Dear all,
the monthly report of Wikimedia Deutschland's activities in May 2012 is
online now!
Find out more about our participation at re:publica and LinuxTag, our first
German Wikipedian in Residence and news about the ongoing copyright debate
here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikimedia_Deutsch…
Best wishes,
Katja
--
Öffentlichkeitsarbeit
-------------------------------------
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstraße 72 | 10963 Berlin
Telefon 030 - 219 158 26-0
www.wikimedia.de
Stellen Sie sich eine Welt vor, in der jeder Mensch an der Menge allen
Wissens frei teilhaben kann. Helfen Sie uns dabei!
http://spenden.wikimedia.de/
**** Helfen Sie mit, dass WIKIPEDIA von der UNESCO als erstes digitales
Weltkulturerbe anerkannt wird.
Unterzeichnen Sie die Online-Petition! http://wikipedia.de ****
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
(sorry for cross-posting)
Hi,
In the past few days, representatives of different Wikimedia chapters and
working groups met in Santiago de Chile for the Second Ibero-American
Wikimedia Summit (also known as Iberoconf). This event took place between
June 1st and 3rd at the DUOC UC Institute – Campus Alonso Ovalle, with two
representatives from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Italy,
Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Uruguay and Venezuela, and for the first time,
guests from Panama and Peru.
The event was an incredible opportunity for the different groups to share
their experiences from a local and regional perspective and articulate a
common framework for future projects in Ibero America. The use of the
native language of all the participants instead of a foreign language as it
happens in most of Wikimedia events was a
Here is a summary of the main topics of the summit:
- Recommendations for the creation and development of Wikimedia chapters.
- Experience of Brazilian and Mexican wikipedians at universities.
- Discussion on development of projects in indigenous languages.
- Best practices for grant making , accountability and GLAM projects.
- Workshop of external communication and social media.
- Workshop of “Wiki Loves Monument”
In the following days, we expect to release an extended summary of the
event in Meta, and records of the sessions and photos. Also, every chapter
and working group will upload the slides of their “State of the Chapter”;
some of them are already available at
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Presentaciones_en_el_Encuentro_W…
I would like to thank to the Wikimedia Foundation for funding this project
and their representative at the meeting (Samuel Klein as part of the Board
and Matthew Roth as part of the Staff) because their valuable and really
helpful participation at the sessions. The same to Délphine Menard, who
came as a guest in representation of Wikimedia Deutschland. Thanks also for
all the participants, -some of them even flew for more than 24 hours, and
for those that voted our bid past March.
But, more important, I want to thank to all the members of Wikimedia Chile
that helped to organize this event. We bid in February mainly as a joke and
now we are finally resting after organizing such a big event. It was a
great opportunity to bring closer our members and learn about event
organization. To Juan David, Lily, Daniel, Dennis, Eduardo, Sarah, Rocío
and Marco, thank you!
I’m really happy with this Ibero-American Wikimedia Summit, which is
becoming one of our traditions as a movement and as an example for regional
cooperation activities. We expect anxiously next summit in 2013 and, as a
general recommendation, I public encourage our fellow chapters to start
ambitious projects like this one.
Kind regards,
Osmar Valdebenito Gaete
Presidente de Wikimedia Chile
http://www.wikimediachile.cl
Yesterday I was at Over the Air, the UK mobile hack day, where developers come together and try to build mobile apps and projects, commercial and open source. (I worked on something Wikimedia-related, more of which when I've made the code presentable.)
One of the things discussed was the perennial topic of opening up of UK government data. The UK government have committed to making as much data as possible openly available under open licenses (specifically the Open Government Licence, which is basically the UK government's rebadged CC BY license).
The UK government are trying to seed use of data with companies, to show an economic and social use for opening up data, and are prioritising open data releases that have some useful economic benefit. For instance, hypothetically, releasing high-quality information about public transport would allow people to develop mobile apps to help people use public transport, while releasing data about bird population studies might be of less commercial importance. The government seem to be leaning towards putting out the commercially useful material first.
One thing that came up in discussion was whether or not anyone has ever done any economic impact studies on Wikipedia and other community-produced open data and open content projects (OpenStreetMap, other Wikimedia projects etc.)? If civic society groups like Wikimedians, OpenStreetMappers, MySociety.org people etc. want to convince governments to put more data out, it'd be helpful to show the economic effects of this, or to have people who are trying to convince government to put the data out to have access to this kind of information so they can make better decisions (cue cynicism here).
There are such reports on the economic impact of open data releases by governments[1]. But I was wondering if we'd seen anything for community-produced data. I know Apple are now using OpenStreetMap within iPhoto[2] and have long had Wikipedia as part of OS X's Dictionary.app. The Foursquare website has just switched over to OSM (the iOS and Android apps both still use Google Maps).
Obviously, the success of Wikipedia has affected the previously dominant players in the encyclopaedia market: Britannica, Encarta, World Book etc. But it is also providing all sorts of much harder to see effects by reducing costs for businesses and organisations. The BBC reuse Wikipedia content within their music and wildlife websites, thus reducing the amount they have to pay for content (or, more charitably, enabling them to do projects that they wouldn't otherwise be able to do). Wikipedia makes Google more useful, and Google have often said "anything that makes the web better makes Google better". Might a decent Wikipedia in a small language effect the market in that language community for technology? If people can actually read stuff in language X, does that increase the demand for computers/mobile phones/Internet access in language X speakers?
Has there been any studies of these kinds of economic impact of Wikimedia projects and other open content/open data projects?
I have seen some discussion of this in the OSM community.[3] Unfortunately, Google is failing me on searching for material on the economic impact of Wikipedia: I just get lots of Wikipedia articles with titles of the form "Economic impact of X". I also couldn't find anything on the Research Index section of Meta.
My eventual interest in this is whether or not there are potential ways governments could work with projects like Wikipedia, chapters like WMUK and with individual volunteers as part of their open data strategy: they seem to want to do likewise with commercial organisations because of the obvious economic benefits that some of that data has. There's potential for a kind of three-way thing, with governments working with both a commercial partner and with a community partner (like a Wikimedia chapter) to produce symbiotically beneficial data.[4]
[1] see http://wiki.linkedgov.org/index.php/The_economic_impact_of_open_data
[2] http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/4/2998428/apple-iphoto-ios-openstreetmap-cre…
[3] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2010-September/053947.html
[4] I hate myself when I write sentences like that.
--
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>
Whatever one thinks of Larry Sanger's campaign regarding
sexual material on Wikipedia or Commons, and I'm not endorsing
everything he says, it should be clear from examination that he holds
his views sincerely. Personally attacking him along the lines of being
malicious and insincere, which is quite false, only adds weight to his
critique about (my phrasing) the bunker-mentality culture.
--
Seth Finkelstein Consulting Programmer http://sethf.com
Infothought blog - http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/
Interview: http://sethf.com/essays/major/greplaw-interview.php
As many may be aware we at Wikiproject Medicine are working with
Translators Without Borders to translate key medical content into as many
other languages as possible. A quick outline is basically we bring medical
articles to Good Article or Featured Article in English. They are than
handed of to TWB who has two trained translators who translates the content
from English to the destination language (one for the initial translation
and one to verify the translation). For those languages where I have been
able to find Wikipedias, these Wikipedians than integrate the content into
that language Wikipedia, if we have not yet found Wikipedians I attempt to
do it the best I can. This has worked well so far for 9 languages as are
listed here in this table outlining our progress
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_tas…
An issue has however risen on the Polish Wikipedia. The English "cite
journal" "cite book" and "cite web" templates do not work. They have
created their own very similar templates partly supposedly to decrease
people translating content between languages. I do not know if a bot exists
that can make the conversion to an entire page? Or if there is another work
around? Many of the articles we are looking at eventually translating have
100-200 references. It will not be possible to do this manually.
If anyone wants to take on the lead role of integrating medical content
into different language Wikipedians I would love you help. Please sign up
here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Translation_tas…
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
Board of Directors Wikimedia Canada
Lead Editor
Open Textbook of Medicine
by Wikipedia
www.opentextbookofmedicine.org
I'm very pleased to announce two new developments at Wikimedia DC.
First, we'd like to welcome our first staff member, Lisa Marrs, who will be
assisting us as an Outreach & Program Coordination Intern over the next
several months. Lisa's duties will include coordinating our outreach
efforts and acting as a primary point of contact for cultural and
educational institutions; preparing our external communications, including
blog posts, press releases, and social media postings; and supporting the
organizing teams of Wikimania 2012 and Wiki Loves Monuments USA 2012.
Second, we've moved into our new office space, which is located at 1875 K
Street NW in Washington, DC. We'll be using this space through at least
the end of September; it will be both a work area for Lisa (and perhaps
another intern later in the summer) as well as a location for internal and
external meetings over the next few months. We're currently busy getting
settled in and setting up the office, and will be ready to welcome visitors
in late June; if you're interested in visiting us, please let us know, and
we'll arrange access for you.
As always, any comments or suggestions are very welcome. We look forward
to hosting everyone here in Washington for Wikimania next month!
Cheers,
Kirill
--
Kirill Lokshin
Secretary | Wikimedia District of Columbia
http://wikimediadc.org | @wikimediadc