Wikimedia Quarto/3/Kenninsnet and Wikimedia, the start of a partnership

Kenninsnet and Wikimedia, the start of a partnership
By GerardM

Kennisnet was something that most of the Dutch moderators did not like. They were the proxies for schools. They were a major source of vandalism. There were frequent discussions about what to do about Kennisnet, block them permanently or should we only block them for short periods in order not to have to good suffer for the bad. We had contact with a few schools and that proved that we could cooperate if we knew whom to contact. This Kennisnet was like an ISP so what to do??

Then there was this WikiJunior, and they had been granted some money to create some educational content. This was the opportunity to approach Kennisnet, maybe we could get them interested in this and maybe they could help us with the other. We called Kennisnet, they were interested and two Wikimedians went to Zoetermeer. We were welcomed, by a big panel of senior people from Kennisnet, we introduced ourselves they introduced themselves and, they liked us, they knew us, and not only that they had been asked what Kennisnet could do to improve the availability of Wikipedia!!

It was quite thrilling to see, how well received our efforts were in our other projects like Wiktionary, Wikibooks and WikiNews. Funny was that our perception of Kennisnet as an ISP proved to be totally flawed. Kennisnet was not and had never been in that business. It was the intermediary between schools and ISP’s to oversee a contract that provided Internet access to schools, it was unfortunate that this contract was also called Kennisnet. :)

We knew that we had to handle this well. We did inform the Wikimedia board, we did inform the Dutch communities. The second meeting was funny as we were with a big group and due to sickness there was only one person for Kennisnet. This proved to be a really important meeting. It showed Kennisnet wanted to act like a partner, the basics for all the projects that were started were identified: hosting, funding for WikiData and Ultimate Wiktionary, using Wikipedia and WikiNews within Kennisnet projects, having kids contribute to Wikipedia. It was really brilliant, in all the excitement we had forgotten about the proxies and we had forgotten about WikiJunior, but this is bound to come up at a next meeting.