Wikimedians of Latvia User Group/2017
This is a report for activities performed by Wikimedians of Latvia User Group in 2017.
Wikipedian meetings
[edit]- During 2017 8 meetings involving local and visiting wikimedians, (at most 8 participants), were arranged, all of them in Riga.
Outreach events
[edit]Multiple workshops teaching people how to contribute to Wikipedia were held:
- January: multiple workshops with education related NGO to cover articles about schools in Latvian Wikipedia, 8 participants
- May: Workshop at Baltic International academy, 10 participants
- November: Workshop at Liepāja University, 9 participants
Education program
[edit]No big changes here, with some participants consulting university professors working with students on Wikipedia.
- Course "Information technologies in education" at University of Latvia, one public lecture (October 4), students needed to create two articles as course assignment, taught by Viesturs Vēzis.
- There are at least two university teachers who work with student assignments in Wikipedia, but we have not been able to contact them.
Community engagement
[edit]- Article contests
- CEE Spring 2017 article contest was successfully run. It was third time for our community and it resulted is 278 new articles (68 from proposed topic lists). Our user group was part of common grant and it allowed to give prizes to best contributors who received gift cards from book store. Papuass was involved in organizing the contest also on international level.
- Science fiction literature contest resulted in 63 new articles by 8 participants and the winner was awarded a t-shirt donated by member of community.
- Wikipedia Asian Month 2017 was promoted in community and 9 users signed up, contributing articles.
- Photo contests
- Wiki Loves Earth was organized for the first time, using support from WMF grants.
- Wiki Loves Monuments was organized for the third time, this time without prizes.
- Online edit-a-thons
- 3 online edit-a-thons (involving 15-17 participants) were organized with topics "missing articles" (twice), and "Estonia".
- Microgrants project
- Together with Wiki Loves Earth grant we applied for microgrants project to fund smaller ideas by community members. Two microgrant funded wiki-expeditions were executed.
Grants
[edit]Participation in regional and global Wikimedia events
[edit]- March 31-April 2, 2017: Wikimedia Conference 2017, Berlin, Germany – (2 participants: Papuass, GreenZeb)
- August 9-13, 2017: Wikimania 2017, Montreal, Canada – (1 participant: Papuass (WMF scolarship))
- September 22-25, 2017: Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017, Warsaw, Poland – (2 participants: Papuass, Treisijs)
- November 1-3, 2017: Open licences, open content, open data: tools for developing digital humanities (organized by WMEE), Tartu, Estonia — (1 participant: Papuass)
Organizational
[edit]Practices have been established to document our events as much as possible. Organizers of event are requested to create information page about their event and add to list containing all historic events. All conference attendees are required to write a summary and present in person during meetups (if possible).
Most important user group activities have been reported to GLAM, Education and CEE newsletter.
Social networks
[edit]- Twitter has been useful tool for spreading information about groups activities and receiving some feedback.
- Facebook account has been used alongside Twitter account.
These social media accounts are promoted during our events.