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Wikimujeres/Reports/2016-17

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At Iberoconf 2017, Buenos Aires. Watch the video Wikimedia Argentina made about it and in which we participated!

Wikimujeres has now completed its second year of existence! During 2016/2017, the goal of the User Group has been to expand the local community, develop programs and events with like-minded local institutions and international partners, and continue its strategy process to fulfill its mission of reducing the gendergap and increasing the quality and quantity of articles related to women, regardless of language. What follows is the annual report and highlights of the User Group for the last 12 months. You can find the 2015/16 report here, and a raw, day-by-day, activity list here.

Establishing our local communities

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Workshop at CIME Etxebarri, Basque Country.

During 2015/2016 we started out with working spaces in Madrid and Barcelona, and in 2016/17 we have continued and solidified this approach in other regions too like the Basque Country. These periodical working spaces offer new editors a place to come and learn how to edit, to ask any questions they may have regarding the projects, and to start getting a sense of belonging to a community. All workshops are guided by long-term editors of excellent standing in their projects. We have observed that having a sense of belonging can predict a deeper long-term engagement in the projects - while people join because of the mission and because they share the values of the movement, they stay because they feel they are part of something, and that feeling is accelerated when editing with other people. While it may seem counterintuitive, editing can be a social activity. The camaderie that comes from being part of an offline group is not easy to create, but it is key to keep people returning and contributing.

Events

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Editatona of Women Scientists, February 2017.

We have continued to celebrate events in addition to our regular workshops. Our editatonas have all been wildly successful - we have averaged 45-55 people per event during the year. These editatonas are thematic: we have organised them for women scientists, women travellers, and with the excuse of the Night of the Books in Madrid, we have organised the first-ever nocturnal editatona, focused on Women Programmers, which was fully attended despite running from 9pm to 3am! Encouraged by this success, we celebrated a second nocturnal editatona, to determine if it had been a once-in-a-lifetime thing or if we might have discovered someting that appeals to the public. This second nocturnal event, called Wikibrujas, took place on Halloween from 9pm to 3am - and was another wonderful success. While it is tempting to continue carrying on this kind of event, we don't believe we can do them very regularly - they are more taxing on the Wikimedians leading the events (concentrating at 2am can be challenging) and people tend to be destroyed the next day, and we want to prevent burnouts. Still, it is a very different kind of atmosphere and vibe during the night, and we may repeat it in the future!

 
Editatona of Women Travellers, March 2017.
 
First nocturnal editatona for the Night of Books. Madrid, April 2017.

During the year we have also tried to tackle the lack of free images of notable women. We have started several initiatives to try to reduce this problem, including a contest about images from Women Writers. We believe images of women is an important gap that needs to be addressed, and we are going to experiment with several ways to try to reduce it.

Collaborations with partners

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We have continued to collaborate with Wikimedia-related partners and local institutions.

 
WikiWomenCamp 2017.
 
Working with universities: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. February 2017.
 
Working with universities: teaching at the Graduate Diploma in Gender and Equality. Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, 2017.
 
Editatona Wikibrujas, Halloween, 2017.

WikiWomenCamp

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As described in last year's report, one of the goals for this year was the celebration of WikiWomenCamp 2017, an event co-organised by Wikimedia México, Wikimedia Argentina and Wikimujeres. WikiWomenCamp took place on July 2017 in Mexico City. This was an opportunity to meet women from around the world and exchange experiences and thoughts on the strategy process. One of the distinguishing features of this conference was simultaneous translation, which allowed people to participate in their own language. We believe this is the future of the Wikimedia Movement - we cannot keep having English as an entry barrier to international conferences and conversations.

 
Presenting at the Foro Social de América Latina 2017.
 
At the WikiWomen session of the Wikimedia Conference, Berlin 2017.

With regard to the global trends of the conference, we would like to signal that we are concerned that there is no general framework for tackling the gendergap or harassment (and there is no need to create one or reinvent the wheel - these frameworks exist outside the Wikimedia ecosystem), and this is one of the things we are determined to put on the table in the global conversations. We cannot continue to try to figure out what is and is not harassment when there are international agreements and protocols that are crystal clear about this. If we need to adapt one to the Movement, by all means let's do it, but let's not act as though harassment is a mysterious thing or subject to differences of opinion. We can do better than this, and we must.

Iberocoop

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We have continued to participate this year in the Iberocoop initiatives and events, most notably at Iberoconf 2017 in Buenos Aires. Out of that conference came the Carta de Buenos Aires, of which we are signatories and which we fully support. We do appreciate the support we had for the use of inclusive language in the Carta - it might seem like a minor thing, but it is not - and we wish to highlight how important it is for the Wikimedia Movement to stress the importance of tackling the language barriers.

Affiliates

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Beyond this, aside from our regular collaborations with Wikimedia Argentina, Wikimedia México and WikiDonne, especially with the work we are preparing for Las Imprescindibles, we have been nurturing the Bolivian group, supporting their growth and participating in person at one of their conferences in La Paz and a workshop in Quito, and have supported the Tunisian user group for Arabic Wikipedia Day. We have likewise supported international contests, such as BBC 100 Women.

Local institutions

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At the local level, we have strengthened ties with institutions like Instituto de la Mujer, universities like Pompeu Fabra, Autónoma de Barcelona and Autónoma de Madrid, cultural institutions such as Medialab-Prado, and we are moving forward to establish ties with groups with similar missions to us.

Wikimedia Strategy Direction

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We went to the Wikimedia Conference but not to Wikimania. Despite this, our participation in the Strategy Process has been constant. On October 2017 we have fully endorsed the Strategic Direction for the Wikimedia Movement. We have great hopes for this process, and look forward to continue participating in it.

Outreach in different ecosystems

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Wikimujeres has dedicated the year to doing outreach with civil associations, women organisations and feminist groups. We even took advantage of our image contest to celebrate the Day of Women Writers to contact and involve es:Clásicas y Modernas and the Spanish National Library. One of the most important events in which we took part this year was the Foro Social de América Latina (Social Forum of Latin America), where we were invited to the plenary panel of project presentations for the Dialogues for a Citizens' Internet.

We have also been very active in other kinds of panels and sessions on communication and gender. We participated in the Feminario that is celebrated every year in Cordoba, where the main feminist organisations of Spain participate, and at other high impact events such as the Día del Amor por el Software Libre (Day of Free Software Love) in Madrid, the Encuentro sobre Red de Centros de Documentación y Bibliotecas de Mujeres in Barcelona, etc. We believe this is consistent with the Wikimedia Strategic Direction - going beyond the Wikimedia ecosystem to learn from other movements and work with them.

Social media

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Wikimujeres has continued to be very active on social media, and as a result we have grown our numbers of followers and positive interactions. Our Facebook page has more than 13,700 followers and 13,200 likes and our Twitter account has ~2165 followers. Our blog is used for announcements and reports of conferences - it is difficult to regularly maintain it with just volunteers. We have found Facebook and Twitter to be better to increase our reach. We have identified our use of social media as one of the key components for the success of our events.

Media

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Many of the events we have celebrated had strong media repercussion. A selected list of meaningful media mentions and interviews follows:

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