Grants:TPS/Mrjohncummings/Wikimania/2015/Report

Participant

• John Cummings, User:Mrjohncummings
• Home: en.wikipedia.org

Outcomes

New Creations:

Wikimedia Documentation Directory

http://tools.wmflabs.org/hay/wdd/

Description: A way to easily discover Wikimedia-related documentation including for outreach activities e.g GLAM and education.

Background: The WMF Learning Day made it very apparent that many useful documents and other resources were available but were hard to find. I realised that Husky's Tool Directory could be re-purposed to create a search tool for useful Wikimedia documentation including resources created outside the Wikimedia Movement e.g Creative Commons. I have been working with Husky since returning from Wikimania on the tool, he has cloned his existing tool and I created the form to add resources and the wording. I gained community input by creating an Idealab page about the tool before it was built.

Research:Freedom of Information Requests

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Freedom_of_Information_Requests

Description: Documents Freedom of Information requests that are relevant to the Wikimedia movement's activities including sharing best practices in making successful requests.

Background: During the WMF Learning Day we reflected on some of the failures we had had. I shared failures in encouraging the Science Museum in London to release content and how it was the system that they operated within that discouraged them from doing so. These pages aim to collate Freedom of Requests related to Wikimedia activities.

Connections

Wikimedia Community

Poster filled out with contact details and ideas from Wikimania attendees.

I produced this A0 (84 x 118 cm / 33.11 x 46.81 in) poster for Wikimania with the aims of:

1. Informing people about the Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO project.
2. Capturing people's ideas of activities that could be carried out during the project.
3. Allowing people to sign up to train UNESCO staff in their country and support new users from UNESCO online.

The poster was displayed during the Learning & Evaluation Poster session and was in the Community Village for entire conference.

Additionally I made useful connections with:

• Doc James
• Lane Rasberry
• Andyrom75

Wikimedia Foundation

It was very useful to meet with people from WMF staff to discuss issues with metrics tools including mobile page view statistics

UNESCO related activities and Metrics

• Maria Cruz
• Kacie Howard
• Alex Stinson
• Jonathan Morgan
• Rosemary Rein
• Abbey Ripstra

Technical assistance with development of metrics tools

• Jorge Vargas
• Yuvaraj Pandian
• Madhumitha Viswanathan

Presentations

Panel Presentation as part of the GLAM Learning Circle: Capturing a GLAM partnership development toolkit

Slides from GLAM learning circle presentation.

Session page: https://wikimania2015.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/GLAM_Learning_Circle

Description: The session is a follow-up to two learning circle sessions we held at GLAM Wiki Conference in April this year. I presented for 10 minutes on:

1. My GLAM partnership experience
2. Tips and resources which are readily available for others to access regarding support along the theme(s) addressed in the session.   
3. Challenges from the experience for which I know no strategies or resources.

Barriers to collaboration: Conflicting interests influencing content licensing decisions in potential partner organisations.

Slides from Barriers to collaboration lightning talk.

Session page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Evaluation/News/Learning_Day_for_Wikimania_Mexico#Lightning_Talk

Description: Outlining how commercial image libraries run by educational organisations (specifically foucussing on national museums in the UK) directly conflict with their educational missions and one possible way to progress a solution, collating Freedom of Information requests to inform debate. Presented on the Research:Freedom of Information Requests pages I have created on Meta for this purpose.

Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO collaboration workshop

Slides from Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO collaboration workshop.

Session page: https://wikimania2015.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Wikimedian_in_Residence_at_UNESCO_collaboration_workshop

Description: An

A background of UNESCO, a description of the project and its funding Encourage the audience to take part by signing up on the Wikimedia and UNESCO poster.

https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/UNESCO

Results of brainstorm

How can we best identify and involve people from countries with smaller user groups or no formal user groups?

• The WMF has a tool which can look at the most active Wikimedians on each project... including ones who communicate the most with other Wikimedians.
• Asking nearby chapters (eg the Australian Chapter might have some members from Polynesia, or WMUK might have some from the Commonwealth)
• Wikimedia Scholarship recipients!
• A directory of local Wikipedians, especially in languages other than English: we need an intersection of geographic and topic based interests and be able to reach out programmatically to these users banners on the smaller language sites? (would need to target logged in users) agreed.
• I would say that there is value
• Essentially repitch to the smaller offices, explaining the benefits of WiR and how it will help them achieve their goals
• Global Education had the exact same problem and they invested a lot in documentation/outreach materials
• Partner with WLM... & Wiki Loves Earth
• Can use similar approach to Art+Feminism which had 79 global node events this year, and build on their directory (works easiest for those who edit a large Wikipedia, eg US, but also any countries where a large Wikipedia is edited)
• Find GLAM-type partners who can host events and see the benefits and purpose ; perhaps focus on wikisource and historical specialists.
• Ask at related wikiprojects for contacts in the target country -- for example WikiProject Oceans is quiescent but ocean specialists have contacts on many islands
• You can always find out people from a country with help of language templates in user pages or even user templates (with people saying I come from El Salvador or Jamaica). Other options to find people: village pumps or Wikimedia blogs.
• You can also find a "mentor" country nearby (e.g. Mexico for El Salvador) that would help with local UNESCO offices.
• In Italian version of Wikivoyage we have crated and promoted an "expedition" to develop Italian content of UNESCO heritage sites for each of the 163 nations (see https://it.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Wikivoyage:Spedizione_UNESCO and for example https://it.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Patrimoni_mondiali_dell%27umanit%C3%A0_in_Italia) The whole activity has been performed by volunteers.
• In Bangkok exists the UN main HQ for South Asia, it would be great to train numerous folks who connect with South East Asia around UNESCO.

How can we ensure suitable trainers for UNESCO staff in countries with no chapter?

• Anyway, one should look for active Wikimedians through village pumps, and suitable the are or not -- it will be obvious after all:)
• Can we piggyback on existing partnerships that UNESCO has with other big organisations?
• I would use the UNESCO existing network, I don't think you are the first one with a challenge like this. (+1)
• Are there Wikipedians who are members of Wikimedia Egypt, but actually live in (say) Sudan?
• Fly them in and train the trainer (expensive) skype as the inexpensive alternative. Google Hangouts is a good way to scale to multiple users.. (how good is internet in some of these places? Could only have Wikipedia zero level access...) (These are good ideas though!)
• Do the training when the UNESCO staff meets up for other meetings and training.

What qualities and skills do good trainers have?

• Good knowledge of Wikipedia and its community/habiitis and policies as well as open access/free licenses
• Communication skill
• Eduaction skill (ie. some background experience with teaching)
• Knowledge of the subject (both UNESCO and WMF)
• Diplomacy!/civility - in general high level of interpersonal/communication skills.
• Understanding how the oldschool tools are changing into the new editing tools. Wikipedia is in transition and new users need to have a foot in both worlds for now.
• Reliability/showing up
• Passion and confidence, ability to not digress into ideology. +++++++1
• Pragmatic.
• Patient, persuasive and hard working
• Teaching new users not to fear the frequent rejection that occurs during inittial editing. (+1)
• They have handouts and online materials so people can work a little independently at different rates
• speak the language and the culture of the local people.
• Enthusiasm.
• They tend to be able to keep up building relationships with various good partners and potential future trainers.
• Ideal trainers are those who are wanting to promote Wikimedia or help spread UNESCO ideas within various social/

What events could be run with UNESCO offices?

• Outreach events targeted at subject matter experts
• Multimedia cultural performance recordings
• Improving the Wikipedia pages of the existing UNESCO world heritage sites
• We need to develop more comprehensive list of WiR doing work in institutions by speciality aroea to help connect Wikipedians with user groups and groups of
• editors around the world.
• Initiatives to match open data / image / text collections (and their curators) to topics in high demand in Wikimedia projects (come and find me if you want to talk more about this -- @readermeter / User:DarTar)