Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Deutschland/November 2012

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Politics and Society[edit]

Consultation about Open Educational Resources[edit]

On November 8, Mathias Schindler, as a representative of Wikimedia Deutschland, was invited by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and participated in a formal hearing about Open Educational Resources (OER). Leonhard Dobusch summarized the hearing on the blog of the Federal Agency for Civic Education. OER will be an important target for the next year at WMDE.

Beta Version of Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library)[edit]

The central German aggregation platform for digital cultural objects "Deutsche Digitale Biliothek" (DDB) has been under construction during the past months and went online for the public on November 28. Wikimedia Deutschland supported this with accompanying talks and blog postings. Our focus for the next months will be the release of meta data, the licensing of content and the provision of data.

Wiki Loves Monuments at the Monuments Fair in Leipzig[edit]

Thanks to the great commitment of many volunteers from Germany and Austria we were able to present Wiki Loves Monuments and Wikipedia at the European fair "denkmal 2012" in Leipzig. The winners of the German contest were also honored there.

Round Table: Cultural Heritage in the Rhineland[edit]

As an initiative of the volunteers Raymond and Elya (user names) and accompanied by Wikimedia Deutschland, six archive institutions from Cologne and Rhineland met on November 12 in an intimate setting to decrease barriers and to talk about possible ways for collaboration. Apart from conversations about current projects, more talks were scheduled in order to exchange ideas with the respective institutions and to develop specific ideas for cooperations.

Education and Knowledge[edit]

Local Workshops and Conferences[edit]

Wikimedia Deutschland's project for senior citizens, Silberwissen, cooperated with the Seniorenuniversität Leipzig (university for senior citizens) for the first time. In addition, a cooperation with the Berliner Academy für weiterbildende Studien e.V. (Berlin academy for further studying) was initiated. Other Silberwissen events started at the adult education center in Münster and Ditzingen. On November 8, an evaluation meeting with cooperating educational providers was conducted by Silberwissen in Hannover in order to gather new input for the program's development in the next year and to exchange ideas about the past experiences.

The Goethe Institute in Budapest received support from our speakers in three locations (Vilnius, Krakow, Budapest) in order to promote the free project wiki called "Bildung macht Schule" (education and school). All topics that have been worked on together were uploaded here and the work in the Wikimedia projects was explained.

At Combinat 56 in Munich, a local networking meeting took place for the first time and was attended by women who were interested in the topic Wikipedia. The instructors were a speaker from Wikimedia Deutschland and a journalist from Munich who works at Webgrrls.

Team Communities[edit]

The Wikimedia Deutschland department Volunteer Support changed its name to Team Communities. They explain this decision in a blog posting.

Scholarships[edit]

Olaf Kosinsky is successfully transferring the concept of the Landtagsprojekt to another organization, namely the Deutscher Olympischer Sportbund (German Olympic Sports Confederation). At the beginning of November, sixty national trainers of the DOSB have already been photographed for the Fotoprojekt Bundestrainer (photo project national trainers), on December 8 offials from the DOSB will follow. Wikimedia Deutschland supports this project.

An initiative that has been supported by the Bilderschatz project took place in October: sailing boats, nautical objects and some surrounding targets were photographed during Hanseboot fair. The results will be available on Wikimedia Commons.

Wiki Loves Monuments[edit]

Together with Wikimedia Austria and Wikipedians from Germany, Austria, South Tirol and Slovakia, Wikimedia Deuschland had a booth on the international fair "denkmal" in Leipzig and offered an info forum. Many new contacts to monuments offices, schools, museums, organizations and private monument conservators show great potential for the picture contest Wiki Loves Monuments. Cooperations between Wikipedians, Wikimedia Deutschland and other Wikimedia Chapters as well as institutions from a cultural background seem to be in our grasp. Especially with Heinz Egger, a Wikipedian in Residence who was able to talk about the cooperation between the Austrian Monuments Office, and another like-minded cooperation in Poland.

One highlight of the event was the award presentation for the annual contest at the Leipzig Congress Centrum. Travel expenses were covered by Wikimedia Deutschland. The prizes for those participants who could not make it will be forwarded.

Eleventh General Assembly[edit]

The 11th general assembly of Wikimedia Deutschland took place on November 24 in Berlin. Almost 50 members attended. The new board was elected and a modified proposal for the toolserver was accepted. A short review of the event was written by Ralf Liebau, the new president of WMDE. The official minutes of the assembly will be published shortly.

Open Sunday[edit]

On the day after the 11th general assembly, Wikimedia Deutschland hosted an Open Sunday and everyone could join. The event was conducted in an open space format, was visited by app. 50 people and was very lively. It was received very well and we think that it might be repeated soon. There will be follow-ups for many topics, e.g. an initiative that was inspired by the Teahouse project in the English Wikipedia, or a group that deals with international topics. For those and other topics please read the minutes of the workshops.

Zedler Prize for Free Knowledge[edit]

The Zedler Prize will once again be awarded for Wikipedia articles, internal and external projects in 2012. After talking about the concept with representatives from the community the nomination phase started on December 1.

Toolserver[edit]

Three new servers have been acquired for the toolserver and assembled in the data center in Amsterdam. They are supposed to achieve a relief for the existing servers and to cater to the growing needs of ressources during the migration of the infrastructure in the coming year. The toolserver is maintained with great commitment by Daniel Baur. He is supported by toolserver admin Marlen Caemmerer and Sebastian Sooth is the contact in WMDE's office.

Community Projects Budget[edit]

The committee of the Community Projects Budget met with applicants in Hamburg in November and gave their suggestions for supporting projects during the current third round of the Community Projects Budget. The results will be published shortly. Sebastian Sooth supervised the committee's work for Wikimedia Deutschland.

Research and Development[edit]

RENDER[edit]

In November, the project team of the research project RENDER concentrated on the necessary preparations and last adaptations of the supporting tools for the review meeting in Luxembourg. During this meeting Wikimedia Deutschland presented the work of the last year to representatives of the European Commission and answered their remaining questions. This meeting was very successful. We published an extensive report on our blog.

During the coming months, the team will now focus on an adequate adaptation of the tools as well as testing them. Questions and remarks can be sent to the RENDER team or posted on the discussions page of the project's Wikipedia page.

Wikidata[edit]

The first part of the first development phase has been published on http://www.wikidata.org: the repository that centrally manages interlanguage links. The Wikidata community immediately started with the population of this wiki. Meanwhile, the Wikidata team continued their work on the second phase of the development which is infoboxes. New functionalities have been created in order to match the items on Wikidata with facts. The communication between the data repository and the client (which will later be Wikipedia) has been improved. The team is in regular contact with the Wikimedia Foundation in order to prepare the deployment of Wikidata in the Hungarian Wikipedia.

The Wikidata team welcomes feedback and questions on the mailing list and/or Meta Wiki.

International Affairs[edit]

Wikimedia Conferentie in the Netherlands[edit]

The Wikimedia Conferentie took place in Utrecht on November 9, 2012. Approximately 130 participants came to the sixth edition of the annual conference of the Dutch Wikimedia chapter. Wikimedia Deutschland sent Lydia Pintscher, Daniel Kinzler, Jeroen De Dauw and Nicole Ebber. The event was organized in three parts: Wikipedia in a scholarly context, Wiki communities and technology. The three parts were completed with two keynotes. An extensive report can be found on the blog.

Workshop about International Collaboration[edit]

During the Open Sunday at the office of Wikimedia Deutschland, a session about international topics was offered. Markus Glaser, the WCA council member appointed by Wikimedia Deutschland, introduced the Wikimedia Chapters Association and its work. Later on, Arne Klempert and Alice Wiegand talked about their involvement with the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. Following this talk, a group of participants working with Nicole Ebber gathered in order to talk about how to improve and concentrate the international collaboration with other Wikimedia chapters and communities. It is now her plan to establish a kind of international portal, a contact or entrance point for the German-speaking Wikipedia where everyone who's interested can find information about the manifold ways for participation. An extensive report about the next steps will follow.

Wikimedia Chapters Association[edit]

The umbrella organization for Wikimedia chapters has, after extensive discussions, agreed on a place for their registration: In the next days, it will register in Geneva and can start looking for a general secretary. Markus Glaser published a blog post about the current state of the WCA and heise.de also published a story about it.

Funds Dissemination Committee Publishes Recommendations[edit]

On November 15, 2012, the Funds Dissemination Committee published their recommendations for allocating financial means. The recommendations are directed at the board of the Wikimedia Foundation, which will now decide on the final allocation of funds. The result for Wikimedia Deutschland is pleasant: The FDC recommends to provide the full amount of $1,820,000 ("full funding") minus the $30,000 that were budgeted for supporting the Wikimedia Chapters Association. In the meantime, the board of the Wikimedia Foundation has accepted the recommendations of the FDC unanimously.

Wikimedia Conference and Hackathon 2013[edit]

Wikimedia Deutschland was the host of the previous four Wikimedia Conferences and Hackathons in Berlin. Not it's time to let a different Wikimedia chapter take over. Wikimedia Italia is interested in hosting the Chapters Conference in Milan in April 2013 and Wikimedia Nederland started planning the hackathon for May 2013 in Amsterdam. Nicole Ebber is in close contact with both chapters and shared her experience with organizing the events with the chapters. In addition, she is working on simplifying the transfer of our events concepts to other chapters with Wenke Storn.

Public Relations[edit]

Press Work[edit]

On November 13, Wikimedia Deutschland started the annual fundraiser with personal appeals that will be shown in German-speaking Wikimedia projects. In preparation, a press release was sent out.

In direct contact with representatives from the press, we worked for some media attention concerning the milestone of 1.5 million German Wikipedia articles. On WMDE's blog we congratulated all voluntary helpers. A selection of the media response about this milestone can be found in Wikimedia Deutschland's press review. On this page, other articles about Wikipedia and Wikimedia can be found, e.g. a piece by radio station SWR2 that involves volunteers and WMDE's CEO Pavel Richter who explain basics about Wikipedia.

Wikimedium[edit]

In November, the fourth edition of Wikimedia Deutschland's free newspaper in 2012 was published. In collaboration with volunteers from the Wikimedia projects we gathered topics and articles during the past weeks. The focus of the newspaper is the Wikipedia fundraiser and its background. For example, we interviewed a Wikipedia photographer who, among other volunteers, offered his help with a personal appeal to donors.

Information Material[edit]

The closing ceremony for Wiki Loves Monuments took place in Leipzig. For this event we created invitation cards. In addition, large-sized calendars of the first one hundred winners of the contest were developed together with the Wiki Loves Monuments community. Those were distributed during the event and were received very well. Another poster that promotes collaboration between Wikipedia and cultural institutions was produced in a smaller batch.

Fundraising[edit]

On November 13, Wikimedia Deutschland started its annual fundraising campaign. After almost two weeks, we can already say that this campaign is the most versatile and sophisticated campaign so far. We have new layouts for our banners, new functions for these banners and the fundraiser page changed its appearance a couple of times during this short period of time. Except for the appeal by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales we were able to run and test other successful appeals, e.g. the first "impersonal" appeal. More than thirty tests led to different outcomes which resulted in running different banners. We published the test results on our fundraising page.

Of course, our communication channels are heavily used. Hundreds of e-mails and phone calls reach us daily. This shows the immense need for support on the part of Wikipedia readers. This support also becomes clear by means of the donation numbers so far: We say thank you to the almost 100,000 donors as of today!

Jobs[edit]

Our current job offers can be found on the website of Wikimedia Deutschland.