Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2019/Programme/Submissions/Wikiexpeditions - generating local content

Group of Wikipedians, longterm editors (at best), along with other people (photographers, drivers, etc.), going in unexplored parts of your own country. Usually, people are attracted to uploading on Wikimedia Commons from places that are well known, or places/lists suggested on photographic contests, but they never search enough to find out forgotten villages with old village churches, small rivers, old monuments, or something valuable, but too far from population centers.

Wikiexpeditions - generating local content

Type of submission (lecture, panel, workshop, lightning talk, roundtable, poster)

• Lecture

Author(s) of the submission

• Toni Ristovski

Username(s)

• Ehrlich91

Affiliation

• Shared Knowledge

Topic(s)

• Diversity
• Research
• Documentation

Abstract (up to 100 words)

Project of Wikiexpeditions in Macedonia is conducted five years, with extraordinary results and I want to share our practices, results, tips & tricks, for other people around CEE region to start to explore their own countries and to generate local content on Wikipedia :)

How will this session be beneficial for the communities in the region of Central and Eastern Europe?

Starting something new in their communities and enrich their local Wikipedia with local valuable content.

Special requirements

Slides or further information

• Learning patterns/Conducting expeditions

Documentation

• https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Wikiexpeditions_-_generating_local_content

Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with a hash and four tildes. (# ~~~~).

1. Bonvol (talk) 07:33, 19 July 2019 (UTC)
2. Yupik (talk) 23:41, 26 July 2019 (UTC)
3. --Erzianj jurnalist (talk) 22:35, 4 October 2019 (UTC)
4. HoMen (talk) 16:04, 6 October 2019 (UTC)
5. Alensha (talk) 07:08, 11 October 2019 (UTC)

Notes

• Some of you have even implemented this project in your community, some of you have paid attention to differences between translating and creating content.
• Wikiexpeditions is on-site research activities to underrepresented regions. Idea is to go and take pictures of something and create content about that. They represent very good source of materials to generate local content.
• There are not only wikimedia commons, wikipedia and wikidata that benefit from these project.
• What is the main value? It is generating local content. You go and visit places that rarely who cares about, and you intend to bring it to the project.
• Why it matters? Because it adds to the sum of all knowledge. It creates new knowledge.
• Translation is localizing knowledge on other language, while with content creation we add new knowledge. At the end we add new knowledge, but we have to boost people to translate it.
• Three forms of content creation:
  • Uploading images - Wikimedia commons
  • Adding information -Wikipedia
  • Loading data - Wikidata.
• Something you have to consider while doing these:
  • Geotagging - You have to know where is the image taken,
  • Processing image before upload - Quality is not always as good as Wikipedia requires and
  • Providing clear description.
• What you have to put on Summary on WIkimedia commons: clear description on what is on the picture, date, source, author and camera location (geotagging).
• How to add information: Informations can be taken before and during expeditions and added o both existing and non-existing articles.

Sources of information:

• • Preliminary research:
    • Monographs
    • Academic studies
    • Strategies
  • On-site research:
    • Direct observation
    • Communication with locals
• What to get the information about:
  • Settlements (villages, cities, towns...)
  • Religious buildings (churches, mosques),
  • Institutions (schools, post offices)
  • Natural places (rivers, lakes, mountains...)
  • Monuments ( palaces, museums)
  • Archaeological sites.
• It is important to develop a model of thematic expeditions (some expeditions take images only of villages, some of the monuments etc) and to standardize structure of articles and data items.
• Wikidata is one of the newest project that we had and the one with really high potential to integrate all the knowledge that we have on all the projects. Data are collected during the course of the expeditions and while adding the information to articled and are loaded in structured data. How we do it? Go to Wikipedia, create the article, then you go to wikidata, provide the link of the article and fill with some sorts of structured statements. Consider defining statements of the data items, geotagging of the documented places and linking to the data items from categories and infoboxes.
• Why data is important? Picture of the map of geotagged places.
• Vision: To lit up every single place in the world.
• Q1: We need to create system of evaluation photographs? Wikimedia is photographic environment, we need to teach photo how to take photos, what to choose...
  • Kiril: I agree that relationship is very important with every project we have in Wikimedia movement. We know what to take pictures of and how to use it.
• Q2: How to finance those expeditions?
  • Kiril: From Wikimedia foundations, we tried to contact local organizations and companies which could be interested in projects like this.
• Q3: I fully agree with these ideas but it is a little bit misleading, like what can be so interesting in Sahara, there are some things.
  • Kiril: It is not literally to lit up every single space, to lit up every single dot in Sahara or Antartic, but as you can see there are a lot inhabited places that need to be documented. For example, we don't have any information about islands in Canada.