Hi everyone,
Wikidata's 10th anniversary is coming in the following days and the social media
accounts start to talk about it, mostly from institutional/official Wikimedia profiles.
That's really good! As one of the responsibles of the microblogging handles of the
Catalan Wikimedia projects, we are also thinking on a good coverage on Twitter for next
weekend, to publicly explain its advantages, successes and uses to free knowledge.
I'd like to remind that we are a multilingual movement and that both Wikidata and also
networks like Twitter are really active in other languages than English. For this reason,
being #Wikidata10 the most neutral and easy hashtag, I do not really get why
#WikidataBirthday was the final choice to communicate this milestone. This obviously masks
outreach efforts from other languages without being contingent upon English-speaking
contexts.
Similar cases have happened in the past. For example, #Wikipedia20 was huge on Twitter in
January 2021 by @Wikipedia and @Wikimedia, but then the WMF comms team utterly ommited to
consider the rest of birthdays of the first group of non-English versions along the year
(luckily the good press did its work and covered well many of those languages when their
20 years arrived). Please, remember that it may seem a small detail, but these things -a
simple hashtag without anglocentric vision- also make a difference on language perspective
(especially after such a time, money and human-consuming Strategy 2030 that boasts about
equity and diversity).
We'll certainly use #Wikidata10 and we encourage other languages to do the same.
Thank you for giving it a thought.
Best,
Xavier Dengra