Wikimedia España/Plan Anual/2018

Background

Wikimedia España is a Spanish non-profit organization, recognized by the Wikimedia Foundation as Wikimedia chapter in Spain. It was officially approved by the Wikimedia Foundation on February 7, 2011 and the same month was registered in the National Registry of Associations of the Ministry of Interior. In May 2011 an agreement was signed with the Valladolid City Council through which the association's headquarters would be located in a municipal agency.

2015 was a key year; in addition to attending the Princess of Asturias Awards Ceremony, where Wikipedia got the International Cooperation award, and which had an important impact on Spanish society, the activities and projects we carried out increased substantially. Due to this, we applied for the first time for a simple annual grant for 2016; it included the hiring of our first employee, a Programme Coordinator. Thanks to this, it was possible to manage the growing demand for activities and projects throughout the country, achieving good results in the number of activities, improved articles, obtained images or volunteers involved.

However, we detected a problem: our achievements and everything related to Wikipedia were not known, both in society and within the Wikimedia movement. This led us to request a second employee in the simple annual grant for 2017, a Communications Manager. The results obtained in the first months of her work confirm us the need to not only continue her work, but increase the number of working hours.

This growth, in order to continue in an organized and easily manageable way, requires prior planning. For that reason, we have started an internal process to define our strategy for the coming years, specifically for the period 2019-2021. This process will last several months and, under the direction of the board, will involve all members of the chapter. We have defined three parts in this process: state of the chapter, what we want to achieve, and how we want to do it.

The first step took place in the conference that wikimedia Spain held in Murcia in mid-September. There, the members attending worked on a SWOT analysis to define the current situation. This will be accompanied by an online survey, for all members, with the same objective: to collect information about the state of WMES. In addition, in January we will hold a meeting, during a weekend: the staff, members of the board and members, to process all the information obtained from the SWOT and the survey. The goal is that in Spring we will have clear what we want to achieve in the coming years and how, and to approve the strategy in Summer. Also, we are undergoing a financial / governance review process with Winifred Olliff and James in 2018.

Programs

Diversity: Gender, content and geographical reach

Description

On of our long-term objetives is to work so that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects are more diverse, both in terms of content and community participation. We all know the problems that Wikipedia currently faces, for example in terms of gender gap: less content about women and fewer women contributors. The same could be applied to other aspects related to cultural gap, with contents centered in Europe and North America, facing shortage of content about Africa, Asia or anything that it's not part of the Western World. In Spain, contents are available in Spanish but not always in the other 8 languages spoken within the country.

In these last years we have been working, increasingly, on these issues. An example of our work are the results for 2017; so far we have organized 24 editing activities, face-to-face or online, and 14 of them have been focused on gender or sexual identity, which is almost 60% of the total. More than tackling these events as single activities we think about them as parts of campaigns: 8th of March Women's Day (different edit-a-thons in several places hosted by different institutions), celebrations of the Day for Women Writers in October or Women and Young Girls in Science Day in February. Our goals for 2018 focus on giving even more importance to this kind of activities, having seen the good results and outcomes they bring to the chapter and the free knowledge movement. We plan to organize at least 8 editing events focused on women, with the aim of increasing content about women in our projects and engaging with women to encourage them take an active role within our community. We usually work with specialized institutions or organizations, which in addition to advising us on what articles work, collaborate with the diffusion of the event and attend as participants. For 2018, and through our Communications and Engagement Manager, we also plan to start working with other organizations focusing on gender equity from the civil society and technical backgrounds.

Our geographical distribution is both a challenge and a strength in WMES. The distances within the country, and therefore the dispersion of the members, can sometimes limit their displacement and participation. However, the existence of members throughout most of the country, belonging to several Wikipedia communities, offers us the opportunity to work in different languages and with different local communities. In that way, in the last two years we have organized an edition event whose focus is the translation of local content between different Wikipedias called Intercultur. Our purpose is to organize a new edition of Intercultur with the participation, once again, of different local communities and other groups like Basque Wikimedians User Group and Amical Wikimedia. As a new approach we plan to expand this activity to the two communities of Wikipedia in Portugal: Mirandese and Portuguese. An example of the geographical distribution of the 2017 Wikimedia Spain activities could be seen on this map (updated in mid September.

During the last Wikimedia Conference, the idea of working together with several Wikimedia groups from Western Europe arose; as a first step we talked about holding a meeting in Porto in 2018, where we present and discuss ideas and projects to collaborate together. One of the central ideas that has been discussed, on which to work, is the linguistic diversity, how to manage it and how to help the smaller communities to promote the different Wikipedias.

Objectives

• We want to achieve more gender-balanced Spanish community.
• Achieving a more gender-balanced content on Wikipedia by increasing the content about women on Wikipedia.
• Increase the content about Spanish cultures, geography, history and other fields of knowledge on Wikimedia projects.

GLAM

Description

Working with GLAMs in Spain is not always easy due to, for example, the little use that cultural institutions make of free licenses or the lack of knowledge about the functioning of Wikimedia projects. However, for years we have been working to reverse this situation. After several attempts, in 2015 we managed to start a project of Wikipedian in Residence in three state museums (National Archaeological Museum, Museum of Romanticism and Costume Museum). The management was not easy since the museums required that there was an agreement with the Ministry to be able to carry it out. Therefore, this agreement was drafted and signed by us and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, which facilitated collaborating and organizing activities with the entire network of state museums. The agreement has been renewed in 2017 and it allows to continue the work with state museums.

The GLAMing Madrid project was a success, being held talks, workshops, editathon, online challenge and uploading pictures to Wikimedia Commons. Last year other museum was added (González Martí National Museum of Ceramics and Decorative Arts of Valencia) and our objective for 2018 is to continue the existing collaborations and to start working with 2 more museums (Sorolla Museum and National Museum of Sculpture). These collaborations are usually translated into content creation, hosting workshops and editathons, but also in the uploading to Commons of images of their collections under free license.

In addition to state museums, Wikimedia Spain works with other local museums and libraries. These collaboration allows us to run edit-a-thons and engage experts and enthusiasts of different topics not well covered on Wikipedia.

In the previous years we have worked woth several GLAM institutions but in some cases we did not carry on the collaboration. One of the most important goals should be not to lost the contact and organizing at least one activity per year with them. For Wikimedia Spain, and also according to the Diversity programm, is more interesting to do different activities in different institutions in several cities and regions instead of doing a lot of activities always in the same institution / city to let people all around the country to participate.

Objectives

• Carrying on collaboration with GLAMs partners we worked in the past, and starting new collaborations.
• Achievement of free materials by involving cultural institutions in the development of quality content.
• Increase the amount of articles related to the cultural heritage of Spain curated by GLAM institutions.

Media content

Description

The media acquisition is a strength of Wikimedia Spain since several years ago. Actaly we can not understand Wikimedia Spain without this programm. The first big activity we had was Wiki Loves Monuments and it allowed us to learn a lot and create a model that was useful for other contest. In addition, the coverage of events (sport, concerts and other) is growing every year, involving WMES members and other volunteers.

The main goal of this program is to empower photographer and creative communities in Spain, in order to increase the quantity and quality of files, mainly images, about Spain in Wikimedia Commons and help spread this content in other Wikimedia projects. Activities under this program include holding national photographic contests (Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Folk), local photographic events such as Wiki Takes Your City, and funding for events coverage or meetups with creative communities.

The participants of these activities have taken 22919 (Oct, 24th 2017) pictures, with 5572 uses and 2003 distinc images used until now. In 2018, we will move one step closer to our goal by obtaining xxx new uploaded pictures, xxx of them used in Wikimedia projects. Along with the photographic equipment purchased last year, for 2018 we plan to add a softbox that will improve the portraits of members of the Spanish Congress. One of the projects, None Spanish municipality without a picture will be achieved sooner or later in 2018-2019, so we are already working on new goals that would motivate our community, for example the documentation of all abandoned villages in Spain (several thousands).

Objectives

• Increasing the quantity of photographic content from Spain on Wikimedia Commons
• Involving new photographers into Wikimedia Commons
• Improving the quality of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects articles / pages thanks to the use of media

Education and learning

Description

Wikimedia Spain has been working on education since the founding of the association, and also when it was not founded Educational institutions such as schools, universities and libraries at those institutions play an important role in our work, intensifying year by year. Wikipedia is key to Education, and education is key to expand the use and to improve the quality of Wikipedia. The use of Wikipedia is generalized but there are still many professors and students who are unaware of its functioning or who ignore the benefits of working with Wikipedia in the classroom. That is why we consider it important to continue and strengthen this work. Our collaboration with educational institutions date back to 2012 when we started a project with the University of Cádiz. Since then, each year the quantity of institutions we collaborate with has increased; 2 more in 2013, 2 in 2014, 4 in 2015, 3 in 2016 and 1 in 2017, to a total of 13.

This is actually a reactive approach. As a chapter, we focus on suporting professors and teachers who want to use Wikipedia at the classroom or who ask for outreach activities such as workshops and talks. In the second case, some of these professors want after that to develop a new project on Wikipedia. Without the support of wikipedians they end up having a lot of problems functioning on Wikipedia (mainly Spanish, English or Catalan Wikipedia) and the projects developed usually fail. Including this kind of program now will allow us to expand it in the future, after having get experience managing these projects.

The forms of collaboration are different in each case. The educational system in Spain allows professors to adapt the class to their objectives. Some examples are translation of content, creation of animations or writing Wikipedia articles or news for Wikinews. The results, for example for 2017, have been, so far, 166 students, 220 articles and more than two million bytes added.

The tasks are, generally, an introduction to Wikipedia (or other Wikimedia projects like Wikimedia Commons or Wikinews), a workshop, the creation of a coordination page on Wikipedia, and the supervision of the students' work. At the end of the projects, volunteers check the work done. The management of these projects is usually through a volunteer and a professor, with the support of the rest of the chapter when necessary. Along with these larger collaborations, other educational or training institutions ask us for a talk or a workshop, small sessions that in previous occasions have been the beginning of such projects. The role of the staff in that project is to support the volunters when necessary or to help directly when there is no volunteer available for that university/city/week.

So our goal for 2018 is continue this work. In addition to content and results, it is also essential that these projects be known so that more institutions and people in the educational field know the benefits of these collaborations. We know that the retention of users is very low in these kind of projects, but in 2017 one student who participated some years before has become a volunteer at his university and other is attending different events and contribute to the media program.

Objectives

• Carrying the collaboration with the professors we worked in the previous years.
• One of the objectives is that the educational programm provides articles to Wikimedia projects and do not provoque problems with the community.
• One of the objectives is to get new contributors that continue editing.