CEE/Newsletter/March 2018/Contents/Armenia report

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Contents

Armenia report: Contests, Community trainings, Funding, GLAM

Austrian-Armenian contest winner in Armenia

By Dato Abuladze, Davit Saroyan (Wikimedia Armenia)

On November 1-30, 2017 Wikimedia Armenia and Wikimedia Austria organized the Austrian-Armenian collaboration month, when many Armenia and Austria related articles were improved on Armenian and German Wikipedias. The winner was selected based on the quantity and quality of written articles. Armenian winner had a chance to visit Austria for 5 days.

From the other side, the Austrian winner - Mathias Sussen - visited Armenia, many Armenian cultural and sightseeing places. On March 12, Mathias led a workshop on Mobile journalism in LOFT center, Yerevan. Many Armenian bloggers, experienced and new journalists attended the workshop. Mathias talked about the rules of mobile journalism, suggested best apps for mobile video editing and advised how to use the final product.

Media links

The Story Is Essential, And Techniques And Applications Are Secondary

Community capacity building

Media literacy workshop at Wikimedia Armenia: By Dato Abuladze, Davit Saroyan, Lilit Tarkhanyan (Wikimedia Armenia)

In order to support the capacity building of Armenian Wikimedia community, Wikimedia Armenia has decided to organize regular capacity building trainings for the community. The first one, named “Media literacy and wiki” was held at Wikimedia Armenia office, on March 16. This workshop was arranged in collaboration with Media Initiative Center.

At the workshop attendees, mostly Wikipedians, learned how to work with information sources, how to check those sources. There was also a discussion how fake news are disseminated in the traditional Armenian media and social media environment and how this process influences Wikipedia.

Copyrights workshop

On March 30 Wikimedia Armenia with its legal partner - Legallab, had organized its next capacity building seminar for its editors. The speakers were Narek Ashughatoyan and Tatevik Gharibyan, experienced lawyers in the copyrights. The participants had a chance to learn how the copyright law works and what are the most common copyright infringements in Armenia. What kind of exclusive rights have the copywriters, what is their duration in Armenian jurisdiction and when it expires. There were also discussions on fair use, public domain, different licenses and how all these processes are reflected on the Wikipedia environment. The workshop was very case directed, community members had an opportunity to learn and discuss on their own cases and questions.

Annual Plan discussion with the community members and Annual Plan Grant

By Gayane Vardanyan, Davit Saroyan, Lilit Tarkhanyan (Wikimedia Armenia)

Prior to development of our 2018-2019 annual plan proposal we have organized a community gathering with active Wikipedians on March and collected their ideas on further expansion of Wikimedia Movement in Armenia, as well as on Wikimedia Armenia projects. It was a facilitated discussion where everyone reflected on the work done by WMAM and made suggestions on future initiatives.

Participants were divided into 3 groups and discussed possibilities of programmatic changes in order to align these activities to WMAM and Wikimedia Movement strategic plans. This resulted in having many new ideas and change proposals which we analyzed and incorporated into our Annual Plan and into the grant proposal to the Wikimedia Foundation for the upcoming year.

Following up the community and staff discussions WMAM has set four major programmatic directions for the upcoming funding period:

Quality Content: In the proposed APG WMAM will concentrate all its efforts on the quality rather than the quantity of the articles. Considering the success of the “I create a vital article” campaign, we will initiate other thematic projects aimed at development of quality articles on different topics: medicine, law, mathematics, physics, art, etc. We will try to establish thematic councils and engage scientists and researchers of the respective fields, experienced wiki editors interested in the topic and thus will ensure the quality of the content.

Community

We will extensively work towards empowerment of our wiki community and engaging them in decision making process. We will encourage them to initiate and run projects in the framework of our current strategy and the annual plan, establish new partnerships and bring new people on board. We will establish a new culture of learning from the community and reporting back.

Education

Education will remain as one of the major programmatic direction of WMAM in this new APG. Lessons learned from our previous experience will help us to revise the teaching methodology and program approaches in general. Meeting with WikiClub coordinators in March 2018 gave us a lot of input on how to revise our strategy in this direction. We will put more stress on using Wikimedia projects as a learning source and will apply diversified approach to different age groups. We will consider each young contributor’s capacity individually, and work towards improvement of their performance. This year we will try to engage more teachers from Yerevan and revisit our approach in working with higher education institutions putting more stress on cooperation on faculty level rather than individual lecturers.

Western Armenian

During 2017 we have continued our cooperation with Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (CGF) on Western Armenian Program and succeeded in our joint effort to get separate ISO 639-3 language code for Western Armenian. Based on our joined proposal, SIL International, the ISO 639-3 Registration Authority, decided to create the code element [hyw] for Western Armenian. This achievement will become a base for our Western Armenian program in 2018 and all efforts will be directed towards creation and support of Western Armenian Wikipedia with quality content. Western Armenian Program has all above mentioned programmatic directions in itself, but as it has a special role, different geography, and target group, WMAM decided to put it as a separate programmatic direction.

To bring the organization to another level of development and ensure better implementation of our strategy and programs, we will work on organizational development, which will be done in three main directions: capacity enhancement both in terms of procedures and staff capacity, outreach, financial sustainability.

See more on our Annual Plan.

Partnership with the National Library of Armenia: Meeting with Tigran Zargaryan

By Davit Saroyan, Lilit Tarkhanyan (Wikimedia Armenia)

On March 5 Wikimedia Armenia staff met Tigran Zargaryan the head of the National Library of Armenia. WMAM had already a successful previous partnership experience with this institution. At the meeting parties discussed the current state of partnership between WMAM and NLA and the possibilities of expanding it. NLA suggested Wikimedia Armenia to get a library subscription in order to have the possibility to request books more effectively.

As always, National Library expressed willingness to share its digitized books database with WMAM. In addition, Wikimedia Armenia can request a book from the Library catalogue which will be digitized earlier than their planned timeline.

Wiki Loves Science Weekend in Tsaghkadzor

By Dato Abuladze, Davit Saroyan (Wikimedia Armenia)

On March 23-25 Wikimedia Armenia organized another Wiki Loves Science Weekend for experienced editors in Tsaghkadzor. At the editathon there were participants who edited one of the 1000 vital articles. The event was also remarkable because of the Western Armenian participants, who were working on the translation of the Western Armenian Wikipedia interface.

Western Armenian Wikipedians

Meeting with GLAM institutions

By Khazhak Drampyan (Wikimedia Armenia)

Wiki Loves Yerevan is a project implemented jointly with Yerevan Municipality with the support of cultural organizations within the framework of Yerevan 2800 anniversary celebrations. The aim of the project is to expand the information about Yerevan currently available on Wikimedia Projects.

On March 28 Wikimedia Armenia organized a meeting in Wikimedia Armenia office with the representatives of GLAM structures. The aim of the meeting was to discuss further cooperation with Yerevan museums within the framework of Wiki Loves Yerevan project. Representatives of 23 Yerevan museums were invited out of which 16 could attend the meeting.

Museum representatives got acquainted with the goals and objectives of Wiki Loves Yerevan project, as well as Wikimedia projects and principles. Special reference was made to GLAM. Examples of fruitful GLAM collaborations both in Armenia and other countries were presented.

At the meeting it was decided to hold a workshop on April 4 in Wikimedia Armenia office to teach the representatives of GLAM institutions how to use Wikimedia platforms and tools.