Hi all,
The past weekend was great! Wikimedia was at FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting, organised as the university ULB in Brussels, Belgium! We had there a stand with flyers about Wikipedia, Wikimedia, Wikimedia Belgium, and a lot of goodies.
In the Wikimedia movement we often discuss the Gendergap, as one of the gaps we have. Wikipedia/Wikimedia looks very much likes FOSDEM, but there the Gendergap is even larger. Wikipedia/Wikimedia needs a more social development, we need software which enables users to form groups in an easy way. The female contributors to Wikipedia do like two things: having in person meetings to socialize with other editors, and second they need more social software. The education extension is a primitive form of what is needed. We need an extension where users easily can form groups (namespace Groups: or something, used by an extension), where they easily can see the recent changes of edits of group members only, to be able to actively interact with other group members and having a long term participation in Wikipedia. Having software where users, interest groups or a group of editors from an external organisation can work together.
To translate it for the tech community: Wikipedia needs a kind of *phabricator* with groups, tasks, assignments, and so on, but then for on Wikipedia itself.
Yes, Wikipedia is not a social network, but we need to create an environment in what we enable people to have a collaboration on a more visible way (if people want to).
That is my clear conclusion after this conference where I spoke with a lot of women about editing on Wikipedia, but also based on many project of the past years we organised.
At FOSDEM I also spoke with someone from the Dutch government who is working on creating an open source free licensed dictionary for words that are used in specific parts of the government and they like to do a project with Wikimedia! They also like to re-use the data from Wiktionary, but they experienced that that was a bit difficult. So a large donation of words for Wiktionary is on its way!
If anyone is interested to go to next years FOSDEM and want to help at the stand, where we also like to include more information about MediaWiki, let us know!
Romaine