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Wikimedians of Bulgaria

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Chapters (37)
Thematic organizations (2)
Wikimedia user groups (153)

This is the Meta-Wiki page of the recognised Wikimedians of Bulgaria User Group.

Pillars

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If you share our values, vision and goals, and wish to contribute to our mission, or even just to express your support, please add your name to this page.
Values
Wikimedians of Bulgaria believe in Free Knowledge and want to dedicate their individual and common resources to promote it in society.
Vision
Free licenses and releasing content into the public domain is the most popular way to publish information.
Mission
Wikimedians of Bulgaria want to popularise the concept of Free Knowledge in Bulgaria, gather freely licensed content and disseminate it online and offline.
Goals
In order to achieve above stated mission and make a step towards the vision, Wikimedians of Bulgaria are working on the following goals:
  • Popularising Free Knowledge and free licenses in Bulgarian society
  • Establishing the infrastructure and know-how necessary to support volunteers in gathering and disseminating Free Knowledge
  • Organising and participating in events that help promote/gather/disseminate Free Knowledge, with special focus on education and international Wikimedia projects
  • Working toward the establishment of an affiliated chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation in Bulgaria (NB: This goal has been strongly contested by some members of the community)

Structure

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Notice: This organizational structure is still preliminary and subject to change.

Basic outline of the general structure of the association to be replaced by proper statutes & bylaws upon registration.

  • Everyone interested can become a member by signing up on the supporters page (temporary process).
  • All members elect a board of 3-7 people.
  • The board is responsible for running the everyday business of the user-group (administration, working on goals, supporting projects and volunteers) and the strategic planning.
  • The board must produce a detailed report on its running the everyday business of the user-group and the strategic planning at least once a year, which is to be accepted by all members with simple majority.
  • The board is responsible for drafting bylaws and plan out a path to becoming a future chapter. These are to be accepted by all members with absolute majority.
  • Projects can be run by anyone, regardless of whether the person is a member of the user group. The board is responsible for officially endorsing projects and appointing project managers.
  • The board might propose to create additional positions within the user-group tackling specific tasks. The newly created positions are to be accepted by all members with simple majority. The people filling these positions can be appointed by the board.

Projects and other activities

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Past

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Wikipedia in education
Students in the following university lecture courses used Wikipedia to create articles on topics from the respective fields of knowledge.
Wikipedia as the core subject of study
  • "Wikipedia and wiki technologies" is a 40-hour university course, which is read at the Faculty of Mathematics, Computer Science and Information Technology of the University of Plovdiv during the three trimesters of the academic 2011/2012 and 2012/2013 and during the first trimester of 2013/2014 year. It is especially dedicated to presenting to bachelors in Mathematics, Computer Science and Information Technologies the wikis as software and Wikipedia as an Internet, media and social phenomena, as well as train students use it and contribute to it.
GLAM cooperation
Cooperation with the Sofia Zoo on the Wikimedia Foundation funded project "Sofia Zoo Powered by Wikimedia"
Getting back the cybersquattered domain "Wikipedia.bg"
The problem of the cybersquatted domain "Wikipedia.bg" was discovered in 2009, when it was used for private advertising purposes. After a wide community support against the cybersquatters in 2009, and after further legal investigations and collecting evidences and supporting materials from the Wikimedia Foundation, a dispute in front of the domain registrar Register.bg was initiated in September 2012 and won a month later. Since then, http://wikipedia.bg has been in possession of the Wikimedia Foundation ([1]) and redirects to the homepage of Bulgarian Wikipedia. Also, the community has been paying for protecting the domain "Wikimedia.bg" from further cybersquattery, and the link http://wikimedia.bg now redirects to Meta.
Legislative initiative
In November 2010, Bulgarian Wikipedians addressed the Ministry of Culture and several other institutions with our concerns related to the Bill for amendment the Cultural Heritage Law in Bulgaria that was a threat to the creation and usage of derivative works of cultural heritage artifacts. As a result, the suggested edits in the legal texts that concerned us were mostly taken into consideration.
Public lectures
  • 27 October 2007: Guest lecture "Bulgarian Wikipedia. Principles, Necessities, Perspectives" during the "Open Fest" Conference in Sofia, Bulgaria
  • 1 November 2008: Guest lecture "Wikipedia and the social networks" during the "Computer Space" Conference in Sofia, Bulgaria [2]
  • 6 June 2009: Jimmy Wales' visit in Bulgaria and Public lecture in the Modern Theater Video (3 parts)
  • 24 April 2010: Guest lecture during the "WebTech" Conference in Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria
  • 25 March 2011: Public lecture "Wikipedia from the inside" for the teachers and students in the "Prof. Assen Zlatarov" University in Burgas, Bulgaria (Presentation in Bulgarian)
  • 5 August 2011: Presentations titled "Lessons Learned from the Lessons Taught" and "Designing a Lecture Course on Wikipedia and Wiki Technologies", during the "Wikimania" Conference in Haifa, Israel (presentations in English)
  • 14 May 2013: Guest lecture for the students in the European Studies programme of Sofia University, Bulgaria, in their course on "Information Society" (Presentation in Bulgarian)
  • 6 October 2013: Lecture "GLAM@Bulgaria. An overview of two successful GLAM projects in Bulgaria (2011-2013)" during the OpenGLAM Conference in Warsaw, Poland (Presentation in English)
Awards
Bulgarian Wikipedia was awarded the Special Award for Contribution to Bulgarian Web Space, during the "BG Site" Awards '2009.

Ongoing

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International article writing contest
Wikipedia in education
Students in the following university lecture courses have used Wikipedia to create articles on topics from the respective fields of knowledge.
GLAM cooperation
Since March 2012, Cooperation with the Bulgarian Archives State Agency has been in operation. Wikipedians who want to be involved have to sign an agreement for cooperation with the Archives, and they can go there and digitize useful illustrative content and documents for free. The files are used in existing articles in Bulgarian and foreign versions of Wikipedia, as well, and have led to the creation of new articles. The community provided a second-hand scanner, and on a special meetup collected money for buying a brand new scanner. Both scanners are now located in the Archive but only available to visiting Wikipedians.
Wikipedia promotion over the social networks
Bulgarian Wikipedia promotion project has been gaining momentum since the beginning of 2014 on the social networks and Facebook, in particular:
  • Private Facebook group "Wikipedia in the social networks" - a very well operating group of the admins of the public FB group and public FB page (13 people all together), as well as people engaged in BG WP public relations, outreach, academia, GLAM. Used for discussions on the content published, statistics and patterns analysis, brainstormings on new ways to reach new people. This way of organizing was the actual reason to make this proposal.
  • Public Facebook group. Aimed at many-to-many communication, public discussions about a variety of aspects of Wikipedia, news, trends, etc. A broad range of topics like wiki software, open source, open hardware, Creative Commons, copyright laws and cases are also often discussed. As of 14:45, 8 August 2014 (UTC), it has 535 members.
  • Public Facebook page. Aimed at one-to-many communication, all page admins are requested to publish on the behalf of the Bulgarian Wikipedia. As of 14:45, 8 August 2014 (UTC) it has 1165 likes, about 5-7 posts a day, with about 100-200 seeings per post. The aim is to balance the posts between links to BG WP articles and "from the kitchen" news *about* Wikipedia (law cases, trends, project, community achievements, etc), but in general it is strictly focused on Wikimedia projects only.
Translation and localization of MediaWiki
We are constantly working on the translation and localization of interface messages in Bulgarian on Translatewiki.net
Meet-ups

Planned

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  • Technology Pool I: large-format, hi-res scanner for digitising cartography collections from the national archives (initially part of the cooperation with the Bulgarian Archives State Agency, which got hampered by the lack of appropriate technical equipment)
  • Technology Pool II: mobile, hi-res scanner to travel to the monasteries in the country and digitise their libraries
  • Technology Pool III: professional cameras for volunteers and photography workshops
  • Technology Pool IV: professional mobile sound recorder (i.e. to capture authentic folklore)
  • Advocating for copyright reform in Bulgaria and the EU, as part of the Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU
  • Wikiexpeditions
  • Thematic edit-a-thons with public bodies
  • Wiki Loves Earth
  • Wikipedia@School

Annual reports

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Resolutions

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