Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Canada/January - April 2012

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Wikimedia Canada's chapter

Live Board meeting

On January 29, 2012, members on Board of Directors of Wikimedia Canada gathered face to face for the first time together. It was an opportunity to meet and discuss the future of Wikimedia Canada. The meeting was open to members of the local community and ultimately led to the recruiting of new members including the present Treasurer Linda Chew. It was the occasion to talk about banking, delegates to Chapters Meeting in Berlin Mar. 30—Apr. 1, 2012, budget, funding, recruitment, projects, and plan our next live meeting at Wikimania in Washington, DC.

Board meeting, 2012-01-29

Chapters Meeting in Berlin

From March 30 - April 1st two Board members attended the 2012 Chapters Meeting in Berlin. Members participated in sessions teaching how to run chapter events and chapter bureaucracy, discussed global issues about the movement with the WMF and other chapters, and networked with the global community.

General meeting

On April 25, 2012, Wikimedia Canada has its first general meeting.

First general meeting of Wikimedia Canada

Aboriginal languages

Cree Wikipedia.

Outreach to Aboriginal communities

Active outreach to Mi'kmaq communities and speakers has being performed through emails and Facebook, resulting in two contributors speaking micmac and one translator volunteering time for Wikipedia. Outreach has also been performed with Cree speakers and linguists and an active discussion has begun to see how to develop the Cree Wikipedia and how to make all Cree, Atikamekw and Innu dialects co-exist on the same project.

Cree Wikipedia

Canadian Aboriginal Languages Wikipedia Coordination

Amqui created the Canadian Aboriginal Languages Wikipedia Coordination's group to encourage the cooperation between the different Wikipedias in Canadian Aboriginal languages and to offer a place for Native languages speakers to seek support from experienced Wikipedians.

Canadian Aboriginal Languages Wikipedia Coordination

Wikimedia Incubator

Due to the efforts of Amqui, very active member of Wikimedia Canada and in several spheres of Wikimedia movement, two Wikipedias in Canadian Aboriginal languages have been created in the Wikimedia Incubator.

GLAM

GLAMcamp DC

On the week-end of 10 - 12 February, 2012, on invitation of Wikimedia District of Columbia, Benoit Rochon attended the GLAMcamp DC. It was, among other things, an opportunity to connect with the Wikimedian community of Washington, and to discuss with several people about the relationship between Wikimedia DC and Washington's GLAM institutions.

Benoit also met the Wikipedian in Residence at NARA, Dominic McDevitt-Parks, who told him about his project "ExtravaSCANza" at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, and germinated the idea of a collaboration between Wikimedia Canada and the Biodiversity Centre of the University of Montreal who is in charge of the Marie-Victorin herbarium. The idea behind this is to scan the million specimens and their datasheets, often old from early twentieth century, often written by hand or in a language other than French or English. This project is a work in progress, but the ultimate goal is to import these datasheets on Wikisource in order to allow the community to make digital transcriptions. Marie-Victorin herbarium and Montreal's Botanical garden is looking to put all this work under free licence CC0.

At GLAMcamp DC, Benoit also met Sarah Stierch and Lori Byrd Phillips, respectively instigators of the projects "Gender Gap" and "The Children's Museum of Indianapolis." Since that time, Benoit is very sensitive to the integration of Canadian women editors of Wikipedia, as well as projects QRpedia at the Children's Museum.

Backstage pass at the Biodiversity Centre of the University of Montreal

On March 16th, some Wikipedians from WikiProject Quebec met in Montreal to socialize and share experiences. Taking advantage of their presence in the city, Benoit Rochon requested and obtained the permission for a "backstage tour" at the Biodiversity Centre of the University of Montreal.

Professor Luc Brouillet, curator of the Marie-Victorin Herbarium, did a private tour where Wikipedians had the unique opportunity to see the brand new building which houses one of the oldest herbarium in North America. The Marie-Victorin Herbarium contains over one million specimens, and requires a specific care to preserve it.

Discussing with the professor Brouillet, Wikipedians learned that all of the herbarium will be scanned and put on the Internet under the CC0 license. However, the datasheets are very old, and a lot are handwrited, some in other languages than French or English, so text recognition (ORC) is almost useless in these conditions. Some suggested to put datasheets on Wikisource in order for the community to transcribe and/or translate them.

As of today, this project is pending until the University of Montreal completes digitization of herbarium.

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

On March 17th, Letartean, Benoit Rochon and ChristianT visited the Montreal Museum of Art and took pictures of public domain paintings. Many of those paintings were made available on Commons. After the visit, photography was disallowed in the museum, making the releasing of public domain paintings more difficult. In the future, talks with the museum to have access to the collection for photography could be interesting.

Gallery of the works imported
blog post on the weekend by Letartean (in French)

Some painting available on Commons from that day

Artist: Otto Reinhold Jacobi
Title: Automne canadien
Artist: James Wilson Morrice
Title: La vieille maison Holton à Montréal
Artist: Camille Pissarro
Title: Vue de la cotonnière d'Oissel
Artist: Théophile Hamel
Title: Les Filles de Jéthro

Contribution days

Contribution day at Université Laval

A Contribution day is one of the Quebec Committee projects, where Wikipedia editors gather in order to significantly contribute on an article and to fraternize with local Wikipedians and ultimately recruit new editors. All day on February 18th, 2012, a dozen of the most active contributors of French Wikipedia gathered in a room of the Université Laval and improved the article Jean Talon.

In the morning, participants divided tasks:

researchers: collect books, find the passages of interest, add sources and references, etc.
editors: write the encyclopedic text, build the bibliography, etc.
media: find free illustrations, high quality scanning, upload to Commons, etc.

Concrete results

Twelve local Wikipedians met for the first time.
103 editions on French Wikipedia during the day ^[1];
22 editions subsequent days ^[2];
63 editions of English Wikipedia subsequent days ^[3];
10 free and high quality illustrations have been scanned. ^[4] Several articles and projects relevant to Jean Talon, have benefited from this Contribution day: 国王の娘たち, Monnaie de carte, Ursulines de Québec, François de Montmorency-Laval, Pierre Le Moyne, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Marguerite Bourgeoys^[5]^[6]^[7]^..., Wikisource^[8]^[9]

Gallery

School projects

Training for the APOP

On January 18th, 2012, Simon Villeneuve gave online training to many stakeholders in collegial education. He also developed the teaching material for these online lessons.

Public Wiki: Initiation to collaborative work (in French)
Association pour les applications pédagogiques de l'ordinateur au post-secondaire (APOP) (in French)

School project at Cégep de Chicoutimi

During the 2012 winter school session, Simon Villeneuve, physics teacher at the Cégep de Chicoutimi and Quebec Committee core member, organised several educative projects in his astronomy and astrophysics classes. His lessons aimed to initiate his students to Wikipedia in order to improve astronomy articles.

Projet pédagogique du Cégep de Chicoutimi (in French)
Results and reports for winter 2012 (in French)

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