Hello all,
The following was posted to internal-l by Sue regarding a possible 'Edit Wikipedia Week' to be held in December as part of a way of keeping the momentum of the fundraiser going. All are invited to participate in the planning for this event at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Edit_Wikipedia_Week.
Thanks,
Sean
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org Date: Nov 5, 2007 4:09 PM Subject: [Internal-l] Edit Wikipedia Week: call for participation To: "Local Chapters, board and officers coordination (closed subscription)" internal-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Hi folks,
I'm writing to invite you –chapters, individuals, everyone- to help stage a bunch of "Edit Wikipedia Week" events in December. The idea is to pick a date, probably the week of December 3, and stage outreach events around the world designed to encourage people to participate in the projects.
The events could be practically anything – big or small. You could speak about the projects at a local school; get yourself booked on TV; talk to a local photography club about contributing to Commons; organize a marathon weekend of translations; recruit new people to help you launch a WikiProject, or even just teach your mom how to edit. Anything that you think will improve the projects: the purpose is to reach out to people who don't edit, and encourage them to make a contribution.
This is intended to be an experiment. The premise is that anyone can organize an event under this umbrella idea, and it can take whatever form makes sense to them. Nobody needs permission: feel free to just participate.
Why now? As you know we're in the middle of the annual fundraiser, which this year runs from October 22 to December 23. Because it's so long, we want to stage events at various points, designed to keep the media and the public paying attention. We've got some Wikipedia Academies coming up in South Africa http://internal.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Academies on November 10 and 11, with Jimmy, Frank Schulenburg and Ndesanjo Macha. Edit Wikipedia Week would be the next big event after that.
This would be focused on Wikipedia, because it's our biggest and best known project, and therefore most likely to generate interest among the media and general public. That doesn't mean we couldn't hold similar events for Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikisource, or any other WMF project. Implementation-wise, I'm thinking of having us set up edit.wikipedia.org, which would redirect to pages in the local Wikipedias. Each of those pages would also refer back to the ongoing fundraiser with a little info-box (something along the lines of "There are different ways to help Wikipedia..").
I'm also going to ask Cary to make a page for this on meta, where we can discuss it, and people can post events. I would ask you please to translate and share this note with whoever you like. I know that not everyone can afford to make a financial contribution to the fundraiser: I am hoping some people will choose to support it (us) by helping with Edit Wikipedia Week instead.
The first thing we'll need to do is finalize a date. I think December 3 would probably work best, but please let me know if/why you think another week would be better.
And lastly .. I am thinking this could become an annual event. In that spirit, this year may be a little wonky and haphazard, which would be okay. If it goes well, we'll learn some good lessons, and next year will be better :-)
Thanks, Sue
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