[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia Academy in Sweden

[Lars Aronsson]

Next week, on November 12-13, we're taking "Wikipedia Academy" to 
Sweden.  It's the first time this event travels north of the 
latitude 55° (which is Germany's northern shore), but not by far, 
since the university town of Lund at 55°42' is neighbor to Malmö 
in the far south of Sweden, and to Denmark's capital Copenhagen.

As pioneered in Germany in 2006, Wikipedia Academy is a two-day 
conference and boot camp for academic researchers and teachers, 
who need to get deeper involved in Wikipedia, and a chance for the 
Wikipedia community to get in touch with the research community.  
Read more on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academy

Lund used to be the seat of Denmark's arch bishop, until Sweden 
conquered this area in war in 1658. (Imagine France conquering 
Kent, including Canterbury.) Lund University was then established 
in 1666 in a move of cultural imperialism. During the 19th 
century, Lund was one of only two universities in Sweden. It's a 
small town with an old and huge university, in many ways similar 
to Göttingen, where Wikipedia Academy pioneered in 2006.

But Lund University, and in particular its library, has also been 
a leader in the new digital cultural revolution of the Internet, 
with web projects dating back to 1993 and the Directory of Open 
Access Journals (doaj.org), founded in 2003. That's why we in the 
Swedish chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Sverige, 
sought to cooperate with Lund University Library for this first 
Wikipedia Academy, and this has turned out very well.

A group of Swedish wikipedians met with Frank Schulenburg of 
Wikimedia Deutschland in Göteborg on January 19 for early 
discussions. Our first meeting in Lund took place on March 5 and 
6. Since then, our main contact and organizer has been librarian 
Åsa Forsberg of Lund University. She deserves all credit.

Also in March, we submitted a grant proposal to the Swedish 
"Internet fund", known to be a generous supporter of projects that 
"improve the Internet in Sweden". Their money comes from the 
surplus from domain name registrations under the .SE top level 
domain. The idea is for this grant to pay for all costs during 
Wikipedia Academy, so that the attendees don't have to.  We were 
aiming for an event of 40-80 participants with hands-on exercises 
for some 30-50 users on the first day, and lectures on the second 
day.

The event was announced on various mailing lists, to visitors of 
the Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication (NCSC), organized 
by Lund University Libraries on April 21-23, and at Wikimedia 
Sverige's stand at the Göteborg Book Fair on September 25-28.

In June, our chapter chairman Lennart Guldbrandsson visited this 
year's German Wikipedia Academy in Berlin, bringing back useful 
observations.

During September, we learned that our grant proposal was accepted. 
Registration for Wikipedia Academy ended on November 1, but with a 
slight surprise. We now have 120 attendeeds, of which 98 want to 
attend the hands-on workshop on the first day.  That's about twice 
as big as we had planned, but since our speakers have very modest 
requirements, we are still close to keeping our budget.  We have 
had to relocate the hands-on workshop to another building where 
we'll have four parallel computer classrooms.

The detailed schedule in Swedish is available at 
http://www.lub.lu.se/wikipediaacademy/

The event begins after lunch on Wednesday November 12, at Lund 
University's center for chemistry, with brief initial 
presentations by Mathias Klang (of Creative Commons, Sweden), by 
myself, by Wikimedia Sverige's chairman Lennart Guldbrandsson, and 
by Frank Schulenburg.  After this, the hands-on workshop runs for 
90 minutes until the coffee break.  Two more hours of lectures 
continue until we break for the evening's social event and more 
informal discussions.

The second day, Thursday November 13, is a full day of lectures 
and presentations, held at the Ingvar Kamprad Design Center (named 
after its sponsor, the founder of IKEA), including coffee and 
lunch breaks.  Some of the speakers are long-time contributors to 
Wikipedia, others are by researchers who are now starting research 
projects to study mass collaboration.

We hope to provide photos and documentation of the event.

Wikimedia Sverige, the Swedish chapter, was founded 12 months ago, 
and Wikipedia Academy is just one of many things that we do for 
the first time.  We're sure to make mistakes, but only to have 
something to learn from.  Next year, this will be routine.  We 
hope to organize another Wikipedia Academy in 2009, and maybe it 
will also spread to other Scandinavian countries.

For the hands-on workshop, I wrote up some modular beginner's 
exercises that can be used individually in no particular order. 
It's possible that some attendees are far more advanced than 
beginners, but then their questions can drive the teaching.

The beginner exercises are now found on 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:LA2/Exercises
where I have started to translate them to English.
Feel free to translate on to other languages and reuse them.
Is there already a collection of such exercises?  Maybe at 
Wikibooks or Wikiversity?  I guess I should have checked this 
first, but I didn't.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se