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L&E Newsletter / Volume 3 / Issue 7 / January 2016
Learning Quarterly
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Program Capacity and Learning: An integrated team at WMF

Learn more about our mission and focus, and contribute your feedback by February 16!
Three teams at Wikimedia Foundation merged together to empower more program leaders across the movement: The Wikipedia Library, Education Program and Learning & Evaluation

In this coming year, we are looking forward to our shared learning and supporting program leaders like you. We need your help defining what that year looks like!

Between now and February 16th, we are asking for your input in prioritizing support to program leaders and affiliates through our newly integrated Program Capacity and Learning Team. Our new team, which integrates Education Program, The Wikipedia Library, and Learning and Evaluation, will also support GLAM and Affiliate Partnerships. Let's write PC&L Roadmap together! What are your greatest obstacles? Do you have a wish list for program support? Share your views into our criteria for resources and concepts for support. Your input will guide our 2016-2017 Annual Plan submission.

More info:

#1Lib1Ref: the campaign that moved librarians and friends
One Library One Reference sought to engage existing editors and new comers in referencing Wikipedia
How did the campaign impact Wikimedia projects?
Imagine a World where Every Librarian Added One More Reference to Wikipedia. With this call to action, The Wikipedia Library engaged editors in different cities over the world in a month-long campaign that highlighted the important role of libraries for Wikimedia projects. As a first stop for researchers all over the world, TWL team was appealing to their big allies to improve Wikipedia. The campaign was supported by a number of network organizations Wikipedia Library, Amical Wikimedia (who successfully runs the Bibliowikis in Catalan), Wikimedia España, Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, Digital Library Federation, Central New York Library Resource Council, OCLC Research and Open Library.

Though final statistics around the reach and impact are yet to be published, we know there were over 1,000 tweets using the hashtag that hit people's Twitter feeds over 1 million times. The campaign page was viewed in different language at least 15,000 times, there were at least 50 blogs and professional periodicals covering the event, and we engaged at least 500 librarians in at least 1,500 additions of references to Wikimedia projects. We think all these numbers are conservative underestimates, and we hope to have better data soon.

The team's priority, however, was to test a number of programmatic strategies and activities within the Wikimedia community. With deeper analysis on key questions yet to come, these are the top three initial findings on the campaign shared by The Wikipedia Library:

  • Can we share a different Wikipedia story with librarians en-mass? -- Many librarians are changing their story about Wikipedia as a friend of research, we wanted to see if we can help facilitate that change. Initial outcomes suggest: this was an overwhelming success.
  • Can we pick an aligned audience, and drive participation and leadership for that audience through social media? Does it make sense coming from a centralized program like The Wikipedia Library? The WMF has rarely pushed communications, contribution campaigns or other programmatic activities from its central position in the movement, despite its central position in the movement. We think that this pilot was a success, but more greater community leadership is needed to make it truly a Global event.
  • Can we activate librarians to participate en-mass? We know librarians are aligned with the Wikimedia movement, but we haven’t been very successful at activating them en-mass to run events, contribute to projects, and actively lead efforts. We concluded that We likely can activate librarians, but we need better materials for developing in-person “brownbag or coffee break” events, which were very popular among participants and appear to have motivated a lot of participation.

The excitement of the campaign brought some really neat project ideas including: a Wikipedia and Libraries journal, internationalization of tools like Citation Hunt and the Hashtag Referral tool and the possibility of another Wikipedian in Residence at a University, like the one being piloted at WVU.

More info:

Stay tuned
blogs, events & more!
Read our blog posts
Every month, we share knowledge with a focus on programs, process or tools on Wikimedia Foundation's blog. Find all our entries on the Wikimedia blog
Featured blog posts: We planned a Wiki Photo School, a three-day photo school with lectures and workshops organized in Petnica Science Center, for all participants who were interested in training to photograph chemical experiments.

Read more.

«European culture cannot be imagined without European science,» said the European Science Photo Competition (ESPC), and opened the contest up for everyone to participate.

Read More

Calendar

February
Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29

February 15: 2016 Community Consultation on WMF Strategy closes
February 16: Program Capacity and Learning: Community Feedback on team roadmap is due.


March
Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31

March 5 - 6: Education Collaborative Annual Meetup in Stockholm, Sweden. (By invitation only)
March 24 - 26: WikiArabia Conference 2016 in Amman, Jordan.
March 31 - April 3: Wikimedia Hackathon 2016 in Jerusalem, Israel.


April
Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30

March 31 - April 3: Wikimedia Hackathon 2016 in Jerusalem, Israel.
April 20 - 21: Peer Learning Academy in Berlin, Germany. (By invitation only.)
April 22 - 24: Wikimedia Conference 2016 in Berlin, Germany.

A Program in the Spotlight
Wikimedia Program highlight of the past quarter
Two giants meet online: UNESCO contributes to Wikimedia projects

John Cummings has been working for the past four months as Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO funded by a Wikimedia Foundation project and event grant. This is his testimony:

I've been working at UNESCO to help staff understand more about using and contributing to Wikimedia and assisting them in making their content available on Wikimedia Commons. Currently we have upload over 1000 files to Commons covering a wide range of content, including photographs, videos, infographics and illustrations with many more being made available over the coming months.

I created Wikiproject UNESCO which is designed to be accessible for people new to contributing to Wikimedia projects and covers several Wikimedia projects. It is structured around activities including writing, translation and sharing UNESCO media and has clear and simple instructions for all tasks. It has several tools to help people in all languages improve information on UNESCO programme inscriptions e.g World Heritage Sites and to help navigate and organise sharing of UNESCO media content on Wikimedia projects.

I'd encourage everyone to share the content that UNESCO has made available on Wikimedia projects to show the value of releasing work under an open license.

I think that Wikimedia has a unique role to play in worldwide education which many organisations are working towards as part of the Sustainable Development Goals. I hope that by working with UNESCO to understand how they can use and contribute to Wikimedia projects it will encourage other intergovernmental organisations to do the same.

Further Reading:

Share your idea

IdeaLab is a space where wikimedians all over the world share their inspiration with others.
IdeaLab is an incubator for people to share ideas to improve Wikimedia projects and to collaboratively develop them into plans and grant proposals. These are two selected ideas this quarter:

This project wants to increase quantity and quality of articles about German culture (literature, film, art, etc.) in other Wikipedia language versions Read more and get involved!

This project aims to increase the coverage of indigenous Philippine musical instruments in Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, and improve their content; and this project focuses on the musical instruments from Cordillera Administrative Region. Learn more about the project and how you can get involved!

Join the IdeaLab community. You can help develop ideas in many ways: with technical skills, translating, networking and more. Share your own!

Learn from your programs

The Program Evaluation & Design portal has tools to learn about your activities and measure their success.

The Learning Pattern Library is a hub to share learning around certain challenges that are common across Wikimedia programs and projects. Featured Learning Patterns in this issue:

Conference sessions are often planned at the last minute with little consideration for goals, expected outcomes, audience preparation, or follow-up. Here are simple guidelines for planning an effective conference session!

Some advice includes: promoting previous research to recover valuable materials, conducting interviews with key references, and explaining the editathon´s methodology and relieve existing digital resources, like cell phones, computers, netbooks, etc. Create local teams with a strategy of division of online and offline activities for the editathon´s day

Share what you know with the PE&D Community. Introduce yourself in the Community!