Talk:Wikimedia New Zealand

Rebooting

Every few months a Kiwi becomes interested in having a local organisation. They ask around, and hear that other wikis arnt interested. I think those who are interested in getting organised should start talking together about what they want to achieve. It might be that a Wiki User Group is more suitable than a Wikimedia chapter, or maybe you want a working group within Wikimedia Australia ;-) . Discuss!

While some may only be interested in communicating here on meta, other modes of communication are going to be more suitable for the majority of the community. e.g. mailing lists, facebook, G+, etc.

Most Wikipedia have a dedicated Facebook page about the project. afaics, there is none for Maori Wikipedia. Is anyone interested in starting one?

It is quite suprising that the mailing list mail:wikimediaNZ-l is so quiet.[1] Does anyone know why?

Would a facebook group or a facebook page be better? John Vandenberg (talk) 05:07, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

Hi John, I saw your message on my talk page (mainly due to the surprise of an e-mail about a modification to it), to tell the truth I'm not really sure what the state of the landscape of the Wikimedia projects is from a New Zealand contribution point of view, and even more so from a social network point of view as I try to avoid them. To address some of the points though, and I'm running purely from memory here, back in the day ('06), a Chapter was pretty much the only option, and even then a lot of it was in the air/undefined (case in point, the fact that the Australian chapter took 2 years, although as I recall, was proposed around the same time).

I think the fact that it's now 7 years later, and no one really has paid much/any attention to the idea of a chapter in that period (until now it seems) is a bad omen for starting up a NZ chapter, now. I mostly gave up on the idea around '07, but hung onto the wikimedia.org.nz (which I kept redirected to wikimedia.org) domain (on the idea if a chapter was formed or WMF asked for it, I'd hand over the UDAI and top up an extra year as a gift), neither happened, so in the end I released it sometime between 2009 and 2011.

I seem to recall that a NZ branch of Wikimedia Australia was suggested at the time when a NZ chapter was proposed, but I'm not sure if it was documented anywhere (there was a wiki that had more details about the proposal, but I can't remember what, if anything, is there). --NigelJ (talk) 06:15, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

(Edit conflict.) I'm essentially a new "Kiwipedian", having only recently registered an SUL account on a variety of WMF projects this year. I was on Wikipedia back in 2003, but I can't even remember what my username was back then, let alone my password. I'm keen to get more involved in the community here, particular amongst other Kiwis, and I was quite disappointed to find out that there isn't a local Wikimedia chapter here. As I mentioned recently in a brief essay in my userspace, I'm keen to see the local chapter get restarted.

Since then it has been pointed out to me that starting a new chapter is not as simple as organizing a Meetup, and it involves money, a considerable amount of it, to establish a legal entity, along with the necessary attendant expenditure for lawyers, accountants, etc. One opinion I received (via IRC) is that this would all be rather hard to justify for such a small nation like New Zealand, and that we would be better off forming a User Group instead. John's suggestion above about lumping ourselves in with Australia could be a useful solution initially, whether as part of a fledgling chapter, a user group, or even just a working group as suggested. Although, National pride would probably see us striving to stand on our own two feet eventually anyway. I assume there are other benefits to having a chapter rather than just a user group? Perhaps someone could do a cost/benefit analysis, or a simple SWOT analysis to help determine whether there really is any advantage to having an Aotearoa/New Zealand Chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Whatever the outcome: chapter, user group, or working group, I'm keen to be involved. AugurNZ ✐⌕ 06:48, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

Hi guys. I ran into this discussion as I was browsing through Facebook, and I would agree with John that getting discussions started on whether or not you would like to set up a User Group is a good way forward. Allow me to introduce myself: I am a member of the Affiliations Committee, the committee of the Wikimedia Foundation that screens and approves the applications of potential affiliates (including User Groups), and if you need any assistance at all with the process of setting up a User Group (or chapter), please feel free to approach us.

In the meantime, I will be informing the AffCom about this development, and hopefully we'll keep our eyes open for any new developments that may come our way. :) --Sky Harbor ^(talk) 12:56, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

A couple of points here:

• The primarily current shared places for New Zealand wikipedians appear to be w:Wikipedia talk:WikiProject New Zealand and mi:Wikipedia:Kāinga māngai. Starting a discussion here and not cross-posting a note there seems less than optimal.
• Previous (offwiki) discussions about getting resourcing for a potential WMNZ from the same sources as Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand led to the conclusion that resourcing from there was unlikely, but some informal / unoffical support may be avaliable.
• There is no "Maori Wikipedia". There is an English language wikipedia which has a lot of content about Māori people, language, culture and heritage and probably the lion's share of Māori-identifying editors; there is also the Māori language wikipedia, which has considerably less of both. Note the use of macrons.
• I can't personally see much point to a WMNZ unless it involves a realistic plan to increase to profile, use and content of the Māori language wikipedia.

Not your siblings' deletionist (talk) 00:59, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Hi Stuart, My apologies for not correctly referring to the Māori language Wikipedia, and not notifying the English Wikipedia WikiProject, or any other wiki project, of this discussion. I was focused on notifying all of the people who were previously interested in starting an organisation.[2][3] We should have followed that up with more notices. I have notified WP:NZ now. Does a native speaker want to notify MI.WP at the appropriate village pump?

I think there is benefit in raising the profile, use and content of all Wikipedias (and other sister projects) used in NZ, including English Wikipedia, and also the software MediaWiki. Mailing lists and Facebook is a light-weight approach to providing a small public face for the local community. I don't know much about the MI.WP project/community; is it useful/viable/etc? With the advent of Wikidata, and the likelihood that we'll soon have the technology to turn wikidata into prose in any language, the MI.WP project may be able to increase in article size automatically and dramatically soon, if the community wants that. John Vandenberg (talk) 05:01, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

All the posts visible on MI.WP's village pump equivalent (mi:Wikipedia:Kōrero) are in English, not Māori (unless you count ones that start with the greeting Kia ora tātou before continuing in English), so I think there's nothing to stop you posting a notification there in English.

Most NZ-related issues are discussed at w:Wikipedia talk:WikiProject New Zealand, not the mailing list. To be honest, I'd forgotten we had one.

One advantage of creating a WMNZ chapter or User Group would be that some people and organisations are more used to dealing with organisations than individual volunteers, so it might help us get better access to institutional archives or media events, for instance. It could also provide a local point of contact for people interested in Wikipedia/Wikimedia. But the hurdles involved in setting up a WMNZ chapter seem significant, so maybe that's not worth the trouble. A User Group might be more manageable. --Avenue (talk) 12:23, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Mailing list and possible User Group

I tried to subscribe to the mailing list recently and couldn't (it gave me an error, saying my email address was not valid - which is untrue). Is the list at all active? Does @Brian: still administer the list? If there is any interest in a User Group, then it seems logical that the first step would be establishing a mailing list and advertising it on en-wiki, mi-wiki and commons. This would be better than a social network, as users who may not wish to be outed can more easily participate. According to Requirements for future user groups:

Wikimedia User Groups are groups of Wikimedians who intend to do offline work that could range from meetups to partnerships to any new and novel way the group comes up with to further the Wikimedia vision.

I suppose the question is, what "offline work" do people have in mind here? - Shudde (talk) 08:16, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

I agree that the first step is to bring the mailing list up. No response from @Brian:? He only has had one brief spurt of activity in the last 12 months, so it may be wise to add another person as the NZ list admin. e.g. the Australian list has three[4]. I sent an email to Brian about the email address problem on 9 Jan 2011, but received no reply. Just now I send an email to the list admin address (Wikimedianz-owner@wikipedia.org), and the delivery failed, so that is another problem to fix at the same time as adding a new list admin. John Vandenberg (talk) 03:09, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

@Shudde & John Vandenberg: I created a task in Phabricator and ask if I can be added as admin into the current list. If that happens, I'll try to make it work. Also, I'm trying to establish the user group first, see Wikimedia Community User Group New Zealand. Please, let's have a further discussions there. Regards, --Podzemnik (talk) 20:27, 20 January 2019 (UTC)