Dear Wikimedia Community Members,
The Core Organizing Team (COT) [1] is excited to take on organizing our
first-ever virtual Wikimania! Many thanks to the Wikimania Steering
Committee [2] for entrusting us with the task of bringing our community
together and celebrating the movement.
This year marks Wikipedia’s 20th birthday [3], and the theme for the 2021
Wikimania will be centered around this fantastic milestone. We want to make
this edition a celebration of all the humans that have made achieving it
possible.
As the COT, we find it important to keep you informed and involved
throughout the process of organizing Wikimania 2021 and we would appreciate
your great support.
We will be reaching out to the wider community for your input on various
aspects to inform some of our decisions. To begin with, we would like to
ask for your opinion on a few things;
-
Entertainment
What kind of entertainment options would you ideally like to see during a
virtual Wikimania? Do you have any ideas for singers, dancers, or any
suggestions for other types of entertainment?
-
Swag / Conference Merchandise
Wikimania participants are distributed all over the world. What are some
good ideas of swag/conference memorabilia for a virtual Wikimania?
Let us know your thoughts using this LimeSurvey link
<https://survey.wikimedia.it/index.php/479123?lang=en> [4]. The survey will
collect anonymous responses and will remain open until the 5th of May 2021.
We are looking forward to hearing your ideas and suggestions, and will be
sharing more with you as we move towards making a decision on these aspects
for our virtual Wikimania!
Thanks and speak soon!
Winnie Kabintie (User:Ms_Kabintie
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ms_Kabintie>), on behalf of the
Wikimania 2021 Core Organizing Team
[1]
https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2021:Save_the_date_and_the_Core_Organi…
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_Committee
[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_20
[4] https://survey.wikimedia.it/index.php/479123/lang/en/newtest/Y
Hi friends, fellow Wikimedians,
[Apologies in advance, this note is very long, and written in my native
English speaker style. Normally I try for shorter and more ESL friendly,
but it was hard to do this time. Thank you for indulging or at least,
tolerating, me.]
It has been my life’s joy and pleasure to be a part of this movement with
you for the past seven years.[1] I came into the Wikimedia movement as a
believer in open culture, open source, and free knowledge. I leave my work
at the Foundation today knowing the Wikimedia movement stands for those
things, and something even greater.
To be a Wikimedian is to embrace humanity’s curiosity and fallibility, our
generosity and irascibility. It is to look across a world that we’re told
is divided -- by arbitrary borders, linguistic conquest, fear of the
unfamiliar -- and instead see our common interest. It’s to know that we are
each flawed, unreliable narrators, and to believe that the best remedy to
our intrinsic failings is to patch our individual flaws with our collective
strengths.
In the spring of 2016, I shared a pizza in Berlin with (our then-future,
now former, board chair) Christophe Henner. We were attending Wikimedia
Conference one month into my role as interim executive director, and had
just finished a challenging day of plenary meetings that brought us
together as a community in catharsis. Christophe was a candidate for the
Wikimedia Foundation board. He asked me, “What are we here for?”
I didn’t know what he wanted me to say, so I just told him what I thought.
“We’re here to make the world better.” It was a cliche answer, but true for
me. He laughed and leaned back in the chair. “Yes.”
This has always been what I read into the unstated part of our vision.
“Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge.” This is a spectacular, inspiring, aspirational
ambition, but it is also missing something critical. For the past seven
years, I have imagined this world every day. And every day, I have asked
myself, “Why?” Why does free knowledge vision matter? What happens then?
What change have we effected in the world?”
Even after I leave, I’ll keep asking myself this. And as you continue your
work here, as colleagues, as contributors, as volunteers, I ask all of you
to ask yourselves as well -- with all that you do, and all that you
contribute, and all that you build. What are we here to do? Do our values,
our structures, our practices, and our constructs serve our purpose? And
how do we ensure they remain as alive and vital as our projects and vision?
The former president of Wikimedia Chile, Marco Correa, would say, “The
knowledge may be neutral, but the act is not.” I always understood him to
mean that while our projects endeavor to serve the most accurate,
verifiable, and neutral knowledge, our movement has never been impartial.
We have always stood proudly for a set of values: freedom of inquiry,
expression, and assembly, the right to privacy and memory, and the
foundational value and dignity of every human. We have defended them under
duress and must continue to do so.
We should never lose sight of how revolutionary the act of producing free
knowledge is in the first place. I’ve always been struck by the myriad
motivations that bring people to this movement. There are those who write
their language into the future, their identity into public consciousness,
who use our projects to grapple with historical injustice. There are some
who edit Wikipedia because an act of fact is itself an act of
self-determination in places where information is used to suppress and
subject.
If we let ourselves believe that we’re simply a free encyclopedia, we risk
losing sight of the power and possibility of our work. Knowledge has always
been a tool of power -- great empire and wealth have been built with its
service, and great injustice has been done in its name. The very idea of
liberating knowledge from power, decoupling it from access and wealth, and
placing its construction, utility, and value in the hands of every person
on the planet is fundamentally radical.
Wikimedia itself is a radical act. It is a verb, a constant action of
interrogation, revision, and evolution. It upends history, it challenges
the status quo. It is the confidence to ask ourselves why we believe what
we believe and whether our knowledge may change in the future. It is the
conviction to defend our values against pressure and threat, while robustly
debating among ourselves whether those values continue to serve the world.
It is the humility to cooperate, collaborate, and learn from others.
Someone asked the other day, “what is the biggest challenge Wikimedia
faces?” My answer was the same as on my very first day. Our biggest
challenge is ourselves. Our success, our complexity, our size -- it could
be easy to believe that we’ll endure forever on our current momentum, to
see ourselves as a website rather than a global movement, or to accept that
our knots are too knotty to ever properly unpick. It is often easier, and
more comfortable, to swim in the eddies of incremental evolution rather
than face the urgency of collective change.
But we carry out our mission against great odds, and it is essential that
we are clear-eyed about both the risks and the opportunities. There are the
challenges of competition and scarcity: We operate in one of the most
heavily capitalized and competitive sectors in the history of civilization
(digital technology), we provide one of the most valuable (yet
nonrivalrous!) assets of humanity (knowledge), we aspire to serve the
entirety of the world equitably, despite all of the ways in which the world
itself builds implicit and explicit barriers to that goal.
There are also the opportunities, which are themselves a form of challenge.
We see more people connected around the globe, more communities in search
of knowledge, more languages represented, more need for trustworthy general
knowledge, and sharper, more urgent questions of power, representation, and
agency. We see an increase in appreciation for the value of knowledge in
society, and for the importance of facilitating agreement on even the most
contentious of issues. Whether we make the most of these moments will be up
to us.
If we are to meet these moments, we will have to find new strengths. We
must be more clever, more bold, simply better than we have ever been. We
must be uncompromising in our generosity, and adamant in our excellence. We
must be more expansive, abundant, and inclusive. We should grapple with the
ways in which we have failed in the past, including instrumentalizing
participation and recapitulating exclusionary canons at the expense of
truly global representation. We must cherish our integrity and
independence, while also understanding our interdependence.
In recent years, our movement has begun doing just this. We’ve been
reconsidering our definition of “community” and “contributor”. We’ve been
interrogating our understanding of what knowledge is, how it is
constructed, and who is represented. We have been pushing for participation
and enfranchisement of underrepresented geographies, languages, and
demographics. We have been asking ourselves whether the paradigms of
encyclopedic notability and verifiability can sustain our mission, growth,
and relevance. We have been exploring what of our current work and
practices might need to evolve in order for us to meaningfully live into
our mission of every single human.
We have been asking questions not only about our knowledge in Wikimedia’s
ecosystem, but about the means by which we realize our mission. We have
always been committed to open architecture and code, but those commitments
have been passive -- common tools, common rules. What does it mean to be
actively open? To go beyond protocol to practice, from standard to value?
How do we ensure that our technical infrastructure and experiences enable
participation, agency, and ownership by everyone, everywhere? How can our
projects lead in privacy, security, and openness by the light of their
example?
In a very real way, this is all in our hands, and in the hands of anyone
who might seek to participate. Our projects are not owned by anyone, but
they are owned by all of us. They are edited, on average, 350 times per
minute, representing the opportunity, every moment of the day, to be a work
in progress -- to aspire to better versions of our movement, our projects,
of ourselves. To change in response to the world around us. Wikimedia
changes as we do, and change is what we make of it.
This is a constant invitation -- and obligation -- to make and remake
ourselves. Do the values that served us from our first day compel us to our
future? Are the decisions that we make, as staff, as volunteers, as
movement leaders, as community members, in service of our purpose? How do
we adapt our work for the world we live in while maintaining our vision for
the world we seek? What are we growing toward? What are we here for? What
is the point, the purpose, of free knowledge?
The answers to these questions may change, but the way we arrive at those
answers should not. We are first and foremost a community, and we should
arrive at our answers through open dialogue and consultation. We can’t
bypass the difficult bits, we must go through them to build the lasting
parts. And the only way we can do that is by committing, to consistency,
communication, and continuation of difficult discussions such as those
raised through movement strategy — questions of power, agency,
decentralization, and autonomy. It is in seeking the answers to these
questions that we will find the ways in which our movement will thrive.
We must see one another as mutual stewards and allies, finding the means to
disagree while valuing one another as people united in common purpose. We
should practice compassion, courage, and kindness for one another and
ourselves, and accept imperfection in the spirit of evolution. As staff, we
must show our volunteer colleagues respect as full partners. As volunteers,
we must return the sentiment to staff of the Foundation and affiliates. We
should break bread together, solve problems together, and see one another
as equals.
To be a Wikimedian is to place your faith in the goodwill of people you’ve
never met. It is to believe in the power of an idea to connect a community;
to be an incorrigible humanist, wise to our failings but returning each day
to do better. It is to believe in human generosity, curiosity, and general
good sense. We not only seek to do the radical thing of making knowledge
freely available, we trust the world to use it well. To contribute in good
faith, to read us critically when needed, to donate to keep us going, and
to criticize us when justified.
We place our confidence in the world, and they place it back in us. We
serve as stewards, anticipating that our work must support and sustain free
knowledge as a public good for decades to come. We forge ahead against the
implacable odds, and we somehow keep moving. We throw our lot in together,
bind ourselves in our success and failure, and accept that our progress is
a work in progress. We believe that we can change the world, because we
already have. [2]
I am grateful to you all for this time we have had, and the ways in which
your passion, empathy, and determination have expanded my world. I have
been fortunate to make lifelong friends with many of you, and believe there
are still many friendships ahead. I am leaving the Foundation; I am not
leaving the movement. I’m easy enough to find on the internet, but for all
things Wikimedia you can find me on wiki at User:Maherkr or Telegram. I’m
also at katherine.maher(a)gmail.com.
We are so fortunate to live in Wikimedia’s glorious moveable feast. It’s
taught me that there is rarely goodbye, just until we meet again.
See you 'round the wikis!
Katherine
[1] Sure, there have been moments of exhaustion, exasperation, and
heartbreak, but those aren’t for right now. And anyway, they’re entirely
overshadowed by that bounteous joy.
[2] And as of the end of today, this is officially just another Wikimedia
essay! YMMV. Thanks for reading!
--
Katherine Maher (she/her)
CEO
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hi Katherine,
It's heartening to see you leave the position (you) handled so well at the
Wikimedia Foundation, am quite sure, many of the staff and volunteers would
be glad if you continued for some more years to come.
The Wikimedia Community will remember your work, achievements and endeavors
to realize the strategic direction for the future of the movement, and we
will work together towards this.
See you around.
On Fri, Apr 16, 2021, 3:02 PM <wikimedia-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
wrote:
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> 1. Re: Thank you + see you around! (Brad Patrick)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2021 07:00:57 -0400
> From: Brad Patrick <bradp.wmf(a)gmail.com>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Cc: Katherine Maher <katherine.maher(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Thank you + see you around!
> Message-ID: <329B5BFB-070E-453C-B63F-4C1AD12F9CCA(a)gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> Congratulations on your tenure. I’m excited to see what you do next!
>
> Brad Patrick
>
> bap(a)baplegal.com
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > On Apr 16, 2021, at 6:51 AM, Olushola Olaniyan <
> olaniyanshola15(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Hi Katherine,
> >
> > I am glad you have done so much as an outgoing Executive Director of
> the Wikimedia Foundation and no one can question it.
> >
> > Sincerely, you have cast your name in Gold with the way you have
> responded to critics and reshaped the movement. Now, we could see ourselves
> not as a tool in the hand of a few but as a platform that stands to sustain
> the revolution of the universe.
> >
> > It takes only a few to do so and you happen to be one of the very few to
> have achieved this feat.
> >
> > Though the journey to the destination desired by you for the movement
> might seem to be far, I am glad that you have laid the track.
> >
> > Continue with your Midas touch and break the glass ceiling.
> >
> > I am wishing you the very best in your next endeavour.
> >
> > I celebrate You.
> >
> > Olushola Olaniyan
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
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> Subject: Digest Footer
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> End of Wikimedia-l Digest, Vol 205, Issue 23
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>
Hi!
I'm not sure how it happened, but for a while I've been the main maintainer
of the Wikimedia Planet: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Planet_Wikimedia
The Wikimedia Planet is a bunch of RSS feeds that aggregate posts from
various blogs in several languages that are related to Wikimedia in one way
or another. Some people think that RSS is an outdated technology, but there
are also quite a lot of people, including myself, who beg to disagree, and
find RSS readers more convenient and nicely organized for getting news
updates than social networks or algorithmic aggregators. (I used Google
Reader and then I switched to Feedly; there are many other RSS readers.)
It's not so *bad* that I'm the main maintainer because there's very little
work to do and it's actually quite fun. Nevertheless, it's not very good
that I'm practically the only one, because sometimes maintenance requests
can get stuck for months, and there's also that whole notion of [[Bus
factor]].
So, if anyone is interested in joining me in this *very easy and fun*
effort, please just take a look at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Planet_Wikimedia and try addressing the
current requests (there are very few of them). And then check the same page
once a month or so. If you know how to use Git, then you have all the
necessary skills to do it. If you don't know Git, I'll be happy to teach
you the necessary basics—it's not as difficult and scary in 2021 as it was
in 2011. Just contact me off-list.
Thanks :)
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
Hello! Last Saturday, April 10th 2021, Wikimedia España celebrated its
General Meeting where a new board was elected after the end of the
period of three years for the last one. The meeting was celebrated
on-line due to restrictions because of COVID-19.
The new board is constituted as following:
President: Florencia Claes (user:Florenciac), former Vicepresident
Vicepresident: Mentxu Ramilo Araujo (user:Mentxuwiki), new in the board
Secretary: Ana Porras (user:Escalafandra), new in the board
Treasurer: Pedro Pacheco (user:Pedro J Pacheco), same position than in
the last board
Member: Ester Bonet (user:Tiputini), new in the board
Member: María Bolado (user:Trastolillo), same position than in the last
board
Member: Santiago Navarro Sanz (user:Millars), former President
The new board was elected by unanimity and it is the first time when we
have a woman for the position of President and also the first time with
a majority of women in the board.
Thank you very much to the board members who will not continue after
many years: Jorge Sierra Canduela (user:Lucien leGrey), Miguel García
San José (user:Rastrojo) and José Emilio Mori Recio (user:-jem-). In the
meeting we remembered Elena Sanz, former secretary, who passed away last
year.
In the meeting we also approve the activity and economical report for
2020 and the plan of activities and the budget for 2021.
The report for 2020 as a pdf file is linked here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Informe_Anual_WMES_2020.pdf
You can read a blog post about the new board in our website:
https://www.wikimedia.es/2021/04/12/nueva-junta-directiva-2021/
Best regards!
--
Santiago Navarro Sanz
Wikimedia España
www.wikimedia.es
[Sorry for cross-posting the following]
Dear Wiki Community,
It is with great pleasure that we - the Wikimania Steering Committee[1] - announce that Wikimania will be hosted virtually from August 13-17th, 2021 [2] and that the Core Organizing Team (COT) has been selected and fully onboarded. Since 2021 marks the 20th anniversary of Wikipedia, Wikimania 2021's theme is 20 years of Wikipedia and all the humans that make it possible. We'll look back at our history and celebrate our future.
We thank everyone who applied to the call for volunteers [3] - it was a tough selection process given the impressive number of strong applicants we received. However, The Wikimania Steering Committee is pleased to announce that after due deliberation and assessment, we selected a total of 9 individuals from our broad community who will lead the way in organizing the first ever virtual Wikimania.
The official Core Organizing Team members are the following:
Vanj Padilla
Anna Torres (Anna Torres (WMAR)
Susanna Mkrtchyan (WikiTatik)
Winnie Kabintie
Lea Lacroix (WMDE)
Yamen Bousrih (Yamen)
Gnangarra
Bodhisattwa
Lodewijk (Effeietsanders)
We trust that each COT member has the skills, dedication and willingness to come together and bring to life our very first virtual edition of Wikimania and to help create the necessary spaces for our community to continue to thrive and work together. We had originally foreseen the need for 4-6 individuals to form the COT but after such strong applications, we decided to extend that number to 9 individuals, given the great team that we identified could work together and flourish.
We invite you all to participate in Wikimania 2021 and to contribute to its content and success. The COT will be reaching out to some applicants who marked their availability to be volunteers in their application, but we also encourage you to let us know if you would like to be considered for volunteer roles and opportunities for Wikimania 2021.
With this said, as the functioning Wikimania Steering Committee, we would like to make public our endorsement of the Core Organizing Team and our trust that they will move forward with the great responsibility and excitement of bringing to life Wikimania 2021.
The COT will soon be announcing more information around Wikimania 2021 and how you can get involved - so please stay tuned. Please save the dates in your calendars, we hope to see you there!
Sincerely,
The Wikimania Steering Committee
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_Committee <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_Committee>
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2021 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2021>
[3] https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2021:Call_for_volunteers <https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2021:Call_for_volunteers>
Hi all,
One last major update before #WikiForHumanRights "right to a healthy
environment" launches next Thursday. Apologies for cross-posting.
To learn more about the campaign see:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiForHumanRights
*Join the launch event! *
We are hosting a launch event April 15 at 1500 UTC available with live
translation in UN languages: learn more at
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/04/02/live-event-join-us-for-the-launch-of-…
*Edit in the challenge!*
Like the WikiGap Challenge, we encourage you to join our international
editing competition focused on topics related. We have international topics
identified by UN Human Rights, UN Environment and UNICEF. Come create or
expand those articles or bring your own!
Join us at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiForHumanRights_Challenge
*Join community events! *
There is a list of community events for the campaign, many of which are
digital and available for all:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiForHumanRights/2021/Events
More events will be coming soon, and if you would like to organize --
please see my previous email:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2021-March/096344.html
*Promote in your community!*
Please share this in your communities where possible!
Thank you!
Alex Stinson
--
Alex Stinson
Senior Program Strategist
Wikimedia Foundation
Twitter: @sadads
Learn more about how the communities behind Wikipedia, Wikidata and other
Wikimedia projects create calls to action to invite new contributors
through campaigns: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Campaigns