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Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Deutschland/May 2013

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Politics and Society

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Federal Elections in Germany: Fact Checking with TV stations ZDF and Phoenix

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Tim Moritz Hector is the Wikipedian in Residence of this project and has, together with a team consisting of ZDF and Phoenix staff, successfully finished the first two weeks of the pilot phase. A report about the ZDFcheck has been published on the blog of WMDE. In addition, the first info graphics have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. For example, one of the graphics illustrates the fiscal revenue in Germany according to its regional administrative bodies. For the month of June a workshop about the Wikimedia projects and the preferred licenses is planned for the staff of the ZDF office in Berlin.

This endeavor is part of the annual project "Excellent Partnerships."

New Edition of the GLAM Broschure

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The new edition of the GLAM brochure has been published. It is a handout for cultural and national heritage institutions in the German-speaking world and illustrates the many possibilities for a collaboration with Wikimedia Deutschland. It is the goal of the publication to encourage cultural instutions (most of all those that can be subsumed under the acronym GLAM which stands for galleries, libraries, archives and museums) to actively engage in the Wikimedia projects. We especially focused on portraying the different forms of collaboration. By making the text of the brochure available on the German Wikipedia we invite all those interested to actively improve or update the text.

The brochure is another part of the annual project "Excellent Partnerships."

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During the Open Sunday right after the general assembly of WMDE, members of the association, Wikipedians and staff talked about relevant questions regarding Wikipedia activities in the cultural sector.

GLAM - What do We Want From Cultural Institutions?

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This session was about new ideas from the community and members of the association about how cooperations can be expanded beyond established formats such as photo excursions or editathons with GLAM institutions. On the one hand, possible forms of cooperation have been gathered and discussed while on the other hand wishful results of the cooperations between Wikipedians and cultural institutions were talked about. The best possible outcome of these collaborations would be a self-evident usage of free licenses in the daily routine of cultural institutions. It was especially emphasized that personal contact is the best door opener and that careful planning of a collaboration is necessary for serving both the individual needs of the Wikipedia communities and GLAM partners.

Ideas and results have been documented on Meta.

Wikipedian in Residence

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Based on the experiences of former Wikipedians in Residence new formats have been developed that can be used to accompany the program. Ideas ranged from identifying Wikipedians who already work for the respective institution to an improved documentation of the measures. There are also notes to this session.

Opening of the Administration: Open.NRW and Govdata

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At the invitation of the state administration of Northrhine-Westfalia, a one-day event took place in the state parliament on May 17. This event was about the open.nrw agenda which is about opening the federal state and its administration for third parties. Components of this strategy are Open Data, a strong freedom of information and a regular process for involvement. It is neither a short nor a straight way to achieving that. There is a summary about it on the Wikimedia Deutschland blog.

On the federal level, the Department of the Interior is working on a response from the civil society about the conditions of the Datenlizenz Deutschland (data license Germany). We participated in a meeting of the sub-working group Law and made some suggestions for a future version of this license which were partly adopted. We continue to stand by our initial assessment that there is no need for yet another new license and that a release under CC-0 or another free Creative Commons license is possible. In how far data can be used conflict-free in terms of the Geodatennutzungsverordnung (geodata usage regulation) remains to be seen:

Blog posts on the Wikimedia copyright blog:

Education and Knowledge

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Tour of Free Knowledge

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In September (9/14-15 2013) Wikimedia Deutschland will host the OER conference "Free Learning Material in Germany" in Berlin. Together with our partners and supporters it will all be about getting together with other people in order to show why free learning and teaching materials (open educational resources - OER) are an important topic in Germany. In addition, the call for participation started and submissions for sessions and talks about free learning material can be made by June 23, 2013. We are particularly happy about the submissions dealing with the social implications, practice, quality and funding of free material. More about the conference and the CFP can be found on our website.

Moreover, the project "Schulbuch-O-Mat" (schoolbook machine) has been nominated for the Zedler-Prize for Free Knowledge and in the course of that offered a workshop at WMDE's Open Sunday. Thanks so much for that! If you have questions or comments, please contact oer@wikimedia.de.

Diversity for Wikipedia

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Together with the International Department and the Event Management at Wikimedia Deutschland, we started planning the conference about diversity on Wikipedia (focusing on gender diversity) which will take place on November 9 and 10 in Berlin. WMDE would like to introduce new ideas for increasing gender diversity in Wikipedia and talk about these with the international community. At the moment, we are right in the middle of the planning process and would like to win over partners from the international movement for this conference in order to set up a program in collaboration with them.

During the Open Sunday which took place at the office of WMDE after the first general assembly of the association in 2013, Ilona Buchem, professor at the Beuth School for Applied Sciences, offered a workshop about "Diversity and Quality on Wikipedia." In the course of this workshop first results of the research projects were summarized and interesting discussions about the quality, gender ratio and self-image of Wikipedia took place.

Evaluation of the Department's Activities

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At the beginning of May we published a report about the activities of the department. This report is a self-critical reflection of the activities in the educational sector we carried out from 2010 til 2012 and concentrates on the content-related conception and implementation of these measures, as well as its framework and infrastructure. The report tries to show strengths and weaknesses and serves as a basis for improving the quality of future measures and discussions. The conclusions of the report focus strongly on structures and target groups, the establishment of mechanisms for quality assurement, the interaction between volunteering and structured educational work, as well as the development of material and cooperations. You can find the full report here.

Shared Knowledge Initiative

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After publishing the report we will now focus on initiating projects for finding new contributors to the Wikimedia projects. Finding older people who want to contribute to the projects will be one aspect of that. We will work on that in the EU project Third Age Online (TAO). In the course of this project two events took place in Germany last month: Hosts of services for online communities talked with representatives of senior citizen organizations in one workshop at the Center for General Scientific Training at the University of Ulm. Topics were strategies and measures for how the target group of over 50-year-olds can successfully be accompanied into the digital world. One of the important results of the discussions was the shared realization that senior citizens find their place in online communities through their topics of interest. Elvira Schmidt represented the department Education and Knowledge with a talk about "Silberwissen - Wissen in der Wikipedia teilen" (Silberwissen - Sharing Knowledge through Wikipedia). In a second event which was also probably the last work meeting, the management board of TAO talked about the necessary steps for the closing of the project on September 30, 2013.

Wikipedia Consultants Network

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After a discussion about restructuring the consultants network it is now important to talk about future collaborations with all parties involved. In order to do so, future contact persons, means of communication and supporting tools are developed for the network. Enabling voluntary consultants to contact educational institutions directly is our goal. A discussion of open questions is going on at the Forum Wiki (registration necessary).

Team Communities

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Scholarships

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Members of the Portal:Chemistry met for the 8th time and were supported by Wikimedia Deutschland. They met in Mainz this time. The minutes show the manifold foci of the work meeting. Lydia Pintscher was there in order to answer questions about Wikidata, the VisualEditor and other technical projects.

An overview about the current state of supported CPB proposals can be found on the project page of the Community Projects Budget. On the general assemly, it was also resolved to install a workgroup that will be concerned with the future of the committee. It will develop suggestions for the CPB's revision by the next general assembly.

The annual project "Drop by Sometime" which focuses on supporting local activists is picking up pace. At the moment, a workshop in Cologne is in the works.

Zedler-Prize Finalists

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The Zedler-Prize for Free Knowledge has been awarded. It honors people who render outstanding service to free knowledge. The great evening can be relived with the live blog and the many pictures on Wikimedia Commons. Once again, we congratulate all the winners (El Greco, Wiki Project Osttimor, wheelmap.org)!

Research and Development

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RENDER

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Our supporting tools will be published at the beginning of June. The development team took many suggestions from the RENDER tour and discussion pages about the beta tools into consideration and made a number of changes. More will be announced on the project page on the publishing date.

On the annual Hackathon in Amsterdam, Johannes Kroll introduced the Limes visualizing tool which had already been moved to the Tool Labs environment. The tool was met with broad interest and could be the foundation for similar projects. The event was also used to increase the popularity of CatGraph. The tool serves as backend and searches the category tree for articles that are contained in it. In contrast to previous methods this tool is much faster. CatGraph will also move to Tool Labs for a test period and can be used as the foundation for various bot tasks.

Wikidata

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The Wikidata team worked on two bigger things in May: First, data can now be used in Wikipedia articles by means of their name and not their ID anymore. Secondly, it is now possible to enter time in Wikidata, e.g. the birthday of a person. Magnus Manske wrote a blog post about the tools that have already been developed for and with the help of Wikidata. In the coming three months, the Wikidata team will support three Google Summer of Code students. Two other students will work on Wikidata in different organizations.

Wikidata's code has been externally reviewed and received a very good assessment. The results have been published. In addition, the team participated in the annual MediaWiki hackathon in Amsterdam again. This prototype of a multilingual map is one of the results of this event.

International Affairs

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Wikimedia Hackathon in Amsterdam

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On the second to last weekend in May, Nicole Ebber (as well as colleagues from the Wikidata and RENDER projects) joined the Hackathon in Amsterdam, which had been organized by Wikimedia Nederland for the first time. Before the event, Nicole supported the Dutch chapter during the preparations and passed on all her material and experience from the previous years to the new organizers. The goal of her attendance at the hackathon was also to talk with members of the Wikimedia Foundation about optimizing the communication and collaboration between WMDE, local communities and the Foundation. Topics like the VisualEditor, the new notification system Echo and the WikiTech Ambassadors were the foci of these talks. Besides technical topics Nicole also had the opportunity to exchange ideas about the project Chapters Dialogue with potential partners.

WMF Elections: Board of Trustees and FDC

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Together with Cornelius Kibelka (working student in the department for International Affairs) Nicole Ebber made preparations to accompany the Wikimedia Foundation elections. The community will elect new members to the Board of Trustees and the Funds Dissemination Committee from June 8-22. Besides profiles of the candidates (Board, FDC, FDC ombudsperson) questions to and answers from the candidates were translated into German for the first time. It is our goal to considerably raise interest and voting partcipation in the German-speaking communities by means of this low-threshold offer. Questions and suggestions about the election can be directed at Nicole Ebber.

Public Relations

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Press Work

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Press coverage about Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikipedia and the work of Wikimedia community members can be accessed via the association's website. A number of reports have been accompanied by intensive briefings and talks on site at the Berlin office. One of these reports was about WMDE's fundraiser Till Mletzko in the printed edition of the German weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT. It introduced online fundraising as a profession, especially in the NGO sector.

Annual Report 2012

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At the beginning of the month the printed version of the annual report 2012 was published. It summarizes Wikimedia Deutschland's activities and goals from the last year for members of the association, donors, community members and other interested parties. At the same time, the report also accounts for its finances in an extensive part that includes balance sheets, income statement, an allocation of costs and income distribution. The report for 2012 has also been audited by the KPMG AG and has been attested with an unqualified auditor's report. Another premiere was the Wiki version of this report, which has also been created in May and can be accessed on the website of WMDE. The online version has also been translated into English and published as Wiki text.

Quarterly Report No. 1

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Another extensive report, in contrast to the annual report is the first one of its kind: In May, we published the first quarterly report about the current state of WMDE's goals and projects. Every three months now, we will publicly balance the goals that have been passed by the general assembly of WMDE. More details about the quarterly report can be found on the blog. This report is available in German and English.

Information Material

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In May, the new edition of the GLAM brochure for players and Wikipedians in the cultural sector has been produced. The printed version has later been transformed into a Wikipedia version as well. For the Zedler-Prize award show, WMDE also produced invitation cards, certificates, gift certificates for the winners, roll up displays, banners and the awards themselves. In addition, the flyers accompanying the welcome letters to those who became WMDE members after the fundraising campaign have also been revised.

Fundraising

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The fundraising team used May to review the fundraising campaign from last year and to make first preparations for the campaign this year. Some interesting things were found out this month, e.g. how personal appeals can be successfully combined with the facts banner. Just like all the other test results, these were published on the fundraising page on Wikipedia.

The mailing of donation receipts has also been reviewed in May: Just like every year, we included a membership application in the mailing in order to ask our donors for more support. Out of 83,000 recipients, almost 1,500 reacted to our question for more support. It is especially great that also 1,100 people decided to become a member of WMDE. This amounts to a member base of 6,436 members - 4,774 sustaining members and 1,662 active members. For the first time, we asked our members to increase their membership dues. Out of the 2,400 members we contacted 52 used this opportunity to increase their contribution. It can thus be said that the mailing of donation receipts has once again been one of the most important campaigns for increasing the involvement of our supporters.

The fundraising team also dealt with a survey by the Wikimedia Foundation that will be conducted soon. For a short period of time, a banner on Wikipedia will advertise for taking part in this survey but it will only be visible to users who are not logged in. This survey will try to get more insight into the perception of donation banners by the readers of Wikipedia.

Job Postings

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You can find all job postings at Wikimedia Deutschland on the website. Just recently, we posted a job in team fundraising.

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