Affiliations Committee/Pipeline/First contact

Email for someone who just wants information

Dear,

thanks a lot for your email and your interest in Wikimedia Chapters. In this email I will try to give you a little more background information, and point you to more sources of information. If you have any remaining questions, please don't hesitate to ask me.

Wikimedia Chapters are local organizations striving for the same goals as the Wikimedia Foundation - supporting creation and dissimination of free knowledge and content. Generally speaking, a Wikimedia organisation in any country should definitely involve members of the local Wikimedia communities – the membership shouldn't be exclusive to Wikimedians, yet the local Wikimedia communities should be able to feel a sense of ownership towards the nascent chapter in their country. I would suggest you leave a message on the village pumps and community portals of the language editions which are relevant to your country.
>SPECIFIC SUGGESTIONS<

As the people are the glue that hold together and propel a chapter to sustainable activity, I would urge you to try to gather more local supporters - especially Wikimedians among them - for the idea of the local chapter and to set up a central planning page on Meta Wiki[1] and list yourselves on the list of chapters in discussion[2]. This meta planning page and setting up a mailing list could help you in gathering the people - as well as organising local meetups or seminars. Once the venues for discussion are set up, you could probably have more luck soliciting input by approaching the active editors on the various Wikipedias and motivating them towards taking a more active local role in the Wikimedia mission.

You can find a lot of information about the approval process on metawiki[3], where we tried to outline every step. Let me know if you have any questions or need help finding the relevant venues to contact local Wikipedians (e.g. the mentioned Village Pumps, sitenotices, etc.). Please keep me updated on the progress you are making and how things are going. We are especially interested in knowing who and how many people are involved, and what your ideas are for forming a chapter.

Good luck and please do stay in touch,

Best regards,

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Countryname
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters
[3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Step-by-step_chapter_creation_guide

Email for Wikimedians

Thank you for contacting us about creating a Wikimedia Chapter in XXX. The best way to proceed is the following:

Please create the page

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_XX

and link it from

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters

even if you don't have much to put on it, add your name and that of the people who are interested in working on the chapter . We strongly recommend that you develop your ideas and documents on meta (in any language you like) rather than on a specific project (Wikipedia or other), so as to make sure that all people who could be involved in the chapter process can be involved and so as to make sure that all information concerning chapters is in the same place.

You should try and gather people from your Wikimedia project of choice and other Wikimedia projects relevant to your country to help you work on the chapter, so as to get some momentum as to what can be done and how it can be done.

The Step by step chapter creation guide, available here:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Step-by-step_chapter_creation_guide

will give you a better insight as to what the process might look like.

It is of the essence that you also read those documents:

so as to make sure you understand the process and don't miss a step.

Note that creating a chapter is ot the only way to make sure that things happen around Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in your country, there are a number of other options, such as for example applying for a grant to the Wikimedia Foundation to support a particular "real life" initiative. This is not said to discourage you from working on a chapter, but rather to make sure that you don't get stopped by the workload that setting up a chapter may bring. Sometimes, putting together a real world event helps round up the necessary people to get the momentum to create a chapter.

The chapters committee will in any case make sure that you receive the appropriate support for your initiative to start a chapter.

If you have any questions, concerning chapters or other ways to make things happen around Wikipedia in your country, do not hesitate to contact me at xxx@xxx.org or to contact the Chapters committee [1] at chaptercommittee-lXXXXwikimedia.org.

All the best,

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Index
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapters_committee