Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Deutschland/July 2011

POLITICS AND SOCIETY

Core Election Issues for Berlin

Analogous to what they did for the Bundestag elections of 2009 and the 2010 state elections of North Rhine-Westphalia, Mathias and Jan created a set of core election issues in advance of the elections to the Berlin House of Representatives on September 19th and forwarded them to the 35 parties. What was new this time was that for the first time we asked the community for assistance with a kind of peer-review process. The draft version of the core election issues was mentioned in several blogs of groups having similar themes –together with our request for cooperation. It quickly became clear that certain groups of questions (e.g. open access) still needed clarification. All requests for changes were able to be considered in the final version. Thank you to everyone who took part in it! Provided a good return, we would like to analyze the responses received in time before the election with you.

Green Future Conference

Berlin was also the venue for the Green Future Conference, at which the Green party wanted to gain impetus for their program work by having numerous workshops and panel discussions. About 900 participants showed up at the event. Representing Pavel Richter, Jan Engelmann participated in the workshop "Copyright Law and Freedom of Information in the 21st Century." The basis for discussion was a handout outlining the key points for a "green way" in the copyright policy, which was posted in advance of the conference. In the presence of the musician Pit Budde and the VUT- legal adviser Reinher Karl, Jan emphasized among other things the differing attitudes of the movement for free knowledge to the proposals of the copyright industry associations:"demands by the music industry to terminate anonymity on the Internet bit by bit in order not to hinder technical procedures for the punishing of copyright infringement, this we regard as being a serious interference with the functioning of the Internet as a platform for social participation processes. A collaborative project such as Wikipedia is generally only possible in light of the fact that people, whenever it appears advantageous to them, can avoid having to provide their real name, because they otherwise might have to fear serious penalties from their employers or their government. "

Wikipedians at the Museum Conference

The international conference “Communicating The Museum” of from July 6th to 8the at the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf has become a sort of networking meeting for Wikipedians who are active in the GLAM sector. As can be gathered from the vivid event report by Raimond Spekking, half a dozen volunteers took the time to convince curators, museum educators and marketing experts of the benefits to be gained from cooperating with Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. It was left up to the first "Wikipedian in Residence" Liam Wyatt to draw attention to the changed economy of attention in the Internet with his lecture. The high Google ranking of Wikipedia content might supply cultural institutions with new users on a regular basis. Most museums and heritage institutions, however, end up enclosing their own inventory of art on their own website through restrictive licensing forms. The potential benefits that a globally networked online community can bring eludes them, for instance, the voluntary participation of people in the development, presentation and content contextualization of exhibits. Matthew Cock, Liam's former employer at the British Museum and who is Head of Web there, has outright called collaboration with Wikipedians a "win-win situation."

4th Collaborative Initiative on “Privacy and Public”

Also in July the work of the fourth Collaborative Initiative Internet und Gesellschaft continued. We intensively worked on scenarios that attempt to portray the consequences of different possible developments in the years to come. On September 16th, the final workshop will be held with invited guests. At http://collaboratory.de/ all dates, reports and documents of the first three panels of experts are available under open licenses.

Until August 28th, it is possible to answer questions in a detailed questionnaire (even anonymously), if you would like to inform the working group of your own position. You can learn more from Sebastian.

PUBLIC RELATIONS & PUBLICITY

Wikimedium

The third edition of the year is being prepared and will appear in September at the WikiConvention. Until August 12th. it is possible to forward texts to Catrin and Micah. You are welcome to reach the two with any questions or suggestions concerning possible contributions at redaktion@wikimedium.de. In July, we will be planning for the forthcoming issue, researching topics in addition to doing the initial round of editing. We currently send out the Wikimedium to around 2,000 subscribers. Interested people (meet-ups, etc.) can order the next issue at Wikimedia Germany for free as always.

Informational Material

In July, we expanded our range of giveaways. From our office, for instance, Wikipedia pencils, fabric bags, pins and lanyards can be obtained. There are also several postcards available with themes such as Wikimedia Commons, fundraising and our school project. If you are looking for explanatory information about our Wikimedia projects, we would like to take this opportunity to introduce you to our brochures on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikiversity. In addition, flyers were designed for our Wikipedia book and the initiative Wikipedia for World Heritage. They will be printed in August. We will be happy to send out printed material to you. An e-mail to Michael suffices.

Press Releases

Current press releases from July can be checked on our website.

Press Talks / Media Cooperation

We are currently in talks with dradio Wissen about having a “Long Night of Knowledge“ event but which – on account of the extremely long lead time- will be held early next summer. Furthermore, there were questions concerning Wiki-Watch, Quadriga, Board resignations, the community project budget and the WikiConvention. Catrin conducted numerous interviews and background discussions. An excerpt from the media reporting in July can be found in our press review.

Wikipedia Book

Between the 18th and 27th of July, the galley proofs of our book were available for a final review. The time was used to send all 94 authors their individual contributions, and, if required, to ask for any necessary clarifications, updates and corrections to the text to be sent to the publisher. In addition, the entire text of Khesrau and Simon - the new interns – was read and corrected with a little bit more objectively. Finally, other employees had a look at parts of the text and gathered suggestions for improvements and corrections. The book is now in print. In addition to the completion of substantive work in July, the first preparations were made for the events to take place in regard to the publication of our book. In addition to the promised book-release party on September 24th in Berlin, Catrin is arranging for Wikimedia Germany to be present at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Furthermore, readings of the Wikipedia book in various German cities are planned, which are being prepared in collaboration with the community (see discussion page).

Initiative “Wikipedia must become World Heritage”

The month of July was marked by preparations for the next steps in the initiative. Sebastian Sooth met with representatives of the German UNESCO commission and discussed ideas concerning how to proceed. At the Brandenburg Technical University in Cottbus, an event was held with students of the master degree program in world heritage, at which, among other things, cooperation between the university and Wikimedia Germany was announced for the upcoming semester. In the meantime, there are now 46,500 confirmed signees of the petition. Catrin spoke to various international Wikimedia chapters concerning local activities. We were particularly pleased by the photo activity "Lend your smile, support Wikipedia for World Heritage!" in Hong Kong. In August and September, additional activities and events are planned in Germany. There will be more information about them here shortly.

EDUCATIONAL PROJECTS

Wikipedia School Project

The Wikipedia School project began in July by holding a workshop at the Humboldt University in Berlin. The workshop was attended by approximately 30 students majoring in Education who are taking part in the online seminar "Let's go Internet" and dealing with questions about how to make use of Wikipedia in the classroom. Pictures from this and other workshops can be found at Wikimedia Commons under the category “Wikipedia School Project”.

In July, we were able to hold a total of 12 workshops in schools. For the first time this month, there was the same number of workshops for pupils as there were for teachers. This reflects the increasing demand for teacher workshops. Four of the workshops took place in North Rhine-Westphalia, which was due to the late holiday start. Also in Fürth we were able to hold four workshops at a vocational school. Thanks to the summer break, we can now totally devote ourselves to making preparations for the fourth Camp in Nuremberg from August 26th to 28th. The meeting will take place in the Co-Working-Space in Nuremberg. On Friday, August 26th, there will be an open workshop on Wikipedia for Co-Workers. Details will soon be announced.

Elly and Denis look forward to hearing about your ideas and comments concerning Wikipedia and education.

Silver Knowledge (Silberwissen)

From July 1st to 3rd in Ulm, the first speakers meeting of project “Silberwissen” took place. Preparation and implementation lay in the hands of the Center for General Academic Continuing Education at the University of Ulm (ZAWiW). It was a content-rich meeting that was very useful to the participants according to their opinion. The results will be posted on the Wikimedia Forum and a detailed blog post by Elvira is planned. In preparation for her lecture and workshops, Elvira went to Wesel to the adult education center Wesel-Hamminkeln-Schermbeck. She explained the project not only to the head of senior adult education center but also to the senior advisory board and to the senior citizens forum of the Local Agenda 21. In all the interviews, there was a great deal of interest in Wikipedia and the opportunities from working together. In September, the project will start in Wesel and we hope that the interest will also be reflected in having numerous people participate. Wikipedia in the library - this was arranged for September in Berlin.

Wikimedia, Central and Regional Library Berlin and the SCC Berlin-Mitte are jointly organizing an introduction to the Internet encyclopedia.Contact was made with the German Society for Postal and Telecommunications History (DGPT) in Berlin. The cooperation which began in the spring in Frankfurt will be continued in the autumn in Berlin. On the 22nd and 23rd of October, the next weekend seminar for postal historians will be held at the Museum of Post and Telecommunications in Berlin.

A new partner of Projekt Silberwissen is the Geographical Society (GfE) in Berlin. In the first quarter of 2012, there will be a lecture with a discussion dealing with Wikipedia in the building of the Geographical Society in Berlin-Steglitz. Not only are members of GfE invited but also partners of this association. Following the lecture, workshops will be offered for those people who are interested. The final arrangements with the chroniclers of the district of Potsdam-Mittelmark (CPM) for participation in the Wikipedia project "Wiki Loves Monuments". One of the two scheduled workshops will take place on 10th September 10th in connection with the national monument open day. Chronicler from the region will get together to put their photos of monuments on the memorial lists in Wikipedia. The instructions in the workshop and the necessary information about licenses will be the responsibility of Aleksander Dera.

FUNDRAISING

In July, the second Wikimedium mailing with a focus on the World Heritage Initiative occurred. We are very pleased to report that we were able to gain through this initiative a total of 21 new members and numerous new donations.

Equally successful was the trial run for our first donor survey. We tested the questionnaire with 124 donors in early July. The result can clearly be seen: a response rate of 38%. On the basis of the findings of the preliminary tests, we found minor weaknesses and were able to improve the survey a bit. At the end of July the large survey began, which will be online for two weeks. We invited slightly more than 4,000 randomly selected donors to participate by mail and we are now eagerly awaiting the results.

Thirdly, we conducted a small initial test on www.wikipedia.de. For almost two days, we displayed a Jimmy banner , which was linked to a personal appeal from Wikipedia’s founder. In 50% of cases, the link led to a text file or a video version of the appeal. Unfortunately, the results are not very instructive when it comes to comparing the two appeals because there were fewer than 30 donations as a result of this mini-campaign.. We can say that as many donations were generated as a result of both the text and the video version. The video format thus seems to be no more effective than the pure text format. More detailed results of this test will follow shortly.

PROMOTING VOLUNTEERISM / COMMUNITY RELATIONS

Literature Stipend

After it was made possible in March for an academic subject to gain access to electronic literature through the “eLitstip“ of the literature stipend via a community initiative of the chemistry editorial staff, the WikiProjekt Africa has now followed suit. Seven authors will receive access to allafrica.com, an archive of African media concerning contemporary history, which will help to enrich the series of articles dealing with this topic. We hope that this example will encourage more newsrooms, portals, and wiki projects to contact us about the literature stipend and let us know about their desires for literature. The accompanying action to Wiki loves Monuments, which started at the end of June, has already borne fruit: some participants have made use of the offer. Wikimedia Germany provides them with literature, with which they can complete new pictures with Wikipedia texts. Anyone who wants to participate in this special aspect of Wiki loves Monuments has until August 8th to register. We look forward to having you participate.

Community Space

For the establishment of long-planned community spaces and the new Wikimedia Germany office, Sebastian Sooth had a look at other sites. With some owners, we are currently conducting preliminary discussions and hope to soon be able to present concrete properties.

Community Project Budget

Five projects from the first round of the community project budget were approved. Sebastian Sooth is in contact with the applicants, is supporting them in the next step of drawing up current project plans and is providing advice in regard to their implementation.

Photo Flight Los Angeles

It was as if he had anticipated the project "photo flights" (see above) that had been approved for our community project budget, the Wikipedia user -jcs- approached Wikimedia Germany not too long ago. He asked us if we might be prepared to fund a photography flight over Los Angeles, where he happened to be staying at the time. No sooner said than done: the opportunity seemed favorable and the flight and the goal to get photographically closer to the moloch known as Los Angeles made sense to us financially and otherwise. Denis gave –jcs- the desired support and in the coming weeks numerous pictures will enrich the category:Aerial_photographs_of_Los_Angeles.

We are excited not only about the result but also the fact that-jcs- came to us with his own idea. If you have an idea that you cannot realize only because you lack resources – please come and talk to us! We’re here for you.

WikiConvention

Preparations for WikiConvention, the meeting of the communities of the Wikimedia projects, which is going to be held from September 9th to 11th in Nuremberg, are going at full speed. On August 26th, the local organizers met with the participating employees of Wikimedia (John, Nicole and Simon) for the second planning meeting in Nuremberg. The preparation for the event is well underway. Responsibilities and to do lists were clarified, questions about catering, the program and participant support were discussed and we also ended up devising a nice slogan: "WikiCon - Knowledge begins with a W." Together with the Nuremberg Media Academy, Catrin prepared and sent out a press release. It is mentioned on the Wikipedia start page (site notice), and together we continue beating the big drum, so that our project communities become even more aware of this event. The registration is open until 15 August and we look forward to having many people come and participate. Our contact person is Nicole.

Wiki loves Monuments

The community continues to work on the additional and uniform creation and acquisition of lists of monuments for Wiki loves Monuments. Several cities are preparing to organize local actions to photograph monuments in the current competition in September. Here, among other places, Bergheim, Fürth (within the context of the WikiConvention), Hückeswagen and the Central Hese project that is funded by the community project tbudget. The contacting of authorities to release their lists of monuments and for possible partnerships has been difficult and has resulted in feedback. It is hoped that the first round in Germany will be so successful that contacting these organizations will be much easier next year. Often one encounters mistrust of our campaign, thus making the work under these less than optimal conditions in Germany (no uniform lists, no central collection point for lists, etc.) even more difficult. The text for a flyer was discussed and agreed upon. It will be printed in August and will then be distributed to as many potential participants and partner cities as possible. We will also be providing flyers to conservation authorities, museums and other cultural institutions. If you have any additional ideas for distributing these flyers or good ideas for the further distribution of flyers, then please let us know! The community has also selected a jury composed of members of the WikiProject Conservation, "normal" Wikipedians, Wikipedia / Commons photographers as well as external experts. Our contact persons are Nicole and Sebastian. Kilian has written a detailed report for our blog: Wiki Loves Monuments: projekte and cooperationen.

WissensWert (Worth Knowing)

News from the WissensWert competition can be viewed in the status report from the projects. The second round is still in the conceptual phase. For any questions you may have, Nicole is happy to provide an answer.

Volunteer Tickets

The insight that contributing to Wikipedia and its sister projects represents socially relevant voluntary work is, apparently slowly making itself known throughout German local governments. In July, the Berlin Senate responded positively to a request from Germany Wikimedia and sent the office a package of 25 tickets known as volunteer tickets, which are good for receiving adiscounted admission for two years at Berlin's numerous cultural and recreational institutions. The distribution of the tickets was discussed with the Berlin Wikipedia community and a list of interested parties was created, which will be closed at the end of July

In many other federal states, some authorities are now making volunteer tickets available such as in Lower Saxony, Bremen, Bavaria, Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia and Hesse. However, these tickets can only be individually applied for by active volunteers, provided that the local federal state is participating in the initiative. Wikimedia Germany can assist the applicant by certifying their steadfast commitment to Wikipedia & Co. Please send inquiries to Johannes Rohr.

Members

In July 2011, 24 applications were received for membership at Wikimedia, including 22 for sponsor membership and two for active membership. At the same time, two current members have informed us that they will cease being members by the end the year. Thus, the association has 919 active members and exactly 300 sponsor members for a total of 1,219 members and thus 63 more than in late May. It can thus be stated that daily a new member comes our way.

SCIENCE

RENDER

Wikimedia is a partner in the EU research project RENDER. In July we continued to work on the formulation of concrete metrics. Here we want to assess different aspects of diversity in Wikipedia articles such as relevance, completeness, and sentiment. On July 26th and 27th in Sofia, Bulgaria, the third project meeting took place at our project partner Ontotext. There we discussed these metrics and the existing technical points of contact with our other consortium partners. Additionally, we discussed the current status of the various sets of tasks and jointly defined steps, which must be completed by the end of September – when several large subpackages are due. A precise overview of the individual work packages can be found on the official EU project page. For several days there has been a project page (currently in English). There you will find some details about the project, our goals, our ideas and its current state. You can post your questions and suggestions on the discussion page and discuss them with us. Whoever else has additional ideas for scientific publications dealing with this topic is invited to add to the RENDER bibliographie. Angelika will answer any questions you might have.

Wikipedia Author Survey 2011

For two weeks from July 7th to 25th, there was an extensive and detailed study on the satisfaction of Wikipedia authors, which was carried out by Wikimedia German and which was started with the support of the Wikimedia Foundation. During this period of time, over 2,000 participants provided information about their involvement with Wikipedia, their motivation and their experiences with Wikipedia. There are important differences to previous studies; namely, in this study consideration is being made of unregistered authors ("IPs") and there is an international comparison of the authorship of the German version of Wikipedia with the English version of Wikipedia. Also looking back at the 2009 preliminary study interesting trends can be identified. A first short feedback on the study will be given by Manuel Schneider at the Wikimania event in Haifa. More will come at the WikiCon and the Wikipedia Academy.

OFFICE WORK

Budget Planning 2012

The year 2012 may still be a bit down the road but we have already begun the initial preparations for the financial planning of 2012 "Is that S.M.A.R.T. enough? "was a phrase often heard before during the last few weeks in the office – we are in the process of developing S.M.A.R.T formulated goals for the financial year 2012, which we then want to advance to the general meeting for discussion. S.M.A.R.T goals are be a method, with which goals can be formulated in a particular specific manner so that they can be measured, can be tested in regard to feasibility and can be ascertained in a realistic and timely way. And thus we can have a better perspective when it comes to obtaining our results.

Compass 2020

Additionally, we have given feedback on revising Compass 2020, which the Board is currently reworking.