Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Nederland/201501

January and February 2015

Community and Participation

Erasmus Prize awarded to Wikipedia community

On 15 January (the 14th birthday of Wikipedia) the Erasmus Prize Foundation announced during a seminar in Amsterdam that Wikipedia will receive the Erasmus Prize 2015.

The prize is awarded annually to a person or institution that has made an exceptional contribution to culture, society or social science. Wikipedia was chosen because the Internet encyclopedia provides worldwide access to knowledge in open and democratic way. The award goes specifically to the international Wikipedia community, the volunteers behind Wikipedia. Wikimedia Nederland hopes that this prestigious award will open doors for new partnerships and encourage more people to become involved. We are planning a program of activities throughout the year.

New Years Reception

Saturday, January 17th the Institute for Vision and Sound hosted Wikimedia Nederland's annual New Year's reception. The meeting was attended by more than 80 members, donors, Wikipedians and other interested parties.

The day was opened by Jan Müller (Managing Director of Vision and Sound). The guests could explore the Sound and Vision Experience or join a tour of the building

Video on Wikipedia

After our New Years reception at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, we received a number of questions about the use of video on Wikipedia. We built a small project page on our local chapter Wiki with a few instructional videos on how to upload and use video. The community reacted with enthusiasm and created a new help page out of this projectpage. Some volunteers became more actively involved with trying to find open video content online to use on Wikipedia.

Content

Education program - call for translation requests

The education program has started with a pilot project on translations. Interns from ITV (a school for interpreters and translators) can translate selected articles from French, German, Spanish, Italian, English and Russian to Dutch. These interns will translate articles requested by the community. In January, a call for translation requests was posted and got a very positive response from the community. The first intern will start in April and will translate articles from German into Dutch.

World War II

A number of meetings took place with archives that have collections related to WWII. We expect to see some media donations over the next few months. We are also working with our partner NIOD (the national institute for war, conflict and genocide research) to prepare an editathon on the role of women during the Second World War. Work is also continuing on a project about the underground press during World War II. This is a cooperation between NIOD, the National Library and Wikimedia Nederland. The aim is to improve the number and quality of articles about illegal newspapers on Wikipedia, and then use these to provide extra content to the National Library database holding the digitized version of the actual newspapers.

Project Nature

The Museum for Natural History Naturalis has started the search for a Wikipedian in Residence. The volunteers involved in project nature are starting work on processing a content donation by De Vlinderstichting (Butterfly Foundation).

Information on and images of the dragonfly species of the Netherlands was released under a Creative Commons licence.

Gendergap

Preparations have begun for the Gendergap project. Plan is to have a projectplan written in April. We are exploring possibilities and we are talking to possible partners for our gendergap project. At the same time, we are preparing activities for the international Women's day in March. We were approached by the feminist magazine Opzij, who want to increase the number of articles about women on Dutch Wikipedia. We are cooperating with them in an editathon at their offices on March 9. We hope this will be the start of longer cooperation.

GLAM-WIKI 2015

GLAM-WIKI 2015 is organized by WMNL and will take place in The Hague on April 10-12. The venue will be the National Library and National Archive. The programme committee and the WMNL office are busy preparing this event. A call for proposals was published, the scholarship request form made available, ticket sales have started.s. The programme committee is now reviewing the proposals.

Catharijne Convent Museum for religious art donates high resolution images

On 24 February, more than 2,500 high-resolution photos of the artifacts from the permanent collection of the Museum Catharijneconvent were added to the database of Wikipedia.

To encourage wikipedians and interested researchers to use the collection, the museum and Wikimedia Nederland are going to organize various activities, focusing on editing and writing articles on Wikipedia. On March 12, the first editathon will take place. More information can be found [here].

Communication and publicity

Campaign

In the final months of 2014 we worked on preparing a campaign to increase understanding among the general public about some basic facts concerning Wikipedia, in particular that it is written entirely by volunteers The social media campaign started in February. More about the results in next month's update.

The WMNL newsletters for January and February were sent out to the subscribers.

Governance and organization

On February 16, Sandra Fauconnier started work as project coordinator at the WMNL office. She previously worked as a Wikipedian in Residence. Sebastiaan ter Burg has left the WMNL team as of March 1.