Wikimedians in Residence Exchange Network/minutes 2018 07 20

This was an in-person meetup at Wikimania Cape Town 2018.

The meetup was posted at wm2018:Wikimedians in Residence meetup and notes were taken from a Wikimedia etherpad.

attendees

Axel Petterson
Filip from Serbia
Lane Rasberry
Andrew Lih
Sandra Fauconner - Wikimedian in Residence twice, now doing GLAM
Miku from Finland at National Archives
John Sadowski
Arbad Diraneyya
Alex Stinson
Mayhachem93, May Hachem, Egypt
Richard Knipel
Robby Schueren from Luxemburg
John Cummings Wikipedian in REsidence at UNESCO
Abbad Diraneyya
Liam Wyatt

Agenda

user group registration
- update about Affiliations Committee application process
- responsibilities and benefits of being a user group
plans for upcoming video meetups after Wikimania
- online training and skill share among Wikimedians in Residence?
- co-working online - virtual room office hour?
- regular chats
mutual support for each other
- talking with institutions about conflict of interest
- when peer to peer support is useful

notes

user group registration

- update about Affiliations Committee application process Richard shared an update about the application to the Wikimedia Foundation Affiliations Committee for recognition as a Wikimedia user group. There is a page on meta outlining what this group would do. About a month ago a few people met up to discuss what benefits an organization would offer to Wikimedians in Residence and how much work it would be to organize

??? (help!)

What do Wikimedians in Residence do?

Richard shared that his residency focus was sharing images from a museum on Wikimedia Commons. John Cummings said that his residency included sharing information on English Wikipedia and Wikidata. Filip reported that a few years ago Wikimedia Serbia started WIR programs. In 2017 WM Serbia talked with the cultural ministry of the central government to talk about a Wikipedia cultural partnership in archiving and digitization. This led to several short-term residency projects, a total of 7, with terms of a few months. There was a challenge to find new people who were appropriate. In the end they choose 1 person already with Wikimedia Serbia and 6 new people. The new people were a mix of Wikipedians and non-Wiki people with subject matter expertise. All of this has focused on museums and archives. The ministry which funded these programs mostly requested the writing of Serbian language Wikipedia articles, which might not have been the choice of all community members but was much liked by the sponsor. This series of programs was unusual for being full-time sponsored staff positions, and being short term, and being externally funded.

The issue came up of challenges in Wikimedian in Residence positions. Sandra reported that she worked in an institution that wanted an outcome in a short amount of time then exiting with no planned follow up. This was not ideal from a wiki impact perspective where it would be useful to report outcomes and respond to community engagement after some time but some organizations may request this kind of engagment.

Lane on tools: Modeled position as a communication professional, with the wide distributiion of the WM platforms. Massviews - impact. Projects and Events dashboard. - tracking edits. Institutionl buy-in of metrics. Sstained traffic of wiki articles in their subject areas Wikipedia > Twitter

Andrew reported that two days ago he presented "One Night Stand", a Wikimania presentation about communication and comparing Wikipedia to other communication outrach.

John said that he has challenges explaining what a Wikimedian in Residence does when he imagines it as a communication professional role but people imagine an artist in residence. Andrew reported that these roles are "sharing consultants"

Alex suggest suggesting thinking about diversifying of roles, some people call themselves Wikimedian in Residence but have limited impact, student interns, staff representative, etc. How do we make sure the ways in which we professionalise gives meaning when we use it.

Robby said that after 2 days a person can be a junior and after a week they could be senior.

Alex says because WMF has high visibility that they are often contacted about Wikimedian in Residence positions,

Liam appears! John Sadowski asked what we all should be doing to collaborate, either as a Wikimedia user group or just as a collective. John Cummings said that we should get serious about documentation so that we can demostrate what a Wikipedian in Residence is instead of just depending on word of mouth referals to personal explanations. Also we should be in solidarity about requesting feature development. Magnus Manske has a godlike role in developing Wikimedia tools but we cannot depend on one person who is not even staff to provide all the needed software development for professional Wikimedians to do their job.

Get serious about knowledge sharing and developing documentation

Sharing knowledge from different contexts and languages (people in developing contexts have a huge amount of knowledge to share) Speak as a group about needs and requirements to tool developers etc Community wishlist kind of model Strategy working groups input as a group Reporting? on social issues we face on Wikimedia projects Understanding how WiRs fit within the wider Wikimedia ecosystem

Wikimedia User Group reporting is light

The idea that this would be a guild The Wikimedia Conference invites representatives from groups to attend. If this group were more organized then it could send a representative to this group to advocate for Wikipedians in Residence. This might change. But more it is about having a community voice recognized by WMF.

How do you do things like a sales pitch for WiR What documentation exists How do you plan and propose a project WMAR has centrally managed WIR, WMSR a bit less so

People doing work in very different contexts are doing work outside of what is considered possible/normal, e.g May is doing workshops for 100s of people regularly