Wikimedia CH/Newsletter/09/2018

Please find Wikimedia CH's 8th newsletter for 2018.
If you wish to share an event or activity through this newsletter, please feel free to send us a message at info@wikimedia.ch. Have a nice reading!

Association

WikiCon in St. Gallen

After eight similar events outside Switzerland, this German-language Wikimedia conference WikiCon took place for the first time in Switzerland at the beginning of October. At the same time, it was the largest with about 300 participants. Consistently positive feedback and unusual large press coverage confirm the success of the event. Switzerland showed true host qualities!

A big thank you goes to the volunteer helpers of the organizing team, who have put aside their wiki work for almost a year to put on this big event with the support of the German Chapter. This cooperation between the individual associations in the D-A-CH-region also calls for sympathetic recognition.

With an unusually high return of 66%, the event was as a whole rated to 94% as very good or good. The full evaluation will be published in the next few weeks and will serve the following organization in Wuppertal preparing for an even more successful WikiCon!

What happened in the past months?

Wikidata

The wikidata program has been quite huge during the last months:

8th September - Zurich Hackathon
25th October - Hackathon at the Swiss Digital Day
29th October - Wikidata Birthday in Zurich

The Hackathons of 8th September and of 25th October have been organized in form of a challenge, having teams to work around a problem or an idea and to produce a final work to present to all participants. On October 29th it was a special meet-up to celebrate the Wikidata birthday with a talk by Manuel Sahli and a panel discussion.

Media in Piazza

The 27th and the 28th September Media in Piazza has been held in Mendrisio with the participantion of several associations (Red Cross, Amnesty International, Cantonal Police, Radixx, etc.) and the Faculty of Pedagogy of Locarno. Around 200 pupils joined the different workshops and learned about the fake news and the information literacy.

Experiment in Mesocco

The 2nd October Wikimedia Switzerland has been invited to the schools of Mesocco to have a full day with them to learn about OpenStreetMap and Wikimedia projects. The students learned how to map and how to use and write Wikipedia.

Student training at the University of Fribourg, September 25th and 26th

Tommy and Alessandro helped Flor WMCH lead a workshop to train doctoral students to edit the English language Wikipedia. Their area of specialty is plant-inspired materials and surfaces, and in two days, they learned how to use an encyclopedic tone, and how to discuss with the community, while making valuable contributions. The results of this intensive edit-a-thon can be consulted here.

Wiknic romand on August 19th

A few volunteers from Romandie and Lyon met up in Geneva for a pic-nic followed by a visit of the archeological sections of the Musée d'art et d'histoire. Unfortunately, the museum's photography services are still unwilling to understand the value of sharing the images with the general public, as opposed to selling them, so we still have some convincing work to do for the images of the visit to be published with high quality images.

Wikipedia training at the Swiss Film Archive on September 5th

The Cinémathèque suisse invited Flor WMCH and Hadi to train some of their archivists and some of their press service to edit Wikipedia. The aim was to give more visibility to their archives on Swiss cinema, which can be consulted |here, and which has a lot of valuable information for Wikipedians that love cinema. Trained personnel are Cinémathèque suisse CT and Cinémathèque suisse CM. Suggestions for edit-a-thons or workshops using the Caspar archive database should be well-received, do not be afraid to ask if you are interested.

Built Heritage on Commons at the Archives cantonales vaudoises on October 11th

Following their upload of archeological photographs by Albert Naef this past summer, the Archives cantonales vaudoises held a workshop to encourage the use of this collection of images on Wikipedia, so that they could circulate further on the wikiverse. The workshop attracted several museum and archives personnel, and led to the improvement of the articles on the French language Wikipedia, mainly concerning their municipalities of employment. The result can be consulted [1]. The advantage of such an image-matching workshop is that editing Wikipedia is not needed.

The workshop was followed by a roundtable on how to conserve and make known built heritage, with a historian of monuments, an archivist, the director of an archeological site of Swiss-wide importance, the director of an archeological museum, and an art history teacher.

First WikiWednesday at MAMCO (Geneva) by feminist-collective les sans pagEs on October 17th

This first workshop attracted four new Wikipedians, who started to improve their editing skills with the advice of Natacha and Flor. The MAMCO provided us with a bibliography on five of their women artists. The articles in French on Elizabeth Murray, Cosima von Bonin, and Christiane Lovay were created, and a total of 35 articles were improved. The books will rotate as we advance in the project.

First Workshop on Geneva at the Bibliothèque de la Cité on October 20th

Mourad led a beginner workshop at the Bibliothèque de la Cité in Geneva. The workshops will continue until at least January 2019, and their program can be consulted following this link. The team worked on improving the articles of the Museum of ethnography and on creating the article about the Municipal libraries of Geneva, as well as on other local, Genevan institutions. Stay tuned for the next edition, announced beneath!

Wikipedia on site

With the maxim of facilitating entry into Wikipedia through personal contact, the three German-speaking chapters have begun to contest the action day "Wikipedia on the spot" on October 28th. On Sunday of the "4th Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon" at the Swiss National Museum, not more than a dozen people had come, as expected, but about 60. So we had to change the program and have deleted the writing workshop. Instead, there were three lectures on how Wikipedia worked and how it was used and how it relates to Wikidata. Many thanks to Cristina Sarasua, who also helped us very much. Here we have summarized our impressions. On the same page are also the reports of the other locations that were involved in the day.

Italian Wikicon: 16th-18th November

The Italian Wikicon will be held in Como from 16th to 18th November. The program is ready and the registration are open. Wikimedia Switzerland is still accpting applications for scholarships. Contact info@wikimedia.ch to receive more information.

Wikineocomensia: GLAMs on Commons, Laténium of Neuchâtel, 16 and 23 november

After the success of their workshops at the University of Neuchâtel, Gilliane and Amandine have prepared a very engaging program to introduce GLAMs to Commons, and encourage them to upload quality images. It is especially aimed at museums, such as the Laténium where the event takes place.

Announcements

Extraordinary general assembly, December 10th, 18h-20h

Our 2018 General Assembly called for a change of bylaws for Wikimedia CH, which are listed here (and only accessible to members). We will have our first online general assembly for this occasion. Please us if you have any question. We are looking forward for you to join us!

New Swiss Calendar

We decided to put up a calendar that includes events from all of Switzerland. This calendar can be updated by all Wikipedians organizing events in Switzerland, by GLAM institutions organizing workshops open to the public, and also by Wikimedia CH.

It is a work in progress, and will slowly be automated for former events to be archived.

Here is the link to this calendar. Please do announce your coming events on it. You can announce them in the language they will take place, and mention if a multilingual option is possible.

Workshops on Geneva at the Bibliothèque de la Cité, 01.12, 13h-17h

The next date to enrich the pages on Geneva will be on Saturday, December 1st. Mourad and Flor will coanimate it and tutor for the beginners. All Wikipedians are welcome to share in the selection of books and documents the librarians will prepare for us, concerning the museums and neighborhoods of Calvin's city.

For non-beginners, feel free to join at 14h, after the introduction to Wikipedia (13h-14h).

List of Coming Events

This table contains the upcoming events until the delivery of our next newsletter and some important events later this year. Some more events – also from like-minded organisations you will find in the Swiss Wikicalendar.


Start Date	End Date	Event	Where	Link
2018-11-24 18:00	2019-11-24 23:00	Stammtisch	TBD	Wikipedia:Zürich
2018-12-01 13:00	2018-12-01 17:00	Genève sur Wikipédia à la Bibliothèque de la Cité	Genève, GE	fr:Projet:Bibliothèque_de_la_Cité/Genève
2018-12-12 12:00	2018-12-12 17:00	Les sans pagEs au MAMCO	Genève, GE	fr:Projet:Les_sans_pagEs/WikiMercrediMAMCO
2018-01-26 13:00	2018-01-26 17:00	Genève sur Wikipédia	Genève, GE	fr:Projet:Bibliothèque_de_la_Cité/Genève