Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Digest 9

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Main: Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/ "No matter how old you are, you can edit Wikipedia and be recognized for it": An interview with Tal, a former participant of Wikimedia Israel's education program who received the Editor of the Week award

In brief

First OpenStreetMap chapter in the movement: Wikimedia Italy has announced that they are the first Wikimedia chapter to obtain a similar status with OpenStreetMap, an organization that aims ot have a freely licensed and editable map of the entire world. Simone Cortesi, the chairman of Wikimedia Italy and a longtime contributor to OpenStreetMap, writes that "the addition of the OpenStreetMap Foundation chapter for Italy as a Wikimedia chapter is very important. Wikipedia and OSM serve different purposes, but are governed by the same idea of contributing to the expansion of Free Knowledge: this way we can avoid wasting resources [by] bringing together two similar worlds."

Mentoring program between the Argentine and Mexican chapters: Representatives from Wikimedia Argentina and Mexico met in Buenos Aires from January 25–29 in an effort to increase the impact of both Spanish language organizations. The Regional Mentoring Program, the first held as part of a larger Iberocoop initiative, particularly focused on how to translate these chapters' successes into other regions. For Mexico, this was learning from Argentina's educational programs; for Argentina, this was learning from Mexico's GLAM collaborations. The two organizations write that the meeting was a "breakthrough in Wikimedia Argentina and Mexico’s programmatic relationships. These gains mean not only that we will work together to promote projects in the near future, but to understand the areas and fields of expertise of each chapter, to face our limits and failures, and generate best practices and learning patterns to enrich the movement."

Wales opening up: Wikimedia UK has published a blog post from Robin Owain, a poet who released 150 of his poems onto the Internet in the 1990s and is now the chapter's Wales manager. Says Owain, "The idea of sharing information and literature freely disappeared from the Welsh psyche in the 1980s. But it’s coming back, and coming fast. In the spring of 2015 BBC Wales released many articles to [the Welsh Wikipedia] and their text has been used on [the site]. This was a large and brave step, and surprisingly: the world did not end."

Maithili Wikimedians moving forward with wiki in education: The Maithili Wikipedia Education Program is expanding to Rajbiraj in Eastern Nepal. Users there plan to "organize regional events for Wikipedians from all over the eastern part of Nepal and ... engage students for workshops." You can see their usergroup for more of their initiatives.

• Spain GLAMing: On January 7, the GLAMing Madrid project ended. It was started in September 2015 as a collaboration with three state museums of Madrid—the Museum of Romanticism, the Museo del Traje (Costume Museum) and the National Archaeological Museum—with a Wikipedian in Residence. From organizer Rubén Ojeda:

In these four months, we carried out various activities to promote the Wikimedia projects, explain how Wikipedia works and generate content related to the three museums and their collections. We organized 18 Wikipedia workshops for the public, 6 for the staff of institutions and a triedit-a-thon. In all these events, 81 people participated, 61 women and 20 men. In terms of content, people at the workshops edited 114 articles, 64 of which were new, increasing information on Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikiquote. We also put on an editing contest between December 14, 2015 and January 14, 2016 (GLAMing Madrid Challenge) which 30 people took part in, editing 373 articles in ten different languages.

Another highlight was the release of media under free license to Wikimedia Commons, in order to illustrate Wikimedia content. The National Archaeological Museum released 197 images, while the Museo del Traje followed with 58 and the Museum of Romanticism 122. We were also able to get 45 audio and video recordings of classical music concerts at the Museum of Romanticism.

From the Kurier: the German Wikipedia will enabling the VisualEditor for new and anonymous users after a community vote. Work by Wikimedia CH (Switzerland), in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Archive and Archives canto dimensional jurassiennes, has resulted in the uploading of 3,100 images from Eugène Cattin. Cattin worked in the timber business in Switzerland in the early part of the 20th century, and he took many photographs from 1900–30 of what is now the Canton of Jura.

New edition of RAW: The French Wikipedia's RAW has now been published.

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