Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Deutschland/January 2013

January started with the closing of the fundraiser und saw important milestones for projects like Wikidata and RENDER. As usual, our monthly report summarizes initiatives and fundings of the past weeks. In addition, we worked on the project profiles for 2013 and published short summaries of next year's plans on Meta. More about that on our blog.

Politics and Society

Election Questionnaire

For the state election in Lower Saxony, Wikimedia Deutschland published the parties' answers to our election questionnaires on January 10, 2013. All parties which were deemed successful for entering the state parliament answered. To many questions we received agreeing or at least corresponding replies. The result of the election allows for three possible coalitions: a grand coalition, conservative-green coalition, or social democratic-green coalition. The latter has been estimated by voting monitors as the most realistic coalition to date. According to the media, a schedule for coalition negotiations is ready. We are of the opinion that a social democratic-green state government could implement a number of projects that are important for Wikimedia Deutschland, especially Open Data, Freedom of Information, and OER (Open Educational Resources). In addition, a social democratic-green state government allows for appealing to the federal government's mediation committee for legislature, e.g. when it comes to the planned neighboring rights for press publishers.

Revenue from Royalties by the Federal Government

The open data debate is less often about reservations than financial feasability. One of the arguments against releasing copyrighted material of the government is the feared discontinuation of revenues from the allocation of usage rights for copyrighted works of the government. In order to assess the validity of this argument, the Left Party of the German parliament posed a minor interpellation (printed matter 17/12103) about the revenue income of the government. Related aspects, like the enforcement of rights or terms of licenses, are inquired in this interpellation. A reply will presumably be published by the beginning of February.

New Licenses of the Ministry of the Interior and Old Problems

The ministry of the interior, together with the federal states and municipalities, has developed two license proposals for an Open Government Portal. Those licenses are supposed to ensure the re-usage of released data. One of the licenses is CC-BY, the other one CC-BY-NC which has to be discarded as a free license. Wikimedia Deutschland was in talks with the ministry and indicated problems with the wording of the licenses. WMDE also pointed towards the negative consequences of the proposition in case free und non-free content is jointly labeled "open". At the moment, it is not forseeable whether our suggestions will be considered since the Open Government project is under some political pressure due to its planned launch before/during CeBIT 2013.

Education and Knowledge

The department Education and Knowledge focuses on the following topics this year: diversity, motivation of new supporters for the Wikimedia projects and acquisition of long-term partnerships in the field of education.

Local Workshops and Conferences

The year starts with the finalization of a project. After one semester, the collaboration with HTW Berlin ended after working together on a seminar about information science and economy. The results are being compiled at the moment. The results are interesting when it comes to the question of how the motivation of the participants changed over the course of the semester since many forms of collaboration have been tested intensively. The collaboration with FrauenComputerCentrumBerlin e.V. continues. In the course of the open networking event "Women edit - Wikipedia and the Web" women are able to meet on a regular basis and edit and discuss their Wikipedia work with each other.

Within the scope of acquiring older people for Wikipedia, the last event of the collaboration with the Seniorenuni Leipzig (university for senior citizens) took place. We intend to collaborate on a long-term basis with them in the future.

Team Communities

Scholarships

The expenses for travelling to the state election in Lower Saxony could be borne for three Wikipedians. The money was paid with the funds of the community budget. Together with devices from the technics pool a number of great portraits and looks behind the curtain could be captured. All pictures are released under a free license.

Community Projects Budget

The projects of the third funding period of the community projects budget (CPB) have started. All projects can be found on the CPB project page. On this page, one can find ways to contribute to the festival summer, for example. In February, the discussion about the development and restructuring of the CPB will be led with members of the committee and the communities. In March, we plan to publish a suggestion for the CPB's future.

Toolserver

Since January, Silke Meyer is the new project manager for the Toolserver. She is in charge of the continued operation of the Toolserver. For WMDE she will coordinate the upcoming migration to the Labs infrastructure of the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimedia Deutschland and the Wikimedia Foundation will work closely with each other in the coming months in order to come up with a definite work and time schedule for the migration in May.

Research and Development

RENDER

The RENDER project team prepared the evaluation of the supporting tools for Wikipedia users in January. After fixing both bigger and smaller problems with the tools, we were able to publish the beta versions as widgets in the Wikipedia namespace. Both the Task List Generator and the Article Statistics and Quality Monitor are ready to use and shall be tested thoroughly. An extensive article about the release of the tools was published in the Kurier, a sort of newspaper in the German Wikipedia, too.

As we said in the Kurier article, we are looking for people who are willing to test the tools with us in order to adapt and expand them according to their needs later on. If you have questions or comments please write an e-mail to render@wikimedia.de.

Wikidata

January was an exciting month for Wikidata. The project was first launched in the Hungarian and later the Hebrew and Italian Wikipedia. More dates for future launches have been set (see blog post). At the same time, we worked on phase 2 of Wikidata. In the version for engineers, it is now possible to add items to already existing items, e.g. the names of a person's children, or to link to a file on Wikimedia Commons. Everything can be tried out on the test environment. In addition, we revised and improved the syntax proposition for the integration of data originating from Wikidata into Wikipedia.

For questions concerning Wikidata, please contact Lydia Pintscher.

International Affairs

First Preparations for Wikimania 2013

Together with Kasia Odrozek and Wenke Storn, Nicole Ebber started a first brainstorming for the upcoming Wikimania in January. The conference will take place in Hong Kong this year. In collaboration with Team Communities they worked on WMDE's scholarship program. In addition, a first kick-off meeting with the other departments took place where we talked about the possible involvement of the organization with the official program of the conference as well as WMDE's presence on site. Whoever wants to be involved in the preparations of the event or would like to have some input for the submission of own presentations can contact Nicole Ebber.

WCA and Wikimedia Chapter

Markus Glaser, Council Member at the umbrella organization for Wikimedia chapters, WCA, published a job posting in late January. The Wikimedia Chapters Association is looking for a secretary general. Nicole Ebber and Wenke Storn also support Wikimedia Italia with planning and organizing the Wikimedia Conference. The event took place in Berlin in the last years but now we offer material, project plans and lessons learned to the hosting chapter. We are also helping Wikimedia Netherland with the organization of the Hackathon in Amsterdam and use these two events in order to standardize the knowledge transfer between Wikimedia chapters.

Public Relations

Press Work

On the 12th birthday of Wikipedia, January 15, the Wikimedia Foundation welcomed a new project to the Wikimedia family: Wikivoyage, the first free travel guide. Wikimedia Deutschland supported the announcement of the Foundation with a press release, many interviews and backstage stories. In addition, we dealt with a number of press inquiries about paid editing in Wikipedia. In our press portal, you can find articles we were involved in or where we coordinated interviews with Wikipedians.

Fundraiser

The Wikipedia fundraiser came to a successful closing on December 31. In a press release we informed about the fundraising goal of 5,2 Million Euros and the record number of more than 230,000 supporters of the campaign. After the campaign, we thanked all our donors and participants in a blog post. Team Fundraising later summarized the campaign and its data in an additional text.

Information Material

In January, Team Communications asked the Wikipedia community to give us more ideas and suggestions for give-aways and information material. Those items are meant to help Wikipedians during community events, for their editing work, to make Wikipedia and its sister projects better known outside of the communities and to advertise voluntary work. A list of these suggestions can be found on Wikipedia. In the meantime, many ideas are reviewed in terms of practicality. A current list of Wikimedia Deutschland's give-aways was uploaded to the association's webssite where it can be used for ordering the items.

For the upcoming project GLAM on Tour, Wikimedia Deutschland designed T-Shirts and two Roll-ups which will be used to point towards cultural partnerships between institutions and Wikipedia during the tour.

Job Posting

In December, we called for applications in the field of graphic design. After reviewing all applications, we are now preparing a pitch. In the coming weeks a number of graphic designers will present their work at the office of WMDE. In March, we are not only planning to start with a new Corporate Design but we will also restructure and rework the website and our blog.

Fundraising

Exciting weeks preceded January. The fundraiser is finished now and Team Fundraising is conducting some evaluations about the course of the campaign. Those numbers played a role in the blog post about the campaign's statistics and faces. Another report with analyses is expected for the coming two or three months.

Apart from evaluating the campaign we have been busy preparing our annual mailing of donation receipts. The increased number of donors also means we have to send out much more donation receipts than last year. We therefore need to complete our database and have it ready for the mailing. To ensure that every donor will receive their receipt we are testing different processes in our database at the moment. Data maintenance and coordination with printing and shipping contractors will be of importance to us until the mailing at the beginning of March.