WMAT's Executive Director participated in the Wikimedia Diversity Conference hosted by WMSE this year and held a lightning talk about our learnings around inclusive events in the context of the 2017 Wikimedia Hackathon. We believe that all Wikimedia events need to become more newcomer friendly when we truly aim at becoming a more diverse community.
We considered the event an important first step for a movement-wide discourse on diversity and inclusion, especially in the light of equity being one of the two main themes of the strategic direction. The conference provided a good starting point for these discussions and even led to some tangible outcomes in the form of a common statement. However, the current uncertainty on how the next steps of the strategy implementation will look like and how and when we will be able to contribute and bring our ideas and concerns to the table, makes it hard to predict how much will actually start changing and moving as a result of the conference. We committed to contributing around the topic of diversity and governance (from an organisational perspective) as a follow-up to the event (see below) - part of the input will come from a paper we presented at the Momentum Congress in October.
The students of a course at the University of Applied Sciences Burgenland in Eisenstadt participated in an edit-a-thon, leading to the following Wikipedia article which they wrote collaboratively:
The couse was led by Herbert Bartl, in association with the Wikimedian K@rl. A WMAT staff member was also present at the edit-a-thon. In addition, WMAT supported the edit-a-thon with travel costs for K@rl and information material. All of the course's 21 participants were new users, 15 of them were female und 6 male. Until the end of the semester in 2018 the students will write other Wikipedia/Wikiversity articles about their native state of Burgenland.
The "Wartungsbausteinwettbewerb" is a contest for removing cleanup templates in the German-language Wikipedia. It is held four times a year. WMAT supports the contest by donating prizes, e. g. Wikipedia chocolate bars. The Fall 2017 edition had 20 participants who edited in teams or by themselves. The competition resulted in 399 improved Wikipedia articles.
Editing Workshop hosted by the Austrian Green Party[edit]
Participants
7
Newly registered
6
Content pages
3
Quality
–
Diversity
9
How to collaboratively write a Wikipedia article
The idea behind Art+Feminism - bringing marginalized perspectives to Wikipedia and thereby making them visible on the internet - attracts and motivates many groups and individuals: After the big media response in spring, we were contacted by many who got inspired and asked for our help to get started editing Wikipedia. Among others the Green Party in Austria who regularly host educational workshops and events in their Viennese offices. WMAT agreed to support a two-part workshop to introduce newcomers to editing Wikipedia with a concept and two female paid mentors. After our learnings from other similar edit-a-thons and events and positive experiences with a similar approach in our Wikiversity courses, we decided to use the opportunity to try a different workshop format with this target group: Instead of having everyone trying to write their own first article, the group works together to create their first article together (de:Cécile Cordon). Pairs of two work together to produce the different sections of a biography and everything is being published together at the end of the day. Among the seven female participants were six new editors. During a shorter follow-up workshop a week later, we answered questions and helped with problems that came up during their individual editing efforts (de:Klagsverband, de:Yoga Austria – BYO) since the last workshop. The retention rate from the first to the second workshop was 50%.
The participants of the Volunteer Supporters Meeting
For the first time, 12 employees from 10 Wikimedia chapters involved in community support met in Berlin. The participants discussed and worked on issues related to volunteer support in the Wikimedia movement. The meeting was organized by our community manager together with a volunteer supporter of WMDE.
The following topics were covered:
understanding each other's work in order to strengthen the Volunteer Supported Network
a common understanding of success and impact
overview and assessment of current metrics and tools the Wikimedia Foundation and chapters use in order to evaluate community support activities
further development of possible ways to evaluate the work as volunteer supporters
challenges related to related to the job as volunteer supporter and related to working with Wikimedia volunteers
communication between Wikimedia affiliates and communities: best practices and problem solving
Jean-Frédéric Berthelot talking about tech volunteering at Wikimedia
WMAT was invited to present Wikipedia and the Wikiverse at the volunteer organized conference "IntoTech" in Vienna in November. The idea of the conference was to get newbies into the tech world, as volunteers or professionals. The concept fit well into tech community outreach focus this year so our ED and the Wikimedians Jean-Frédéric delivered a presentation and hosted an information booth.
Unfortunately, the event - like many free events - suffered a bit from a high dropout rate: instead of a 100 registered participants only 60 people attended, this was especially noticeable by few visitors at the info booth. However, it was a great opportunity to reconnect to many like-minded communities and volunteers with whom we worked around the Hackathon and to come up with new ideas for collaboration: an open source coders group will now host workshops regularly in the WMAT office which are also open to interested Wikimedians and will help us stay connected with potential local tech volunteers.
After we have partipated in several volunteer fairs in Vienna in the past years, some of our volunteers from Lower Austria decided to host a info booth at the first fair of this kind in Lower Austria. WMAT provided information material and equipment and covered the cost for the booth and transport. For some volunteers it was the first time to participate in such an outreach event. Over 1.000 visitors attended the fair and our team could network with quite a few exisiting and potential new partners. Our booth was facilitated by the Wikimedians Agruwie, K@rl, Manfred Kuzel and Robert Heilinger.
As in previous semesters we conducted an edit-a-thon during one of the university courses on War and Propaganda until WWI by Prof. Friedrich Schipper at the University of Vienna. The 30 students (12 male, 18 female) are going to write one Wikipedia article each (with the help of Wikipedia tutors) until next year. 16 were new editors. 10 of these new editors edited Wikimedia projects at least 5 times every 4 weeks during a time span of 12 weeks after registering.
Wikimedia Partnership Group Meeting in Berlin[edit]
Participants
1
Newly registered
–
Content pages
–
Quality
–
Diversity
1
Timeline and milestones of the 2017 Wikimedia Partnerships Workshop in Berlin.
Our Wikimedia 2030 strategic direction envisions a world in which Wikimedia has an essential role in a global ecosystem of free knowledge. We are going to keep the door open for newcomers, including individuals from all over the world, as well as local, regional or global organizational and institutional partners. We expect that this will translate into exceptional diversification of people involved, activities performed and content created in the process.
Hence, a group of partnership experts from various corners of the Wikiverse met in Berlin in order to work on input concerning what this means for us as a movement and which challenges we will need to overcome to make this strategic vision a reality. Our goal is to start a broader discourse with all movement stakeholders involved in partnerships in order to facilitate the Phase 2 of the strategy process on this topic. The result of the two days topic will be a written document concerning common challenges, questions to consider and some possible answers. We also provided input to the question on how these topics should be included in the design of the Wikimedia Conference 2018.
For WMAT the Executive Director, who manages many of our partnerships, attended the workshop and provided input especially on issues regarding "diversification and alignment". We will also support the next steps of the process by contributing to some work packages regarding the distribution of our document to relevant stakeholders (e.g. in the CEE communities).
Denkmal-Cup and Armenian Writing Competition[edit]
Participants
38
Newly registered
–
Content pages
925
Quality
–
Diversity
19
de:Windmühle Charlotte about a wind mill in Northern Germany is one of the new articles written for Denkmal-Cup
The Denkmal-Cup (“Monuments Cup“) is a writing contest in the German-language Wikipedia about cultural heritage monuments from all over world. It was organized by the Wikimedian Braveheart. WMAT supported the contest with awards. The 2017 edition was already the fourth one.
Due to a special cooperation with Wikimedia Armenia there was a special price for cultural heritage monuments in Armenia: an invitation to to Armenia by Wikimedia Armenia. At the same time as Denkmal-Cup there was an article writing competition about Austria in the Armenian Wikipedia. WMAT invites the winner of this contest to Austria.
The 2017 edition of Denkmal-Cup had 19 participants. It resulted in 653 new or improved articles. The article writing competition in the Armenian Wikipedia also had 19 participants who created or improved 272 articles.
Students of the Summer University in the Botanical Garden of Graz
The Summer University on World Heritage was a cooperation of the University of Salzburg, the University of Graz und the University of Vienna. Its target group were students from these university. The course began in March 2017. It was coordinated on German-language Wikiversity and included in-depth introductions to Wikimedia, Wikipedia and Free Knowledge. It was organized on Wikimedia's side by the Wikimedians Friedrich Schipper, Regiomontanus and Karl Gruber. 17 female and 8 male students participated as Wikimedia users, 23 of 25 participants were new users.
The Europa-Forum Wachau is an international discussion meeting in Lower Austria with the purpose to strengthen closeness to citizens and to serve as an impulse and discussion platform for political decisions concerning Europe. The meeting is held by the club Europa-Forum Wachau in partnership with the Federal Ministry for European and international affairs and the state government of Lower Austria. In the context of the Wkiversity Austria project with the University of Vienna, one of the courses this year started a cooperation with the Europa Forum. This year's edition with its focus on "A Europe Closer to Its Citizens" offered students of journalism and communication studies at the University of Vienna an opportunity to compile knowledge on Europe and disseminate this knowledge via Wikipedia. 25 of the 30 students were female; 27 were new editors, the others already had Wikimedia accounts. 3 new editors edited Wikimedia projects at least 5 times every 4 weeks during a time span of 12 weeks after registering. Together with their Wikimedia tutors Friedrich Schipper, Regiomontanus, Agruwie and K@rl they were invited to the Forum to discuss what they learned in the process together with international politicians and youngsters from all over Europe. In addition to an existing Wikipedia article in German, the students created articles about Europa-Forum Wachau in 11 other Wikipedia language versions: ar, arz, cs, en, fr, it, pl, ro, ru, sk and uk. Wikimedia Austria also hosted a information booth about Wikipedia and Wikiversity on site.
The WikiDienstag (“WikiTuesday“) is a weekly meet-up in the WMAT office. Volunteers share their knowledge and work together on improving the content of Wikimedia projects.
We support Wikimedia Commons contributors with equipment from our tech pool, accreditations for events, travel grants, post-processing software and skill transfer activities.
Selected files
Photography in Styria
The Austrian Sports Personalities of the Year 2017
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Photography in Styria
The Austrian Sports Personalities of the Year 2017
Interior design photography
Vienna Capitals vs Fehervar
Festivalsommer
