Wikimedia CH/Newsletter/02/2019

Please find below Wikimedia CH's 2nd newsletter for 2019.
If you would like to publish an event or activity through this newsletter, feel free to send us a message at info@wikimedia.ch. We wish you a good reading!

What happened in the past months?

Maximum amount for micro-grants raised from 500.- to 1000.-

Wikimedia CH has been rethinking its strategy to retain more community and the corresponding budget. We increased the amount allotted to active Wikipedians, and therefore raised the maximum amount for micro-grants from 500.- to 1000.-. The conditions for application remain the same: applicants must make sure they fill in the conditions described on the WMCH micro-grant page, and follow the described steps (same page), so that the jury can vote to accept or refuse the grant. Unlike projects submitted by the end of August and noted in the yearly budget, Micro-grants can be applied for throughout the year, and funded as long as allotted funds remain.

We are looking forward to receiving your ideas!

Wikipedia workshop @Itopie, Geneva, February 23rd

Five experienced Wikipedian, a Wikipedian attending his second workshop, and a newbie came to Itopie in Geneva to contribute on the topic of boats on lake Leman, and women navigators. This workshop lasted six hours, to make up for the shortness of the January one, and this time, no one had to be chased out by exhausted librarians! French-language Wikipedia received improvement on several boats belonging to the CGN. All results can be seen here, if you are curious. If you missed out and would like to help out establishing the encyclopedic relevance of boat Coppet, or perhaps pair it with its twin the Genève navibus, or completely remove it from Wikipedia if it makes more sense, that means you will be helping out a beginner Wikipedian. If you do remove it though, be gentle with the main contributor, of course!

German language Writing-Atelier in Winterthur

Host of this event was Sammung Winterthur, location the very popular Winterthurer Bibliotheken at Kirchplatz downtown Winterthur. On 23rd of February, approximately a dozen of editors arrived punctually at Stadtbücherei Winterthur to get instructions how and about what to work on this day. Beforehand 50 photos were uploaded by the institution, half of them were used in articles after the event.

The press (Der Landbote) was informed and so nice to come and report. See their résumé article (hidden for non-subsriber, but we can send out a pdf document with this text. Plese send us a mail).

This session will be continued at SBB Historic on 6th of April (see calendar at the bottom).

Spontaneous visit to Rämibühl Zurich

Thanks to an e-mail from a donor, we had the opportunity to present Wikipedia in the middle school Rämibühl in Zurich. The donor asked to receive her donation receipt as soon as possible. Her submission message showed that she worked as a teacher. In an afterword, we replied to their mail with the note: "If you are interested in getting to know Wikipedia, perhaps right in your lessons, to learn what information you can still read from the articles, how to check who the text wrote and how reliable he is, I also like to come to you in the classroom. This could help students and teachers to be more competent with knowledge in the future." So I were already two weeks later in her class. The approximately 25 students were very well prepared and interested accordingly. The letter of thanks stated: "Our students described your style as very spontaneous, which they liked in principle because they were able to follow you so well, but some of them found it too spontaneous, that is, some things seemed a bit unprepared. They also liked so much the same on Wikipedia, and there were also voices who thought there was something they did not need, but others said that these things were still interesting. I will be with you if there is another opportunity for cooperation in the future."

Knowledge equity

Blind ans visual impaired users

Wikimedia CH started a collaboration with the association Albinit in the 2018. This collaboration is aimed to have a testing phase of visual impaired users as passive and active users. The first round is finished and had four testers to check four Italian projects (Wikipedia, Commons, Wikivoyage and Wikisource) giving an evaluation based on 6 parameters:

Easy reading of the articles and links easy to use
Easy research: ability to jump between different contents of the page
Good management of non-textual elements: ability to read non-textual elements
Content distribution: page management and content distribution
Usability of accessory elements (specifically templates): infobox, notes, etc.
Energy spent in the activity (a measure in self-assessment of the effort necessary for the activity)

In this case the focus of the test has been based not only in the accessibily, as it is done usually for disabilities, but considering also the usability and specifically it's considered important the last parameter: the energy spent during the activity.

The goal of the project is to check the ability of people with a specific disability to use the Wikimedia projects for thei daily activity (study or work or edutainement) and to check if Wikimedia projects can bring an advantage specifically for students having learning disability.

After this pilot project, the experiment will be extended in other countries where the association is present and specifically France, Spain, Netherlands and Danemark.

Within this project, Wikimedia CH has been in touch also with the association of "Libro parlato" (Spoken Book) of Verbania which collaborates with other similar Swiss associations to publish their catalogue in Wikidata.

Announcements

General assembly

Our next General Assembly (GA) will be held on April, 13th 2019 at the Gutenberg Museum in Fribourg. Please save the date! All Members should have received their invitation. If not so, please contact us.

You can find more details about the venue and the program of the General Assembly on the dedicated page in our Members Wiki. This page will be updated with additional information and documents within the next weeks. If you wish to participate in the General Assembly and the following lunch, please make sure you register in the attendance list. Closing date for the registration is Wednesday, 27th of march!

Castles-Dossier

Lenzburg castle ranks as one of the oldest and most impressive hilltop castles in Switzerland and has the state of a heritage site of national significance. At this place we will come together with volunteers of the Swiss OpenStreetMap (SOSM) association to build a register of castles of the two cantons of Aargau and Zurich. We try to figure out if every single building categorised as a castle is registered in our lists, tables and "article stock". Which articles should be improved? In which articles should we rectify pictures, chronological tables, coordinates, links to important biographies etc., and are Wikivoyage artices which could be enhanced with maps? In OpenStreetMap (OSM), there also is a lot to do: Does the castle have correct tags, like castle type or opening hours? What's about the surrounding ways and associated buildings? Are there wikipedia or wikidata entries attached?

A lot of work, but also a lot of fun. Goal of this event is mostly to get in touch with people of the other community and to understand their needs. Furthermore, to be able to make little changes in the foreign project (OSM for Wikimedians and Wiki-work for Mappers) and to be aware what work should be done. After this event, every participant can continue working at their own working places and teach other members of their community. After visible success in this pilot project, we proceed with similar events in and for other cantons. This event will take place in the gatehouse of Schloss Lenzburg on Saturday, 27th of April from 10:30 to at least 17:30. Later this evening we will have optionally our regular Zürich-Stammtisch in the medievial town of Lenzburg.

To participate, please register on our project page.

Who writes his_tory? in Basel

As announced in our last newsletter, the next Edit-a-thon-session of Who writes his_tory? will take place in Basel. On Sunday, 17th of March from 2.00 until 7.00 PM you can bring your computer and start editing about female artists or their art that is not present on Wikipedia yet. In addition to art exhibition „Vergessen oder so“ with the contemporar artists Julia Hübner, Alexandra Meyer, Guadalupe Ruiz and some works of unknown performers from the depot of the Kunstmuseum Olten (German), this event will be held in theKaskadenkondensator, Raum für aktuelle Kunst und Performance, Warteck PP, Burgweg 7, 4058 Basel. No registration is nessesary, come and visit. General information to this project: http://whowriteshistory.me

Next sans pagEs workshops in Geneva, 27.03.2019 and 10.04.2019

Our next sans pagEs workshop will take place on March 27th, at the Bibliothèque d'art et d'archéologie of the Musée d'art et d'histoire in Geneva. Wikimedia CH has been carrying out workshops to add more women to the French language Wikipedia in that location since 2016, as can be seen on their [page]. We are looking forward to going back to this institution! Join us 5, promenade du Pin, 1204 Genève, at the entrance gates to join for lunch at 12, or proceed inside if you arrive later on.

The following workshop will take place at MAMCO again, on April 10th. We meet at the entrance of the museum.

Write down the dates and join us: from 12h, if you'd like to join for lunch, from 13-14h if you would like a refresher class on how to edit the French Wikipedia to add women, and from 14h on to freely contribute and help newbies contributing for the first time.

Wikidata GLAM day in Bern, 28.03.2019

Gilliane, Baptiste, and Amandine have organised a very exiting day of exchanges and reflections to encourage GLAMs to think about their past experiences with Wikimedia projects, and to encourage them to contribute to Wikidata. Diego, Ilario, as well as board member Michael Gasser and former Wikimedia CH director Chantal Ebongué Pittet will give presentations, and Louvre employee and Wikidata enthusiast Shonagon will join us. The whole program can be found here on Wikidata.

Feel free to invite any member of a GLAM that might be interested to join! Registry is open until March, 18th.

Wikidata workshop in Lausanne, 29.03.2019

Shonagon agreed that spending only one day in Switzerland was not enough, and accepted to give Wikimedians a one-day workshop for those interested in starting to edit Wikidata. You do not need to be very experienced as a Wikimedian to come, the focus is purely on Wikidata, for beginners. For more experienced users, you should be able to ask more advanced questions, while the beginners like Flor toil on the exercises that Shonagon gives them. You can see the entire program and register on the following page. As of now, there are 11 spots left, to be taken before March 19th (so we can adjust catering).

Flor is looking forward to see you there!

Education

Wikimedia+Education (San Sebastiàn 5th-7th April)

Wikimedia CH will be present at the Wikimedia + Education in San Sebastiàn from 5th until 7th April. Int this specific international meeting it will be presented a panel "Wikimedia 2030 strategy and a case study" and it will be discussed Wikimini within the panel "Txikipedia, Vikidia, Klexion: Encyclopedia for children".

Other Swiss wikipedian will present the activities done in Africa with Kiwix.

Wikimedia + Education logo

Thelab

Wikimedia CH will have the secons session of theLab with the faculty of pedagogy of Locarno dedicated to elementary school next 18th March. After the first session with middle schools, this time the session of information literacy will be dedicated to children. The format will a game with a sequence of quests to be resolved using Wikimedia projects in general having the structure of questions true/false.

Collaboration with CERRD (Cantonal department of Digital Resources)

In September Wikimedia CH started a collaboration with the Cantonal department of Digital Resources of Canton Ticino to transfer teaching materials in open license in Wikimedia projects. The material is specifically dedicate to high schools and concerns biology, chemistry and physics. It is published currently in a Moodle platform and is released in open license, with this project Wikimedia CH will train a community manager to transfer it in Wikiversity and in Wikibooks.

Wikipedia training for teachers in Geneva, 27.03.2019

Gabriel will be giving a workshop to teachers in Geneva. The project is not entirely defined yet, and will be added both to our calendar and to the page for the month of French-language contribution, which takes place every year in March.

Wikipedia training for students of the university of Neuchâtel, March and April 2019

Amandine made a successful project in 2018, the Wikineocomensia project. Aimed to involve the university of Neuchâtel and the Laténium museum, it helped her secure strong ties with the Laténium director, who also teaches at the university. She will be training a group of his students to edit Wikipedia, possibly on Swiss archeological topics, from the end of March to early April 2019. The project page will be displayed once it is set up, on our next newsletter.

University of Lausanne researcher and Wikipedian looking for support

The Belgian chapter alerted us through twitter that Michael Piotrowski is looking to edit Wikipedia in March 2020 on the topic of Swiss pioneers in the domain of numerical studies of human sciences. The exchange and the contact may be found through Twitter, here. Wikimedia CH will get in touch so we may program something for next year, but if you already have interesting insights on this topic, feel free to share them with him.

OpenGeneva, 18-24 March

A like-minded association is organizing a week of presentations and workshops in Geneva on the topic of open licence and software. The program can be found here. Due to short notice, Wikimedia CH is not able to participate this year, but this event could interest local Wikipedians.

Richard Stallman in Vaud for Wikipedia Day, 06.03.2019

Richard Stallman will be visiting Grandvaux to give a conference at a local ecovillage about open license software and the ethical issues related to it in the laid-back context of a potluck dinner. The ecovillage's address is Rue de la Gare 17 1091 Grandvaux, and their contact information is listed here. All information can be found on the following page.

WikiConventions in Germany and in France

During the last few weeks the French-language community announced the date of the next WikiConvention francophone: 6th to 8th of September 2019. Location will be Brussels. Some weeks before we received note that Wuppertal, in Germany, will host the German-language 2019 WikiCon. It will be four weeks later, from October 4th to 6th. Here you can read more information about these events:

The Italian Wikiconvention is defining the next place. At the moment Rome and Bari have presented a candidature. For both candidatures the event will be held at the middle of November.

List of Coming Events

For later dates, see the WMCH calendar.


Start Date	End Date	Event	Where	Link
2019-03-17 14:00	2019-03-17 19:00	Who writes his_tory?	Basel BS	who writes his_tory
2019-03-18 09:00	2019-03-17 14:00	#theLab	Locarno TI
2019-03-27 13:00	2019-03-27 17:00	les sans pagEs à la Bibliothèque d'art et d'archéologie	Genève GE	fr:Projet:BAA/Genève
2019-03-28 09:00	2019-03-28 16:00	Wikidata and GLAMs in CH #GLAMwikiCH 2019	Bern/BE	GLAM & Wikimedia CH
2019-03-29 10:00	2019-03-29 17:00	Atelier Wikidata avec Shonagon	Lausanne/VD	Atelier Wikidata à Lausanne
2019-03-30 11:00	2019-03-30 12:30	Annual General Assembly of Swiss OpenStreetMap Association	Basel BS	GA of SOSM at Borromäum, Basel
2019-04-06 10:00	2019-04-06 16:00	Wikipedia-Atelier bei SBB-Historic	Brugg/Windisch AG	WikiProjekt Schweiz/Atelier
2019-04-06 09:30	2019-04-07 14:00	Wikimedia+Education	San Sebastian+Donostia	2BEducation Conference 2019
2019-04-10 13:00	2019-04-10 17:00	Les sans pagEs au MAMCO	Genève/GE	Les sans pagEs/WikiMercrediMAMCO
2019-04-13 10:00	2019-04-13 13:00	General Assembly	Fribourg FR