Greetings!
Apologies for cross-posting. After a successful first iteration of the “Months of African Cinema” last year, we are happy to announce that it will be happening again this year, starting from October 1! In the 2018 edition of the contest, about 600 Wikipedia articles were created in at least 8 languages. There were also contributions to Wikidata and Wikimedia commons, which brought the total number of wikimedia pages created during the contest to over 1,000. About 9 in-person events were also organised for the edit-a-thon in different parts of the world.
The contest is organized by a Wikimedia project called "The AfroCine Project",[1] which is dedicated to improving the coverage of the history, works, people, places, and events, that are associated with the cinema, theatre and arts of Africa, African countries, the Caribbean, and the diaspora.
If you would love to join this exciting event, please list your username as a participant on the English Wikipedia contest page.[2] If you would love to lead this contest for your country or community, please list your name in the coordinators page here.[3] The rapid grants team would be accepting proposals throughout October and November, in case you'd need funds to run local edit-a-thons or some other activities related to this event. Upon listing your name on the coordinators' page, you'd be contacted to talk about the resources you'd need to run the event in your community. You can also contact me directly for any clarifications.
Finally, We also need volunteers to handle some aspects of the AfroCine project. These aspects include:
1. Community Liaison: This role essentially involves closely engaging with local communities to support their activities within the scope of Afrocine.
2. Communications: This involves the communications aspects of the project. Sharing relevant information on mailing lists and social media would be the responsibility of this person.
3. MAC Jury: This role involves joining the jury of Months of African Cinema contest. We need as many people as we can get :).
4. Tools: Going forward, we would need relevant tools to better track the metrics and also analyse the general impact of these events. We are calling for Wikimedia volunteers who can navigate wikimedia tools that can be useful for the project.
If you would love to help with any of these roles, or some other roles that have not been mentioned, please contact me directly.
If you have further questions, complaints, suggestions, etc., please reach out to me personally or right here on the mailing list or the project talkpages.
Thank you!
Sam Oyeyele.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_AfroCine_Project
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_AfroCine/Months_of_Afri…
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_AfroCine/Coordinators
"*The Foundation does not care so much of the French-speaking contributors*".
This harsh sentence is the translation of a statement in French, I've just
said in a conversation a week ago at the Francophone Wikiconvention held
last weekend in Brussels. The statement may seem excessive, because the
Foundation does things for the Francophone community as well as for other
communities (and its website is fairly well translated into French). But it
reflected my feeling, shared by my three interlocutors, all non-French,
facing that no Foundation high-level members were present to this
Wikiconvention: no executive director, nor members of the Board, nor any
level-C staff. In an another conversation, where the subject came up over
again, someone said this absence was offensive. I do not know if it
reflects the majority of attendees feelings but with varying degrees, I
would said it was widely shared.
In 2017, for the Francophone Wikiconvention in Strasbourg we had a very
quick visit of Katherine Maher, in 2018, a simple video message and in 2019
... nothing. At the same time, the Francophone Wikiconvention has stepped
up with ever more participants, always more countries represented. This
year, it brought together more than 220 Francophones, Algerian, Belgian,
Beninese, Cameroonian, Canadian, French, Guinean, Ivorian, Swiss and
Tunisian contributors, and I may forget some, with varied and enriching
conferences and meetings. A huge success, very well organized by employees
but also by several volunteers, who dedicated time and energy. This
Wikiconvention and the projects and achievements submitted have shown the
French-speaking Wikimedia community vitality, which will continue to grow.
FYI, French is foreseen, thanks to Africa, to be the most rapidly growing
languages in the next twenty years and will be the mother tongue or the
language used for communication for more than 8% of the world's population
in thirty years' time. But my reaction would have been the same if I had
attended an Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, Swahili-speaking or any other
important languages Wikiconvention.
So yes, this Wikiconvention is not in English. Fortunately, not all
Wikimedia meetings are in English. In a previous discussion on this mailing
list about the question of whether or not it is appropriate to continue
Wimania, one of the participants argued that unlike other Wikimedia
meetings, anyone could attend Wikmania. It may be obvious for those who
have English as a mother tongue or for Northern Europeans for whom English
is almost a second mother tongue but this is false: English is spoken only
by a small minority in the world, less than one human in six. So only one
human in six or seven could attend Wikimania or any other english-speaking
conferences or meetings (the case of the vast majority of global Wikimedia
conferences). I do not deny a common working language usefulness but a
Wikiconvention in French, as I hope other languages ones will be more to
come soon, allows all non-English speaking Francophones to participate in
the Wikimedia movement and above all, help them to meet our common goal of
spread freeknowledge.The movement talks a lot about its efforts to overcome
differents gaps (gender, LGBT,...) and it's rightly pointed, these topics
are important. But it simply forget the language gap and the almost
exclusive use of English excludes a very large majority.
So why no high level Foundation members in Brussels ?
I was told that Valerie D'Costa, the new Chief of Community Engagement,
should initially be there but finally told she will not. But then, no other
member could then replace her and why only one Foundation representant
given the part of French language in the WM projects ? Perhaps no Foundation
Board or high level member speaks French or feels she/he speaks good enough.
But with more than 220 attendants at the FWC, it would have been easy to
find volonteers with a good level of English to provide simultaneous
translation in discussions with other non-English speaking participants or to
translate conferences.A higher-level representation would have helped the
Foundation top level to gain more insight into Wikimedian French-speaking
community and enabled this community to have a direct access to the
Foundation, like in Wikimania. That would have helped bridging the gap
between these "two worlds". Because this gap is real. In the 2011 Finance
Meeting in Paris, during workshops where a Board member was in each
group (Jan-Bart
de Vreede for mine), me and another non english-speaking chapter head (she/he
will recognize her/himself) had made the comment that we had the impression
in our relation with the Foundation of "*colliding with an Anglo-Saxon wall*".
I notice that despite more Foundation staff diversity in recent years,
French speaking organizations would probably still have the same feeling
and clearly many French-speaking wikimedians feel that gap.
It is sad that the Foundation, which is very demanding with Francophone
chapters, does not apply itself to these demands with the Francophone
community. FYI the next French-speaking Wikconvention will be held on WE 31
october/1 November 2019 in Tunis. Save the date.
Regards
--
Thierry
PS. Assas, Diane and Benoit (for those I met) don't take this personaly.
Your presence was appreciate and you avoid the Foundation relationship with
French Community of a total Bérézina as we said in France.
Dear wikimedians,
Three years have gone since we started with the Basque Wikimedians User Group Education Program, funded by the Basque Government. After two years and a half of great enhancing of Basque Wikipedia (more than 2.500 students adding more than 1.5 million words on fundamental topics) the Basque Government has announce us today the extension of the funding for four more years.
In this four years we will try to strengthen our Educaton Program but also open to new areas in order to make our knowledge equity vision possible. By 2024 we will have taken sure steps towards creating a free knowledge ecosystem centered at Wikimedia.
Sincerely,
Galder
tl;dr Wikipedia can engage millions, billions of people to achieve the
Sustainable Development Goals by 2030
Wikimedians and Wikipedians around the world have been involved with
Wikimedia 2030 since 2015. The strategic direction is to build the
essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge. Back in 2015 a
total of 193 members of the United Nations agreed to the 17 Sustainable
Developments Goals to be reached by the year 2030. Last August many of you
were in Stockholm, Sweden for Wikimania. The theme this year was “Stronger
Together: Wikimedia, Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development
Goals”.[1]
Michael Edson, founder and director of UN Live, the Museum of the UN in
Kopenhagen, Denmark held a keynote and asked Wikipedia for help. The UN
isn’t able to reach millions, billions of people on its own to have them
work on achieving the SDGs.[2] Wikipedia reaches half a billion people each
month. Millions of people have contributed to Wikipedia.
Of course Wikipedia can spread the knowledge about the SDGs and how to
solve them in each country, and in each language. We can make a very good
case for an “open access knowledge sharing project related to the
Sustainable Development Goals that uses Wikipedia as a tool”. A lot of
knowledge will have to be gathered locally about local solutions to local
problems. We as a free knowledge movement have done so succesfully in the
past. We can do succesfully now.
The one big reason to step upto the challenge is in the vision of the
movement: “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely
share in the sum of all knowledge.” Imagine every single human having
access to how to solve each of the Sustainable Development Goals in their
locality, in their language.[3]
Another reason is part of our mission: to empower and engage people around
the world to collect and develop educational content.[4] Might people
involved with the movement be able to educate people why and how to solve
global goals locally?
Knowledge about SDGs is just a small subset of all knowledge. It would be a
big step for mankind to have exactly that knowledge available well before
the year 2030.[5] It won’t impede anyone to collect and share knowledge
outside that subset, however.
To make it happen imagine having a small office with a handful dedicated
people in each country. People with the capacity to build partnerships with
NGO’s, universities, research institutions, government agencies, groups of
citizens who are already involved with the SDGs.[6] People with the
capacity to organize SDG themed writing contests and SDG themed
edit-a-thons with participants from interested parties.[7]
As written above, it has been agreed to build the essential infrastructure
of the ecosystem of free knowledge. Why would it be worthwhile to invest 50
million dollar a year to build such an infrastructure?[8] With those tiny
offices in each country we it can exactly be done what Michael Edson begged
us to do: get millions (or billions) of people working together on global
goals and share the knowledge they gathered. To connect people everywhere
and catalyze global effort toward accomplishing the Sustainable Development
Goals.
The Wikimedia movement has the capacity to raise the necessary funds
through banners on Wikipedia on top of what is now already collected, and
alreadt spent each year.[9] After a long period - over four years - of
mainly inward looking activities of board and working groups, the time has
come to look outwards. The works of our movement have influence globally
and can have global impact. Not impact measured as number of articles, or
number of editors retained, but impact on the real social life of seven
billion people, by sharing knowledge how to end poverty, how to end hunger
and so on.[11]
Imagine a world where there is no poverty and zero hunger; with good health
and well-being, quality education and full gender equality everywhere.
There is clean water and sanitation for everyone. Affordable and clean
energy has helped to create decent work and economic growth. Prosperity is
fueled by investments in industry, innovation and infrastructure, which
helped to reduce inequalities. Living in sustainable cities and
communities, and responsible consumption and production are healing our
world. Climate action has capped the warming of the planet, and life below
water is flourishing, and there is abundant diverse life on land. There is
peace and justice through strong institutions, and long term partnerships
for the goals have been built.[12]
In the coming weeks I continue to have talks with people to get an “open
access knowledge sharing project related to the Sustainable Development
Goals that uses Wikipedia as a tool” or Wiki loves SDGs project started and
launched. People willing to get involved, please contact me through private
message.
Next week will start a strategy sprint in Tunis, with members of working
groups present, the board of the WMF, chiefs of the WMF office and some
people of WMDE to finalize the recommendations for Wikimedia 2030. Have a
look at the SDGs and think about what you can do for the SDGs, and not what
the SDGs can do for you.
Regards,
Ad Huikeshoven
[1] https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania (Thank you, Wittylama)
[2]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimania_2019_Keynote_address_–_Mi…
[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Vision
[4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mission
[5] https://www.sdgnederland.nl/sdg-moonshot/
[6]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Working…
[7]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Working…
[8]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Working…
[9]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Working…
[10]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Working…
[11] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Learning_and_Evaluation/Logic_models
[12] https://www.thenewdivision.world/the-global-goals
Hi everyone,
At Wikimania 2019, we shared information about the upcoming sustainability
report for the Wikimedia Foundation. Today, we’re publishing that report in
full. You can find an analysis of the report and what we’ll be doing next
in our sustainability efforts on the Wikimedia Foundation website here:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2019/09/19/how-the-wikimedia-foundatio…
You can also read the full report on Commons here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_Sustainability…
The report was developed in collaboration with the Strategic Sustainability
Group, a consultancy focused on helping organizations assess their
environmental impact. It includes a summary of our current practices,
identifies opportunities, and provides recommendations on how the
Foundation can do better. While it focuses primarily on the environmental
impact of the Wikimedia Foundation, rather than the movement as a whole, we
view it as an important starting point for further work in this area.
As an organization, there is much we’re already doing to limit our
environmental impact, but there is also much work we still have to do. Over
the next year, dedicated staff at the Foundation will be creating a
sustainability policy framework to incorporate sustainability as a guiding
practice in the organization.
Thank you to the staff and many groups and individuals in the movement who
worked with and encouraged us to take this important step to ensure
Wikimedia is supporting a sustainable world.
If you want to help spread the word, please retweet @Wikimedia and share
the blog post from your own channels. Our hope is that this work will help
build awareness around the need for organizations, and in particular tech
companies, to adopt more sustainable practices.
If you have questions or feedback on the report, we ask that you post them
on the talk page on Meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sustainability
Thank you,
Lydia
--
*Lydia Hamilton* (she/her)
Director of Operations
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hi all,
I’m excited to officially welcome Grant Ingersoll as our Chief Technology
Officer! Grant will be starting September 23. He’ll be based in Charlotte,
North Carolina.
Grant comes from a long history of working on open source projects. Most
recently, he served as the Chief Technical Officer of Lucidworks, an
AI-powered open-source search services company which he co-founded. He is a
Lucene and Solr committer, co-founder of the Apache Mahout machine learning
project, and a long-standing member of the Apache Software Foundation. He’s
an author, having written a book for Java developers on how to wrangle
unstructured text for search, text-mining, and the like. He’s also a
long-time, committed remotee, having worked with the distributed Lucidworks
team from his home in North Carolina for nearly a decade.
In Grant’s own words, “The power of learning and knowledge have always
stood as key pillars in my career. I'm a big believer that access to free,
trusted knowledge is of vital importance as society looks to tackle large
scale challenges. My wife, Robin, and I recently moved from Chapel Hill,
North Carolina, our home for 10 years, to Charlotte, North Carolina, where
our daughter lives. We also just dropped our son off at college for his
freshman year. We're adjusting to the empty nest life with our dog Allie (a
black lab mix). When not traveling or exploring Charlotte, I can usually be
found on a bike, out kayaking, or writing code.”
Grant will be working with myself, Erika Bjune (who is transitioning to VP,
Technology), and others in the leadership of the technology department to
determine a set of priorities for his first year. I expect these will
likely focus around evaluating our current capacities and co-creating a
vision for the continued evolution of our technical platforms, supporting
the staff of the department, working with the finance and operations folks
on planning and budgeting for the future, and of course, getting to know
our technical community and the broader movement. Under Grant’s leadership,
we will continue the work of improving and modernizing our technical
ecosystem to respond to our future needs, as laid out in the movement
strategy.
I’m thrilled to have the CTO role filled, and to bring Grant in at a time
when the movement is digging into the question of what it means to “become
the essential infrastructure of free knowledge.” From our first meeting, I
was struck by his curiosity. He was genuinely interested in how Wikimedia
works, and was willing to get into what I often think of “Wiki PhD” level
conversations about the nuances of our community and values. I have
generally found that the folks who bring that sort of openness and humility
to their work are the folks who thrive in the challenges of our mission and
movement. As our movement expands, I’m glad to have Grant’s experience,
curiosity, and passion for building things on board here at the Foundation.
I want to also thank Erika Bjune for her work as interim CTO. She
passionately advocated for the importance of our platforms, embodied
partnership and cooperation, and her expertise on the interview panel was
invaluable. I’m thrilled she’ll be working so closely with Grant as we move
forward.
Please join me in welcoming Grant to the Wikimedia Foundation!
Katherine
--
Katherine Maher (she/her)
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
_______________________________________________
Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
_______________________________________________
WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list
WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
Hello everyone,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed next Wednesday, September
18, at 9:30 AM PT/16:30 UTC. This will be the new time going forward for
Research Showcases in order to give more access to other timezones.
YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDhAnHrkBks
As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. You
can also watch our past research showcases here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase
This month's presentations:
Citation Needed: A Taxonomy and Algorithmic Assessment of Wikipedia's
Verifiability
By Miriam Redi, Research, Wikimedia Foundation
Among Wikipedia's core guiding principles, verifiability policies have a
particularly important role. Verifiability requires that information
included in a Wikipedia article be corroborated against reliable secondary
sources. Because of the manual labor needed to curate and fact-check
Wikipedia at scale, however, its contents do not always evenly comply with
these policies. Citations (i.e. reference to external sources) may not
conform to verifiability requirements or may be missing altogether,
potentially weakening the reliability of specific topic areas of the free
encyclopedia. In this project
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Identification_of_Unsourced_Statem…>,
we aimed to provide an empirical characterization of the reasons why and
how Wikipedia cites external sources to comply with its own verifiability
guidelines. First, we constructed a taxonomy of reasons why inline
citations are required by collecting labeled data from editors of multiple
Wikipedia language editions. We then collected a large-scale crowdsourced
dataset of Wikipedia sentences annotated with categories derived from this
taxonomy. Finally, we designed and evaluated algorithmic models to
determine if a statement requires a citation, and to predict the citation
reason based on our taxonomy. We evaluated the robustness of such models
across different classes of Wikipedia articles of varying quality, as well
as on an additional dataset of claims annotated for fact-checking purposes.
Redi, M., Fetahu, B., Morgan, J., & Taraborelli, D. (2019, May). Citation
Needed: A Taxonomy and Algorithmic Assessment of Wikipedia's Verifiability.
In The World Wide Web Conference (pp. 1567-1578). ACM.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.11116
Patrolling on Wikipedia
By Jonathan T. Morgan, Research, Wikimedia Foundation
I will present initial findings from an ongoing research study
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Patrolling_on_Wikipedia> of
patrolling workflows on Wikimedia projects. Editors patrol recent pages and
edits to ensure that Wikimedia projects maintains high quality as new
content comes in. Patrollers revert vandalism and review newly-created
articles and article drafts. Patrolling of new pages and edits is vital
work. In addition to making sure that new content conforms to Wikipedia
project policies, patrollers are the first line of defense against
disinformation, copyright infringement, libel and slander, personal
threats, and other forms of vandalism on Wikimedia projects. This research
project is focused on understanding the needs, priorities, and workflows of
editors who patrol new content on Wikimedia projects. The findings of this
research can inform the development of better patrolling tools as well as
non-technological interventions intended to support patrollers and the
activity of patrolling.
--
Janna Layton (she, her)
Administrative Assistant - Product & Technology
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Dear fellow Wikimedians,
On 7 September 2019 Amical Wikimedia organised a community open meet-up
(https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viquiprojecte:Trobada_d'Estrat%C3%A8gia_2019)
to discuss the Working Group recommendations at that time for the
current Wikimedia 2030 strategy process.
Outcome was also delivered to Strategy liaisons and every comment was
appended to their respective discussion pages several days ago. In any
case, for the sake of transparency and for helping other affiliates and
whole-community participants to share and discuss their points of view
with us, we also gathered all them in the page below:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Amical_Wikimedia/Strategy_Meetup_2019
We look forward to reading the upcoming updates from Strategy Working
Groups!
--
Toni Hermoso Pulido
-------------------------
Amical Wikimedia
https://www.wikimedia.cat
Dear Wikimedians and Education leaders,
My name is Sailesh Patnaik, I work as a Communications and Wikimedia
Outreach contractor with the Education team at Wikimedia Foundation. The
Education Team wants to support the Wikimedia community to successfully
communicate about the amazing things happening with Wikimedia in education.
We’re hosting a series of webinars on “How to talk about Wikimedia in
education” These 1 hour sessions will give you the tools to speak to anyone
about the impact of using the Wikimedia projects in education. You will
also learn about some high impact projects that have already happened, or
are happening right now! We’ll be recording the event, so if you can’t make
it, you can watch it later! We encourage you to come to meet others and ask
questions.
Please join us! Dates and times below:
1.
Webinar 1 : 17th September, 12:30 PM UTC [1]
2.
Webinar 2: 28th September, 18:00 PM UTC [2]
If you can’t join for the Webinar, you can still keep up to date through
these communication channels. You can also join the Wikipedia & Education
UG[3] to get more involved.
1.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WikimediaEducationTeam/
2.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WikimediaEdu
3.
Newsletter: https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/News
4.
Education Mailing list:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
If you have any other questions, feel free to reach out to me.
[1]
https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/how-to-talk-about-wikimedia-in-educatio…
[2]
https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/how-to-talk-about-wikimedia-in-educatio…
[3]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_%26_Education_User_Group
Dhanyabaad!
--
*Sailesh Patnaik*
Communications and Wikimedia Outreach Contractor