Hi Folks,
I am finally finding five minutes to thank you all for the warm
welcome and to reiterate that Bence and I, as well as any other member
of the chapters committee, are here to help with any questions you
might have.
Here is our "wikimedia report" of our workshop.
Best,
Delphine
========
Wikimedia South Africa, kickoff Workshop - 7/8 August 2010
== BACKGROUND ==
Wikimedia activities in South Africa are not exactly new, in 2007,
iCommons and the Wikimedia Foundation organised a Wikipedia Academy in
Johannesburg, while a group of Wikimedians started to put together a
bid for Wikimania. The South African chapter idea probably finds its
roots in those two initiatives, but for lack of momentum at the time,
did not pick up. In 2010, Achal Prabhala, member of the advisory board
of the Wikimedia Foundation, who helped found the Indian Chapter, put
the idea back on track.
Achal, with the help of Kerryn McKay and Daniela Faris of the African
Commons Project [1], advertised the idea of a workshop to kick off a
South African chapter, and invited various wikipedians and otherwise
interested people (FOSS activists, users of Wikipedia, non-profit
experienced people) to participate in a workshop destined to kick off
a South African chapter.
== WORKSHOP ==
The Workshop gathered around 25 people [2] from different backgrounds,
among which Ian Gilfillan, who had been leading the Wikimania bid and
Nhlanhla Mabaso, Head of CNS at The Universtiy of the Witwatersrand,
who played a great role in reaching out far and wide for interested
(and interesting) people. Bence Damokos and myself attended as members
of the chapters committee.
=== Saturday, 7th August ===
The session started with an introduction to the Wikimedia Universe,
focusing on the existing organisations (Foundation and Chapters) and
outlining the existing processes to set up a chapter, as well as what
chapters do.
After a round of introduction of each of the participants, the group
then split into smaller working sessions which reflected on the
following topics:
*Potential activities and initiatives for a South African Chapter
*Vision of a Wikimedia Chapter in South Africa
*Purpose of a Wikimedia Chapter in South Africa
*Challenges that a Wikimedia Chapter in South Africa might face
The results of these sessions can be found on meta here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_South_Africa&oldid=20…
Of those results, two have particularly caught our attention as being
specific to South Africa, or at least different than one might expect
from such a session in other chapter groups, namely:
*Ownership of Wikimedia to South Africans (in the purpose section):
this was meant as giving the chapter the task of making sure that
Wikimedia projects don't appear too "foreign" or even too "western",
but rather would hopefully be recognized as fair in representing South
Africa but also the whole African continent.
*Documenting content which is only orally available; finding a
workable citation method for languages with oral traditions (in the
challenges section): a task which actually questions fundamental
pillars of Wikipedia (no original research and "cite your sources")
and is much more critical in many of the African languages than maybe
in western languages.
A third point that was unique - so far - to South Africa, though maybe
less novel than the above two was the role and share of mobile
internet access and the associated opportunities and challenges that
it will bring. Africa is a continent where internet access through
mobile phones is the rule rather than the exception, and efforts to
make Wikipedia accessible not only to read, but also to edit, are a
real challenge that an African chapter should tackle.
=== Sunday, 8th August ===
The Sunday session focused rather on presenting and discussing the
different legal options for a Chapter in South Africa as well as work
on a timeline of next steps and the formation of a team for the
creation of the chapter. Results can be found here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_South_Africa&oldid=20…
== CONCLUSION ==
The idea of fostering the creation of a chapter by enabling people to
meet, specifically reaching out to potentially interested people and
bringing them together for a workshop is somewhat of a novel idea in
chapter creation. We found it to be extremely interesting and
productive. It allows, in countries where getting together, or taking
the first (legal) steps might be a real hurdle to chapter creation, to
be extremely helpful in ensuring that diversity of the people
represented in the first step of the chapter is achieved.
Bence and I would like to thank Achal for starting this process,
Kerryn and Daniela for organising the workshop and everyone present
for their participation and the lively dicussions. We are confident
that such initiatives should be fostered in countries where founding a
chapter might encounter difficulties to emerge.
The future of Wikimedia South Africa is discussed on the wikimediaza
mailing list:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaza, as well as
on meta. Please join the conversation.
[1] http://www.africancommons.org/about/
[2] http://picasaweb.google.com/davidrichfield/Wikimedia#5502986611082048162
--
~notafish
NB. This gmail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails will get lost.
Intercultural musings: Ceci n'est pas une endive - http://blog.notanendive.org
Hi
Below is a request for geolocation testing to enchance wikimedia tools
that could be useful to us. Anyone with a minute to spare please help
out by following the instructions below.
To see the geolocation of where you are, an easy way is view the records
at http://www.worldcitydb.com/south_africa_country.aspx
ian
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [afrophonewikis] Please help test geolocation
Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:09:34 -0700
From: Erik Moeller <Eloquence(a)gmail.com>
Reply-To: afrophonewikis(a)yahoogroups.com
To: afrophonewikis(a)yahoogroups.com
Hello all,
we're experimenting with geolocation tools. For the purpose of
supporting the coordination of meetups and events, we want to add
functionality that will make it easy to run banners in a particular
region (e.g. a city and surrounding area).
To do so, we need to license a database that will allow us to look up
a person's presumed location based on their IP address. Before we do
so, we want to gather some reports from around the world about the
quality of the information provided.
To help out, please visit:
http://www.maxmind.com/app/mylocation
And then report your results at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MaxMindCityTesting
Thanks for any and all help,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
__,_._,___
The topic of seeding came up at the workshop, and how the English
Wikipedia benefitted from being seeded with a large quantity of freely
available material, from the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, and the CIA
factbook, for example.
A few years ago I write a translation tool to help with translating
templates. The tool sits at http://greenman.co.za/translate/ - I haven't
used it for a while, and it may not have survived the transition to a
new server since it was last used, but if anyone shows interest I'll
patch it up again.
To be clear, I'm not in favour of simply translating English, or another
large Wikipedia, into another language. Besides the obvious technical
difficulties, there's the problem of simply replicating another cultural
template. Each language develops in its own way - there's no simple 1 to
1 mapping of articles, and content is presented through a different lens.
Still translating can be useful for certain content, such as country
templates.
Country templates contain easily-translatable static data such as name,
president, area, population, etc. If these key terms are translated,
it's quite easy to automate the template translation, and quickly have
basic country (or other widely-used templates) data.
I've used it in the Afrikaans Wikipedia before, and if anyone is keen to
translate strings for any of the smaller languages, I'll happily help
rolling out some articles. Let me know if you are, and I'll send you a
list of strings.
Translating strings can be quick - say half an hour, and it could result
in a basic template for every country of the world in a particular language.
Hope to hear from some of you :)
--
Ian Gilfillan
www.greenman.co.za
Thanks to all who attended the workshop - it was great to meet many of
you. I wrote a brief overview of the workshop at
http://www.greenman.co.za/blog/?p=727
Jan Vermeulen and David Richfield did great work adding the notes on the
meta page - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_South_Africa - but
let's keep the momentum going and keep working on it. Especially for
those who didn't attend, the one-liners lack context and hide a whole
lot of discussion.
For those who didn't attend, feel free to ask for more detail, and to
add to the discussion. We're just getting started :)
--
Ian Gilfillan
www.greenman.co.za
Hello
In this page
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters
Information for Wikimedia-za are in the "Ideas for chapters" sub-title
It would be interessing to create a row in the "Chapters in discussion
phase" ?
Thanks
--
Cordialement
David Crochet
http://fr.wikiversity.org : Communauté pédagogique libre à laquelle
chacun peut prendre part !
http://www.wikimedia.fr : Aidons la diffusion de la connaissance libre