Report for Wikimedia Austria
Back in 2008 I inscribed in a Master Program about Sciences and Sustainable
Development in the University of Cadiz
(Spain)<http://www.uca.es/grupos-inv/HUM117/grupogial-viejo/paginas/cursosymaster/enlace2>.
I got introduced in Wikipedia editing just by searching items and finding
them in the English edition, and not in the Spanish edition. So I started
translating.
2011 was a year of political
activism<http://someotherpeople.tumblr.com/post/14218325590/magazine-cov…
many locations of the world. Tunisia and Egypt started what was named
Arab
Spring <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring>, and social unrest spread
to many other countries including Greece, Spain, Portugal, Russia, Chile,
or USA.
I was involved in the international coordination of the global action day
of 15 October
2011<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_October_2011_global_protests>ts>.
Mainly it was carried on through facebook. Several facebook groups put
together the coordination efforts of people from different locations.
Calendars <http://october2011.org/blogs/margaret-flowers/road-dignity> were
lined-up and graphic
design<http://galacticchannelings.com/english/global_change.html>was
built-up, in parallel with the local
processes <http://15odotorg.wordpress.com/tag/europact/> of gathering
assemblies and promoting and organizing that day event in every place.
Three major networks popped up. One based on Spain, under the name of
"¡Democracia
Real Ya!" ("Real Democracy
Now!")<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A1Democracia_Real_YA%21>l_YA%21>.
Other one USA-based, under the tag of
"Occupy"<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_movement>.
And a third one I believe based on UK and Spain, named "Take the
Square"<http://takethesquare.net/>or "Toma
la Plaza" <http://tomalaplaza.net/>.
The diversity of informatic tools and the heterogeneity in locations,
languages, and world-views was not hindering in an early moment the
self-organization of a global unified event. The only precedent I know of
are the demonstrations carried out previously of the Azores
Summit<http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbre_de_las_Azores>that
triggered the Second
Gulf War <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_war> back in 2003.
The experience of Wikimedia projects on overcoming the difficulties of
multilinguality and on providing a frame for heterogeneous communities made
me think on using Mediawiki to empower further the participative social
processes. This is already happening to some
extension<http://dev.democraciarealya.es:8080/wiki/index.php/P%C3%A1gina_principal>.
Anyway, there's a tough challenge on establishing new wiki tools, specially
to achieve the community development that make it functional.
The Wikimedia conference provided a good insight to these concerns. One of
the speakers was pointing that the average number of contributors after
analyzing 8000 wiki based projects is one! I also meet the Canadian person
who nourish the Occupy wiki <http://wiki.occupy.net/wiki/User:Amgine>, and
had the opportunity of talking face to face with him about the potentiality
of the use of Mediawiki on social issues.
Also here
http://feministoinenglish.blogspot.com/2012/07/report-for-wikimedia-austria…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Feministo/Wikimania2012
--
Salvador Espada Hinojosa
Tlf.: (+43) (0) (1) 9462896
skype: salva_e
http://about.me/salvae