Wikimedia Eesti activity reports

WMF grant spending
Year	Euros	Additional projects
2010&11	3004.97
2012	6669.00
2013	24885.67
2014	43513.55
2015	37027.00	28645.55
2016	64802.00
2017	58840.62
2018	41078.28
2019	47202.00	17525.58
2020	52295.15
2021	62833.56
2022	65325.74
2023	72336.02
2024
2010–2023	579813.56	46171.13

Here is a summary of Wikimedia Eesti activity over the last years.

Earlier reports: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010

2017

2017 has been a year of building partnerships and creating the networks.

Education

Seven of 8 set goals are met (see green check marks and consult the midpoint report above).

1. Our new partner universities include University of Life Sciences, Estonian National Defence College, Tallinn University of Applied Sciences, Tartu Art College. First attempts are made in Estonian Academy of Arts and Mainor Business School. Another college of Tartu University has joined the education program - University of Tartu Pärnu College. Tallinn University has added new courses where the assignments are related to editing Wikipedia. Estonian Aviation Academy is about to join from the next semester.
2. New courses cover a wide range of fields: building, pharmacology, philosophy, art history, IT, law, finances, agriculture, life and exact sciences.
3. At least 500 students and high school pupils have been writing articles to Estonian Wikipedia in 2017.
4. There were 30 high school students (among the registered 80) who reached to participation level. As it was an e-course it is hard to tell exactly where they were from. In addition, 69 high school students wrote articles during the article contest which was organized for high school students. Winners of the contest (who produced content of admirable quality) were from Tartu and Võru high schools.
5. Teachers and lecturers of the education program have continued their regular meetings.
6. Planned experiment is in designing process and is postponed to 2018 as we have been quite busy with the universities network.
7. As the main project in our education program is still Wikipedia we have created a quality assessing manual for the Wikipedia articles.

GLAM

We have achieved all the objectives of our GLAM program.

Workshop with Liam Wyatt during Digital humanities conference in Tartu

1. Our new GLAM partners are National Library of Estonia, TLU (Tallinn University) Academic Library and Estonian Museum of Natural History. We have been conducting negotiations with the Estonian National Museum and the National Archive. Of the previous partners, our cooperation continues with Tartu Art Museum, Estonian Museum of Natural History, Estonian War Museum, Estonian Literary Museum, Estonian Theatre and Music Museum, and University of Tartu Art Museum.
2. Over a baker's dozen of people from various Estonian GLAM institutions have been involved in projects run by Wikimedia Eesti.
3. In additional to numerous minor events, we have conducted a major conference on digital humanities and Wikimedia projects12 3 (with Asaf Bartov as the introductory keynote speaker, included in the official program of events of Estonian presidency of the European Union), several Wikidata workshops in GLAM and educational institution as well as in Tartu Startup Hub, a specific workshop on data art in Tartu Art Museum, and created a virtual exhibition (in four languages) in the framework of the Europeana 1914-18 program.
4. Our GLAM activities concern at least three Wikimedia projects: Wikipedia, Commons, and Wikidata. By this aspect, our Europeana project is especially noteworthy, as it connects different Wikiprojects (with the Wikidata activities to be developed further in 2018). (See also our GLAM newsletter from Nov 2017.)
5. WMEE has established its place in public discussions concerning cultural digitization processes and popularization of such projects, focusing on openGlam. In this field, we would like to stress the effects of our digihumanities conference (there is also a report in Latvian, thanks to Mārtiņš Bruņenieks, and another from Poland) as well as the activities concerning the Estonian translation of the Public Domain Manifesto and Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture (public signing, book presentation, and book exhibition in the National Library in Tallinn, the latter being turned into a virtual exhibition by the library in 2018, a book presentation in Tartu, and another public signing round in the National Museum during the digihum conference) 1 2.
6. WMEE participated actively in the summer seminar of Estonian GLAMmery and on the digihumanities conference (for which WMEE was also the main organizer).
7. Concerning quality control processes and general competency raising on open GLAM, the Estonian translation of the rights statement templates for GLAM institutions provided by rightsttatements.org has been produced (initiated by Vahur Puik, translated by Tanel Pern, edited and commented by Raul Veede) currently in the process of international review).

Examples on media contributed by the museums

• 
  Nikolai Triik. Old Garden
• 
  Konrad Mägi. On the Road from Viljandi to Tartu
• 
  Hermann Friedrich Schrenck. Emajõgi
• 
  Karl Anton Schulz. View to Tartu from Kassitoome
• 
  Aleksander Uurits. Portrait of a Lady
• 
  Jaan Koort. Portrait of Artist’s Wife

Community

We have achieved almost all the objectives of our Community program, bar one.

Participants of Wikipedia Summer Days 2017 in Estonia

1. Of the community events on the narrow sense, keeping the wikicommunity in mind, we have been running monthly gatherings of Wikipedians (both in Tallinn and Tartu), Wikimedia Christmas parties (in both towns), our yearly Wikipedia summer days and as a community/public event, the 15th birthday party of Estonian Wikipedia (visited also by a major Finnish delegation). Online, there have been monthly elections of the Wikipedian of the Month, supported with small prizes by WMEE. In 2017 we also started the yearly election of the Wikipedia Photographer of the Year (Kristian Pikner). Of the community events on the wider sense (meaning the public community around Wikipedia), there have been the events concerning the Public Domain Manifesto and Lessig's Free Culture (see above), a copyright-themed music quiz in Tartu, several Wikidata workshops here and there, and a data art workshop in Tartu Art Museum (see above). Altogether, these events were visited roughly by 600 people.
2. Concerning our goals for Wikiexpeditions, there have been a bit less expeditions (3 instead of 4 as prognosticated) but more pictures (660 instead of 200); of the hoped 100 in articles, 70 have been added, but part of the pictures are still being processed, so the final numbers will be higher.
3. Instead of 3 local competitions in the goals, there were 5 article competitions, 3 photo competitions, and 1 editing competition, resulting in over 470 articles created or edited (the goal was 300) and ca 500 photos uploaded (the goal was 250). Also, Estonia coordinated the international science photo competition which brought over 10,000 photos by over 2,000 contributors all over the world.
4. Instead of 1 competition in cooperation with a new partner, there has been cooperation concerning competitions with the Kae Maailma Foundation, NGO Mondo, and the Estonian Association of Copy Editors (see the midterm report for details).
5. The local communities from Tallinn, Tartu, Võru, and Vigala as well as Kolodavitsa have been continually contributing to Wikimedia projects.
6. Instead of "at least 500 images collected all over Estonia", we have acquired ca 60,000 images in donations. Due to the sheer amount, uploading into Commons requires major preparations and will be conducted throughout 2018.
7. Out of 5 microgrants as hoped, none have been applied for. Apparently, the income levels among Estonian Wikipedians are more than adequate. Ain't much we can do in this matter, though.

• 
  RB2017 expedition: Riisa Bog
• 
  Vepsamaa 2017 expedition: Vepsan pies
• 
  LV2017 expedition: Dižstende Castle, Latvia
• 
  HELP8 image: Eurasian oystercatchers
• 
  Pildikorje 2017 image: Papiniidu bridge
• 
  Science photo competition image

Public activities

We have achieved almost all the objectives of our Community program.

Mart Noorma, Friend of Wikipedia 2017

1. As referred above, the Estonian translation of Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture has finally been published, presented (thrice, in different cities), and covered in national media (1 instance of our press release in the largest cultural newspaper in Estonia, 1 review in a major intellectual journal, 1 upcoming radio show in the national public radio channel Klassikaraadio, devoted specifically to this book). The book has been met enthusiastically, and has already been added among the compulsory reading lists in university courses (in plural).
2. Thanks to the public announcement of the Friend of Wikipedia prize, the 15th birthday event of Estonian Wikipedia has deserved mentions in publications as varied as the Estonian teachers' gazette, the newspaper of Tallinn City Government, and the internationally notorious propaganda channel Sputnik.
3. About the public events concerning Wikipedia, see the description of community events above. This includes, again, the digital humanities conference, various workshops on Wikidata, the public birthday event of Estonian Wikipedia, etc. In addition, there have been several minor events focusing on volunteers. WMEE has participated in a hackathon affiliated with the University of Tartu, in a volunteer fair in Tallinn, in a social impact data hack at the Idea Lab of the University of Tartu, etc.
4. WMEE has been presented in about a dozen meetings and consultation with different institutions and stakeholders like the universities, GLAM institutions, creative associations, and academic societies, up to the culture committee of Estonian parliament.
5. There have been twelve blog posts in WMEE blog, concerning issues as varied as Wikimedia events (local and international), the history of Estonian Wikipedia, our education initiatives, and copyright issues during Estonian presidency of EU. Several posts have been republished by different channels in national media. One blog post was authored by Polish public policy activist Anna Mazgal.

International Activities: Education

Four out of five objectives have been achieved, while one has been deemed to be pointless.

Giving a presentation about Wikipedia

1. Instead of three conferences as hoped for, the experiences of the WMEE education program have been shared on one conference: Käbi Suvi held a presentation on Celtic Knot (see the midpoint report).
2. There were three reports in the international GLAM newsletter (January, June, and August), and one in the CEE newsletter.1,

2, 3

1. By the decision of our ED, WMEE has reconsidered its position and forgone dealing with the learning patterns, as there is remarkable lack of evidence of their actual impact as compared to the time spent of writing and painting them. (As for the future, don't hold your breath.)
2. The application into the Erasmus program was finished (see the midterm report).
3. The Central and Eastern European cooperation towards the establishment of an education network was continued.

International Activities: GLAM Program

Out of 6 objectives, 4 were achieved fully, one almost fully (a bit lower than the numerical goals), and one was scrapped (see also previous section).

Vahur Puik in 2nd European GLAMwiki Coordinators Meeting

Y1. Wikimedia Eesti participates in the meeting of European Wikimedia GLAM coordinators and its follow-up activities in early 2017.

Y2. In the second half of 2017, Wikimedia Eesti is represented at the annual Europeana meeting.

Y3. Wikimedia Eesti participates in the Europeana 1914-1918 project, engaging at least 3 partner organizations at the local level.

Y4. At least 100 media files are uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in the course of the project and at least 100 media files tied to relevant articles. This will result in the creation or improvement of at least 100 articles on Estonian and English Wikipedia.

Y5. Estonian GLAM activities are covered in the international monthly newsletter.

1. WMEE participated in the meeting of European Wikimedia GLAM coordinators and its follow-up activities in early 2017.
2. WMEE was represented at the annual Europeana meeting by Vahur Puik.
3. WMEE participates in the Europeana 1914-1918 project, engaging several partner organizations at the local level. See the local news coverage, the virtual exhibition, and special mention by Europeana.
4. Out of the pictures from Tartu Art Museum, 75 very high quality TIFs (and additional JPG versions) were uploaded to Commons (goal: 100). Of those, Wikipedia articles include over 60, and ca 25 of the Europeana images (altogether 85, goal: 100; still, there were some minor additions not counted).
5. Estonian GLAM activities were covered in the international monthly newsletter of Europeana.
6. As per GLAM learning patterns, see point 3 under International Education Activities above.

International Activities: Community

Out of 7 objectives, 6 were achieved, and 1 achieved 1 out of 3 numerical goals.

Käbi Suvi at the Celtic Knot 2017

1. Indeed, WMEE was represented on Wikimania, Wikimedia Conference, and CEE conference.
2. WMEE held talks on Wikimania (Kaarel Vaidla), CEE Conference (Kaarel Vaidla, Eva Lepik and Raul Veede 1, 2), Celtic Knot (Käbi Suvi), Copycamp (Eva Lepik and Raul Veede 1), and European GLAMwiki Coordinators Meeting (Vahur Puik, see above).
3. WMEE participated actively in the work of CEE and Finno-Ugric networks.
4. The international Rail Baltic wikiexpedition was planned (to be conducted in 2018), the possibilities for Baltic and Nordic-Baltic cooperation were mapped, and the Greater Nordic conference organization was started (covering strictly Nordic countries as well as others in the Baltic Sea area). In addition, consultations with Wikimedia Norge were held on the matter of cooperatively resurrecting the Northern Sami Wikipedia. Also, discussions have been held on cooperation with the Erzyan Wikicommunity. A Fenno-Ugric meeting was held in Tartu.
5. In the WMCEE article competition, there were 10 participants and 160 articles edited; in the science photo competition, there were 30 participants from Estonian community and 144 photos uploaded to Commons. Altogether, 40 participants (exceeding the goal: 30), 160 articles (goal: 300), 144 photos (goal: 500).

International Activities: Public Policy

All 3 objectives were achieved with flying colours.

1. Wikimedia Eesti participated in discussions related to European policymaking and covered major developments on the local level. Our activities and statements received major public coverage in Estonian and occasionally in international media.
2. In 2017, Wikimedia Eesti was represented with by more than one person on more than one international meeting on policymaking.
3. Wikimedia Eesti published several stories (and no learning patterns, see above) on local experience in policymaking and/or communication with stakeholders. A radio broadcast on our experience is upcoming.

Spending 2017

Total spending: 58840,62 EUR

2018 (H1; H2)

A daylong strategic meeting in Tartu on April

An independent audit was commissioned on the 2017 finances, and found no issues (English summary).

Wikimedia Eesti has had a good first half of the year, despite the volunteer workforce. In addition to the per-program information below, the board and other very active members of Wikimedia Eesti got together twice for an entire day to discuss and plan the future strategic goals of the association. We expect the progress to be faster in the second half thanks to the newly funded positions. We ask the readers to bear in mind that the presented plan we're reporting about was intended as a full year plan, not a half year one, so this is effectively more of a midpoint than a final report.

We managed to hit every metrics goal except for the one for number of pictures uploaded and in use (Metrics). For the latter, we're reasonably confident we managed to acquire the rights to enough pictures to upload, but between the OTRS issues with one of our competitions (mentioned below) and a delay in our image uploading while we figure out a more efficient way to upload large quantities of images, the actual upload and reuse is lagging behind. We're expecting to improve this in 2019.

Education program

Winners of a language editing competition

Wikipedia meets NLP workshop

• The cooperative efforts with the University of Tartu (UT) continue both with the Miljon+ project, dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Republic of Estonia, and with efforts to get the university students to write Wikipedia articles. At least 8 courses including Wikipedia assignments were held in the H1 semester in UT, with 278 users (274 of them new) writing and improving 294 pages. UT even organized its own wikiarticle competition for law students of UT. Digihariduse konkurss, that is organized under UT, also took place in this spring semester.
• Exercises involving wikiarticle writing kept spreading in Estonia. The newest addition among the institutions involved was the Estonian Aviation Academy.
• A language editing competition that started at the end of 2017 and during which 40 participants edited 735 articles came to its conclusion in March. It was organized in cooperation with the university, Tartu Hansa Rotary and the Estonian Copy Editors' Association.
• We helped organize a Wikipedia meets Natural Language Processing workshop on September 27th as a part of the Human Language Technologies - The Baltic Perspective Conference in Tartu. 35 people took part. Some images from the event.
• We kept expanding the tasks related to Wikipedia article writing in Estonian universities, and started looking into possibilities of expanding the program into vocational education institutions and high schools (which led to at least one partnership we're already in talks for during 2019, and will hopefully lead to more during the year). We've reached a point where the university-level program is mostly being led by the universities themselves, and WMEE is becoming mostly an advisory group that helps when needed. We feel this level of adoption is in itself high praise for the program and hope to be able to eventually replicate something similar at other levels of the education pyramid.

GLAM program

Ivo Kruusamägi describing Wikidata and our GLAM work there at Open Data Day 2018

• We have started a new cooperation project with the Tartu Art Museum, as part of which the museum assets will be described in Wikidata, and high quality images added to Wikimedia Commons when legally possible. So far, the information about museum's painting and watercolor collections have been imported into Wikidata. Additionally, the museum has provided Wikimedia Eesti with high quality images of the artworks by several well-known Estonian painters in the public domain to be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, a process we expect to begin more seriously in H2.
• Talks are ongoing about cooperation with the National Library of Estonia and the Estonian Natural History Museum, and about data usage from the Estonian Art Museum.
• A cooperation between Wikimedia Eesti and the Estonian Photographic Heritage Society, ran by the Wikimedia volunteer and EPHS board member Vahur Puik, led to the standardized rights statements for online cultural heritage, RightsStatements.org being officially translated into Estonian.
• Also in collaboration with the Estonian Photographic Heritage Society, who edits and maintaining the Biographical Database of Estonian Photographers (EFEA) on KulturNav, the EFEA KulturNav IDs were added to the Wikidata entries for the photographers.

Photography exhibition about the best images from Estonian Science Photo Competition in Tallinn TV Tower

• We continued our efforts to add as much information as possible about the painting collections of Estonian museums to Wikidata. As part of this, we have contacted and started collaborations with multiple art museums around the country, including both national and regional art museums and even some general museums with small art collections. For example in Q3 we added 9320 new Wikidata items for paintings (with 460262 total edits adding, referencing and improving data). We even got some artwork images from a contemporary artist.
• Our talks with the Estonian National History Museum were fruitful and we will be working on a project to upload several thousand images from their geology collection to Commons. We have uploaded an example of how we expect the uploads to look like, and we plan to work on an automated import.
• Besides importing information to Wikidata and to Wikimedia Commons, we are running our own (real-world) photography exhibition as well, exhibiting images from the Science Photo Competition around Estonia.

Some examples of uploaded content:

• 
  "Portrait of a lady" by Konrad Mägi
• 
  "Portrait of Artist Aleksander Hagen" by Julie Wilhelmine Hagen-Schwarz
• 
  "Unistuste kaugused" by Lola Liivat
• 
  Fossilised gastropod Lophospira sp.

Community program

Märt Põder talking about our EV100 campaign in Miljon+ edit-a-thon in Tartu

• In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Republic of Estonia, we asked 100 scientists, scholars, writers, journalists, environmentalists and activists to write Wikipedia articles. Plenty of new articles were created and some people decided that only one article clearly wasn't enough.
• There have been several volunteer events and workshops, including an article writing event in connection with the same 100th anniversary which led to multiple new articles and improvements.
• Unfortunately, the Estonian representative office of the European Commission discontinued the support of translation bees this year, which meant that event didn't take place. We're confident of still reaching our original goal of 4 local level competitions nevertheless by the end of 2018.
• Wikimedia Eesti once again organized the Estonian section of the Central and Eastern European Spring article competition, which saw 10 participants creating or improving 212 pages.
• Wikimedia Eesti and Fenno-Ugria organized another edition of the Finno-Ugric article competition, leading to 5 participants (including one new user) creating or improving 15 pages).
• We were working on the preparations of two photo competitions in autumn and also prepared the Wikipedia summer days.

One of Vaido Otsar's high quality photos, of a concert in Tallinn

• Community meet-ups in Tartu have happened every month. We have successfully expanded our events to Tallinn as well, with regular meetings taking place monthly at the University of Tallinn, led by a local volunteer who has agreed to keep organizing them in the future. We have also formed a specialist group of volunteers related to graphic design, and are still looking into organizing other topical groups.
• We celebrated our annual Summer Days in July, with 23 wikipedians meeting in the Estonian countryside near Otepää for a two-day event with both social activities and presentations about our current projects. We used the chance to survey the attending wikipedians and find out more about what they would want us to concentrate on, for example in the field of GLAM cooperation. The awards for the Estonian section of the Central and Eastern European Spring article competition were also given during this event.
• We celebrated the Estonian Wikipedia's 16th anniversary in Tallinn with 14 people, both chapter members and local wikipedians.
• We celebrated the Estonian Wikipedia Christmas parties in both Tallinn and Tartu, with 9 and 11 attendees respectively.
• The fourth edition of the Digihariduse konkurss, a competition for economy-related Wikipedia articles organized by the University of Tartu, took place during this period. Additionally, Lõimumisteemaline artiklikonkurss, a competition on articles related to social integration organized with the Government Office of Estonia, started in November, and Eesti notariaat 25, a competition about legal topics organized as part of Miljon+ and in cooperation with the Chamber of Notaries of Estonia, started in September. International cooperation with Wikimedians of Latvia led to the Eesti-Läti 100 competition, which ran on both the Estonian and Latvian Wikipedias and encouraged both sets of users to write about both countries to celebrate their 100 years of independence.
• Two photography actions took place. In the first, HELP9, 81 new images of Estonian nature were added to Commons. For the other, as part of a competition organized by magazine Eesti Loodus, participants were allowed to mark whether their pictures for the competition should also be made available on Wikipedia under a CC SA-BY 4.0 license. Over a thousand photos were submitted, and around half of them were licensed appropriately. They will be made available as soon as they go through the OTRS process (where they are being delayed since some OTRS contributors think we should write a letter to every participant to get them to confirm their permission again).
• The Best Photographer award for 2018 went to Vaido Otsar, and the result was covered by a national level newspaper.
• We started creating our technology park to be able to both record promotional materials and document things and people as part of Wikimedia actions.

• 
  Summer Days group photo
• 
  Estonian Wikipedia's 16th anniversary
• 
  Wikipedia Christmas party in Tartu

Public activities

Estonian Students Society housed both the Science Photo Competition awarding ceremony in February and a talk on the copyright reform by Eva Lepik in March

• The Miljon+ project has received good media coverage:
  • Our board member Märt Põder gave a long interview on the Estonian Radio 2
  • Our volunteer Ivo Kruusamägi wrote 2 new Estonian Wikipedia articles live during the morning program "Terevisioon" on the main public national television channel.
• Public events:
  • A public article writing event took place in March 10 in Tartu (and was mentioned in the media during the Terevisioon segment linked above). A second happened in May 12 in cooperation with the Prima Vista literature festival, with the presence of cultural figures such as singer and translator Peeter Volkonski (who wrote his first ever Wikipedia article during the event).

Peeter Volkonski during the article writing event

• Meetings with stakeholders:
  • A meeting took place with Estonian Academy of Sciences
  • Meeting in Tallinn City Government

• Public policy
  • Our board member Eva Lepik held a presentation on the copyright reform of the EU for the Estonian Students Society.
  • Wikimedia Eesti was a leading voice in the debate about the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market in Estonia, contacting the Estonian MEPs both with an open letter and privately, and writing articles in the Estonian press about the situation. This activity started during H1 and continued during the first weeks of H2.
  • In cooperation with Tartu Häkkerikoda, a public viewing of the film Democracy – Im Rausch der Daten, about the EU General Data Protection Regulation, was organized in Tartu, with 15 attendees, including former MEP Marju Lauristin.
• Exhibitions
  • We assembled an exhibition about the best science photos of Estonia. It would be traveling around Estonia for next few years.

Friend of Wikipedia 2018 Ulvar Käärt

• We awarded the Friend of Wikipedia award to Ulvar Käärt, editor-in-chief of the Horisont popular science magazine.
• We have held talks with the Government Office, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Culture and the European Commission Representation in Estonia about possible cooperation (the Government Office talks already led to a co-organized article competition). We've also had talks with several political parties who are preparing the copyright legislation sections of their programs for the 2019 elections, and the program of one of the parties includes creating Wikipedian-in-Residence positions in museums.
• The darkening of the Estonian Wikipedia (July 4-5) in protest against the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market led to coverage across all the Estonian media, including a segment in the evening news program of the main public television channel. Wikimedia Eesti was also quite involved in public discussion of the situation during the entire summer and in the days before the second European vote.
• We organized one event in Tartu and one in Tallinn specifically to present our projects to interested members of the public and try to find new volunteers.

International activities

• The Science Photo Competition was organized as planned. The submission phase ended in 2017 and the multiple juries around the world have already selected their national winners. A longer than expected delay in choosing some of the national winners means the international winners are yet to be chosen, but they should be picked soon.
• Our board member Eva Lepik participated in the Copyright Action Week in Brussels at the invitation of the Copyright for Creativity.
• Our board member Käbi Suvi and our volunteer Ivo Kruusamägi attended the WMCon in Berlin in April 2018.
• A learning pattern was made available, related to our organization of the Digital Humanities Conference in 2017.
• Wikimedia Eesti signed and translated into Estonian the Open letter in light of the 27 April 2018 COREPER I meeting.

Participants in the Rail Baltica photo expedition

• We collaborated with the Wikimedians of Latvia, both to organize our Estonian-Latvian article competition and to darken the Latvian Wikipedia during early July.
• A photo expedition following part of the planned course of Rail Baltica took place in the end of August. Wikipedians from Estonia and Latvia were present (we were unable to convince Lithuanians to participate).
• The rephotography competition had to be postponed, as our collaborators in Ajapaik are behind schedule in their plan to enable their app to upload images to Commons. Wikimedia Suomi used the technique as part of their Wiki Loves Monuments competition this year, which seems promising for future rephotography usage in Estonia as well. The competition has been rescheduled for 2019.
• We assembled the list of 1000 vital articles about Estonia, and we worked during Q4 to convince other Nordic countries to assemble similar lists. The aim is to reduce the cultural gap between the Nordic countries and improve the coverage of each other's cultures in our Wikipedias. In the future, if this project works out, we plan to expand the idea further to cover other countries as well.
• We participated in multiple international meetings, including a strong representation at the Nordic Wikimedians meeting, the second edition which should take place in Estonia in 2019.

Spending 2018

• H1 total spending: 19,806.11 €
• H2 total spending: 21,272.17 €
• Total spending: 41,078.28 €

2019

Education program

Riina Reinsalu (depicted) and Sirli Zupping represented us at Wikimedia+Education Conference 2019

Wikipedia work in higher education

The last education institution to join our with our efforts on putting university students to write wiki articles was the Aviation Academy, and we are slowly extending our reach. The Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre is the next one in the line and we have agreed to start working together in 2020. What we have left to do is get the Tallinn University of Technology to become more active and to get the Tartu Health Care College on board. After that, there would no longer be anywhere left to expand into in that sector.

The universities haven’t directly reported on the number of articles written, but some of them have indicated them in this page (split by university and then by subject). Sadly, keeping an eye on exact statistics needs resources we do not have. We are more interested to ensure university students write articles and get familiar with Wikipedia than on controlling exactly how many articles are written and where. For years we have tried to move into the direction where the university program would work even without our direct involvement, and while we still occasionally give lectures, answer questions and teach faculty staff, it does mostly run autonomously by now.

We also participated in the University of Tartu Career Day, where we were looking for volunteers.

Expansion into elementary and high schools

Our work outside of higher education has seen the first results. 200 students of the Kadrioru Saksa Gümnaasium high school were given lectures about Wikipedia by Ivo Kruusamägi and 44 of them decided to write 33 new Wikipedia articles as part of the EV101+ project. The best of them got recognized in an act with the presence of WMEE member Siim Tuisk. The school has mentioned that they liked the experience and plan to keep doing it in the future, meaning the objective for the year (“to reach at least one pilot agreement with an elementary school or high school, leading to the introduction of a specific collaboration project”) has been achieved. Additionally, Miljon+ representatives went to Pirita Majandusgümnaasium and Viljandi Gümnaasium. We were also present at the national Student Science Festival, showcasing Wikipedia to school students.

Additionally, we also plan to experiment with some new stuff. With Kadrioru Saksa Gümnaasium the plan is to do a test project with Wikiquote, while we are also aiming to get some activity into the Estonian Wikibooks (a test project is ongoing).

Expansion into adult & vocational education

We have looked at possible institutions to contact on the adult education, but nothing has happened yet here. We have also had contacts with the Tartu Kutsehariduskeskus vocational school and hope to get something done in 2020. Progress has been slow due to the lack of manpower.

GLAM program

Estonian painting collections

We have continued uploading artwork images to Commons. Some examples: Paintings by Konrad Mägi, Paintings by Nikolai Triik, Drawings by Nikolai Triik. During the project, the Tartu Art Museum decided that sharing all full-size pictures was a risk to their finances. While we're still talking to them about this, we are also planning to start automatically uploading images (even if in smaller sizes) from the Estonian Museums Database MuIS, that can be later be replaced by bigger and better versions if we get the agreement of the specific museum that owns each painting.

We are also ready to start some Wikipedian-in-Residence positions in museums, but so far we have not managed the get any funding. The main issue we keep facing is that we have been given access to a lot of materials from museums, but we don't have that many volunteers to deal with it. And solving this issue with volunteers only is not really efficient (that is: it would be cheaper to hire a person to deal with the integration of all this material than to constantly spend time searching for and teaching new volunteers).

2020 is the year of Digital Culture in Estonia and we have held talks about cooperation with the institutions leading this program. That might also lead us to our first WiR positions.

Public event in Estonian Museum of Natural History to celebrate Estonian Wikipedia 17th birthday

Estonian natural history images

The bot to upload the images was written during June, and we uploaded 6270 images between August and October (category in Commons). It would still take time to link them with relevant articles. But this was our first automated mass upload and we hope that already in 2020 we'll be able to add several times this amount of files. More and more museums in Estonia are ready to open up to Wikipedia and this is now the moment to make use of this opportunity.

Summer seminar of Estonian GLAM institutions. We were also present

Virtual exhibitions

We have set up some virtual exhibitions in the past (example) and we have wanted to build on that to show to a wider range of organizations that in Wikimedia there are more options than just building an encyclopedia. To encourage the Nordic cooperation we proposed the idea that every country could locate artworks that are about other countries in the region so that it would be possible to assemble a set of virtual exhibitions (like "Paintings about Estonia in the collections of other Nordic countries" for every country involved with around 60-70 images each). We even started collecting images, but we've found the interest just wasn't there. So we focused more on Estonia only for now. The first result is an exhibition that was in the Estonian Museum of Natural History: "The Secrets of Ancient Seas". We are preparing to do the same with other exhibitions and involve more museums. For that we have already reached agreements with the Tartu Art Museum and the Estonian National Museum. The main idea is to use Wikisource as a place where texts created for exhibitions can be published so that they would not get lost over time and would still be available to a wider audience. We also intend the bring related images into Commons where possible. Some examples of images that reached Wikimedia Commons in relation to the exhibition "The Secrets of Ancient Seas":

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Wikidata

Map of GLAM institutions on Wikidata, modelled in Carto. Yellow – institutions present on Wikidata in April 2019. Purple – items created between April and October 2019 (Estonia and the USA made a lot of progress in 2019)

Following the OhWTFs system, we added support for Wikidata-powered infoboxes to the Estonian Wikipedia, starting by porting the Catalan "Visual Arts" infobox (with a few changes for the Estonian context) as a bigger and better update to our current "Painting" infobox. That is part of our approach to put more emphasis on Wikidata, but we are also making preparations to use the information about paintings in the Estonian Museums as a leading example on the potential of Wikidata for the GLAM sector.

We have also improved information about Estonian libraries in Wikidata. Absolutely everything except school libraries is now up. But that is more effective to show on a map.

As for our plan of documenting Estonian books in Wikidata... we have had to put that on hold. We have entered a test entry and everything is ready as such, but the publisher we were talking to seems to have lost interest and we have found some other interesting databases in the meantime. As our resources are very limited, then we need to think about what to select and because of this, we are considering changing our focus to Estonian films first. Getting that kind of information would be easier (a lot less work required) and the potential impact would be bigger.

Wiki Science Competition exhibition

The exhibition has been traveling and is now booked for most of 2019 and part of 2020, both in the bigger cities (Tallinn and Tartu) and in smaller rural areas (Kose, Karksi-Nuia, Abja-Paluoja) so the goals have been reached. We’re still looking for even more places to exhibit the photos in 2020 though and also in 2021. We're really happy that we have managed to show the results of our competition in all sorts of places, from small halls in the countryside to the Parliament of Estonia.

Open culture

Group photo at the end of a protest in Tallinn

Already at the start of the year it became very clear that additional work would be needed in policy related to the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. WMEE continued to play an important role on this, including being part of the organization of a protest in Tallinn, and keeping the topic alive at the national level in the media as well as the streets. The social pressure was one of the reasons why Estonia abstained in the EU Council vote on the directive, rather than voting in favor. We also wrote a longer blog post on how Wikipedia loves copyright to present our views on the topic more clearly. Wikipedians are creators and deserve a copyright law that supports their aspirations.

Work on Estonian public domain

In 2019 we stated to celebrate the Public Domain Day in Estonia to bring more attention to the topic. In connection with this we did our best to locate some materials that went into the public domain on January 1st. We managed to find 5 historical recordings of Aleksander Läte (uploaded to Commons), and 22 stories from Juhan Jaik's collection "Võrumaa jutud" (added to Wikisource). With recordings, it seems to be extremely hard to find the ones where all the components (both the composition and the performance) are in the public domain. We also wrote a blog post on the topic ("On Copyright and the Public Domain) and translated another ("At the Heart of Creativity Lies the Public Domain"), and celebrated with an exhibition and a discussion evening in the Tartu City Library.

We also worked to find materials for PD Day in 2020. The biggest name there is composer Raimond Valgre. During our work, we found out that a lot of the content by Valgre was not digitized at all, making it very difficult to move ahead with the project (we offered our help with digitization but were told the relevant museum wanted to have this carried out by musicologists). We chose to reorient the project somewhat, turning it into an exploration of what Estonian works already in the public domain are still not available to the public, in the hope of starting a discussion on how to improve the situation.

Eva Lepik, who has been our most vocal spokesperson on copyright topics, was selected as one of the Volunteers of the Year. Eva receiving an award from the president in December

Guides for content usage

Roughly 300 students in the faculty of arts and humanities in the University of Tartu did learn the basics of copyright from materials provided by us (written by Eva Lepik), including information on free licenses and how to use materials from Wikimedia projects.

We have exchanged numerous e-mails with the biggest daily newspaper in Estonia to change their bad practice of using Wikipedia photos without attribution and also sent our reminders to others if anyone has been caught on using Wikimedia stuff without proper attribution.

We have had talks about how exactly to write these texts (Estonian-language guides) but nothing has been published yet.

Meetings with stakeholders

During the EU directive campaign we had plenty of talks with involved MEPs. We attended an event organized by MEP Yana Toom, MEP Igor Gräzin attended our Tallinn protest, we exchanged emails with MEP Indrek Tarand, etc. We also sent a representative to FKAGEU's Big Fat Brussels policy meeting. We were invited by the Ministry of Justice to take part in the consultations related to the implementation of the EU copyright directive (which again shows WMEE is considered as a valuable organization in the copyright and open culture debate at the Estonian level). We attended 4 meetings during the consultation process (specifically the ones dealing with articles 3-4, 8-9, 15, 17) and wrote an overview of our perspective. So we can say we made sure our voice was heard.

Estonian support for FKAGEU

We have kept FKAGEU updated about the changes in the copyright debate in Estonia, and coordinated actions with them.

Community and outreach

Special logo to celebrate reaching 200 000 articles

Giving out Friend of Wikipedia Award

In 2019 Wikimania was near to Estonia. For this reason there were 8 Estonians in total participating in the event

WMEE general meeting took place in Tartu Art Museum. Some of the participants

As a general note, not directly connected with any of the objectives but still worth mentioning: in June 2019 the Estonian Wikipedia overtook the Lithuanian Wikipedia to become the largest Wikipedia in the Baltic countries, and on August 12th the number of articles reached 200.000, which is a very important milestone for us!

As for community we have held small meetings and get-together events. For example, we had Estonian Wikipedia Christmas parties in both Tallinn and Tartu and we held an Estonian Wikipedia birthday party at Tartu Art Museum and in the Estonian Museum of Natural History in Tallinn.

We have kept giving out Best Wikipedian of the Month awards (selected by the community). The Best Photographer award for 2019 went to Jaan Künnap (blog post). The Friend of Wikipedia award was given to Tartu Hansa Rotary Klubi (blog post).

We also now have a new webpage and we merged our blog with it. (Previously we were using or chapter wiki as homepage.) That change helps us to communicate more clearly and, in general, it just looks a lot more professional.

Ease of use

We wrote a serious-yet-funny blog article to teach people how to write a basic Wikipedia article.

We have written a framework for wikiclubs, which we're now improving. We've also hosted multiple community meetings, and gotten at least 2 contributors who worked on their first articles. That said, we saw that the attendance to the monthly meetings was dropping, so we've put the program on pause for now while we rethink how to approach them. We have held talks with the Miljon+ team at the University of Tartu about directing their students to the meetings, and we also hope the wikiclub approach will make the community meetings more interesting for Wikimedians: one common complaint we've gotten, especially from already experienced users, is that if the goal of the meeting is to write articles, it is easier for them to just do that from home (which is probably true!), so we need to offer a different experience if we want to get people to leave their homes and get together. In September we even had a meetup in Põltsamaa with the local librarians of Jõgeva County where this was discussed heavily (as libraries could be one rather suitable place to build those wikiclubs around). But we hope to really launch that initiative in 2020.

EV101 article writing project

The EV101 project wasn’t as successful as we hoped for, probably because we failed to take into account that the enthusiasm to “give a gift” to Estonia that was promoted with the EV100 national celebration wouldn’t be so strong this year. Additionally, we had some issues since this is a rather workforce-intensive event which ended up clashing with our campaign against the EU directive, which also kept us quite busy (thanks, EU). That said, 116 people listed themselves on the project's website and the project was promoted by, among others, the President of Estonia, giving it pretty good reach, so it’s entirely possible that more people reached the Estonian Wikipedia and even wrote some articles but didn’t register through the project page. Many students of Kadrioru Saksa Gümnaasium who wrote articles as part of the project (as mentioned in the Educations section), also didn’t register themselves through the page, meaning the real number of contributors is likely to be at least 150. This project is a part of our work to show that every person can write a Wikipedia article.

Writing competitions

Awarding the winners of Keeletoimetamistalgud

We have again organized multiple editing competitions. All in the hopes of attracting new people to the project.

We participated in the CEE Spring, where 10 editors created or improved 366 articles (same number of participants as in 2018, but a much larger number of articles). 17 participants took part on the Keeletoimetamistalgud, editing, reviewing and helping improve 474 articles. Keeletoimetamistalgud is notable for the reason as this deals directly with the quality of language used in the articles. This is important to show that for Wikipedia, quality matters. It often seems like we just try to get as many articles as possible, but one of the biggest bottlenecks in Wikipedia is actually the reviewing and improving of the articles already there to turn them into better, nicer articles. This is exactly what this competition helps with, and we're very happy it keeps helping keep our quality high!

Finally, two competitions organized with outside partners started in late 2018 and finished in 2019. The Lõimumisteemaline artiklikonkurss, a competition on articles related to social integration organized with the Government Office of Estonia, saw 12 participants create or improve 55 articles (and we've been told the Government Office was very satisfied with the results). Eesti notariaat 25, a competition about legal topics organized as part of Miljon+ and in cooperation with the Chamber of Notaries of Estonia, saw 34 participants create or improve 34 articles.

The victorious team in the 24h article competition

One more innovative event was the 24 hour article competition, a "hackathon-style" activity for teams of up to four people. This competition was brought to life to really bring some collaborative effort on working with articles and as a potential way to reach new audiences. We have had this idea for years, but only now we finally found some funding to pull it off (the competition was sponsored by Swedbank, the biggest bank in Estonia). We had 5 teams and all of them were writing about towns in Estonia (the town each team worked on was assigned randomly on-site, so the teams didn't know before the competition what article they may end up working on). This worked pretty well and we hope to repeat that as a 36-hour-article-competition in 2020. The winning team wrote about Suure-Jaani.

Naturally, there was another edition of the Digihariduse konkurss. With this, we have tried to bring various article competitions under one roof to make it easier to promote them. This time it included 4 different topics/competitions: one about energetics, one about finance and economics, one about the European Union and one about media literacy. The prize fund was huge.

As such, we've had 111 editors work on 1008 articles. Even if we don't count the 474 articles that got edited and improved (rather than created) during the Keeletoimetamistalgud, that still puts us quite above the hoped-for 200 articles, and also above our goal of 100 participating editors.

Additionally, MTÜ Mondo organized a competition ("Iseseisvalt maailmahariduses(t)") independently from WMEE (as such, we have no data about the participation levels there).

Image competitions

Meeting between Thomas Shafee, Alessandro Marchetti and Ivo Kruusamägi regarding Wiki Science Competition

Ivo Kruusamägi receiving the Estonian Science Communication Award in 2019. 2nd prize in the category "Best researcher, journalist or teacher communicating science and technology"

We are organizing an international Wiki Science Competition to bring more scientists and science-related media files into Wikimedia. The main part of the WSC happened in November & December. From Estonia we collected 106 files from 22 participants, but as mentioned, this is now grown into an international event. This time we had 14 countries with local teams, but we also included other countries. The total image count in the 2019 event is well above 5000. By the way, we're very thankful to Alessandro Marchetti and Wikimedia CH for all their help with this edition of the competition!

We also held the 10th HELP image collecting campaign, likely the last in the series that started back in 2010. 8 participants added 221 files. What makes it so special is that this event is easy to hold and over half of the collected content is being used in the Wikipedia articles (that is significantly more than what is the norm with other image competitions or campaigns in Wikimedia). And as it was one of the first image collecting campaigns in Wikimedia, then over the years it has helped to lead us to the point where Estonia is among the countries with the most nature-related featured and good quality content in Wikimedia Commons. We still have many objects without images, but now we plan to focus more on targeted searches to cover the white spots.

But there was one more photography action, as we cooperated with the nature photo competition organized by magazine Eesti Loodus. The participants of that competition were allowed to mark whether their pictures for the competition should also be made available on Wikipedia under a CC SA-BY 4.0 license. Something like 1300 photos from 250 authors were submitted, and at least half of them should have the appropriate license for use in Wikimedia. Gallery of winning images. We should receive the files in the 1st part of 2020. We have also confirmed our cooperation with magazine Eesti Loodus for another edition of the Eesti Loodus Photo Contest during 2020. This is the other reason we decided to discontinue the HELP campaign: through this cooperation, we get a much wider reach in our call for nature photography anyway.

The rephotography competition got delayed yet again. We'll ensure that third time's the charm and properly organize it in 2020. We were also discussing the possibility to have a photo competition together with European Commission Representation in Estonia in May (when the European Parliament elections were held), but declined, as we didn't have time to pull it off. That may take place in 2020 as part of the rephotography initiative.

Photo expeditions

In the first half of year we had two expeditions: a small personal trip to Western Estonia in March (category page in Commons) and one to South Estonia in April (category page in Commons). The first had 1 participant and 27 images were uploaded; the second had 2 participants and 288 images were uploaded. In the 2nd part of the year, we were focusing more on different bigger events and did not held separate events focusing only on photo collections. One of the reasons is also that there is a growing backlog of images waiting to be uploaded and further events would contribute more to the growth of that backlog.

Estonian Wikipedia Summer Days / Strategy Meeting

At the end of July, we brought together 45 people (mainly from Estonia and Russia) for one 3-day-event, combining the Estonian Wikipedia Summer Days with a WMF Strategy Meeting. As WMF was looking for a chance to hold a strategy salon for Wikimedians in Russia, we gave them a helping hand and organized it in the Russian-speaking North-East areas of Estonia, which in return helped us make the event a bit bigger for our own community and get an idea of the developments on the strategy process. We also invited a few Latvian delegates, and one of the outcomes of the event was that the Latvians are now also planning to hold their first Wikipedia Summer Days event in 2020.

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Wikimedia Northern Europe Meeting in Tartu

Group photo during WikiNEM 2019

Northern European international cooperation is slowly gaining momentum. On 4–6 October 2019 we organized the Wikimedia Northern Europe Meeting 2019 in Tartu. We had 25 Wikimedians in attendance, representing all of the invited countries except for Lithuania, and 8 people participating as organizers. This was the 2nd Nordic meeting and this time we also included representatives from the Saint Petersburg Wikimedian group. We also proposed that half of the participants should be newcomers to encourage local organizations to think more about how to encourage the participation of new people in the movement. To keep cooperation going outside of the WikiNEM meetings themselves, a Slack channel was set up where discussion can happen continuously and where video meetings are being held once a month. 10 possible cooperation projects were pitched during the event, and discussion is ongoing on how to make some of them happen. As usual in Estonia, we kept the expenses record low.

Spending 2019

Total spending: 47,202 EUR

2020

Since the funding wasn’t enough to get both an executive director and a communication specialist this year, we prioritised communication and managed to take the edge off the issues caused by the lack of an ED by convincing more members to join the board and take joint leadership responsibility. This is of course not a proper long-term replacement for an actual ED, but we’re confident it will see us through to 2021 at least by giving us a bigger buffer in case of burnout and widening the expertise of the board. The general assembly of the chapter, initially planned for February or March, had to be postponed until June because of the COVID-19 outbreak, and for the first time ever we had to have it digitally (thankfully, a recent change in the chapter’s bylaws allowed for digital assemblies and we didn’t have any legal issues because of it). We managed to come up with procedures for a remote digital general assembly and a way to conduct a proper secret vote for board members, which resulted in a new 6 member board (a big improvement on the previous size of 4 members). As another step to compensate for the lack of an ED position, we decided to rotate the HR management among the board members monthly to avoid burnout, since it requires a fairly large time investment from the board member in charge of it. The board has also initiated a review and update of the formal procedures of chapter management (that hadn’t been updated for years), producing missing guides to formalize the processes, from a Phabricator guide and a Slack guide (both of which weren’t even in the picture last time the procedure documents were updated) for current and new members as well as employees, updating the job descriptions to be more precise, and clearly stating what is expected of board members and what are the responsibilities of the board.

During the COVID-19 outbreak the board decided to hire a communications officer and increase the workload of the current GLAM/education project manager, hoping the cooperation between the two employees would help us quickly adapt to remote-only events and improve the running of our communication channels (both external social media channels and chapter-facing mailing lists), which has proved successful. Besides significantly improving our communication in social media and our blog, we are also reviewing our internal communication methods with our communications manager to better reach our members and keep everyone updated. The board has also used some of the resources freed by the cancellation of physical events and obtained via non-WMF cooperation agreements to finance temporary contracts for Wikidata and GLAM projects that help prepare the chapter structure for a bigger team of employees and volunteers. Even with the more limited resources and the global disruption, we still worked in the direction indicated in our 2020 application.

Education program

Wikipedia work in higher education

The Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre is the newest addition in the list of higher education institutions that lets their students write Wikipedia articles. Articles keep coming. In 2020 the most popular topics were law and art history as both had several university courses that resulted in over a hundred new articles in both topics. We helped organize a program in which one University of Tartu copyediting student did 156 h of practical work improving Wikipedia articles. We hosted another internship for a sociology student, who conducted a Wikipedia reader survey, and a Wikidata project was also carried out as a part of a similar internship.

Wikipedia work in elementary and high schools

WMEE communications officer Kristel Birgit Potsepp giving recognition to the Kadriorg German Gymnasium students for their contributions to Wikipedia

Kadrioru Saksa Gümnaasium (KSG), our main pilot partner in this field, won a prize and endorsement by Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, and is taking the status as a role model seriously, inspiring other schools to follow their example with videos and media coverage of their regular Wikipedia commitments.

We have taken up work on getting the Estonian version of Wikiquote into shape so it can be presented as an alternative way to commit to the Wikipedia ecosystem to situations where writing a full article might be too resource demanding for teachers or students (especially for younger students). We’ve been working on cleaning it up from some messy editing in the past and improving it in general (see stats) and we are also pushing the project in schools to recruit new editors and promote its use. Although our pilot project "Kross 100" together with KSG was put on pause because of COVID-19, the Estonian version of Wikiquote is already growing fast: there were 137 times more edits per day and 14 times more edit making users per day in 2020 than there were in 2017.

We assembled introductory materials for the project. In December we also had a month-long campaign for Wikiquote. And there is now even a Twitter bot to popularize Wikiquote outside of the Wikipedia ecosystem. In 2020 the number of pages in that project grew over three times. On January 2, 2021 it passed 3000 pages and had risen to 18th place among 89 Wikiquote projects.

Expansion into vocational education

Our plan of getting into vocational education institutions in Estonia has seen a somewhat innovative approach: we now have a large set of high quality 360° panoramas about 30 vocational schools in Estonia in Wikimedia Commons. That helps us to gain more knowledge about vocational schools and present to the schools ways in which Wikiprojects can be beneficial to them and make them more visible. And of course we’re always happy to get the chance of bringing high-quality media materials into Wikimedia Commons! We managed to extend this to some other institutions as well (for example the Estonian Aviation Academy, the Estonian University of Life Sciences, the Tallinn University of Technology, Stenbock House, and the House of the Blackheads among others).

As a part of a new traveling wikiphotographer pilot project we also aim to expand our 360° panoramas project even further and collect more of that kind of imagery from around the country. Our efforts in that field should bring results already in early 2021.

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We have also had some discussions with the Estonian Art and Music Schools Union on how they might contribute to Wikimedia and how that might be useful for them. The Kose Art School could become a pilot partner here.

GLAM program

Ivo Kruusamägi in a Museum Education Information Day in August

The Year of Digital Culture project, initiated by the Estonian Ministry of Culture in cooperation with the National Library and other institutions, has become a partner for our GLAM and Open Culture goals. We have undersigned a cooperation agreement with this project through which we will help them to expand the concept of digital residency with a Wikipedia residency in GLAM institutions, as well as helping the non-experts understand the promise of Open Data by producing guides and examples for the educational use of Wikidata. We also closely cooperate with their media team to support them when working with the open culture aspects of digital culture, which haven’t been always understood as essential by the ministry and their partners.

We are still working with our previous partners from GLAM institutions and using our success stories to promote the publishing of free content on Wikipedia and sister projects among all the other Estonian institutions. The Estonian Museum of Natural History has been our partner in the field of natural sciences and has hosted our talks about Wikipedian in Residency projects. They also openly asked people to write geology-related Wikipedia articles connected to their big image donation in 2019. We have also added some high-quality art repros with our partner the Tartu Art Museum. Additionally, we have started to look into new cooperation projects with the Estonian National Museum, that was our partner in organizing the international Digital Humanities Conference in 2017 but hadn’t been actively cooperating with us in the meantime.

As an interesting example of mixing education and GLAM internationally, a team of University of Tartu students assembled an Estonian-Polish virtual exhibition. Wikimedia Polska helped us find some Polish volunteers and promote it in Poland. It is a great example of showing how wikiprojects can truly be used to share free knowledge in a multitude of ways and we wish to keep on expanding this idea. We also hope to use the same approach in Nordic cooperation to get people from different countries working together.

To show museums how they can use Wikimedia projects we assembled several other virtual exhibitions. It was arranged by our wikipedian in residence Helena Eglit. Helena contacted 25 museums and all but two showed interest to cooperate with Wikipedia. So we see a lot of room for extending our activities in the GLAM field.

• "Heinrich Tiidermann: Eesti rahwa näolaad" with Photography Museum
• "Karilatsi vald 100" with Karilatsi Open Air Museum
• "Kalamaja kõrvad" with Kalamaja Museum
• "Tanu all" with Pärnu Museum
• "Where Even Sunrays Will Not Reach" with Kalamaja Museum

We feel it necessary to point out that in our opinion, Wikimedia needs a WikiMuseum site that is designed for free virtual exhibitions.

Science photo exhibition in Otepää

Showcasing the Wiki Science Competition exhibition has been somewhat problematic due to the COVID-19 lockdown in spring, as for several months the public spaces were closed down. During the pandemic it remained in the same location, visible at least to users of the library located in the same building (the only service in the whole building that still operated). In the second half of the year it visited Otepää and Vana-Vigala: locations that have several wiki activists and interest towards a heavier presence in Wikipedia.

Wikidata imports

Introductory video of Wikidata by Tarmo Pungas

We consider Wikidata as an important support layer to our GLAM objectives, and have planned imports of data about GLAM infrastructure in Estonia into Wikidata to help the institutions with their efforts. Tarmo Pungas assembled Wikidata training materials and translated Wikidata tours so that now we also have them in Estonian. That was promoted in several schools and relevant institutions.

We have also found information about all of the schools in Estonia, but have not yet imported that into Wikidata.

Sum of all paintings project is nearing completion. In addition to over 19k of paintings from Estonia that have their information in Wikidata, a lot of PD paintings now also have an image next to them. We still need to work a bit with improving data quality and there are a lot of "depicts" statements that are still waiting to be filled in. We are also working together with museums to get maximum resolution repros to Wikimedia Commons. We intend to promote the results in 2021 and also use that to popularize Wikidata.

Open culture

In the Estonian Students' Society XX album there was a story about the importance of Estonian Wikipedia (written by Ivo Kruusamägi)

Meetings with stakeholders

Although as a result of joint efforts of free license proponents the Minister of Education had already agreed back in 2018 that as part of its lifelong education program Estonian schools should adapt to the concept of open educational resources, the actual implementation of the decision only started in January 2020. We were already consulting with teachers’ unions about the decision to accept only CC BY-SA resources in the government-endorsed “electronic school bag” of educational materials, but nobody could have anticipated the attention remote learning got because of COVID-19 pandemic. With help of arguments based on our experience with CC BY-SA licenses, the government stuck to its decision even during the pandemic and now learning materials digitally published in the ministry-endorsed repository must have a fully Wikipedia-compatible license, which makes the transfer of knowledge between the education system and the Wikipedia ecosystem finally legally straightforward. The full impact of these decisions remains to be seen, and we as experts in CC BY-SA licensing continue to pay attention to what means the government provides to help teachers and how teachers are adapting to the decision.

Our cooperation with the Year of Digital Culture project by the Ministry of Culture has so far seen promising results in bringing the ideas and practices of open culture into the ministry’s agenda and that of its partners.

Works of Elmar Leppik went into the public domain at the start of 2020 and so we collected all of the reproductions of his works that Estonian museums have into Wikimedia Commons

Totally unrelated to us some Estonian (and non-Estonian) scientists investigated Wikipedia's impact on tourism and found it to be pretty big. During the summer we were planning to start a campaign to local municipalities, and couldn't even have hoped for that kind of good luck to now have the science to back up the claims we make. Unfortunately, there were some delays in making necessary contracts to kick off the project, but that should move forward in early 2021.

Public domain promotion

Eva Lepik has assembled thorough teaching materials on the topic of copyright aimed at university students for the University of Tartu, and we have prepared them for publishing on our soon to be updated website. We intend to keep promoting them in schools and educating the general public on copyright matters. We’re also finishing a translation of the relevant WMF policy goals that will be given a dedicated section in our website.

We have been looking into getting better coverage of Kalevipoeg, the Estonian national epic. Among other things we have gotten an audiobook of the shortened version of the epic and numerous new high quality media files. Getting more books into Wikisource is part of our goal to promote different Wikiprojects and show that a contemporary encyclopedia is much more than just articles about key words.

To make it easier to contribute to Wikisource we have been updating our guides, and initiated discussions about how to enable more participation by volunteers.

Community and outreach

Expanding the chapter

Ivo Kruusamägi explains to the online general assembly of Wikimedia Eesti that they can now use pseudonyms sent to their e-mails to cast votes on Etherpad.

On 13th June we had our chapter’s annual general assembly. This time it took place in a virtual form, which was somewhat of a new experience, especially since a board election requiring secret voting was in the agenda. We did successfully run the secret voting though, and 6 people sit on the new board: Eva Lepik, Märt Põder, and Nicolás Tamargo de Eguren (who were all re-elected), Uku Kangur (elected last year, and as such in the middle of his two-year term), Ursula Erik (new to the board), and Teele Vaalma (who returned to the board after some years as a regular member).

In autumn there was once more a change in the board. Uku took a break from his board duties due to military service and Märt Põder was voted down from the board. As of now the board has four members.

We have moved forward with the creation of a “supporting member” status for the chapter. What this means is that both individuals and organizations can get a "supporting member" status by supporting our activities financially. This allows people and companies who don’t want to join the chapter (and as such be required to attend meetings and keep up to date with all the activities) to still show their support for Wikimedia Eesti. Within the first year we got our first two supporting members.

We have also kept on improving our homepage to make it more modern and informative. Together with the efforts made by the board in clearing up the official procedures, updating or creating guides and task lists as well as coming up with improved event concepts for volunteers, we aim to engage new members and enlarge our pool of volunteers.

Friend of Wikipedia 2020 - Edina Csüllög

We have kept giving out Best Wikipedian of the Month awards (selected by the community). The Best Photographer award for 2020 went to Jaan Künnap (blog post) who is the first 2nd time recipient of the title. The Friend of Wikipedia award was given out on January 15th to Edina Csüllög who has helped to promote Wikipedia in the wider Finno-Ugric community.

Enlarging communities

Our most generic outreach tool planned for 2020 was ”to become digitally big/grow digitally up” campaign in Wikipedia to show that a contemporary encyclopedia is much more than just text and there are many ways to contribute: things like adding images and quotations, improving Wikidata, and adding source materials to Wikisource are also a necessary part of providing free knowledge. We started it as a common starting point for other campaigns and have been promoting it jointly with the University of Tartu’s Miljon+ project as part of Year of Digital Culture initiatives.

In relation to the pandemic, we ran WikiProject Quarantine in the Estonian Wikipedia and tried to help make information related to COVID-19 more widely available to everyone in their native language. It was covered in the Year of Digital Culture channels and the national broadcasting agency news portal. We also posted a longer blog post about our experience during the time of lockdown in our own blog.

The EV102 project was the 3rd installment in the series that started on the 100th anniversary of the Estonian Republic. It gives people the possibility to show that they are making a gift to Estonia by writing a Wikipedia article (or a few!). This time we did not invite well-known participants one by one, since that’s a labor-intensive process which would have taken time off our other projects that needed it at the time and a lot of the well-known people most willing to participate already did on EV100 and/or EV101.

“How Wiki are you?” T-shirt

To encourage women and other underrepresented groups to contribute to Wikiprojects we held a WikiGap campaign (in cooperation with the Swedish embassy in Estonia) that ran from June 15th to 26th. It was well covered in relevant circles as well as introduced with a dedicated show in the community radio IDA Raadio. The start of the campaign coincided with the Black Lives Matter protests, a coincidence that put the topics of WikiGap in focus even more clearly.

We commissioned the design and production of a unique “How Wiki are you?” shirts with a dedicated online “wikiness test”. We now also have wiki socks, a new set of wiki mugs, and quite suitably to the time period - wiki face masks.

Unfortunately we had to cancel our plans for the Wikipedia Summer Days, since even though that was a pretty safe time in Estonia, the WMF guidelines at the time still had a blanket ban on chapter events. The same fate befell the Christmas meetings: by this point WMF had allowed small gatherings, but it was no longer safe for us since the infection rate in Estonia had gone up significantly near the year's end.

In December we conducted a reader survey. As participation was a bit lower than we expected, we extended the response collecting period into January. The summary is still in the works.

In December we started a new interview series. The first one was with the director of Institute of the Estonian Language and the second with the director of Tartu Art Museum. We intend to continue with that into 2021. Our hope is that it will raise awareness about Wikipedia and catalyze new cooperation projects with influential organizations.

At the end of 2020 we also started a Wikipedia newsletter. The first edition went out to 84 people, which is more than double the number of WMEE members.

Competitions

Awarding of the winners of Keeletoimetamistalgud 2020 in September

The Keeletoimetamistalgud took place for the 3rd time: 17 participants edited 716 articles. This competition deals directly with the quality of language used in the articles and it is aimed towards professional copy editors. As such it plays an important role in helping to ensure the quality of the content in the Estonian Wikipedia. Due to the COVID restrictions the awarding ceremony was postponed to autumn. In December we started with the 4th keeletoimetamistalgud campaign. Back in 2015 we helped to set up the international article competition CEE Spring. Since then we've actively participated there each year and in the 6th installment of that event in 2020 we had 9 participants creating 568 articles. Together with the Estonian Young Academy of Sciences and Estonian Research Council we arranged a science oriented article competition. 23 participants contributed with 27 articles. When in CEE Spring it is common that only long-time Wikipedians participate, then in that competition most of the participants were newcomers.

WSC 2019 award ceremony in January

We are organizing an international Wiki Science Competition (WSC) to bring more scientists and science-related media files into Wikimedia. The image collecting part of the WSC happened in November and December 2019 but the selection of the winners took place in 2020. This is one of the biggest image competitions in Wikimedia and it involves a significant number of countries.

Winners were announced in the summer and awarding was carried out together with Wikimedia CH. We would also like to thank Alessandro Marchetti for his help!

The competition is held once every two years and after the previous installment in 2017, 2 out of the 3 Commons Picture of the Year winners in 2018 were Science Competition images. We hope to see the most recent WSC winners achieve a similar level of recognition in the upcoming POTY 2020.

We have started to collect confirmations on what countries will participate in WSC in 2021. By the end of 2020 we had already 17 countries listed.

Photography

Araneus diadematus weaving web. Photo by Edvard Ellervee that was selected as a general category winner in the Eesti Loodus photography competition

We continued co-organizing the nature photography competition “Eesti Looduse fotovõistlus”, which ran from August 1st to October 31th. Over 2000 images were submitted and over ⅔ of them were allowed to Wikimedia Commons. This year we did no longer run our HELP campaign that we used in the years 2010–2019 to collect nature images. So we have completed the transfer into the Eesti Loodus photo competition that will replace the former campaign.

Wiki Loves Rephotography logo

In September and October we held the Wiki Loves Rephotography campaign in cooperation with Ajapaik to collect rephotos and popularize the activity of taking them. During that period over 1800 photos were added to Ajapaik. There were also two rephotography-themed lectures - one in Tartu and one in Tallinn. Summary (in Estonian).

Due to the springtime quarantine, we postponed our GLAM photo expedition plans to next year (although since Estonia never went under full lockdown and individuals could still move around, there was a one-man photoexpedition outdoors in March). We acquired some new equipment to be able to produce studio photographs at the time we once again can freely move around.

Visiting GLAM sites involves photographing their collections (which many small museums can’t really afford on their own) as well as their facilities and the atmosphere both inside and outside. We intend to start cooperating with different types of museums and find out more about their interests and needs so we can adapt our offerings to them accordingly. Photography at museums is a good and simple entry-level task for volunteers. We have also kept on asking for image donations. For instance we have received numerous images from the Government Office. They also reflected this change on their Flickr account, where "All rights reserved" is now replaced with "Some rights reserved": some progress over there! We keep on reminding institutions that they should use licenses that support sharing of their images, given that often that is their true intention anyway.

Finno-Ugric work

Participants of Finno-Ugric wikiseminar 2020 in January

The Estonian language is a Finno-Ugric language like Hungarian and Finnish (i.e. not Indo-European). In addition to those two well-known members of the Finno-Ugric family, plenty of others exist, most of them minority languages spoken in different regions of Russia. For the speakers of these smaller languages, Wikipedia will most likely remain the only encyclopedia ever available in their language, and as such, it plays a significant role in building the web presence of those languages. Estonians are very interested in ensuring those smaller languages (a piece of our shared heritage and culture) remain viable, and as such we have a long history of Finno-Ugric cooperation. Wikimedia Eesti has also worked toward this goal for a long time; we held our first Finno-Ugric wikiseminar already back in 2014.

On 15-21 January 2020 we held the 4th Finno-Ugric wikiseminar. This weeklong event was held in Misso (South-Estonia) and there were 10 participants. It focused on building cultural contacts and involved a lot of practical work in wikiprojects. The languages included were Estonian, Võru, Hungarian, Udmurt, Mari, Komi and Khanty, and the projects involved Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource. At least 15 wiki articles were created, two books uploaded, a lot of media files added, etc. We even identified one bug. And there was some media coverage as well (in Võru language).

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We were present at Finno-Ugric Film Festival 2020

In July we were present in the Finno-Ugric Film Festival in South Estonia and introduced Wikipedia there. There is now also an agreement to have a Wikipedia workshop at the 2021 film festival.

In the 2nd half of the year the Võro Wikipedia got more attention and also a new front page. The previous solution had been there since the beginning in 2005 and it had barely changed. An update was clearly needed. The design solution is based on the North Sami Wikipedia front page, created by Jon Harald Søby. That design update got very positive feedback and hopefully it will help to promote the Võro Wikipedia.

We have been in communication with Võro Institute to have an article competition and a promotion campaign for the Võro Wikipedia in 2021. We have also gotten some publications from the institute, whose materials could be published in Võro Wikipedia.

Spending 2020

Total spending: 52295.15 EUR

2021

Program Progress

The office of Wikimedia Estonia in Tartu as a part of the Sofa Office (door no. 7)

In January we hired Käbi Laan as office manager (0.5 FTE) and in spring we moved into a new office space that suits our needs better.

We have hired a new education project manager, Pille Priks (0.5 FTE), who started working on July 1st. In mid-august, we hired a new GLAM projects coordinator Kerdo Kristjan Tamm (0.5 FTE), who has been actively searching for new cooperation opportunities with different GLAM institutions.

We have slowly grown the subscriber base of the Wikipedia newsletter that we started in 2020 and it is now a bit over 100.

On June 12th we had a general meeting. On July 18th we held another general meeting, where we selected two new board members: Ivo Kruusamägi and Jaan Meriniit. Since that meeting, the board of Wikimedia Eesti consists of 4 members.

Education program

Wikipedia work in higher education

Coaching teachers of Pühajärve primary school

We've been working with partners at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre and the Tallinn University of Technology to develop “timelines of world history” that could be used in education.

There was also a new Wikipedia-related course in the Estonian Academy of Arts.

We have been in contact with student societies and sororities – in particular with sorority Amicita – and we have agreed to help them conduct a Wikipedia writing project(s) to celebrate their 100th anniversary.

Thus far we have close contacts with the University of Tartu – one of the examples from this year in cooperation with University of Tartu Youth Academy in terms of organizing a 30-h writing contest together that was intended for students from primary and secondary schools as well as for university students.

Wikipedia work in elementary and high schools

We have been consistent with the work with elementary and primary schools. This year we have been present at both school levels. For example, our education project manager has been coaching teachers of Pühajärve primary school and students from Kadrina High School. Some of these outcomes are visible in Estonian Wikipedia (both from the viewpoint of students and teachers). Kadrina High Scool also has a project page.

We are offering internships to students from universities. This year we had a Sociology intern from the University of Tartu who conducted a user survey in the Estonian Wikipedia. We have also been actively spreading the call for interns and volunteers in various education-related channels. At the beginning of September, we were also present in the student’s fair organized by students network Ole Rohkem, where different organizations are looking for volunteers and interns.

Other education related projects

Pille Priks attending training session

We have started developing a project in collaboration with Integration Foundation dedicated to high school students in Ida-Viru County. The idea of the project is to introduce Estonian Wikipedia in the form of a photography competition to students from Ida-Virumaa which is a region with the highest % of the Russian minority in Estonia. The project is also dedicated to integrating students with Russian-speaking backgrounds to Estonian cultural space, hence the collaboration with Integratsiooni Sihtasutus. We had intentions to initiate the project itself in 2021, but due to complicated times, the project is waiting to be executed in 2022.

Our education project manager Pille Priks took part in the training program “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom” and is now a certified trainer of trainers. One of the outcomes of this training is to create a special platform for teachers to use in Estonian as well as give our teachers the best-structured know-how about Wikipedia.

At the end of the year, we're also making preparations to apply to become a strategic partner of the Ministry of Education and Research.

As part of Wikipedia Art Month, we promoted art-related content in Wikipedia to Estonian art schools.

GLAM program

One of the paintings by Tiit Pääsuke that is now in Wikimedia Commons. "Kris & Kris I" (2016)

As a part of our long-term cooperation with Tartu Art Museum we now have a set of audio files of visual descriptions of Estonian paintings in Wikimedia Commons. Ten of them already existed before (on the museum website) but are now more widely distributed thanks to this cooperation, and five new ones were created as part of this initiative. We also got some paintings from Tiit Pääsuke and assembled a virtual exhibition on the topic mixing together the visuals and descriptions of them. This was our first project that targeted blind or visually impaired people and we hope that it will inspire future collaborations.

We got our hand at the first 360° panoramas at the end of 2019. In 2020 the main focus was on 360° panoramas of vocational schools in Estonia and in 2021 we have our first sets of 360° panoramas of various museums. What does that look like:

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  Rakvere Castle and Vallimägi (360° view)
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  Rakvere castle interior (360° view)
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  View to the Estonian Aviation Museum (360° view)
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  Cockpit of F-4 Phantom II (360° view)
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  Estonian Mining Museum visitor center (360° view)
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  Estonian Mining Museum (360° view)

After years of planning, we have pioneered a project of “Mobile photo studio” and the first outcome of this project was related to documenting Tartu City Museum historical collection. A similar project is already planned for January – to capture the collection of historical clocks. A few examples of the historical collection:

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In the Fall we managed to take part in a training course about digitizing, organized by Archaeovision.

We were also present at the national summer seminar of Estonian GLAM institutions and participated in the national analysis on how to make digital cultural heritage more accessible.

The traveling exhibition about the science photo competition has been touring around Estonia with the last locations being the Library of Adavere and in the lobby of Tallinn University of Technology. Also, some of the photos were present in Voronja Gallery in the summer.

”Kolmekesi ühes paadis” (2003) Margus Rump

For the first time during October, we organized a project called “The Wikipedia Art Month”. The purpose of the project was to get art and Wikipedia in the focus. We introduced Wikipedia to several artists who contributed with some of their artwork. Alongside we held three online lectures about Wikidata, Using Wikipedia in the Universities, and about using Wikipedia in the studies of art. Also, a writing competition took place as part of the art month. More from GLAM newsletter.

We have continued our work with photo expeditions, but unfortunately not to the desired extent, due to the coronavirus. However, for the first time, the expedition has been conducted in the county of Lääne-Virumaa. Also, an experience story about the expedition has been published in our blog to encourage others to organize an expedition as well.

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  The church of Haljala
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Open culture

The island of Sorgu – one of the donated images by Maa-amet

The Government Office has made several batches of image donations (of images related to both the COVID pandemic and the government members themselves). The Estonian Land Board has confirmed that their images under Maa-amet OpenData license can be imported into Wikimedia Commons. We've also promoted Wikipedia to the members of the Estonian Sculptors' Union and have been in contact with the Estonian Writers' Union. We have also had some discussions with people documenting intangible cultural heritage.

We have continued to work on educating the press on how to reuse Commons content. We also had to elevate a complaint to ERR (the state news broadcaster), since they decided to translate and publish a Daily Mail article about Wikipedia, which claimed it to be biased, without even contacting anyone for a reply nor trying to offer an alternative opinion. In the midsummer, we sent out detailed instructions to media houses in Estonia, about how to reuse Commons content and about the correct way to refer to the author.

We have worked to get some data from the business registry and about natural monuments into Wikidata.

In the wind of celebrating the 19th anniversary of Estonian Wikipedia, we managed to collect seven new institutions to sign the Public Domain Manifesto. New signatories include Estonian Museum of Natural History, Tartu University Library, Estonian Literary Museum, Institute of the Estonian Language, Estonian National Heritage Board, Tartu Artists’ Union / Tartu Art House, Tartu Art Museum.

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  A representative of the Estonian Museum of Natural History signing the manifesto
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  A representative of the National Heritage Board signing the manifesto
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  A representative of the Estonian Literary Museum signing the manifesto
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  A representative of the Institute of the Estonian Language signing the manifesto
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  A representative of the Tartu Art Museum signing the manifesto
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  A representative of the Library of the University of Tartu museum signing the manifesto

Community and outreach

Local community

Estonian Wikipedia summer days 2021 group photo

Our biggest community event is yet our big summer meeting, where we had presentations about ongoing projects, CEE Spring award ceremony, etc. This year we organized it in the countryside and approximately 25 people took part in this event.

We celebrated the 19th anniversary of Estonian Wikipedia and gathered in Tartu and in Tallinn. Besides the anniversary we also celebrated Christmas with NGO members and Wikipedia volunteers in Tallinn and in Tartu and joined the event with another award ceremony – the awards for Art Month were given out.

Celebrating 19th anniversary in Tallinn

We have continuously been giving out the award for The Best Wikipedian of the Month, who is selected by the community. For the 5th time we gave out an award for the Best Photographer and the best in 2021 is Virgo Siil (article in media). His contribution includes many drone pictures like the one that can be seen on the left.

The Friend of Wikipedia 2021 is Tartu Art Museum for close and effective collaboration in the field of virtual exhibitions and bringing more art to Wikipedia.

Swimming in a bog during big summer meeting – a picture by Virgo Siil

Friend of Wikipedia 2021 – Tartu Art Museum

We have been steadily increasing the base of our newsletter receivers – our newsletter is issued once or twice a month.

The board of Wikimedia Eesti has started a local strategy process – we have had 3 meetings since and the process is ongoing. The outcome of this process should reflect the NGO’s main ambitions and particular activities required to meet the objectives.

In November the first small-scale Wikiclub was initiated in Tartu. The aim of the club is to show how different activities in Wikipedia can be fun and social. Wikiclub people meet once a month and have discussions about different aspects of the Wikipedia world, learn new things, help each other with upcoming problems, share knowledge and experience and initiate new joint activities such as article writing, photo tours, etc. This club is a piloting project to test if this kind of format is viable and should be used more widely.

Our local community was also present in international meetings – we were participating in Wikimania, CEE online meeting and also held a discussion during the Nordic meeting (where we inspired Danes to assemble a similar list to our "Eesti 1000").

Around the time of Estonian Wikipedias’ 19th anniversary, we also held a meeting with Kaarel Vaidla to get a better insight to the ongoing strategy process of Wikimedia Foundation.

Competitions

Writing competitions

Winners of Keeletoimetamistalgud 2021

The Keeletoimetamistalgud took place for the 4th time: 23 participants edited 491 articles. This competition deals directly with the quality of language used in the articles and it is aimed towards professional copy editors. As such it plays an important role in helping to ensure the quality of the content in the Estonian Wikipedia. Due to COVID restrictions, the awarding ceremony was held in virtual form.

The team of Pühajärve primary school for 30-h writing competition

The 7th CEE Spring resulted in 10 participants creating 664 articles in the Estonian Wikipedia. This time we expanded the competition to also cover the Võru Wikipedia. It was the 2nd article competition ever held in that language version and there were 6 participants who created 30 articles. At the end of last year, we helped to set up a new front page for that language version and we have also tried to promote it more. It is showing some results, but promoting it is challenging, as Võro is mainly a spoken language and hardly anyone can write according to the language rules.

As mentioned above, during the art month we held another writing competition – a competition where art and artists were in the focus. Our partners in organizing this competition were Tartu Art Museum and Tartu Art House. As a result, 51 new articles were created and 9 users took part in the competition.

Our last but not least writing competition took place at the beginning of December. The 30-h Wikipedia writing challenge was a competition organized together with the University of Tartu Youth Academy. Ten teams took part in the competition, altogether with 33 participants. The youngest teams were part of primary school and the oldest ones were university students. The outcome of the challenge is ten thorough articles about local municipalities of Estonia, the topics were given out as a lottery. The story about that competition is also present in Education Newsletter.

Image competitions

For spring we planned an image competition in cooperation with Ajapaik, but due to slow development progress on the Ajapaik side (not helped by the difficulties in working with their Finnish colleagues while borders are closed), we have to postpone it.

We held a week-long campaign to collect photos made of cultural heritage objects in Estonia. We had 92 images. Some of the contributions:

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  The church of Kose
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  The park on manor Neeruti
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  The barn and well of farm Korsi
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  The windmill of Tõnise

Selecting the winning images of Estonian Science Photo Competition 2021

The Science photo competition was held locally from November to December and the international competition round is yet to be held in the first half of 2022. Local round gave us 112 files from 32 different authors. We are also the ones organizing the international part of the competition.

Some of the winning files from that competition in Estonia:

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  Geological fieldworks on a oil-shale mine
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  Clastobasis loici posterior view
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  Chironomidae larvae
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  A waterspout over Lake Peipus
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  Students of geology describing a limestone core sample
• Video of a Wilson chamber

We also have been part of organizing the photo competition of the nature magazine Eesti Loodus (Estonian Nature) to encourage authors to contribute these files also to Wikimedia Commons. From there we gathered nearly a thousand photos, but they were first collected to the server of Eesti Loodus magazine and we are still organizing the upload of the images to Wikimedia Commons.

Wikiquote

The Estonian version of Wikiquote has kept growing at a fast pace. It had reached 11th place for July among all language versions and by the end of the year, the Estonian Wikiquote is already in the sixth position! Last year’s program story "Fighting gender gap in Estonian Wikiquote" is still relevant today and we feel it is a good example of how to make improvements in this field in a non-intrusive way. In addition, there is also a program to incorporate as many artworks by female artists as possible. Wikiquote also got a brand new design for its homepage thanks to our help.

Estonian Wikiquote was also present at CEE Online Meeting, where Eva Lepik and Raul Veede held a lightning talk: Estonian Wikiquote: how to get your wikiproject into the top ten in a year (and all the ladies).

Other community and outreach work

Sänna Libray where Wikipedia workshop was held during Finno-Ugric Film Festival

We have been in active communication with people from Kadrina. We hope that this kind of example of common people from one parish coming together to work on Wikipedia content will inspire other parishes in Estonia. In order to promote this idea, we have also looked for contacts in other local municipalities. This is part of our long-term project of reaching all corners of Estonia.

We held Wikipedia workshops at the Finno-Ugric Film Festival in Sänna and were present at VIII World Congress of Finno-Ugric Peoples in Tartu. Ivo Kruusamägi talked about Wikipedia in Tallinn Photomonth.

Kotkajärve Forest University, which is a traditional gathering of foreign Estonias, was held in virtual form in August. Ivo Kruusamägi talked there about how to contribute to Wikipedia.

In relation to Wikipedia 20, there was a longer interview with Ivo Kruusamägi on Vikerraadio (the most popular radio program in Estonia) and we helped to organize a Ööülikool interview/seminar about the digital world.

We also got some media presence at the Estonian Wikipedia birthday in August ([1]) and worked to get more media mentionings beyond that (like: "Will Wikipedians rescue the Estonian language? It can be done").

Spending 2021

Spending:

• Programme 1: Education: 2934.97€
• Programme 2: GLAM: 837.28€
• Programme 3: Open Culture and Outreach: 3690 €
• Community support: 3435.37€
• Staffing Expenses: 42475.8€
• Other Operational Expenses: 9460.14€

Total spending was 62833.56€

2022

The office cat and a thermos flask

Meeting of the members of non-profit Wikimedia Estonia at the guesthouse Veldemani in the village of Vaibi (August 2022)

At the beginning of the year, Wikimedia Estonia employed 4 people and all with 0.5 positions. Käbi Laan continued as office manager, Pille Priks managed the activities in the education field and Kerdo Kristjan Tamm the GLAM direction.

Kristel Birgit Pottsep, who was working as a communications manager, left during the first months of the year, so we started looking for her replacement. We found several suitable candidates, but by the beginning of the summer, both of them had found that their path was not compatible with WMEE's, so we hired Käbi as a full-time Executive Director from the beginning of July.

We had a general meeting on the 26th of March in Tartu where a new board member Virgo Siil was elected. Also, Teele Vaalma’s mandate was renewed for another two years. Thus the board had 4 members until Teele decided to leave the board at the beginning of the summer. The board remained with 3 members until the end of 2022: Ivo Kruusamägi, Jaan Meriniit and Virgo Siil.

On August 27, the second general meeting was also held, where one of the main topics was the presentation of the strategy. The strategic plan was approved and so we will continue to work on that plan.

Education program

Wikipedia Workshop at the Student Science Festival

One of the biggest milestones in our field of education is that we were selected as a strategic partner of the Ministry of Education and Science in the beginning of 2022, with a duration of 3 years. The content of the partnership is the involvement of doctoral students and the development of the Estonian scientific language. In this regard, we were also able to hire a person at the end of the year on a project basis, who started to make preliminary agreements for the further implementation of the project.

Wikipedia work in higher education

At the beginning of the year, we made interim summaries in the Amicitia 100 project - the ultimate goal is to write 100 articles by the sorority's 100th jubilee (2024). Alongside we cooperated with Tartu Health University, where we went to do some trainings. Cooperation with the University of Tartu and lecturers, who we can support with know-how in conducting courses, is also continuing.

During the year, we had a total of 4 trainees who completed the internship as a university subject. Three of them were students specializing in language editing, and one of them was a German language and culture student practicing his hand at translating articles.

Wikipedia work in elementary and high schools

Wikiclub meeting

This year, for the first time in history, we organized a competition aimed only at elementary school and high school students. 6 teams registered for the competition, 5 of which showed up. The students had 24 hours to write an article about an Estonian bird in cooperation with the team.

In the spring, we were present at the Student Science Festival, where we also held a workshop on Wikipedia and its functioning.

In Estonia, national curricula are being reorganized and the concept of media competence is being written into the curricula. We have also caught the tail of this, and thus we have participated in the work of the media literacy network, and the media literacy conference, and we have also tried to create media literacy learning materials ourselves.

Other education related projects

Introduction tutorial video

The Vikiklub initiative, launched in 2021, worked until the end of spring when club members actively participated in meetings. Unfortunately, there were no new interested parties in the fall.

We have also continued with various courses for adults, for example, Pille went to do training for the Integration Foundation, the ESTA club, the Lasva community, librarians of The Tartu Public Library etc. In addition, in the autumn we cooperated with Tartu Public University, where an almost month-long course on writing an article for Wikipedia took place.

One big improvement is also the production of educational videos. Namely, we participated in a video production course in the spring, and as a continuation of that, we porduced educational videos to write on Wikipedia. In addition, we also made short educational videos on commons and wikidata topics.

We still occasionally contribute to the Educaton Newsletter and on 2022 we also contributed with various texts.

GLAM program

In the field of GLAM, we were once again active in preparing several virtual exhibitions. During the year we prepared, the Knight's Order Museum's diamond exhibition, the Järvakandi Glass Museum's exhibition and an exhibition on physical anthropology created in cooperation with the Museum of the University of Tartu.

Images from the virtual exhibitions:
1. Diamond Decorations - Diamonds for Merit

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2. Helga Kõrge - the story of Estonian glassart

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3. Physical Anthropology in the University of Tartu

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We also continued with the mobile photo studio project, and thus, the project of Tartu City Museum historical collection was finished. Some examples:

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The traveling exhibition of Science Photo 2019 was still traveling around, and the professors of the University of Life Sciences were also contacted so that they could have representative pictures on Wikipedia.

We cooperated with the 'Year of Libraries' project, the aim of which was to bring libraries across Estonia to greater attention. In cooperation, we launched a project in the beginning of July to add Wikiquotes to the page - namely, we invited library staff to add their favorite quotes to the Wikiquotes environment. Although the project was not too successful, by the end of the year a few new people were introduced to the Wikiquotes environment.

In addition, there was a lot of communication with various institutions, with whom, however, there was no following cooperation at the moment. So we exchanged letters with the Arvo Pärt Center, Vaal Gallery, Vabamu, the Defense Academy Museum, the Chuvash representative in Estonia, Ene Valter, etc.

With greater momentum than before, the photo expeditions project also started. At the end of the year, we even had two photographers who traveled around Estonia and photographed various places.

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We were once again present at the Summer Seminar of Memory Institutions, where Ivo participated in the panel talk on how to make cultural heritage accessible.

Wikipedia Art Month was held once again. Together with Tartu Art Museum we also brought to Wikimedia Commons images from artists Ludmilla Siim (born 1938) and Lilly Walther (1866–1946).

We also contributed to the GLAM newsletter several times during the year.

Community and outreach

Local community

On August 24, 2022, the Estonian language Wikipedia turned 20! We celebrated this by getting together and eating cake. We thanked longtime administrators with a Wikipedia lapel pin, and there were also several speeches (including a welcome from Maryana Iskander, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation). Ivo assembled statistics page Wikipedia 20, that summarises the work of most active Wikipedians in the first 20 years of Estonian Wikipedia.

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Estonian Wikipedia summer days 2022 at Vaibla

The birthday celebration continued on Wikipedia's summer days by Lake Võrtsjärv. In connection with the birthday, we also extended the time of the summer days - if we usually organize a 2-day meeting, this year the summer days were as long as 3 days. As part of the summer days, we held a general meeting of the NGO, presented a strategic plan, went kayaking on the lake and got to know the surroundings. About 25 people took part, including a participant from Latvia.

Toomas Kukk, Friend of Wikipedia 2022

We continue to award The Wikipedian of the Month award every month. Also at the end of the year, Ivar Leidus was chosen as the photographer of the year. At the end of the year, we also selected a Friend of Wikipedia, Toomas Kukk, editor-in-chief of the magazine Eesti Loodus. Cooperation with Toomas started already in 2010, when together we organized one of the first image collection campaigns on Wikimedia Commons: HELP or Good Estonian Nature Pictures.

We are continuing to send out a newsletter once a month and we have been able to increase the subscriber base a little. We also represented Wikimedia Estonia at the Be More student fair, where we advertised internship and volunteering opportunities. Until the end of spring, Vikiclub, which gained momentum last year, got together.

Ivo at the CEE meeting

We were also represented internationally. Käbi and Ivo participated in the meeting of the CEE region in Ohrid, which took place as a physical meeting again after several years. Both participants also made presentations: Introductory videos of Wikipedia, Extending Wikimedia with WikiMuseum, October could be the Wikipedia Art Month and Developments with the Wiki Science Competition. Käbi also became a member of the Steering Committee of the newly created CEE Hub and took part in the activities and video calls of the Executive Directors Group.

As usual, we also celebrated Christmas parties and from time to time organized informal meetings of Wikipedians and volunteers in Tallinn and Tartu.

Competitions

Writing competitions

The winners of language editing workshop

Traditionally, another Language Editing Workshop (Keeletoimetamistalgud) took place in the winter, already for the fifth time in a row. 19 people took part and 339 articles were edited. The purpose of the competition is to improve the quality of articles and value the work of language editors. Over several years, the award ceremony took place once again in the form of a physical meeting.

Estonian winners of Wikimedia CEE Spring 2022

For the eighth time, the CEE Spring competition was held on the Estonian-language Wikipedia. 9 people participated in the competition and wrote and/or edited a total of 304 articles. The award ceremony took place as part of the summer days.

Once again, the art month article competition took place in October, for the second time in a row. The goal of the competition is to bring more art content to both Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Once again, we organized it together with Tartu Art Museum and Tartu Art House. This time there were a total of 10 participants and 56 art-themed articles were created.

Students' 24 h article competition

In mid-November, we continued to approach students with the format of a quick competition: a 24-hour article competition as mentioned in the education section.

Illustration added to newly created science article

From the beginning of November to the middle of December an article competition Science into Wikipedia was held, which we organized together with the Estonian Youth Science Academy and the Estonian Science Agency. Review articles based on scientific research and publications were invited for the competition. The competition received 26 articles from 15 authors. It in notable that almost all participants were newcomers.

Image competitions

In September, we had the honor to cooperate with the Heritage Board and the Norwegian Cultural Heritage Board, and thus the "Living Old Town" picture competition was part of the Heritage Days program. As part of the photo competition, we collected photos from the heritage conservation areas of Estonian cities. During the competition, we collected a total of 618 files from heritage conservation areas in Estonia (a total of 12 heritage conservation areas, 11 of which are in cities). Best contributions:

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  The best action picture
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  The best city life picture
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  The best old town picture
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  The best architectural photo
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  The grand prize winner

Once again, we also collaborated with the magazine Eesti Loodus. In the photo contest, you can also indicate that you allow the use of your images on Wikimedia Commons. A total of 1,329 pictures were submitted to the competition from 231 authors. In the awarding ceremony, Ivo also gave a talk about Wikipedia and photography.

In 2022 we announced the international winners of the Wiki Science Competition.

Other community and outreach work

Sven-Erik Soosaar

We have sought recognition for our volunteers at every appropriate opportunity. In 2022, The Language Editing Workshops in Wikipedia and the user Kuriuss, who has been engaged in large-scale language editing of Wikipedia articles, were chosen as The Deed of the Language in Estonia. The Deed of the Language is chosen by current and former education ministers, so it's a big accolade. In addition, once again our volunteer contributor and former board member Sven-Erik Soosaar received the title of volunteer of the year 2021.

Kaupo Kukli, on of the interviewed lecturers

We also focused on seniors more than before: we wrote about Wikipedia in a web portal aimed at seniors, and in autumn a 4-page long story about writing on Wikipedia was published in a paper publication aimed at seniors. We also tried to get in touch with various seniors' associations, but serious cooperation did not result.

We have also updated our website wikimedia.ee a lot. We have written both our GLAM and educational projects and have made several content pages that teachers can use, for example (e.g. "Wikipedia A&O", etc.). In addition to the content pages, we have collected various experience stories from lecturers on the topic "Using Wikipedia as a teaching tool at the university" in the blog in order to inspire other lecturers as well.

Käbi and Pille at the Be More students fair

Since we are also a member of several networks, we have taken part in the work of the Volunteer Network, the Media Competence Network, and the Be More network (which brings together the student body in Tartu). The big advantage of networking is getting new acquaintances and opportunities, and thus for example we were also present at the Be More fair, which is aimed at students at the beginning of each fall. In order to achieve greater visibility, we also put more emphasis on our physical and visual identity and promotional materials, so we have designed flyers and ordered other merch to stand out more at fairs and the like.

Despite the confusion with the fast changing of the communications managers, we have been actively and consistently in contact with the press and sent out press releases.

Spending 2022

Spending:

• Programme 1: Education: 2445.84€
• Programme 2: GLAM: 2314.4€
• Programme 3: Open Culture and Outreach: 1200€
• Community support: 3918.53€
• Staffing Expenses: 46979.89€
• Other Operational Expenses: 8467.08€

Total spending was 65325.74€

2023

General meeting in April 2023

2023 was a year to focus on the stability of the organization. We brought on new people, changed at roles of employees and board, and looked for more financing options. We continued as a strategic partner of the Ministry of Education and Science, which helped us to expand our outreach activities in academia and increase the range of various competitions. We also increased the amount of in-person events to finally get out of the pandemia period.

Our staff and intern in a weekly meeting

At the beginning of the year, Wikimedia Estonia employed 3 people including 2 people with 0.5 positions and one with 1.0. Käbi Laan continued remaind as CEO, Pille Priks managed the activities in the education field and Kerdo Kristjan Tamm GLAM direction. However in April Käbi gave in her resignation and so total restructuring of WMEE staff started. All employees working with 0.5 position kept their job, but were assigned to new roles: Kerdo Kristjan became our office manager and Pille communication manager. Searches for a new CEO who from now on would also act as a projects coordinator ended in May, as Ivo Kruusamägi (our former chairman of the board) became the new executive director. Officially his contract started on June 1st. We are working with the same team ever since.

Celebrating the birthday of Estonian Wikipedia

We had our first general meeting of the year on the 22th of April in Tallinn where a new board member Robert Treufeldt was elected. In 16th of July a second general meeting was held, where Jaan Meriniit as well as Mario Luik were both chosen to serve as board members for the next two years. We also changed our statute and since then Our strategy was also discussed at both of those meetings and members had a chance to express their opinions and worries about the chapter's present and near future. Next general meeting is planned to take place in Spring 2024.

National Internet Day 2023, where Ivo was talking about SLAPP cases

Communication has been particularly successful this year even thou we had a rough start, as Ivo Kruusamägi was targeted in one SLAPP case against Wikipedia. We have been very visible in both traditional and social media, and developing our e-mail newsletter. In addition, we have good contacts in many state offices, like the Republic of Estonia Government Office. August is the birthday month of Estonian Wikipedia, during which we carried out a month long campaign introducing the Estonian Wikipedia. We continued interviewing Wikimedians to document the history of the movement and conducted a membership survey.

In February we helped to set up Wikimedians of Võro language User Group (not yet recognized by WMF) and have aimed to promote more Võro Wikipedia.

The main goal for next year is to increase the number of volunteers. For this, we hope to make the most of the Wikimedia Hackathon in Tallinn, WMEE summer days, Wikimania in Krakow, and summer photo tours, where preparations have started already this year.

Education program

In the field of education, we had another busy year! We gave workshops and lectures, but also arranged several competitions and showcased Wikipedia in multiple public events.

First half of the Year

Ivo giving an online lecture in May, that was viewed by ca 150 students

On January 26th WMEE conducted two workshops on a career day in Kehra Gymnasium where our team members introduced to the middle and high school students the principles of operating in Wikipedia. There we created opportunities for all those interested in trying to format one wiki article as well as make their best in the so-called five-click challenge. This is something we intend to replicate.

Moreover we continued with various courses created for both seniors and adults. On February 6th we held a Wikipedia learning lesson for the 8th and 9th graders at Luunja Middle School followed by a follow-up training on February 22nd, during which the 9th graders wrote or edited and added new information to the articles on topics related to their hometown. Approximately 40 students in total were educated on that day. Just a few days later on February 8th a seminar introducing Wikipedia to the employees at the library of University of Tartu (circa 25 people in total) was held and in the second half of the month we participated in Job and Internship Fair in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University of Tartu, where we met and recruited our intern Britta Junolainen who started her Wikimedia Estonia internship in March and ended it in May the same year.

Introducing the results of research project "Using Wikipedia in education: students' and teachers' view"

In addition we participated in the Estonian Students' Science Festival held on April 11-12th where we introduced Wikipedia as a tool of teaching. Everyone who wished could try editing Wikipedia on the spot and also participate in the five-click challenge. In the field of training, we held a few events as well. Firstly on April 13 a follow-up training took place for University of Tartu's staff during which 13 participants edited Wikipedia articles. Afterwards we conducted two wiki training sessions for UT's library staff also, the first of which was held on April 20 at the Viljandi City Library and the second on April 27 at the Central Library of Lääne-Viru County.

On May 31 a community career day was held at Vastseliina's high school. There we conducted 3 computer class lessons for middle school students 13-15. In those lessons we introduced the working principles of Wikipedia and as a practical task, the students searched for information from various Wikipedia articles. Almost 70 students and 3 teachers were involved in this project.

In June our activities included the final event of the WMEE-supported research project "Wikipedia in Education: The view of Students' and Teachers'" where results about the use of Wikipedia among students and teachers were presented. In summer generally our activities were on a small break as everyone is trying to make their best out of the summer holidays and vacations.

Winners of the science-themed article competition

Education in the second part of 2023

Wikipedia Terminology Competition winners

In the second part of 2023, the main focus on education was on competitions (Wikipedia Terminology Competition and Wiki Science Competition), as they were targeting people in universities.

On September 5, Ivo went to introduce Wikipedia to University of Tartu IT students and nearly 200 students participated in total. Education-themed projects continue to be one of our key priorities the following year alike and we hope to find partners and many new schools where to spread wiki-knowledge.

We have also participated in the state-wide media literacy network activities and hope that this could help to introduce Wikimedia projects in schools as a great way to learn about media literacy. The best way to learn is by doing.

In the end of the year we had our second intern Avely writing Wikipedia articles.

GLAM program

Wikipedia cultural trip to Kultuurikatel in August

In the beginning of January, we summarised the Wikiquotes project´s results. The aim of the project was to celebrate the Estonian Year of Libraries 2022 and encourage librarians to add new wikiquotes to wiki from their favourite books. Together with the chairman of the Estonian Librarians Association Tuuliki Tõiste we concluded that although the because the project reached only a few librarians due to the abundance of information, and therefore the number of added citations remained small (approx. 30-40 new quotes were added in total), the potential and purpose of the competition itself was strong and very promising. We received several recommendations to repeat similar initiative in the foreseeable future, when all kinds of problematic factors (especially overload of information) have been solved and librarians are not disturbed by that.

In cooperation with the Museum of Viljandi 33 works of the photographer Jaan Riet (1873-1952) from the first part of the 20th century were uploaded to Commons. We were also in talks with the Estonian Public Broadcasting and the Estonian Olympic Committee on getting image donations to Wikimedia Commons.

We created a virtual exhibition about Ruhnu Swedish women's hats and children's hats together with the Museum of Ruhnu which has received positive feedback as well, whereas The Museum of Ruhnu has expressed its desire for future cooperation. Moreover, a detailed manual for arranging and pulling through a photography trips was created and has been ever since freely available to everyone visiting our website.

Examples from the Estonian manor schools project:

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  Suure-Kõpu Manor School, Ants Orav, "Pompei" Paintings in the Great Hall
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  Vääna Manor School, Kerdo Kristjan Tamm, Decor in the former bedroom of countess Constance von Stackelberg
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  Vasalemma Manor School, Ants Orav, XIX Centruy Fireplace
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  Puurmani Manor School, Ants Orav, Original Fireplace made out of tiles from late XIX Century
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  Tõstamaa Manor School, Ants Orav, Ceiling Paintings in the Hall

Lady Macbeth. Carl Gottlieb Venig. Late XIX Century. Narva Museum

Agreements were concluded for some longer-term projects. One of which is a plan to collect photographs of the artistically valuable details found in the interiors of various Estonian Manor Schools, thereby supplementing Wikimedia Commons photobank. In March, we reached an agreement with the chairman of the Association of Estonian Manor Schools Mr Tõnu Kiviloo, whose help and support allowed us to reach many useful contacts. Pilot exhibition was completed by February on the basis of the Vääna Manor School and by August we had completed the project with more than 110 new pictures added to Wikimedia Commons. Huge thanks goes to Mr Ants Orav whose large collection of the photos of Estonian Manor School was used. All the beautiful examples of Estonian-Baltic German manor art can be seen here.

Instructional material for museums for creating a virtual exhibition with all the necessary templates was completed in April. On May 2nd we were received by the representatives of Narva Art Gallery with whom we reached an agreement to prepare a joint virtual exhibition for our Wikipedia Month of Art in October. Exact topic being about the famous art collection of the Russian-Estonian Lavrentsov family. We are very glad that Narva Art Gallery has shown a great willingness to use Wikipedia in the future also in the creation of its coming exhibitions.

In 2023 we had a small project with Tartu Toy Museum, that resulted in articles about Estonian toy companies and makers. At the end of the year, we announced similar cooperation with Tartu Art Museum, where already in 2023 we saw the expansion of museum-related articles. There were also discussions for cooperation with the Art Museum of Estonia.

We also contributed to the GLAM newsletter.

Community and outreach

Friend of Wikipedia 2023

Community

In January we celebrated the English Wikipedia birthday and on August we celebrated the 21th anniversary of Estonian Wikipedia in Aparaaditehas (Tartu) where the WMEE office is located. At the end of the year, we held our traditional Christmas lunches in both Tallinn and Tartu, where more than 10 people participated on both occasions. We supported smaller gatherings like Võro Wikipedia and Estonian Wikiquotes meetups.

In July we held our annual Wikipedia Summer Days which this time took place at Metsajõe Puhkeküla (Metsajõe Vacation Centre) in Järva County. There were 13 participants in total including Kimmo Virtanen from Wikimedia Finland.

We continue to award The Wikipedian of the Month award every month. Also at the end of the year, Jaan Künnap was chosen as the Photographer of the Year. We also selected a Friend of Wikipedia 2023, Riina Reinsalu.

We were present at many notable events (like the Tech We Want to Open Governments event, a science communication conference, psychological defense courses, summer seminar of the Estonian GLAM institutions).

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  Gathering for English Wikipedia birthday in January
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  Wikipedia summer days 2023 in July
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  Wikimedia Võro Meetup in Tartu
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  Finnish-Estonian meeting in Helsinki (October)
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  WMEE, AvoinGLAM & WMFI meeting at Oodi, Helsinki (November)

International representation

Pille and Ursula in Tbilisi

In August, Ivo and Robert were our representatives at Wikimania in Singapore. Käbi was also present as she is involved in organizing the next Wikimania in Poland.

Between September 14–17 the CEE Meeting 2023 took place in Tbilisi, Georgia. Representatives of Wikimedia Estonia were our board member Jaan Meriniit, former board member Ursula Erik and project manager Pille Priks. Pille held a presentation called "Education with Wikipedia in the Estonian Way" where she gave a brief overview of the use of Wikipedia in the context of education (how it started and what we in Estonia have achieved so far). We also created and presented a video titled “Tartu - the capital of Estonian Wikipedia” where our CEO Ivo Kruusamägi talks about cooperation between Wikipedia and University of Tartu. An article on it. It was considered inspiring by others.

We developed closer relations with Malaysian Wikipedians and made one trip to Helsinki (Finland) to discuss possible cooperation.

Wikiexpeditions

Photography trip to Kalaranna fort

We increased the number of photographic trips. In total, there were 12 wikiexpeditions.

Two bigger ones were to the Kalaranna Fort and Kultuurikatel in Tallinn. They were both open to our chapter members and interested people outside, and they were carried out by our new board member Robert Treufeldt, who is an architecture historian.

We also helped to finance the Estonian Association of Archaeologists trip to Hiiumaa island in an attempt to get them more acquainted with uploading images to Wikimedia Commons. And we had a photographic trip to Suomenlinna (Helsinki, Finland) together with the Finnish Wikipedians.

Examples of images taken during photography trips:

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Competitions

Winners of Keeletoimetamistalgud

The year started with our 6th Language Editing Workshop (Keeletoimetamistalgud), that lasted more than three months and ended on the Day of Estonian Language, March 14th. 19 persons participated in total, who together edited 215 articles in the Estonian Wikipedia.

Between February 18th and 19th we organized another 30-hour article competition for all the university students in Estonia. This year the topic was Estonian architecture. Six teams participated and wrote lenghty articles on notable buildings in Estonia.

Estonian winners of CEE Spring 2023

We continued with CEE Spring where 12 participants wrote 466 articles. Together with the Wikimedians of Võro language User Group we also carried it out in Võro Wikipedia, where 7 participants wrote 31 articles.

The first half of the year ended with our first sports-themed article competition in cooperation with the Estonian Sports and Olympic Museum, and the Estonian Olympic Committee.

In September, Estonian Social Work Association, the Estonian magazine of social work and Wikimedia Eesti organized a social work terminology themed workshop. That got lot of coverage.

Winners of Wikipedia Special Prize in Eesti Looduse fotovõistlus

We continued our support for the Estonian Nature Photo competition (Eesti Looduse fotovõistlus) were Wikipedia Special Prizes were given out.

The opening of Science Photo exhibition in Tartu

During October, when we have Wikipedia Art Month, there was a thematic article competition with 8 participants who submitted 51 articles.

Between 10th October and 10th December a Wikipedia Terminology Competition took place: an article competition intended for students and employees of Estonian higher education and research institutions. We invited them to write and supplement all kinds of articles in Estonian on the topic of scientific concepts. To carry it out we partnered with the Institute of the Estonian Language, Estonian University of Life Sciences, Estonian Military Academy, Tallinn University, Tallinn University of Technology, and University of Tartu. That was a massive undertaking.

Estonian Science Photo Competition 2023 jury meeting

Moreover, on the 1st of November, the Wiki Science Competition started. In there we had both an article competition and a science photo competition. The photo competition saw 19 uploaders and the article competition had the same number of article writers. With the article competition, we cooperated with the Estonian Young Academy of Sciences. Photo competition on the other hand had multiple sponsors. We also arranged the international section of the competition.

On October 30, the opening of the Science Photo exhibition was arranged in Tartu. We plan to use this as a traveling exhibition for the next 3+ years to promote the Science Photo Competition.

In December, Keeletoimetamistalgud started for the 7th time.

Spending 2023

Spending:

• Programme 1: Education: 15000.00€ (Non-grant funded)
• Programme 2: GLAM: 500.00€
• Programme 3: Open Culture and Outreach: 4900.00€
• Community support: 5176.83€
• Staffing Expenses: 46955.10€
• Other Operational Expenses: 14804.09€

Total spending was 72336.02€

2024

Opening Wikimedia Hackathon 2024 in Tallinn

Wikipedia Summer Days 2024

Wikimedia Estonia started the year with the same 3 people including 2 people with 0.5 positions and one with 1.0 as the previous year ended. Ivo Kruusamägi remained as CEO, Pille Priks continued to manage the chapter´s communication and Kerdo Kristjan Tamm held his position as Office Manager.

The main goal for this year is to increase the number of volunteers. The Wikimedia Hackathon in May in Tallinn gave us a great opportunity to recruit new potential members of the NGO as more than 10 people registered as volunteers to the Hackathon.

We had our first general meeting of the year on the 16th of March in Tartu in our office in Aparaaditehas. There our members approved the fiscal year report from 2023 and also discussed the state and future of our revision commission. Our strategy was also discussed at this meeting and members had a chance to express their opinions and worries about the chapter's present and near future. CEO Ivo also talked about the results of SLAPP case against him.

Our second general meeting was held in August as part of Wikipedia Summer Days.

Starting this year we are members of Wikimedia Europe.

Education program

Wikiball rolling in Tartu

Pille speaking about Wikipedia in the Rakvere State Secondary School

Võro meetup in Tartu in 2024

Education-themed projects continue to be one of our key priorities. During the first three months of 2023, the main focus on education was on competitions (Baltic Sea Themed Competition and 30h article writing competition for University students).

We participated in Terminipäevak (Terminology Day) at the library of University of Tartu on the 2nd of February where we presented the awards for the winners of the Wikipedia Terminology Competition.

In the second half of February we participated in Job and Internship Fair in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University of Tartu. There we also met our new intern Katrin Kõpp who shall work on editing and writing new Wiki articles until the end of May.

On March 6th WMEE conducted a workshop in Tartu at Pallas University of Applied Sciences where our Communication Manager Pille introduced to the art students the principles of operating in Wikipedia. The students translated and added eight new articles to Estonian Wikipedia.

On 14th of March we celebrated Estonia’s Mother Tongue Day by participating at University of Tartu assembly hall where Ms Riina Reinsalu, Lecturer in Estonian Text Linguistics delivered a lecture “Does Wikipedia have a place at schools/universities?” In her lecture she spoke about the position of the Estonian-language Wikipedia among other language versions (incl. compared with neighboring languages) and the goals that Wikipedia as an open-access online encyclopedia fulfills in the textual landscape.

As part of the Student Days in Tartu we held a wikiball rolling event in April to promote Wikipedia.

In May another student project took place in which the students of Rakvere State Secondary School participated in the Wikipedia article writing process. Altogether 22 articles were either started or updated.

The winners of Keeletoimetamistalgud were awarded in May. This was the 7th language editing competition in Estonian Wikipedia where 272 articles were edited. The number of copyedited articles in total over seven years is 3200!

In May our communication manager Pille conducted a workshop in Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies in University of Tartu. In addition, we were present at the Estonian Ministry of Education and Science´s Partnership Day which took place in Tartu.

We also conducted interviews with Wikipedia Friend 2023 Riina Reinsalu, with Spanish photographer Diego Delso who holds the record for most added photos to Wikimedia Commons (more than 27 000), with Wikipedia fellow from Tartu Toy Museum, and with the NGO member and University of Tartu Junior Research Fellow in Fenno-Ugric Languages Janek Vaab. Three more interviews were conducted during the summer. One of them is with the oldest known Wikipedian in Estonia who was born already in 1930.

We helped to assemble a development plan for Võru Wikipedia together with the unofficial Wikimedians of Võro language User Group.

In the end of August, as part of the Aparaaditehas´ Festival and Gallery Night vol 13, doors of our office in Tartu were open to public from 6 to 9 p.m. Our event was called “Wikipedia Laboratory” and as a result of joint effort from all the visitors, Johannes Gutenberg, our famous factory cat, finally got its own Wikipedia article!

We continued with conducting interviews with different people whose ties with Wikipedia are considerable. In September we released two-part interview with our CEO Ivo Kruusamägi whose effort in regard of developing Estonian Wikipedia for almost 20 years has been immense.

This year, for the first time, WMEE awarded two so-called “terminikratt” scholarships. Is aim is to support the enrichment of the Estonian language in Wikipedia and to promote high-quality terminology. Monika Reppo and Inge Varik were chosen as the first scholarship holders, who´s future work in Wikipedia shall include Estonian scientific and technical vocabulary.

In October we talked about Wikipedia in Tartu Education Festival and in University of Tartu Pärnu College. We were also present in Media Literacy conference.

During this year we promoted the use of Wikiracing competions in education and in November we held the first Wikiracing competition in Aparaaditehas (Tartu).

GLAM program

Part of the Science Photo exhibition in Kose

Introducing Science Photo exhibition in the Lääne-Viru County Central Library

Estonia is updating its Copyright Law. As part of policy work, we provided feedback on the planned changes and submitted our proposal for the Freedom of Panorama. We may expect some results there in 2025, but we keep working on the topic to prepare materials and push forward the long-needed change in the law.

The Wiki Science Competition local winners were annonced in January this year, where we had both an article competition and a science photo competition. The photo competition saw 19 uploaders and the article competition had the same number of article writers. Photo competition had multiple sponsors and we arranged the international section of the competition as well.

On 2023 we opened our new Science Photo exhibition, that we plan to use as a traveling exhibition for the next 3+ years to promote the Science Photo Competition. Since the beginning of 2024 we have exhibited selected works at Kose Cultural Centre, Olustvere School of Service and Rural Economics, Jäneda Manor (in cooperation with Centre of Estonian Rural Research and Knowledge), and Lääne-Viru County Central Library in Rakvere. Science Photo exhibition travelled then to Tallinn University of Technology (Taltech) where it would be exhibited until the beginning of next year.

We were in talks with the Estonian Public Broadcasting and the Estonian Olympic Committee on getting image donations to Wikimedia Commons. The first images were uploaded under CC SA-BY licences.

We have been developing an artwork-finding site, where we started work at Wikimedia Hackathon in Tallinn.

October is once again “The Wikipedia Art Month” to promote art in Wikipedia and Wikipedia in the art field. Also, a writing competition took place as part of the art month.

We have a small cooperation project with Tartu Art Museum under the name "Muuseumikratt".

Community and outreach

Community

Introductive video about Võro Wikipedia

In January we celebrated the English Wikipedia birthday in Aparaaditehas (Tartu) where the WMEE office is located.

In January we filmed and edited introductive video about Võro Wikipedia (Vikipeediä) where our partner and research fellow at University of Tartu Sulev Iva introduced in Võro language how to write and edit new articles on Wikipedia.

Giving a presentation during Wikipedia Summer Days 2024

We continue to award The Wikipedian of the Month award every month. Also at the end of the year, xx was chosen as the Photographer of the Year. We also selected a Friend of Wikipedia 2024, yy.

We were present at many notable events.

In August we hold our annual Wikipedia Summer Days which this time took place at Jõgeva County in Pajusi Manor. In there we even had visitors from Latvia and Finland.

On the 24th of August we celebrated the 22th anniversary of Estonian Wikipedia. Event itself took place in Aparaaditehas, Tartu in white greenhouse – the same place hosted us three years ago. Speeches were held, food and different beverages were consumed – we had a great late summer evening!

Wikimedia representation in Palace of Europe right before the Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe event

International representation

In February 2024 the European Parliament formally adopted the anti-SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) Directive. Ivo Kruusamägi was present in Strasbourg to say that SLAPPs target not only journalists, but also Wikipedians, and point out that sharing information has always a cross-border dimension. We met with the Coalition against SLAPPs in Europe.

The CEE Steering Committee meeting was held in Tallinn at the beginning of March.

Wikimedia Hackathon was held in Tallinn from May 3rd – 5th, that had around 200 participants. Most of the lifting was done by the Program Management team of the Wikimedia Foundation, but Wikimedia Eesti was acting as the local host.

Our delegation on its way to Wikimania 2024

We were present at the Wikimedia Europe General Assembly in Prague in May. In September we were also present at the Big Fat Brussels Meeting.

Estonian representatives in CEE Meeting 2024

At the Wikimania 2024, which took place in Katowice (Poland) between 7th and 10th of August, we had a large reprecentation. Our chairman of the board Robert and CEO Ivo both participated, as well as four more Wikimedians from Estonia. In our road trip to Poland (and back) we also involved one Latvian and two Finnish Wikipedians.

Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2024 was held in Istanbul from 20th September to 22nd of September. Our representatives took part in it as well, including CEO and chairman of the board. We had some lightning talks there. We applied to host the next CEE Meeting in Tallinn in 2025, but this time it would be held in Thessaloniki (Greece) instead.

Wikiexpeditions

Within the first 10 months of the year, we had 5 wikiexpeditions under what we collected over 300 images.

Competitions

Winners of Keeletoimetamistalgud 2024

Municipalities that participated in our "Külast külla" photo collecting campaign with providing local prizes

Our first competition this year started on the 1st of February. Baltic Sea-themed Competition took place until March 15th in the Estonian Wikipedia. The aim of the competition was to increase the knowledge of the Baltic Sea through the creation, updating, and supplementing of relevant articles. 10 participants dealt with a total of 106 articles.

Between March 2nd and 3rd, we organized another 30-hour article competition for all the university students in Estonia. This year's topic was historical building in Estonia. Nine teams participated in total and wrote lengthy articles on the topic. Teams assembled articles like Rapla KEK-i haldushoone, Pärnu rannahotell, Villa Tammekann, Eesti Kunstiakadeemia õppehoone, Paide Muusika- ja Teatrimaja etc.

We continued with CEE Spring between 21st March and 31st of May where 11 participants wrote or improved 255 articles. CEE Spring was also held in Võro Wikipedia where there were 7 participants who wrote 10 articles.

Moreover, together with the Estonian Sports and Olympic Museum, Estonian Olympic Committee, and Estonian Athletics´ Association our already second sports-themed article competition was conducted during Spring, which had 10 participants writing about the history of Estonian sports. The winning article was about the history of competitive sailing in Estonia.

For the summer we had an image collection campaign “Külast külla” (en “From Village to Village”) about the Estonian villages. We invited everyone to capture their summer moments from thousands of Estonian villages. All in all, 23 uploaders added 579 photos of different sceneries of Estonian villages and small towns.

We continued our support for the Estonian Nature Photo competition (Eesti Looduse fotovõistlus) where Wikipedia Special Prizes were given out. This is the largest photo competition in Estonia and in 2024 it had over 1300 submissions.

In September we held Wiki Loves Monuments. Almost 500 photos were uploaded to the contest (497 to be exact). Last time it took place in Estonian was in 2015. The competition was organized with the cooperation of National Heritage Board.

We also hold Wikipedia Terminology Competition for the second time this autumn. It took place from October 10th to December 10th. It´s an article competition for students and employees of Estonian universities and research institutions. We are inviting people to write new wiki articles and expand terminology in Estonian to make the presentation of scientific results more accessible.