Team Communities

In October, the new Communities Team organized a conclave on communication, funding, and infrastructure; the group working on the future Communities Project Budget (Zukunft CPB) prepared a final draft to present at the 13th Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE) general assembly; and meetings and workshops on regional meeting places were held. The month also saw the association successfully and happily support lots of other events organized by the community.

Each week, the WMDE office hosted events run by or for the community, including the WikiTV meeting, the editorial team meeting on physics, a diversity workshop, and an open editing session. WMDE also funded an intensive Photoshop workshop in Kassel to enable community members to enhance freely licensed photographs. They will now share their newly acquired knowledge in further workshops with other volunteers.

The jury of this year’s Wiki Loves Monuments photo competition also met to discuss the 900 photos long-listed from the 35,580 that were entered. It picked 100 winners, who will receive prizes from WMDE at WikiCon.

WMDE also supported a workshop in Cologne at the start of October. Participants discussed how to continue improving support for local activities and how to set up sources of support for the community in Cologne and other places.

Support programs

The Communities Team has been working very successfully with the WikiCon organizing committee. The various facets of the project are taking shape and the team is working hard to develop or implement them. Over 200 people are expected at this year’s WikiCon, the largest get-together for people involved in Wikimedia projects and friends of free knowledge. This year’s event is being financed and co-organized by WMDE.

Other October highlights included the first constructive and enthusiastic meeting with the WikiSource community in Leipzig, which has been active for many years. WMDE representatives explained the various forms of support available, created a dedicated team within the Communities Team, and organized logistical and organizational support for the future.

The regular Wikipedia meeting in Munich celebrated its tenth anniversary and received WMDE’s congratulations at the anniversary meeting. The 80th regular Wikipedia meeting in Dresden also took place and Wikimedia Deutschland marked occasion with a special cake for the local Wikipedians.

Politics and Society

Cultural Initiative outreach campaign

In October, we evaluated the first round of feedback from the GLAM survey that went out to 6,800 members. Over 100 people responded – a whole 50 percent more than expected! We were particularly pleased at the high proportion of supporting members who sent in feedback. We received over 40 concrete suggestions for GLAM collaborations, a number that also more than exceeded our expectations, and we will now consider each suggestion in detail.

Photographer accreditation at WDR events

After two Wikipedians recently had problems obtaining accreditation for WDR press photo shoots, the Communities Team and the Politics and Society Department got in touch with WDR to find an acceptable solution for all sides. All sides are supporting the ongoing endeavors to formulate an agreement, and we would like to thank all those who have lent their support in this matter so far.

GovData.de workshop

We participated in an evaluation of the government data portal GovData.de. The aim of this evaluation was to help prepare the site before it goes live. Our main concern was to reverse the use of “unfree” licenses as state licenses.

Events

(P = presentation by a WMDE speaker; O = organized by WMDE)

GLAM on Tour Oberlausitzsische Bibliothek: November 1 and 2, 2013, Görlitz (O)
Copyright 4 Creativity: November 12 in Brussels, workshop on text and data mining (P)
(November 25 in Luxembourg) (P) (European Commission public hearing on implementing public sector information guidelines)
Workshop on Wikipedia research hosted by the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim: 8 and 9 November 2013 (P)
Zugang gestalten (Shaping Access); November 28 and 29, 2013, in Berlin (O)
KNK open access conference; December 12 and 13, in Dessau (P)

Education and Knowledge

Diversity workshop

On October 12, we hosted a workshop at our office in Berlin to discuss diversity within Wikipedia. As well as discussing the working paper “Gender – Diversity – Wikipedia”, participants also got together in groups to develop concrete ideas and draft proposals for activities in this area. The results have been summarized on the workshop project page and can be discussed there.

Wikimedia Diversity Conference

We were extremely busy preparing for the international Wikimedia Diversity Conference on November 9 and 10, 2013. In October we produced the program for the conference, which we are planning and organizing in collaboration with Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia Nederlands, and the Wikimedia Foundation.

The conference will see volunteers from all over the world present existing initiatives and projects, and come together in workshops to work on new ideas and projects that are currently at the planning stage. The conference will focus on aspects of gender diversity and geographical diversity.

We are looking forward to meeting with our international guests and to an excellent program of events. Please click here to read the program and find out more about speakers at the event.

Women Edit

The Women Edit project was launched in August with the aim of developing local networks for women working in Wikimedia projects. The project team made excellent progress this month by finding local “Wiki women” who are interested in acting as multipliers. It also received many positive responses from the community and gained a large number of supporters. Apart from the Diversity Conference, another important event is WikiCon, which will take place in Karlsruhe in late November. This conference provides a forum for Wikipedians to discuss ideas and suggestions about how to continue the networks. Participants were invited to submit ideas for sessions here by the end of October.

Open Educational Resources

In mid-October, the partners involved in the 2013 OER Conference met for a follow-up session, during which they discussed the conference and looked to future activities. The various partners are keen to work together more closely in future. Following the conference, the first report on the mabb teacher training project on free content by the media educational organization Mediale Pfade is now available. The next important event is a book sprint with the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) at our office on November 22, 2013. The event will take place in English, and we ask all participants to register in advance.

René Pickhardt has written a WMDE blog entry about his Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). We will be collaborating with him to offer a workshop at WikiCon to discuss the question of how OER and Wikimedia fit together.

RENDER

The official part of the RENDER project came to a close at the end of September. In October, the RENDER team issued the final financial reports for the European Commission and made preparations for the final review meeting, which will take place at the end of November at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the project coordinator.

Wikidata

At the beginning of the month, Lydia Pintscher took over as product manager for Wikidata. She published a blog entry outlining her goals for the future of Wikidata and answered several questions in an interview. There was also an interesting interview with Magnus Manske in which he discussed, among other things, the tools that he has developed for Wikidata. Wikidata now keeps statistics on various metrics related to Wikidata and its sources, labels, and descriptions to allow it to improve source listing in the long-term.

In addition, developers continued to work on the creation of platforms to allow simple queries to be addressed to Wikidata and introduced a new data type (numbers).

A prototype for a multilingual picture dictionary was published, as well as a tempo-spatial tool for displaying historical chains of events and a tool for generating lists in response to a query. Last month also saw Wikidata celebrate its first anniversary. To mark the occasion, Wikidata created a special page with comments, critical reflections, an interview, and other information.

International Affairs

Chapters Dialogue

In the Chapters Dialogue project, we ask chapters and their stakeholders (the Wikimedia Foundation, the Funds Dissemination Committee, the Affiliations Committee, and communities) about their wishes, goals, concerns, and suggestions for the future of the international Wikimedia world. The aim of the project is to paint a picture of the status quo in order to achieve mutual understanding and, above all, to develop ideas on future development. Nicole Ebber is leading the project and working alongside Kira Krämer, who is the Design Thinking expert for interviews and interview analysis.

In October, Kira traveled to South America, where she attended the conference for Spanish-speaking chapters, Iberoconf, in Mexico City. She interviewed representatives from Mexico, Spain, Portugal, and Venezuela during the event. Kira also conducted interviews in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Germany. As well as making travel arrangements and organizing documentation and other aspects of the project planning process, she made further improvements to the questionnaires for interviews with chapters and stakeholders. Information on upcoming tour dates can be found on the meta page and on Facebook.

Communications and international collaboration

After submitting an application to hold the Wikimedia Conference 2014, we were awarded the contract at the beginning of October. This will be our fifth time to host this international conference, which brings together representatives from international Wikimedia organizations and committees to discuss the future of the Wikimedia world. Our event management team will take care of all the logistics. Nicole Ebber is a member of the program team that is currently identifying the burning questions and hot topics, which it will then include in the program to be drawn up over the next few months.

Public Relations

Press work

Preparations took place in October for the upcoming conference Shaping Access – More Responsibility for Cultural Heritage. This included preparatory work on press coverage and coordination with our event partners. The conference will take place in Berlin on November 28 and 29.

We received a large number of press enquiries on professional writing in English Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation commented extensively on this topic and on collaboration with volunteers in October, and this also generated requests for background information in Germany. A selection of press reports on these and other topics can be found on our website.

Information material

The Communications Unit also worked last month on three conferences, which will take place in November. The unit ordered T-shirts, shirts, and hoodies for the organizational team at WikiCon in Karlsruhe, as well as Wikipedia beanbags and cardboard stools. It also drew up a detailed conference program for the Wikimedia Diversity Conference and designed suitable posters and a roll-up to ensure a consistent image at the conference. The third Shaping Access – More Responsibility for Cultural Heritage conference is also taking place in November. The Communications Unit produced an invitation flyer for this event that will be distributed by mail.

Communications monitoring

The communications team carefully followed the discussion on our draft 2014 annual plan. Since October 27, the desired changes to the draft that were compiled via online suggestions, as well as at meetings in six German cities, have been incorporated into the draft. The team also produced material for the presentations in Munich, Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, Essen, and Berlin. A decision will be made on the final form of the draft, which has now been adapted to include the community’s wishes, at our general assembly. Additionally, the FDC proposal for the coming year and the previously mentioned third annual quarterly report were edited.

Fundraising

The next fundraising campaign will be launched soon, so we are in the home stretch as regards finalizing preparations. This meant that October was a very busy month.

First of all, we took on a new student trainee, Philip, who is helping us with data processing and the statistical evaluation of tests. Philip is studying mathematics at Berlin’s Humboldt-Universität, so he is a very useful addition to the team. With this new appointment our team is now complete and is well prepared for the challenging tasks ahead.

The donations for the second half of 2014 have been announced, and our target for the next two months is now clear. With this in mind, we conducted some promising web-banner tests in October – from changing the donation amount on our “most successful banner text” to incorporating a donation form into the banner. We constantly publish all test results here. However, it is likely that we will place less of an emphasis on personal stories this year than we did last year.

Furthermore, we have carried out a great deal of work on new donation forms and Web pages. Further information will be made available in November when the first tests take place. One thing we can reveal now is that the donations pages will undergo a comprehensive re-launch.

As well as the donations goal, we have also set ourselves another target: to raise the number of WMDE members to 10,000. Currently, we have 1,725 active members and 5,375 association members. This means that we need to gain a further 2,900 members for the free knowledge cause.

Job Postings

You can find all current job postings at WMDE listed here.