Content Partnerships Hub/Background

Content Partnerships Hub

Improving the Wikimedia movement’s work with content partners

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  About

  • Background
  • Goals
  • People
  • Events

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  Needs assessment

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  Helpdesk

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  Capacity building

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  International partnerships

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  Software

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  Data uploads

Background

So many opportunities if we work together

Multiple actors in society produce free knowledge aimed to be shared with the world. For many years already, Wikimedia communities across the world have partnered with like-minded organizations who wish to share their free knowledge. The Wikimedia movement has for years provided a unique infrastructure around knowledge dissemination and public engagement.

A lot of great progress has been made, but historically this work has been done by organizations and individuals behaving like separated islands and not as a unified system or network. To change this we need to establish an essential infrastructure for global heritage and content partnerships.

To date, the Wikimedia movement has only been able to support partners ad hoc, with vastly different abilities and in a non-equitable way. The Wikimedia movement lacks both a solid international support network and an accessible technical partnership infrastructure to make access to content partnerships truly equitable. This limits our ability on a global scale to form strategic partnerships and coalitions with aligned organizations.

The Hub will provide a number of services to the global Wikimedia movement and work to increase coordination and collaboration. This will help Wikimedia affiliates, and the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), to work more efficiently to bring high value content from partner organizations to the Wikimedia platforms, for example from Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM), civil society organizations, authorities, research institutions, or UN agencies, just to mention a few.

It will empower and connect affiliates and volunteer communities and support a thriving movement across the world. In the long term, the goal is to develop and maintain key infrastructure needed for content partners to engage readily and effectively with the Wikimedia movement.

Wikimedia’s Reach

Wikipedia is the only worldwide platform that links knowledge, free educational and cultural text and multimedia from individuals as well as institutions, and connects it with a global, multilingual community of 500 million people across 300 languages.

Many organizations across the world want to connect with Wikimedia volunteers and affiliates, sharing their information and knowledge with global audiences, and participate in the free knowledge ecosystem.

Problems/Issues

There are important and valuable content partners all across the world, but the capabilities and capacities for the Wikimedia movement to effectively engage with them differs significantly. This preserves the unequal coverage of knowledge from different parts of the world, it limits the opportunities for local volunteers to enhance locally relevant content in their language and it limits the opportunities to engage new volunteers through the partners networks.

We must work to make it possible for more content partnerships to take place around the world and support the volunteers and local staff that are interested in leading the work. The lack of hands-on support, of capacity building opportunities, of well-functioning and easy-to-use tools, of necessary financial resources and of important contacts and networks can all be significantly improved with limited investments.

For content partners, such as GLAM communities, it can be complex to do work with us, given the lack of technical infrastructure for content partnerships, including batch uploads and editing, analytics and data synchronization.

A lot of the potential of our platforms is still unrealized. To be able to share content to the Wikimedia platforms at scale there is currently a need for highly specialized people, who are knowledgeable in a large set of difficult-to-find tools that often are not being maintained and actively developed. This unstable situation far too often leads to very frustrating experiences from partners who want to contribute to the Wikimedia platforms, and to a dependency on a very narrow group of volunteers or affiliates with experience in those projects. This also effectively excludes a wide number of communities, including newcomers.

The approach from Wikimedia Sverige

The 2030 strategic direction states that Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and that anyone who shares that vision will be able to join us. This includes several recommendations related to partnerships including:

• Increase the Sustainability of Our Movement
• Coordinate Across Stakeholders
• Invest in Skills and Leadership Development
• Manage Internal Knowledge
• Identify Topics for Impact
• Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt

The work with this initiative will integrate the recommendations from the Movement Strategy Working Groups. The focus will be adjusted accordingly and with time to best serve the needs of content partners and the Wikimedia community in the longer term. One way to do this is to coordinate a socio-technical support structure for content partners, where all Wikimedia communities and partners can easily work together, be part of a support network, and have access to user-friendly tools and technical infrastructure.

Wikimedia Sverige has been involved in GLAM technical development with international focus for a long time. It has developed expertise in international GLAM projects and has access to a growing network of international funding opportunities.

Wikimedia Sverige will investigate the needs, roadmap and resourcing that is needed in this area. These efforts will be designed in a very participatory way, in order to lead to a co-creation initiative by means of diverse, globally representative pilot projects and to kick-start a social support infrastructure for content partnerships as well. The purpose of this experimentation is to provide a framework for the discussions with stakeholders to identify what a thematic hub could and should work on in the future.

The plan builds on the notion that local affiliates should take a much larger leadership role in the movement and that affiliates should actively participate in the software development process. Some advantages, compared with the current model, include:

1. Spreading the risks and making the movement more robust.
2. Benefiting from local experiences.
3. Distributing responsibilities for technical development further beyond the United States, improving the position of the Wikimedia movement as a truly global movement and helping to ensure multilingualism.
4. Benefiting from contextual advantages and collaborations.
5. Strengthening the feeling of ownership and agency in other parts of the movement.
6. Spreading the financial resources over a larger geographical area.

How the work is funded

Wikimedia Sverige currently has a one-off grant from Wikimedia Foundation which we are combining with funding from external sources and donations.

We have an ongoing exchange with WMF Advancement around fundraising, initiated through a previous grant from the WMF Product team. The local fundraising capacity will continue to evolve with the aim to over time develop significant funding streams to cover a large part of future initiatives around content partnerships. We will continuously apply for external project grants to further the work we do.

Different opportunities for Wikimedia organizations and other partners to co-finance different areas of the work will be developed.

Notes