After years of running successful Wiki Loves competitions in Austria, we decided it was time to refine the concept and adapt it to our
local needs and preferences and incorporate the experiences we gathered throughout the past years. Instead of focusing on one narrow topic at
a time, we want to test a broader approach which offers ample possibilities for new and existing volunteers to contribute. With WikiDaheim we created a platform that enables contributors to fill knowledge gaps about villages, towns, and cities in Austria - covering everthing from cultural and natural monuments to cemetries and other common infrastructure such as municipal offices, parks, fire stations etc. WMAT supported the project with PR and outreach and the financial means to set up and design a suitable landing page in a modern and attractive design, which got a lot of positive feedback in Austria but also internationally, e.g. during Wikimania where the project participated in the Hackathon to refine the technical infrastrucutre and fix bugs. We even got requests from other (CEE) communities who want to adapt it to their local context. There will be another edition in 2018 where we plan to refine the usability, especially for newcomers and increased efforts at winning new contributors and partners across Austria by focusing on specific topics during the competition in order to address interested participants more directly. The volunteer project leader was user Braveheart.
number of files
7,216
distinct files used in main namespace
826 (11.4% of all files)
pages in main namespace using files
1,105
total file usages in main namespace
1,378
last check: 2018-01-18
number of participants (total)
113
new editors
30
retention of new editors
0
The media files for WikiDaheim were divided into seven categories:
Denkmale = cultural heritage monuments
Natur = natural heritage monuments and protected areas
Public art = public art items
Kellergassen = cellar alleys
Gemeingüter = commons (municipal offices, fire stations etc.)
"The Austrian Galicia and its Multicultural Heritage" was a course at the University of Vienna dealing with the interdependent cultures, literatures, languages, religions, economies, ethnic and social groups of the crownland of Galicia and Lodomeria from its incorporation into the Austrian Empire in 1772 to the year 1918 and with the multicultural heritage of Galicia in Poland, the Ukraine and Austria as well as in the emigration to the present day.
We conducted a Wikipedia introduction for the eight students (six of them were female, all of them new users), during which the students created a German-language Wikipedia article together:
With the support of Wikimedia Deutschland, there was a Wikipedia booth at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany. One of the organizers was the Austrian Wikimedian WernR. We supported his involvement with a travel grant.
The project included an online multi-language edit-a-thon with 26 participating editors, which resulted in 75 new articles and 933 revised articles.
Editing workshop with refugees at WMAT's officeOrientation session for Afghan refugee community in Vienna
WMAT hosted a visiting Wikimedian from Iran at our office from end of September to mid-October, provided infrastructure for his work and served as a fiscal sponsor for a rapid grant the volunteer conducted together with a French expat Wikimedian who lives in Austria. The focus of the project was the digitization of oral history documentaries from Iran, but we seized the opportunity of his stay to run some pilot workshops with local Farsi and Arabic communities - many of them refugees - and to reach out to refugee organisations in Austria for possible cooperations.
Wikipedia is one of the most accessible online sources for knowledge. It can support refugees with information about the geography, culture, and heritage of their new surroundings in their native languages. However, currently a lot of this information does not exist at all in all necessary languages or could be improved (regarding quality or the diversity of perspectives). Teaching refugees to edit Wikipedia helps to enrich this content and make it available for everybody and empowers participants to navigate online resources, assess sources, and the quality of information as well as to contribute their own knowledge.
As a result of the work with the visiting Wikimedian from Iran, WMAT decided to make Wikipedia for refugees an incubator project for the coming months. In additon, several other European chapters (WMUK, WMSE, WMNL etc.) are currently doing similar projects and started to collaborate around this topic to learn from each other, to look for scalable approaches and possibilities for third party funding.
number of participants (from various cultural and language communities in Afghanistan and Iran)
60
number of articles created or improved
15
hours of video material uploaded to Wikimedia Commons
As diversity has become a major focus of WMAT's work this year and the movement strategy also seems to point at an increased importance of this aspect in future, we try to seek for expertise and inspiration in like-minded communities. The Momentum Congress in Hallstatt, Austria has been a conference and think tank that brings together politics, science and civil society around topics of social transformation. This year's main theme was diversity, so WMAT's ED Claudia paired with the Austrian researcher Leonhard Dobusch, who has been doing research around Wikipedia for many years, to produce two papers on the topic and to host a session for 15 participants on diversity in the Wikimedia movement. The conference also provided valuable insights in various aspects of diversity research and activism (e.g. the significance of emotional labour) that we can bring back into the discussions in the Wikimedia movement.
WikiAlpenforum is an international community project for free content in Wikimedia projects about the Alps. It focusses on Wikipedia articles in German, French and Italian as well as on Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. WikiAlpenforum involves communities from the Alpine regions of Austria, France Germany, Italy and Switzerland.
The two-days WikiAlpenforum meeting in Isny, Germany included guided tours to a castle, a church, a library and an outdoor city tour. Besides new images for Wikimedia Commons, seven German-language Wikipedia articles were written or improved. WMAT covered the travel costs of an Austrian participant.
As a follow-up to our community building around the Wikimedia Hackathon in Vienna, we sent two members of our Austrian tech community to WikidataCoN in Berlin. During the Hackathon and the WikiCite conference in May Peter Kraker, Stefan Kasberger, and Daniel Mietchen together with Tom Arrow from ContentMine formulated a first plan for collaboration with Peter's project Open Knowledge Maps, involving the WikiFactMine project. WikiFactMine seeks to use text mining of the Open Access bioscience literature to enhance the Wikimedia projects. With the release of the WikiFactMine API, which was announced at WikidataCon, this idea is getting closer to becoming a reality, also because Wikidata is becoming an increasingly important bridge between the scientific community and Wikimedia. In addition, Wikipedia itself has also sparked a lot of research, but there is also an increasing amount of research based on Wikidata and Open Knowledge Maps is a great tool get an overview of the exisiting ressouces on these topics.
The WikiDienstag (“WikiTuesday“) is a weekly meet-up in the WMAT office. Volunteers share their knowledge and work together on improving the content of Wikimedia projects.
We support Wikimedia Commons contributors with equipment from our tech pool, accreditations for events, travel grants, post-processing software and skill transfer activities.
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Women's handball Austria - Russia
Summer Grand Prix Competition Planica
Traunsee
UEC Track Elite European Championships
Festivalsommer
