Grants:IdeaLab/Wiki Loves Pride 2014

status: idea
project:
Wiki Loves Pride 2014
idea creator:
project contact:
participants:
summary:
International edit-a-thon and training session to improve and expand LGBT-related content across several Wikimedia projects.
created on: 17:30, 28 March 2014

Project idea

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What is the problem you're trying to solve?

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This outreach project seeks to increase engagement of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community, both within the Wikimedia movement and otherwise, and to improve content related to LGBT history and culture. A need for greater LGBT involvement in Wikipedia has been identified by previous outreach initiatives, including the Gender Gap, the Wikimedia Diversity Conference, the WikiWomen's Collaborative, the various friendly space policy proposals, and the Wikimedia LGBT user group proposal.

What is your solution?

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One solution for improving LGBT-related content and for recruiting new contributors as an outreach initiative is to organize a one-day international campaign called Wiki Loves Pride. This campaign would then promote an international edit-a-thon event (possibly organized at different dates over a short period, depending on countries and languages, and renewable regularly) and Wikimedia training sessions to be coordinated internationally by anyone who wishes to volunteer. It is to be modeled after the Art+Feminism event which was hosted in February 2014. Project pages (and associated templates and categories) have already been created for the campaign at English Wikipedia:

  • Wiki Loves Pride; the main page will provide a summary of the campaign and its goals, share results, link to (historical) annual campaigns, and advertise upcoming events
    • Wiki Loves Pride 2014; subpages will be created annually, providing details specific to each year, and will contain an archive of hosted events and results

During the edit-a-thon, volunteers should also contribute translations (notably for the Wikimedia training sessions created in this project) and help promote these resources, because the most serious issues are experimented by LGBT people living in non-English speaking countries, where they also have difficulties to contribute online on this subject and need help from their international expatriates and friends (the most notable languages should include French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Tamil, Sinhalese, Bengali, Indonesian, Malay and Chinese as a pritority, without excluding other national and regonal languages). This is also in sync with another outreach goal to improve contents for the Global South and in South and East Asia, but the scope of LGBT issues is much larger (just like the issues against Women, the gender gap in Wikimedia, and the lack of general education of children, which are also related to this project and could also share common solutions with this project).

The difficulties to contribute on Wikimedia on LGBT topics should also be studied, and the outreach event should contain a brainstorming to help design some solutions or finding and selecting those already existing and the most effective, in order to promote their use, as well as non-working ones that cause negative impacts on the project International affiliate organisations could also help with their working solutions based their own local experience. These innovative solutions would likely be useful for lots of other topics once exposed in learning patterns, or in improvements to Wikimedia policies and guidelines.

This project proposes to use the learning pattern system to help people plan their events.

Project goals

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  1. Organize meetups, mostly in the form of edit-a-thons, in multiple cities on a single day in June 2014, a month when LGBT communities traditionally gather to celebrate their culture and history.
  2. Invite a local LGBT organization to each edit-a-thon as a community partner for the event.
  3. Provide training to new contributors; be gracious hosts by providing coffee and tea and snacks in a free venue.
  4. Develop content related to LGBT culture and history, local or otherwise; create lists of articles needing to be created or improved.
  5. Take pictures; perhaps have someone at each event record and upload oral histories.
  6. Take notes, report contributions to Wikimedia projects, and see if this can happen every year along with other LGBT events.

Get involved

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Welcome, brainstormers! Your feedback on this idea is welcome. Please click the "discussion" link at the top of the page to start the conversation and share your thoughts.


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