Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Deutschland/March 2014

TEAM COMMUNITIES

Supported projects

Thanks to user:Ak ccm’s donor campaign in print and online trade media, the mushroom hunter Thomas Pruß has granted the use of his extensive photo collection. 1840 files were uploaded to Commons. They mainly show known fungal species, but there are also some as yet undocumented fungi that will hopefully be classified soon. Wikimedia Deutschland has taken on the upload as part of the “Image Treasure Trove” support program. All images can be found in the Category:Photographs by Thomas Pruß.

Wikimedia Deutschland assumed the travel costs for a first WikiCon preliminary meeting on March 13 in Berlin. It was decided that the database for conference participant registration, which was developed last year by volunteers, would be reused.

A report on the 57th meet-up of the Wikipedia local community for the Ruhr area on March 8 in Dortmund was published on the local community page. The meet-up was funded by WMDE.

The 14th photo workshop took place between March 14–16, this time in Berlin in Wikimedia Deutschland’s open rooms. WMDE supported the event with the loan of equipment and by reimbursing travel expenses.

On March 13, the photographers from the festival summer visited the German preliminary round of the Eurovision Song Contest 2014 – “Our Song for Denmark.” Wikimedia Deutschland supported the project by reimbursing travel expenses and with photographic equipment. So far, 183 high-quality photos of the event, and in particular of the featured artists, were uploaded to the Commons free media repository.

To mark the new episodes of the children’s series Wickie, Commons photographers visited a ZDF press event on March 27 in order to take free pictures of the voice actors, musicians, and editors on location. Wikimedia Deutschland supported the project with the provision of photo and video equipment, and by reimbursing travel expenses.

Free Knowledge Advocacy Program

On March 22, the second working meeting of the Free Knowledge Advocacy Program (FKAP) was held with twelve participants. The main topic of the meeting was the buildup of a portal on which ideas can be elaborated and developed into projects. The central challenge is to find a solution for the complex program’s design with intensive community participation. The minutes and further information can be found on the project page.

Current FKAP projects deal with ideas such as a Wikipedia for children or the creation of videos for Wikipedia articles.

Berlin community space and community meeting The draft designs of the community space have been submitted and will be discussed online before the next meeting. On March 5, female Wikipedians met for a Women’s Edit in the community room in order to edit articles together, among other activities.

Also this month, hosts Andreas Paul and Schlesinger once again welcomed guests to a Wikipedia Salon in WMDE’s open rooms, this time to address the subject of “paid editing.” The event took place on March 13 with around 20 participants. A report can be found in the Wikipedia-Kurier (German equivalent to Signpost).

On March 14, Wikimedia Deutschland visited the Münster meet-up to get to know the local community and to answer https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:M%C3%BCnster_%28Westfalen%29/Archiv#Bericht_7 questions addressed to Wikimedia Deutschland], specifically on the subject of volunteer support.

The monthly Open Editing has grown to be a permanent fixture. This month, around 15 Wikipedians met on March 27 in WMDE’s open rooms to edit Wikipedia together and take part in a social gathering.

The Zedler Prize

The juries for the three categories “Wikipedia Article of the Year,” “Community Project of the Year,” and “External Project of the Year” met from February 16 to March 24 and, after intense discussions, nominated the corresponding projects for the Zedler Prize shortlists.

Wikimania

March 31 was the deadline for program submissions for Wikimania. Several articles on the subject were published in the special edition of the Wikipedia Kurier, including detailed tips for applying. Wikimedia Deutschland is awarding 47 grants to attend Wikimania. The recipients were notified on the last weekend in March.

Writing contest

To mark the tenth anniversary of the Wikipedia Writing Contest, Wikimedia Deutschland donated prizes in honor of former winners in collaboration with Wikimedia Austria. A blog post on the subject published in the Wikipedia Kurier probably led the report by ZDF Hyperland.

Wikisource

At the suggestion of Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikisource contributors composed two long Kurier articles to mark the milestone of 30,000 Wikisource texts.

Local activities

The very active Wikipedia community in Cologne has launched an appeal to find a place for their activities in Cologne and the surrounding area.

Range of information and WMDE’s presence in Wikipedia

The previous overview of all support programs has been expanded into an extensive support portal, on which news, support guidelines, forms, and help will also be available in the future. Likewise, the device list for the technology pool underwent a comprehensive redesign. In order to make Wikimedia Deutschland's presence within Wikipedia clearer, all of the association's pages were switched to a lemma with a uniform prefix and without the suffix “e. V.,” an archive overview was set up, and a new category was created.

EDUCATION AND KNOWLEDGE

MS Wissenschaft

Our participation on board the exhibition ship MS Wissenschaft, on which we are represented with an exhibit as a partner of the German Science Promotion Year 2014 (Wissenschaftsjahr 2014), is going full steam ahead. The first prototype of the exhibit was developed and tested together with the software development department in March. It was also agreed with board member Jürgen Friedrich that an event on the MS Wissenschaft would be scheduled for when the ship docks in Bremen on May 30, 2014. The topics free knowledge, Wikipedia, and science are to be linked at this event.

HIVE Learning Network

With the HIVE Learning Network this year, we want to create a platform together with Mozilla to inform people from all age and population groups of the possibilities of digital learning and the benefits that free knowledge has to offer. In mid-March, the project participants and several interested parties had a meet up in the open rooms of Wikimedia Deutschland to work together to share ideas and discuss the year’s further planning. Among other things, the meeting focused on planning a maker party at the Open Knowledge Festival 2014 in Berlin as an event to showcase HIVE Berlin – we are still looking for support for this. In addition, several participants gave short presentations on the projects and ideas for which they are seeking support. For example, the OpenTech School Berlin is looking for teachers to develop new teaching methods for tech workshops.

German-speaking chapter cMOOC initiative: Wiki-Dialog

Together with Wikimedia Austria and Wikimedia Switzerland, we have continued to work on a community product with the name "Wiki-Dialog," which is based on the cMOOC method (connectivist Massive Open Online Course). Those interested can find more information on the project site and can help design Wiki-Dialog as a group. The contact people for this inter-chapter project are Julia Kloppenburg, Dirk Franke (WMDE), Raimund Liebert (WMAT), and Muriel Staub (WMCH).

Free Education Alliance

The Free Education Alliance – an action alliance initiated by Creative Commons, the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Wikimedia Deutschland – has begun work. In March, the Alliance contacted a number of potential partners and started planning a networking meeting for April. In addition, we initiated a collaborative working process to develop policy positions on OER in Germany. A website is now online at www.buendnis-freie-bildung.de – it is still under construction and is constantly being updated.

POLITCS AND SOCIETY

“The ABCs of Free Knowledge” event series kick-off

March 20 saw the first event of the new format “Wikimedia Salon – The ABCs of Free Knowledge”. Silke Helfrich, Leonhard Dobusch and Elektra Wagenrad discussed the perspectives of Commons in the context of digital communities and in the future network economy. The event with the titular subject “Commons – Where Are Community Projects on the Net Headed?” started the series of discussion events that will shed light on the topics, problems, and concepts relating to free knowledge. The events will each be accompanied by artistic contributions and a reception with drinks and music.

• Video of the event: live stream
• Blog post by Ilja Braun: http://www.carta.info/71072/allmende-wir-mussen-nur-wollen/
• Images on Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:A_%3D_Allmende

GLAM networking meeting in Bremen, March 29–30

The third meeting of Wikipedia contributors in the cultural sector takes place on March 29 and 30. Wikipedians who are involved in the GLAM sector will talk about their past and future projects (e.g. BremenpediA); discuss difficulties, successes, and experiences; and gain an overview of GLAM activities in other regions. The [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/Projekte_2014/Programm program includes a “GLAM-meets-Bremen evening” together with the Bremen meet-up group, a guided tour of the old town, and a visit to the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art. The content of the event will be posted on the project page under documentation] and a report on the meeting, among other things, will appear on the WMDE blog afterwards.

“Free” as in Getty

Getty Images allows the integration of part of their image stock in private web pages for non-commercial purposes. Both the technical implementation and usage rights are similar to a (now defunct) project called Picapp. We have compiled and published some comments on the usage rights and technical solution in a blog post ([ http://blog.wikimedia.de/2014/03/24/getty-images-embed-viewer/“Free as in Closed: The Getty Example”]). In it, we highlight in particular the differences between various pieces of content under a free license.

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Initiatives to improve the MediaWiki software and tools for communities have been pushed forward. User:Raymond’s technical wish list served as a starting point. There followed a vote to prioritize community submissions. The TOP 20 was subsequently finalized by the WMDE development team and experts. A cost assessment and feasibility analysis was carried out; the planning of the implementation of the next steps will go ahead in the second quarter of 2014. According to the planning and cost assessment, exhibits for the MS Wissenschaft project and Wikimedia Deutschland’s exhibit at re:publica are in active programming and development. The programming work on the reuse tool was completed.

Wikidata

The use of Wikidata to support Wikiquote has been prepared. Ranks (best statements) will now be passed on to Wikipedia and can be used by templates and Lua scripts there. Errors in the software behind Wikidata were fixed and the speed can be increased in the page structure. The display and functionality of version differences (diffs) were expanded. Planning and consultations for an improved user interface have begun.

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

Chapters Dialogue

In March, the last interviews for the Chapters Dialogue took place, for the most part not in person but via online video calls (see Facebook fan page). Over the past weeks, Nicole Ebber and Kira Krämer have largely devoted themselves to the analysis and synthesis of the almost 100 interviews and have been preparing for the project completion in April/May. The final presentation will be held at the Wikimedia Conference; a portal with text, pictures, and an accompanying film will also be created on Meta for the documentation. In this way we will ensure that all available information is accessible for follow-up projects, discussions, or decisions.

Nicole and Kira were invited to the training workshop for board members in London so that they could give a preview of part of the final presentation. The presentation has achieved its goal: The subsequent discussions on Movement-related topics all took the overall picture and the complex relationships into consideration, without getting bogged down in details. Reactions to the presentation also help us to better record and manage the expectations of the audience for subsequent presentations.

Wikimedia international

Wikimedia:Woche was again published on a weekly basis in March. With the support of Wikipedians and Dirk Franke from the Communities Team, Nicole Ebber was once again able to produce the weekly newsletter with up-to-the-minute information from the international Wikiverse. The Wikipedia week unrolls in a collaborative editing process, so interesting contributions from interested contributors are always welcome!

The Wikimedia Conference (April 10–13, Berlin) is just around the corner. In the meantime, the program team has released a draft of the program with considerable contributions from Nicole Ebber; the list of participants is impressive and our event team has continued to dedicate itself in March to preparing participant assistance and logistics at the venue. The conference itself is not open to the public but Wikithusiasts are cordially invited to attend the evening events. More on this on the WMDE blog and in the Kurier special edition

March was also a month of preparations for the cross-departmental Wikimania. We will also be in the thick of the action in London – under this year’s heading Networking and Enabling – to introduce our projects, practices, and positions; pursue partnerships; and get feedback from the international scene. Nicole Ebber will take on the coordination of the WMDE presence and has conducted numerous discussions with department heads and the council.

COMMUNICATIONS

In March, we continued working on the completion of various reports. At the top of the list was the 2013 Impact Report for the FDC, which is to provide a substantive and financial annual review. The work on the first Quarterly Report of 2014 is also in full swing. The 2013 Financial Report is nearing its last edit – we are just waiting on the final figures.

The recruitment process for the new position of Specialist in Media and Public Relations is almost complete. We have met many interesting candidates. More details will follow in the next monthly report.

Anything else? A whole load of materials – from posters for community events to flyers for our presence at re:publica – we’ve been designing, implementing, and ordering.

FUNDRAISING

Donations

After several weeks of intensive work with addresses and numbers in the database, as well as extensive coordination with our shipping service provider, we were able to send out more than 114,000 donation receipts on March 20. Never before have we been able to issue so many receipts so quickly following a campaign! As with every year, all the receipts were sent with a membership application form for Wikimedia Deutschland. The current return rate is very good and we are pleased that so many donors want to support free knowledge on a long-term basis.

With the dispatch of the donation receipts, the 2013 fundraising campaign comes to an end for the fundraising team a good three months after the switching of the thank-you banner. We have started evaluating the campaign – the first conceptual considerations for the upcoming fundraising campaign will be made over the coming weeks. But ultimately it’s the same story every year: After the campaign is before the campaign.

STAFF

Natali Bosnjakovic took up the position of Head of Human Resources and Administration at the beginning of March.

There are also new arrivals in the Fundraising Department: Hannah Weber will be supporting the team as a student trainee (Donor Assistance) from now on and Christian Heil is now responsible for CRM and Controlling full time.

Our student trainee Bettina Hesse (Education and Knowledge Department) left us April.

FINANCES

Bequest

Wikimedia Germany has received the sum of 34,000 euros as part of a bequest.

Job Postings

Current job postings at Wikimedia Deutschland are collected and listed on the association’s website.