Projects & Activities of Wikimedia Germany in January 2011

10 years Wikipedia - Party in Berlin

On 15 January around 300 guests followed the invitation of Wikimedia Germany and came to the birthday celebration at the HomeBase Lounge of Berlin. A colorful mix of Wikipedians, friends and supporters of Wikipedia listened to a brief review of the last 10 years, feasted on the birthday cake and took the opportunity to get to know or meet again. The interactive installation "WikiLetters" was a special surprise for the guests by SPTA, they danced to DJs Mogreens, das Kraftfuttermischwerk and DJ Schönberger, a slide show presented a best-of from Wikipedia- and community images while one could follow the national and international activities over the Twitter Wall. A detailed report can be found in the blog, a collection of nice pictures of the celebration on Commons and Flickr.

Wikimedia Conference

Preparations for the Chapters' Meeting were intensified in January. We are pleased to have found again a program coordinator like Bence Damokos (Wikimedia Hungary, a member of Chapter’s Committee) with international experience and good knowledge of the Wikimedia structures. Together with the Chapters he will develop the program and ensure that each Chapter will send two representatives to Berlin on 25th -27th March. Wikimedia Germany will be in charge of all logistical tasks such as travel/arrival and accommodation of participants, clarification of visa and insurance matters, the search for the venue, technical and culinary supply and the many little things of a big international conference brings with it. We are delighted to have found a beautiful and well equipped venue - the Beletage of the Heinrich Boell Foundation. As in previous years we want to offer our guests a Berlin typical recreation program and in this regard we will contact the Berlin Wikipedians in the coming weeks for more detail. Unlike in recent years there won't be a developer workshop during the Wikimedia Conference Conference 2011.

School Project

The Wikipedia school project started with full energy into the New Year. We organized already 4 events in the first month and have many inquiries for additional events. Next to the care of the speakers, a collaboration with the media education center Bits21 in fjs e.V. started. A joint tender offer for workshops and a mutual, professional knowledge exchange shall be the focus here. Even the media presence is being targeted at present and a network over online newsletter is planned. The school project will be present with an information booth at two educational meetings: In February at the teachers meeting at the University of Mainz, with the topic "Is new media changing schools?" and in March at the 3. Berlin-Brandenburg School Library Day in Berlin. Apart from that we decided this year to send letters to specific schools. In January the first focus was the region of Cologne. Here we would like to thank Raimond for his strong support. We are looking forward to a successful school year!

German National Library

Negotiations are currently going on with the DNB about the first steps in the cooperation about write access to the standard files for Wikipedians. Thereby it will focus on the creation of PND entries to persons who are not covered by the PND, but have biographical articles in Wikipedia. Mathias is in conversation about this with the DNB-employees. Our medium term goal is that every wikipedian, should be able to make corrections to PND data records.

Bridgeman

Wikipedians know "Bridgeman" especially in the case of Bridgeman vs. Corel about the issue of copyright protection of images of works. Harriet Bridgeman, founder of Bridgeman Art Library, is a visitor of the Wikimedia GLAM events. We have contact through the Europeana workshops with her. Mathias is in talks with Bridgeman about forms of cooperation, or even in spite of different views on some copyright issues. Our goal here: Release of digitized public domain work.

Studio Hamburg

Studio Hamburg is a subsidiary of the NDR and large parts have been funded by the Public Service Broadcasting. For a while we have been talking with representatives from Studio Hamburg about the release of content under free licenses. A concrete discussion concerns a project called "histoclips", which is already online. The aspects of the negotiations represent the problems of many institutions of public service broadcasting: beginning from the basic question, whether it belong to the public, when the public has already paid for it, and about the question who has actually sufficient rights, to set a video clip with material from many sources under free license. Mathias is in talks regarding this issue. If successful, we will have interesting contents for Wikimedia Commons, alternatively we will know more about why the fee-funded content market still doesn’t work as requested.

RENDER

Mathias participated in the middle of January in the first meeting of the RENDER Consortium, which deals with the development of specific tasks for the research partners in this project. Regarding this in the coming months we will write to the project administration with the partners of these tasks and update the schedule.

Wikimedium

The first edition of the newspaper association Wikimedium will appear in March. But preparations have already begun in January. We are collecting ideas, articles and images and we will again address external authors (Wikipedians and readers) to create articles for Wikimedium. Now and again we have called to participate in the newspaper association and at this place I would like to repeat this request: we are depending on external help to compile avariety of contributions from the Wikipedia-/Wikimedia-Universum for the newspaper. Please register and send your suggestions to <catrin.schoneville at wikimedia.de> or <redaktion at wikimedium.de.> We are also happy about the distribution. The newspaper can be subscribed for free at Wikimedia Germany. 180 new readers made use of this in January. Wikipedia-Round table or friends of the Free Knowledge can order higher-volume from us in order to distribute the newspaper. Overall there are now 540 individual recipients, among them 91 supporting members of the association. The subscription covers currently over 1,400 copies of Wikimedium.

Information booklets for Wikimedia projects

The brochures of Wikipedia-basics as well as the brochure on Wikiversity completed in November are going well and being ordered heavily in the agency. We would like to repeat these remarks gladly: Required information can be obtained in the agency.

Donations result in the media

In January we have published three press releases. On 5th January the result of the online donation campaign 2010 was communicated and there was great interest from the media and many imprints of our press release or the website.Questions, interview questions and background information has been processed. An excerpt of the report can be found here.

10 years Wikipedia

The second press release was sent out on the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia. The anniversary has brought about a media echo, which was not achieved till now. Altogether over 150 emails with media queries were sent to Catrin. Most came from Germany, but also press inquiries from Austria, Switzerland and Denmark. What does the processing of such requests involve and the evaluation of the coverage can be found in the blog of Catrin.

Spoken Wikipedia

The project "Spoken Wikipedia" should be expanded further. In December we have a collection of articles of the day (with cooperation with DZB) burned to CD and provide it free of charge for those interested: just order under <catrin.schoneville at wikimedia.de>. In addition, Catrin would like to share with Achim Raschka and other community members an additional CD- collection of read articles of Wikipedians. Soon there will be a proposal regarding the same. Preparations for a meeting with Wikipedians and possible partners have already begun in January.

Wikipedia for Schools

We created a press invitation for the workshop of the school project in Cologne and sent it to the local and regional media. Before the workshop select individual media representatives from print online media and radio were contacted.

Wikipedia book

The book project made considerably progress in the past month. After calls we made to join the association blog and on various social networks, which however did not receive great response, another approach had to be chosen. Therefore hundreds of Wikipedians - selected according to different criteria (oldest, youngest, most active, etc.) – were written directly and were appealed for cooperation on concrete topics. This action proved to be more successful and so numerous short stories and anecdotes could be gathered for the book. The issues of allocation and coordination of the preparation of the main contents of the book took place parallel to it. Other areas that were not taken up by the community had to be reconsidered and revised. Many good ideas from Wikipedia authors were added. Overall the co-authors from the community were essentially given more freedom than originally planned. Meanwhile all the major topics were issued and the writing started. Some issues are also handled by employees of the office. The attention in the scope of the 10th Birthday of Wikipedia was very useful for contacting potential publishers, since many known publishers had already expressed their interest in Wikimedia book. These key points and terms of cooperation could be explored in the first round of negotiations with these publishers, which will in turn serve as a basis for decision to work with a publisher. Overall the Wikipedia book is on the right track and making steady progress.

Members

In January 2011 22 members with active and 30 members with advanced membership were given associate membership. Five members have cancelled their membership on 31st December 2011. The association has 497 active (= right to vote at the General Assembly, only natural persons) and 195 supporting members (= financial support of the association), a total of 692 members, plus an honorary member (Jimbo Wales).

10 years Wikipedia - synchronous Round tables

Already in August 2010 the idea came up to organize as many round tables as possible for the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia: It started first with hesitation, but gradually many Wikipedians and Round table organizers liked this idea, so that at the end almost 30 Round tables in Germany, Austria and Switzerland were celebrating. There was no limit to the creativity: in Munich and the Ruhr region the opportunity was utilized to organize workshops on topics related to the Wikimedia and invite the interested public, members from Nuremberg and Fürth had invented an "editable cake", which at the end was eaten by "deletion requests". The people from Cologne celebrated in a big group in their favorite restaurant, they sat comfortably together in Braunschweig, Hamburg held Klönschnack, members from Basel and Lörrach celebrated binational together in Basel and in East Friesland friends of the Open Streetmap project had been invited and in Berlin there was a party with over 300 guests and friends of free knowledge. All Round tables of Wikimedia Germany were given smaller or larger packages with information material about Wikipedia and Wikimedia, a few T-shirts and five extra decorated birthday candles made for this event. Apart from that a few round tables were also financially supported by Wikimedia Germany in its activities. Many Wikipedians, who had never attended a regular table, used the birthday meet to know other Wikipedians in "real life". All in all the 10th Birthday at Wikipedia can be described as a great success. We thank all initiators for their creative ideas, their enthusiasm in participating, organizing and celebrating!

Silver Knowledge / TAO

In January the preparation and implementation of a joint event with the Senior Computer Club Berlin-Mitte was a priority. On 26th January 30 seniors met in the conference room of the multi-generation house on the fishing island. They listened with great interest and active participation to the remarks by Denis Bartel regarding emergence, cooperation and the most important rules in the wikipedia. 14 participants are either certain that they want to participate in a workshop or they are still thinking about it, or want to be informed about the progress of the joint project. It is scheduled in February or March to conduct a workshop in the premises of the SCC. Then everybody interested can begin writing in the Wikipedia with support or expand existing knowledge. The event was advertised in the local Berlin press. There was an interview with Catrin and Wikipedia Author Lienhard Schulz on radio 88.8.

Contact approach to more VHS and to the chairman of the Association chronicler Potsdam-Mittelmark. A joint event has been planned end of February and workshops have been planned in the following months for interested parties.

TAO Project - Third Age Online - Community & Collaboration: Telephone consultations with our partners in Germany, the ZAWIW Ulm. During the Academy weeks in spring (March 3 to April 1 2011) a major information event for Wikipedia and workshops is being planned by ZAWIW.

Fundraising

January is the third and final month of the fundraiser. In the beginning of the month two Wikipedian authors raised a call to give the community the opportunity to speak about Wikipedia. The fundraiser ended early on 6th January because of the large donations followed by the ‘Thank-you letter from Jimmy Wales. Due of the ongoing donations response the fundraising was busy till middle of January with the processing of incoming donations and inquiries. In the second half of the month the fundraising began with the preparations for sending the tax receipts in February. In addition the first summary was published with the blog post by Till. At the same time the collected experiences were summarized for the preparation and execution of the next Fundraiser.