Well Formed Data).
• Kim Rees (Periscopic).
• Andrew Vande Moere (KU Leuven and Information Aesthetics).
• Erik Zachte (Wikimedia Foundation)
• Gregorio Convertino (Xerox PARC and WikiSym 2011 Symposium Committee)

How to participate

Please, refer to the WikiViz call for participation to learn more details about terms and conditions to participate, submission instructions, selection rules and evaluation criteria. Only entries based on open data and licensed under a Wikimedia Commons-compatible open license will be considered.

Important dates

• June 29, 2011: Challenge call for submissions.
• August 28, 2011: Submission deadline (extended).
• September 12, 2011: Winner and finalist submissions announced.
• October 4, 2011: WikiViz awards session, WikiSym 2011 (Mountain View, CA).

Contact

For any questions, comments or interest in supporting or collaborating with this challenge, please contact the co-organizers at: wikiviz2011@easychair.org

• Felipe Ortega (WikiSym)
• Dario Taraborelli (Wikimedia Foundation)

You can also follow us on Twitter: @WikiViz (tag your tweets with #wikiviz11).

More

WikiViz 2011 is the second of two data challenges the Wikimedia Foundation is organizing this summer. If you are interesting in building predictive models of Wikipedia editor activity, check out the Wikipedia participation challenge

Organizers

Media Sponsors

Knowledge Partners

On May 24th and 25th, the Wikimedia Foundation hosted a CiviCRM coding sprint in our San Francisco office. CiviCRM is the premier open source constituent relationship manager; WMF uses it to store donor and contribution information. Our CiviCRM database contains more than a million contact records and a million contribution records.

CiviCRM, The Free and Open Source Solution for the Civic Sector

The sprint was a terrific success. The eight participants squashed many CiviCRM bugs — and the Foundation directly benefited, as they improved CiviCRM contact/contribution search performance by 15 to 25 times! Formerly, it could take more than two minutes for someone to search among the contribution records. The developers’ tweaks, hacks and patches whittled that down to about 4-6 seconds per search. This will save innumerable hours for WMF administrators and fundraisers.

The Foundation’s Arthur Richards, a fundraising engineer, enthused: “Any software tool, open source or not, comes with headaches; the beauty of tools like CiviCRM is that we can solve our own problems. Thanks to having some great hackers in one place, we managed to mitigate one of our biggest CiviCRM pain points in a matter of hours.”

You can read more details about the sprint on Donald Lobo’s CiviCRM blog.

Richards was especially excited to “highlight how awesome it is working with other open source projects and using other open source tools. We get to scratch each other’s backs, which helps support a sustainable, healthy ecosystem of software/communities. Also, using open source tools like CiviCRM – while not without their (often big) pain points – is great because we can fix the software ourselves. While the tools are free to use, with a little bit of elbow grease and some resources, they can be molded and fixed to meet our needs much easier (and likely much cheaper) than relying on proprietary tools. Plus, the CiviCRM community has been instrumental in helping us troubleshoot, solve problems and add new features to meet our usage requirements.”

The CiviCRM community is planning to run another code sprint in the fall in Northern California; please contact them if you’d like to participate or even host it. In the meantime, Wikimedia and thousands of other nonprofits will enjoy the CiviCRM improvements developed in May.

-Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

While GLAMCamp NYC finished on Sunday (Signpost coverage), the work initiated there will continue throughout the GLAM community.  Representatives from cultural institutions and Wikimedia chapters, as well as individuals, are working on several projects.  The projects concerning web badges for free culture allies, a metadata standard for use in the mass uploader/data ingestion tool, and the web analytics proposal are in particular seeking contributors and project managers; please comment at the coordination page to signal your interest.

Also available: the collaborative notes from Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and specifically for discussion of the Ambassadors program, the Point Of Entry project, the data ingestion tool, and the metrics/analytics proposal.

Thanks to the organizers and participants for a productive and illuminating weekend.

-Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

Mary Wollstonecraft, whose work "Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman" was featured for International Women's Day

March 8th is International Women’s Day, a holiday around the world that celebrates the accomplishments of women in all walks of life, as well as a collective reminder of past and continuing efforts to eliminate inequalities faced by women.

On the Main Pages of Wikipedias in every language, there is a longstanding tradition of presenting a list of holidays and anniversaries. For a few, Wikipedia projects curate special content that is relevant to that event. Perhaps the most famous example is the epic April Fool’s Day Main Page sections.

In consideration of the current discussion and community organizing around the Wikimedia movement’s own gender gap, we’d just like to take a moment and recognize the great encyclopedic content that was showcased on Wikipedia for International Women’s Day.

The first standout entry is Mary Wollstonecraft’s sequel to The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman, which is assessed as a Featured-quality article on English Wikipedia and is the selected Featured Article of the day for March 8th, appearing front-and-center on en.wikipedia.org (until March 9th rolled around, in UTC time).

There are also nine solid entries in the “Did you know…” section of the English Main Page, ranging from abolitionist Anna Murray-Douglass to artist Claire Falkenstein.

Off of the front page of English Wikipedia, there is also an in-depth interview with community leaders from WikiProject Feminism in the latest edition of community newspaper The Signpost. That WikiProject is one of several now devoted to women-related topics, with WikiProject Women’s History as a second great example.

While the topic of gender is relevant to the evolution of the encyclopedia anyone can edit, this kind of activity is also something that goes on every day at Wikipedia regardless of the topic: people who care about a subject show up to participate and share free knowledge.

International Women’s Day is about focusing conversation on one problem that we face as a global society. Hopefully Wikipedia can be a place where we can support that conversation by providing neutral, verifiable information written by women and men in collaboration.

Steven Walling, Wikimedia Foundation Fellow

You may remember that last year, to close the Wikimedia annual fundraiser, Foundation staff and volunteers worked together to create the Wikipedia Contribution Campaign– a two-week long initiative to encourage people all over the world to become new editors.  Throughout the past few months, volunteers have continued to work together, creating the Wikipedia Contribution Team, to continue to drive the good work being done. Since January 2011, the Contribution Team has grown from 10 participants to 40, recently taking on projects such as the Backlog Drive – a project focused, six-week project to reduce the backlogs on Wikipedia, as well as in-person outreach to help encourage people to become new editors.

Supported by the Wikimedia UK chapter, the Wikipedia Contribution Team has planned a number of great events throughout the UK to support outreach and encourage people to join the Wikimedia movement. Throughout the next few months, the Team will support Wikipedia education and editor recruitment at several UK colleges and universities, including the Imperial College of London, University of Sheffield and University of Leeds.

No matter where you are in the world or how you like to work (online or IRL) there are a number of ways you can get involved to help educate people everywhere about the importance of working as a Wikimedia volunteer and how to encourage others to join!

If you’d like to join the Contribution Team, it’s as simple as signing up.

Good luck to everyone involved; we look forward to hearing more about
your successes!

Moka Pantages, Communications