Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/@WeAreWikipedia: One Wikimedian every week to tell untold community stories on Twitter

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@WeAreWikipedia: One Wikimedian every week to tell untold community stories on Twitter

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Screen Shot of WeAreWikipedia page

With 280 Wikipedias and ever growing language communities many a times communities do not get to hear about other communities, their new initiatives and activities in a single place, especially in social media. Often the cross community learning do not get out of the community periphery. Search result for #Wikipedia would get 10 new tweets in one minute. To bring many communities in a single place @WeAreWikipedia was started. @WeAreWikipedia is a week-long curation on Twitter that brings Wikimedians from diverse communities to update the world about their own communities; activities, new projects, institutional collaborations, outreach and learning. The curator becomes a star in the entire Wiki-Universe for a week. This pilot, so far has produced 821 tweets by 10 curators contributing to 10 different language Wikipedias. It also has got participation of the founders of 3 Wikimedia Chapters. This is the first of its kind of a rotation curation model in the Wikimedia movement.

The idea of having Wikimedians to curate and share untold stories using Twitter draws inspiration from WeAreBangalore, a city based rotation curation of the Indian city, Bangalore in which I was curating for a week. This, of course was an experiment the engagement with more people on the Internet, to make them aware about Wikimedia projects in their languages and cross-pollinating ideas and interesting learning from community projects. But, it certainly brought people together to even share individual learning beyond borders-Bangla, for instance, which is spoken both in Bangladesh and India has far less editors from India. Nurunnaby Chowdhury Hasive, founding member of Wikimedia Bangladesh feels it gave him a chance to speak to a wider world of Bengalis about the low participation on articles related to India which they can improve. Odia Wikimedian Diptiman Panigrahi was live-curating @WeAreWikipedia during Odisha Dibasa 2014, an event organized by the community which brought a lot of attention towards the re-release of 14 books in Creative Commons license. During the History Month 77 articles were created about notable Indian women and articles related to women. One if this event's driving face and Malayalam Wikimedian, Netha Hussain and another Wikimedian Noopur Raval curated for two weeks during March bringing attention to noted Indian women.

I liked it that I had to do some research to find out material to share. I found that not many tweets from those I follow are re-tweetable. I found that we will need to follow more wiki people to be able to generate more tweets. My personal research on news related to wikipedia took me to many blogs I was otherwise unaware of.

— Netha Hussain, Malayalam Wikimedian and curator of WeAreWikipedia

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