Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Nederland/201312

This is the chapter report for Wikimedia Nederland for December 2013

COMMUNITY: supporting and mobilising volunteers and editors

• Sweden-week on NL-Wikipedia

The Dutch Wikipedia community decided to organise a ‘Sweden week’ to support the Netherlands-Sweden friendship year in 2014. More than 1000 articles about topics related to Sweden were added to Dutch Wikipedia. WMNL supported this initiative by liaising with WMSE and the Swedish Embassy in the Netherlands who promoted the activity via their website.

• End-of-year Wiki-Saturday

On December 21 volunteers, boardmembers and staff met at the WMNL office for the last Wiki-Saturday of the year. In total, 20 people came to Utrecht for this special festive event.

• Wiki-café Groningen en Den Haag

Wikipedians met in café’s in Den Haag and Groningen to get to know each other better and talk Wikipedia. In total some 11 Wikipedians attended. They enjoyed this opportunity to meet fellow Wikipedians and want to repeat the event.

WORK: content, collaboration and activity development

• Kick-off meeting World War II project

A group of volunteers and staff met with representatives of the National Committee for Remembrance (Nationaal Comité 4 en 5 mei) to start preparations for a campaign aimed at improving content concerning war monuments both on Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia. April 2014 will be war monument month.

• DISH 2013

Staff member Sebastiaan ter Burg co-hosted Alex Hinojo's chef table about starting Wiki-related projects for GLAM's at DISH 2013, an international conference about digital strategies in heritage.

• Presentation Landscape Heritage Utrecht

Staff member Sebastiaan ter Burg gave a presentation about GLAM projects at the soft launch of UtrechtAltijd, a province wide new landscape heritage platform. This event was organized by Landscape Heritage Utrecht on the 19th of December.

• Event organisation and evaluation toolkit

WMNL is developing a (beta) version of an event organisation and evaluation toolkit. The toolkit is designed to support volunteers in setting up events and to increase the quality and consistency of the evaluations. In January, it will become available for testing.

• GLAMWiki Toolset

The GLAMWiki Toolset is a tool for uploading large content donations. The tool has been added (can be used from) the 17th of December. Wikimedia Nederland was one of the partners of this project.

WMNL

• Media coverage

An article in national newspaper NRC Handelsblad about the future of Wikipedia (partly based on the MIT report and interviews with Wikipedian Lodewijk Gelauff and WMNL executive director Sandra Rientjes) led to two radio-interviews and and a 10-minute item in a well-watched current affairs programme on national tv. Although the original article had a quite negative focus on problems within Wikipedia concerning editor recruitment and software, the media follow-up was more nuanced and generally sympathetic to Wikipedia.

(Full list of media coverage)

• Membership

On December 31, WMNL had 217 members. We started the year with 175 members. This growth occurred despite a rigorous ‘cleaning’ of the membership list to remove people whose membership expired in 2012.

• Newsletter

The last Newsletter of the year was published. In 2013, the number of people receiving the newsletter rose from 189 to 360.

MONEY

• A private grantmaking foundation donated € 20,000 to Wikimedia Nederland to improve coverage on Dutch wildlife and nature via Wiki Loves Earth.

ORGANISATION: board, management and support

WMNL started the search for candidate Board Members. Elections will take place in March 2014. More information can be found on the WMNL website.

Upcoming

• The New Years Reception will take place on January 18 in The Hague.