Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Belgium/Activity/2020

This is the annual activity report of Wikimedia Belgium over the year 2020.

Logo Wikimedia Belgium

Large activities

Wiki Club Brussels

Bi-weekly Wiki Club Brussels

The Bi-weekly Wiki Club meeting: via video calls we coach individual users how to write for Wikipedia.

The Wiki Club Brussels meeting did not attract many volunteers because of corona and the fact that the physical meetings were converted into a video conference. Volunteers did find those virtual sessions less attractive. But we were able to attract new young (25-35) and older people (+60).

Iedereen Wiki - Schrijven voor Wikipedia Ternat

Rita Saerens en Paul Hermans

In the Library of Ternat we organised again Iedereen Wiki, a training Writing for Wikipedia about local subjects, bringing people together in workshops.

Industry museum Ghent

Writing session Industry Museum

We organised 2 trainings “How to write for Wikipedia” for the Industriemuseum Gent. Statistics

Women street names

OpenStreetMap and Wikimedia projects

The names of public spaces (streets, avenues, squares and others) define the identity of a city and how citizens interact with it. Brussels suffers from a major inequality between male and female street names and we want to make this more balanced! The names of public spaces (streets, avenues, squares and others) define the identity of a city and how citizens interact with it. Brussels suffers from a major inequality between male and female street names and we want to make this more balanced!

There are several ways to approach the inequality of street names and leverage a positive change in our society. Ours is with the use of Open Data. We want to use technologies to create a world where knowledge creates power for the many, not the few.

Several not-for-profits, Open Knowledge Belgium, OpenStreetMap Belgium, Wikimedia Belgium and the feminist collective Noms Peut-Être are partnering up to build a map visualizing the street names of Brussels by gender. To make this happen, we use open data - data which can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose - from OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia.

Some data already existed, we want to link both data sources. During this event, we added Wikidata tags (a tag containing all the information from a Wikipedia page) to the streets on OpenStreetMap. Linking this data allows many possibilities such as using existing Wikipedia pages as suggestions for cities or analysing what types of profiles are used for street names. Statistics

RTBF Wikipedia Marathon

RTBF Wikipedia Marathon in action

On the 5th of March, the International Women's Rights Day, we organised an edit-a-thon, in collaboration with the RTBF, the Belgian French speaking radio and TV broadcaster, in collaboration with Open Knowledge Belgium and Les Grenades.

Objective: We want to increase the 18% female biographies. An under-representation that influences the way we know the history. We wanted to create 100 new women's articles on Wikipedia. The marathon lasted a whole day, from 7am to 11pm. Statistics

At the Flemish national television one of our volunteers presented how he created an article on Wikipedia about Miss Athléta, a woman circus artist.

Erfgoedcel Pajottenland Zennevallei

Schrijven voor Wikipedia door Erfgoedcel Pajottenland-Zennevallei

Together with the Erfgoedcel Pajottenland Zennevallei we make an inventory of the region's heritage. We take photos and write articles on Wikipedia. We are making the inventory of the bunkers of the KW Line from the Second World War. Everyone is invited to complete this list; many pictures are still missing…

Webinar training “Wikipedia for Heritage groups”. As part of these projects we made an inventory on Wikidata and lists of possible pages are automatically collected through Listeria. We have recorded a video of the webinar that we presented on this occasion and a presentation. Statistics

OTRS upload campaign

Schrijven voor Wikipedia Erfgoed Pajottenland-Zennevallei 2020

The user account Erfgoedcel Pajottenland Zennevallei has been recognized by OTRS to release images of heritage under a free licence. Now we are ready to upload hundreds of images of heritage.

Women and dance

Writing for Wikipedia project Women and Dance 2020

In collaboration with CEMPER and meemoo we have set up a project to better document about Women and dance. We want to make the performing arts better known. Therefore we organised a training and an inventory of existing and missing pages. Statistics

Digital storytelling with Linked open data

The University of Ghent organised a Webinar on digital storytelling about women's editors. WeChangEd is a project of Ghent University, Digital Humanities. They have a research project to create a distributed digital archive on Female Writers. On June 29th they presented the results of their project.

Wiki Loves Heritage Belgium 2020

The Wiki Loves Heritage photo contest Belgium 2020 has started on 1 July 2020. It is an extension of the worldwide Wiki Loves Monuments campaign, which also runs around this period, and is specifically aimed at monuments. With the Wiki Loves Heritage campaign we want to highlight movable, immaterial, maritime heritage, landscapes and museum collections. It is the third time that Wikimedia Belgium organises the Wiki Loves Heritage photo contest since the European Year of Cultural Heritage in 2018. We find it important to make the inventory and describe heritage.

Why are we doing this? We want to document heritage in all its aspects. There are still many heritage items that have not yet been inventoried and described on Wikidata/Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons.

The Wiki Loves Heritage 2020 prize session in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek van Brussel with presentations about national Public domain projects.

On 2 February 2021 10 prize winners were awarded. Wiki Loves Heritage 2020 produced fewer uploads than the year before during the European year of Heritage, but the images were very interesting. There were a lot of well known photographers that already won a prize before and some newbies. Some participants only contribute to Wikimedia Commons, others collaborate very intense to a lot of other Wikimedia platforms.

1. Kasteel van Ooidonk
Johan Allard
2. Abbaye de Villers
Herman.vandenbroeck
3. Station Schaerbeek
Trougnouf (Benoit Brummer)
4. Monument de général Storms
EmDee
5. Carnaval van Aalst
Selcenc
6. Volkskundemuseum Brugge
Rainer Halama
7. Grave AfricaMuseum
Hispalois
8. Nieuw Kasteel van Petegem
Paul Hermans
9. Ondergrondse begraafplaats van Laken
Dirk De Nil
10. Abbaye d'Orval
Roosde

Conferences

Volunteers active in Wikimedia Belgium visit regularly conferences and conference like events (study days, symposiums, seminars, workshops, etc) inside and outside Belgium to stay informed, to inspire organisations to release materials on Wikimedia Commons, to get ideas for new activities, and more, all to improve the content of Wikipedia and her sister projects.

Open Data Day

In Hasselt we presented Wikidata on the Open Data Day. Statistics

Collaboration with musea and other institutions

Schrijven voor Wikipedia at the University of Ghent

Hadewijch

In 2019 we gave 2 trainings “Writing for Wikipedia” for the University of Gent. We learned librarians how to write for Wikipedia and how to benefit from Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons.

The library has a huge inventory of scanned books, that they licensed as CC BY-SA. In August-September there was a writing campaign about medieval manuscripts with the University of Ghent that resulted in 316 uploads and 106 new articles.

Vlaams Architectuur Instituut

We organised 2 writing sessions with 60 and 90 students together with the Vlaams Architectuur Instituut. Due to corona we could not organise a physical training. The students were given a video conferencing where we presented what Wikipedia is and how you can write good articles. We have recorded the training session.

4 faculties participated: KASK, Universiteit Gent, Universiteit Antwerpen, KU Leuven. The professors and Wikimedia Belgium coached the students, and answered their questions. 98 students wrote articles on the English and Nederlandse Wikipedia. 50 new articles were written; 41 published; 47 artikels updated, 16 images uploaded.

VIVES Kortrijk

De Wikipediaklas

We contacted Benedict Wydooghe, who is history teacher at VIVES Kortrijk. He orders students to write about social and historical subjects on Wikipedia as part of their curriculum.

Iedereen Leest

We prepared to organise in March 2021 4 writing sessions about Flemish youth authors. Therefore we created an inventory in Wikidata.

Heritage organisations

Several heritage organisations are willing to collaborate with us to write articles about local heritage subjects.

National Library

We are in progress to establish a collaboration with the Belgian Koninklijke bibliotheek.

Radio - TV and Press

Interview Iedereen Wiki

In Ternat the city magazine published an interview with the Wikimedia Belgium president about Wikipedia and Wikimedia.

Women Street names

This was part of a TV series.

Strategic campaigns

Volunteer support

Support volunteers

We supported volunteers with small expenses to allow them to write decent Wikipedia articles (car allowance for short travel, museum tickets, buying a book).

Individual coaching

Individual coaching via sharing the desktop was frequently done, and led to quick solutions for volunteer questions.

Motivating volunteers

We invited volunteers to participate in writing articles related to the projects we are conducting. Each time explaining to them how they can benefit from the integration of Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons.

We participated in activities of Wikimedia Nederland: the Schrijfwedstrijd and the Maand van de geschiedenis.

Book "Schrijven voor Wikipedia"

We continue to distribute the book Schrijven voor Wikipedia to volunteers that have completed at least one new article on Wikipedia.

Friends of Wikimedia Belgium Fund

A Belgian fund wmbe:Fund Friends of Wikimedia Belgium was established within the Koning Boudewijnstichting to permit us to issue fiscal certificates to Belgian tax payers providing a gift to our cultural, social and heritage projects. In 2021 we will be able to fund one or more projects with the budgets we acquired in 2020.

wmbe:Donation_with_tax_certificate

Social media

Wikimedia Belgium is also active on social media to reach out to the world about our activities, projects, and to promote the vision of free knowledge with the people in Belgium and beyond.

Governance

General Assembly

We held a General Assembly on 29 August 2020. A new board was elected, and a new office address was approved.

On 19 September 2020 we held an extraordinary General Assembly to approve the new statutes.

Board meetings

See board meeting for more information

Statistics

Event	Editors	New editors	Articles edited	Articles created	Improved articles	Image upload	Percent used	Wikidata items	Wikidata statements	Organisations	#Sessions
Volunteer program	81	59	359	65	294	38	57%	65	228	4	15
GLAM program	45	14	525	102	423	625	54%	385	11123	5	9
Education program	100	62	582	147	435	323	74%	96	1392	6	6
Wiki Loves Heritage Belgium	17	2				840				1	1
Total	243	137	1466	314	1152	1826		546	12743	16	31