Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Deutschland/June 2010

Dear Chapters,

please find below the chapter report of Wikimedia Germany for June 2010.

Dear friends of free knowledge,

School project

At the end of June the deadline for application for consultants for the Wikipedia-school project closed. Among many interesting and dedicated applications we also received offers for support from teachers, scientists and mediaculturecentres. To prepare selected candidates for their tasks we have invited them from the 23th-25th of July to Essen (at the Linuxhotel). During this summer-camp [1] we are going to develop standardized schooling and the necessary material for the coming workshops. In order to be able to start the first workshops with the new consultants directly after the summer holidays, we started and intensified contact with the media centers and media consultants.

Additionally we prepared a workshop at the Berlin Lessing-Grammar School. There we will communication about the correct and critical handling of text with 30 pupils on the 5th of July using Wikipedia as an example. The workshop will be accompanied by a camera team of the RBB.

Zedler-Medal 2010

In July the first meetings and talks with partners and potential supporters occurred. In cooperation with publishing company Spektrum der Wissenschaft ("Spectrum of Science") and the Academy of Science and the Literature Mainz, Wikimedia Germany is going to increase the dedication to the Zedler-Medal [2] this year. Concept, targets and target-group were partly modified and the competition expanded by a few aspects: Due to the Year of Science 2010 Wikimedia will offer a special prize for the topic "Future of Energy" [3] additional to the awards for natural-science and humanities. In addition to articles another special prize will be offered for outstanding photos or graphics, which illustrate an insufficient article in the German Wikipedia.

The competition is about to begin on the 15th of July and will end on the 30th of September. The Award-ceremony will occur in November in Frankfurt in context of the Wikipedia Academy.

This year we want to increase including members and community in planning and organization and have asked for concrete help [4] in a few points. We are especially happy to present David Ludwig, a member of many years and winner of the Medal 2009, as a member of the jury.

At the moment we are looking for cooperation with partners, which will help us with the event, for example sponsoring the award-money, donation of material prizes or helping us with covering the costs of the event.

Wikipedia Academy 2010

Also the preparations for the Wikipedia academy, which will occur in November 2010, is taking more and more shape. The key context of this year's event is the Year of Science 2010 "Future of Energy". Central purpose of this conference will be an exchange of concepts about knowledge-use and communication as well as a discussion about the question of broad effect versus scientific accuracy in online-projects such as Wikipedia. Among others the main aim of the academy is the increase of public awareness for the societal relevant topic-complex "Future of Energy" as well as the retrieval of further qualified Wikipedia authors, lecturers and editors for the topic of energy.

For the sake of further development the dialogue between Science and Wikipedia, we will include experiences from projects such as "Renewable resources in Wikipedia" and intensify contact to external experts. In context of the Academy the starting signal for the network "Trust lecturers for free knowledge" in German grammar schools.

We chose Frankfurt as venue for this event, the search for adequate conference rooms and cooperation-partners will be continued in July.

Skillshare

During the first weekend in June the Community-event "Skillshare" [5] occurred in Lüneburg, which was also supported by Wikimedia Germany, during which multiple members offered workshops. The atmosphere was as good as the organizations, the workshops were excellently prepared and the feedback from the community was very good.

Board of directors-meeting

Mid-June the Board of directors-meeting occurred in Lage, about which were reported in detail here [6]. The agency prepared this meeting, i.e. we organized the accommodation and catering, ensured that the equipment works and much, much more. Yet again the CEO accepted the invitation by the board of directors and took part.

Lobbying

It is more and more noticeable: the new Enquete-commission "Internet and digital society" [7] led to an clear increase in interest of the political parties in regards to net politic topics. Also Wikimedia Germany is sought of as contact person, as a result I was invited in June to a talk with members of the Bundestag (Lars Klingbeil [8] (SPD), Sylvia Canel [9] (FDP) and me were invited to a "net politics dialogue" with the Green party. During such meetings I mention the school-project as well as questions about copyrights. In order to be better able to show our position in future, Mathias is currently working, in context of the Compass 2020, on a series of position-papers about for us important political questions, which then can be communicated to the responsible decision makers.

Third Basket

End of June the Federal Ministry of Justice started the hearing of the Third Basked about copyrights, among other things it is concerned with the ancillary copyright for publishers. The coming hearings will be concerned about Open Access and Orphan Works. Wikimedia Germany is invited to these hearings and will take part. This is the beginning of a very long process.

Open Government Data

On the 17th of June occurred in the Ministry of Economics of Niedersachsen a conference of task group about "Open Government Data", in which Mathias took part. The Ministry is at the beginning of a process if, how and which data of the Ministry can be published and which benefits it would bring for the land.

Free Catalogue-data

The library of the RWTH Aachen is now also a member of the growing circle of libraries which offer free access to their catalogue (License CCO) [10].

Wikisource

As mentioned in last month's report, we are very happy, that the digitization of the book "Funny natural history or zoologia Comica, which is an accurate description of all in this book occurring animals of the world with 86 accurate illustrations" [11] by Franz Bonn from 1877 has now arrived: Natural science; with pretty but not too serious illustrations.

With this, five books of this authors are now available by Wikisource in fully corrected versions: "The funny natural history" from 18772 of which the image/text site about "Vampyr" [12] should be mentioned and the sequel second book "Funny Botany and Geology" [13] in second edition of 1880. Additionally writings "To modern education" [14] of 1836, "Laypeople- scientific Lecture by Dr. Sulphurius about School and education" [16] from 1880 and "laypeople-scientific lecture about Chemistry by Dr. Sulphurius" of 1882 [16].

It took long until the delivery of the in two volumes coming book "Fantasypiece in Callot's manner" [17], which E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote between 1814-15: Ordered in January, the CD finally arrived in June. By now the PDFs of this 2nd edition of the work from 1819 to regeneration and editing has started. Who wants to help and has time to, is invited to help editing.

The best for the end! Until a few days ago there was a gap in by Wikisource published editions of "Children and Home fairy tales" of the Brothers Grimm; in each case the first and second volume of the 1. (1812/15), 2. (1819) and the 4. to 6. edition (1840,-43, -50 and -57) and the first volume of the 3. edition of 1837 were available (List of all volumes: [18]) but the 2. volume of the 3. edition were still missing. Paulis found this volume by chance in the catalogue of the national library of Berlin and the Wikisource employees did not hesitate long with the Digitalsat-request: This PDF will no slowly suspended and is also waiting for keen helpers for the editing [19].

Themes in the Media

The press release [20] about the new user interface evoked little interest by the press and almost solely caused news coverage by Online-media.

Another source for interest from the media was the deletion of pornographic images from the Commons and the announcement of Wikimedia Foundation, or rather the Board of Trustees to employ an external consultant, to develop a suggestion about the handling of potential offensive materials. Questions of the German press were mainly concerned with background information.

Press contacts

Catrin established in June contact to the Polish Embassy in Berlin, in order to reach, in context of the Wikimania 2010 in Gdansk, the local German press as well as Polish journalists. The embassy is willing to send out invitations and press releases via their press-distributors and to provide contacts to the media. Unfortunately the organisation of the Wikimania is going slowly.

Contacts to the media such as "Brandeins" [21] and the "Neon-Magazin" [22] led in June to intensive preparations and research for in-depth Wikipedia-Portraits. Catrin is currently creating a distributor for Wikipedia-authors, to have faster access to potential interview partners in the future. Precondition is especially, the willingness to speak with journalists, the publishing of photographs of the authors and naming of the full name.

In context of the school-project Catrin started contact to the rbb [23] (a public TV-channel) and is currently preparing a coverage for the evening show. Denis Bartel will give a workshop in July at a Grammar-school in Berlin, which will be accompanied by a camera team of the rbb. More information and air-time will follow.

Wikimedium

In June preparations for the 3rd editions started, which will be published in August. Currently Catrin is collecting ideas for editorial topics. Due to a cooperation with the host of the Science Berlin 2010 [24] the contents will be expanded and for the next edition are, for the first, external articles planned. Additionally Catrin is in negotiations with the print office, to increase the length of the wikimedium by 2-4 sites and to double circulation from 5.000 to 10.000. Since the print office is offering the newspaper for free, we hope to extent this engagement.

Knowledge in Clip format

The realization and cooperation with the Berlin Fenster GmbH (a journey TV in trains) had to be delayed, because license- and tax related issues about the use of Wikipedia contents, the compliance of licensing and the integration of Donation-appeals took more time than anticipated. From the beginning of July the Knowledge-clips should be shown in Berlin's underground-trains. With careful preparation and development of written contracts with potential (media-) partners Catrin will (hopefully) be able to achieve future cooperation faster.

Further talks with media partners are followed up annually and are searched among other things project related. For example is Catrin currently searching for another media partner in addition to the Spectrum Publisher of Science. For this there will be talks in July with the Hessisch Radio and The Frankfurter Rundschau.

Festschrift

Due to encouragement by Marcus Cyron [25] (Wikipedia-author and member) an anniversary writing was created. Ideas, concepts and writing was supplied by Marcus Cyron and Catrin printed in cooperation with PediaPress 25 copies. In July we will report who received them- we don't want to spoil the surprise :) In context of Compass 2010 are the following arrangements in the area PR still to be taken care of:

The information leaflets for Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource and Wikiversity are in the final stages: Texts are almost finished and the layouts are integrated or rather adjusted, shortened and supplied with graphs and images. Individual Community-members helped Catrin with the development of texts and layouts. In the third quartile the production of the information leaflets is meant to be finished for all 10 Wikimedia-projects.

Due to the 10. anniversary of Wikipedia next Year the Club plans to publish a Wikipedia book. In context of the book project first preparations, research and talks with wikipedians have started. The first contents were collected, contact to potential publishers was picked up and further working steps were defined. Further details can be found in the next report.

Members

In the course of June we recruited 20 new members, of which 3 applied for active- and 17 for sponsoring membership. Unfortunately we also received a note of termination.

On the 2. of June all member were contacted by mail who pay their fees via bill or transfer: if you did not receive a mail from us, look maybe in your spam file or give us your new email address (office@wikimedia.de).

Also contacted (25th of June) were all members who pay via direct debit: we will collect all member fees on the 5th of July for the year 2010. Also this time the appeal: If your bank connection has change since last year please let us now via email (also office@wikimedia.de).

Community Budget

We enabled Martin Zeise to travel to Belgrade: There he took part in the 4th regional Wikimedia conference Western Balkan, which was held on the 5th and 6th of June by Wikimedia Serbia. He was one of 25 Wikipedians which took part, who mostly arrived from Serbia. About the contents and topics of the conference are a few citations from Martins report (obviously with his consent):

There was a quickly developed German-Polish-Hungarian presentation about sighted versions, which are not yet integrated in the Serbian Wikipedia. The lecturers however, were not able to convince the locals about the usefulness of this activity, rather it was perceived as a "scheme aimed to create work".

Further key points were lectures and discussions about the critical handling of sources using the "Prophecy of Kremna" [26] as an example, the meaning of the work of stewards for the smaller Wikipedias, censorship within Wikipedia (on the basis of image deletion from Jimbo Wales) as well as the future of Wikipedia in general. Here the German Wikipedia was used as an example for a "saturated Wikipedia" with a constant number of active, alternatively very active users, or rather new articles, but with reducing number of new users.

The presentation and discussion about guidelines about allocation of money from the Community-Budget was topic of a workshop, which Henriette held on the 4th of June at the "Skillshare" conference: 18, mainly Wikipedians, were not only interested in the topic, but also had lively discussions, good suggestions & ideas and criticized when they thought it to be necessary. We want to thank every participants for their valuable input, which will be integrated in the new versions of the guidelines.

Literature scholarship

Last month we were able to celebrate a nice anniversary with the thousands article, meanwhile the "daily trade" continued processing new applications but in parallel also works on the announce relaunch are done. To not get ahead of ourselves, there won't be further details on this now, but more information will be given during the next month.

From the engine room

Since the beginning of June an external IT-provider is handling the IT-infrastructure in our office. To begin with this is handling simple things such as a standardized Backup-solution or a better telephone-system, etc.

The area development we had some advances: the extension to display TIFF-images is now in the review stage by members of foundation, it seems that the extension might soon be available to Wikimedia Wikis. Further Daniel Kinzler implemented a first prototype of the extension to integrate bibliographic data ("DataTransclusion"). Different solutions to service the data are still discussed.

The integration of external data can be tested in our new prototype-Wiki here [27] a short text, this site [28] offers an insight about how this is meant to be used when it is finished. The TIFF-extension is also active in this Wiki, as demonstration this example [29] is used.

At the end of the months we were hosts of the third Wiki4Enterprise-meeting. These MediaWiki-user meetings are concerned with the exchange of experience and Know-How between companies and institutions, which use Wikis.

Fundraising

June was shaped by numerous small but important activities and meetings.

On the 11th of June there has been a meeting between representatives of Wikimedia Germany and the German central institution of the Blind in Leipzig. During this meeting the possible cooperation to improve the access of blind and visually impaired to Wikipedia was discussed. Among others the topic was the creation of the article of the day as podcast as well as the related technical issues. Further there have been talks about the campaign "Wikipedia to listen", which is meant to be the beginning of a long-term collaboration as a fundraising campaign. However, this campaign is not to start until next year.

Further multiple meeting with fundraising agencies and providers of donated software was held. The decision about cooperation as well as selection of donated software will take place in July.

Finally three fund-raising activities are to be mentioned. Firstly, soon an information campaign for German donors of the Wikimedia Foundation will start. Aim of this is inform about activities of Wikimedia Germany and in a second step the gaining and binding of these donors. For this Till Mletzko is in contact with Rand Montoya, the responsible fundraiser for Wikimedia Foundation. Secondly the selected donors for Wikimedium were contacted. With this activity "Faces behind Wikipedia" we want to enable donors to tell their story. This possibility will be expanded in the future. Last but not least the we have to mention the successfully running funding membership-campaign. Through this 16 new funding members could be gained until the end of June.

The next report will be published on the 2nd of August 2010 (in German, aprox. one week later in English)

Links

Kind regards, / Mit freundlichen Grüßen,

Pavel Richter Executive Director

Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. Eisenacher Straße 2 10777 Berlin