Wikimedia Community User Group Albania/2021 Report

< Wikimedia Community User Group Albania

After a tough post pandemic year, our UG efforts were once again focused on establishing partnerships with projects, communities, and entities around GLAM and Education. In addition, we have new members on board that are planning to start from Jan 2022 with the goal of working on all the groundwork to prepare us for the implementation of the projects.

Activities for May 2021 - May 2022

Social movements edit-a-thon

Date: 19.03.2022

Location: Open Labs hackerspace, Tirana

Organized by: WCUGA & The Movement for the University Albania

Description of the activity:
From 9 March several protests started organizing in different cities of Albania, against the rising of prices in the country. Especially in Tirana these protests have been organizing every day in a row without stoping for one week now. The biggest manifestation has been on the 12 of March. Therefore it was necessary to organize an event in Open Labs Hackerspace regarding these important protests to gather and add as much information about them on Wikipedia in Albanian, to somehow document these important events. This event happened on the 19th of March and gathered different people and activists from different fields with the mere purpose of documenting these events in Albania but at the same time share the knowledge about how to use and edit on Wikipedia.

Edit-a-thon about Albanian Architects

Date: 16.04.2022

Location: Open Labs hackerspace, Tirana

Organized by: WCUGA & the preservingtirana.city team

Description of the activity:
The 16th of April, an editathon was organized with the main purpose of gathering and adding materials and information to the Albanian Wikipedia regarding some of the most important Albanian Albanian architects and their most important public works and projects through the years in Albania. Due to the lack of articles in Albanian language related to this category, that was especially noticed during previous editathon sessions, this event appeared to be most needed and worthwhile. A considerate group of young architects, architecture and Wikipedia enthusiasts gathered on this date and got the chance to learn more on how to edit on Wikipedia and at the same time learned about some very significant but yet unknown architects in Albania, that had played a big role and contribution to the architecture we see today in Albania.

Wikipedia SQ open day and discussion & intro to Wikidata

Date: 18.01.2022

Location: Open Labs hackerspace, Tirana

Organized by: WCUGA & Open Labs Albania

Description of the activity:
The last year (2020) we had many people that wanted to do their first steps in contributing in SQ Wikipedia. We wanted to tackle this by organising a series of activities were focused on people that were doing their first steps in contributing. We explained the importance of Wikipedia as the largest source of information on the internet, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata and the importance of references in articles. This was quite important given the fact that SQ Wikipedia needs more contributors than we actually have.

Preserving Tirana Editathon

Date: 22.10.2021 (more than one event)

Location: Open Labs hackerspace, Tirana

Organized by: WCUGA, Open Labs hackerspace & the preservingtirana.city team

Description of the activity:
A series of events have been organized at Open Labs Hackerspace related to architecture and a very specific one the most vulnerable and endangered architectural assets for the city of Tirana. A group of architecture and Wikimedia enthusiasts, young architects and students have gathered to add on Wikimedia commons more photos and information regarding some of the most valuable historical architecture assets of the capital, that today are particularly endangered from neglect and lack of specific preservation policies. This editathon organized in three to four meet ups were organized in the contexts of the open source project and platform PreservingTirana.city, which is a project that adds a very high contribution of materials and photos from the architecture of Tirana, to open source platform such as Wikimedia Commons and OpenStreetMap.

WikiFilmat SQ editathon

Date: 29.06.2021

Location: Open Labs hackerspace, Tirana

Organized by: WCUGA

Description of the activity:
This was the last of the events related to the SQ Wikifilmat project, a collaboration between Wikimedia Community User Group Albania and The Albanian National Center of Film. We reviewed the project, all the work done during the last year and thanked all contributors.

Other activities

Below is a list of additional activities where members of our user group were involved.

Presence at the main open source conference in Albania

During the first edition of Open Source Conference Albania (aka OSCAL) Lars Haefner hosted a presentation featuring some insights related to censorship of Wikipedia.

Link: https://twitter.com/alb_info/status/1536055363673505796

Preliminary meetings with GLAM and Education related institutions

After the SQ Wikifilmat project, where we collaborated with the Albanian National Center of Films, we have started preliminary meetings to explore potential establishment of collabs with the following entities:

Lëvizja për Universitetin
Këshilli Shqiptar i Medias
Institute of Cultural Anthropology and the Study of Art
Debatic Center of Contemporary Art
Pika pa Sipërfaqe publishing house
Erafilm Albania

So far we have had positive feedback, and we are confident that we will be able to sign agreements with these entities to further enrich Sq Wikipedia with qualitative articles. This has been quite an intensive work with quite a few meetings involved.

First drone image of Tirana @ Wikimedia Commons

We are quite excited and proud to have uploaded the first high quality drone image of Tirana city center at Wikimedia Commons https://twitter.com/WikiUG_Albania/status/1463604963469406209. The video can be found here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tirana_Skenderbeg_Square_birds_eye_view.webm. This is the first video and will be followed by at least 10 more.

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