Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Österreich/January 2016

January 2016
Report

Community Support

Wikipedia 15 events in Austria

Images of Wikipedia 15 in Austria

WMAT celebrated Wikipedia's 15th birthday together with our community across Austria (birthday celebrations in Vienna, Graz, Linz, Salzburg and Dornbirn), and an open house for Wikipedia users and a generally interested public in Vienna. The rich media attention (especially radio coverage) helped to attract locals to visit our open house event in the Museum's Quarter, where Wikipedians were editing together, talked to visitors and users about their work, and enjoyed some cake and sparkling wine together to make it a real birthday party. Some of the visitors even decided to become WMAT members on the spot. In the evening even more community members joined for more celebrating and a joint dinner in a nearby pub and restaurant.

Individuals involved: 95 (active editors: 79 [engaging 1 editor who has formerly not been or very rarely been an active WMAT volunteer into the planning and/or executing], WMAT staff: 3). - WMAT support: venue, catering, coordination, information material and birthday party equipment (posters, beer coasters, WP cakes).

→ Images on Wikimedia Commons

→ Wikipedia 15 in Salzburg: report in members wiki (in German)

DACH Volunteer Support Retreat in Vienna

WMAT, WMCH and WMDE staff in WMAT's office in Vienna

The volunteer support staff members of WMAT, WMDE and WMCH stay in touch with each other regularly in order to coordinate and develop the chapters' volunteer support activities (we published a learning pattern about this cooperation). Most of the communication throughout the year happens in regular telephone conferences, via online exchange (e-mails, shared documents etc.) and informal meetings at conferences such as Wikimedia Conference. Now for the first time these staff members met in person in Vienna for a whole weekend. The retreat was dedicated to the following topics which miss out otherwise:

Appreciation of volunteer work: discussion of different approaches and arrangements concerning the sharing of our learnings (learning patterns, workshops).
Improving our support supplies: focus on evolving topics such as book grants and support for the Wikivoyage community.
Enhancing the communication with active editors: towards a better collaboration concerning information materials and our presence in the German-language Wikipedia.
WikiCon: preparing and improving the communication and arrangements between chapters concerning this year's and future WikiCons.

Individuals involved: 4 (WMAT staff: 1). - WMAT support: infrastructure.

WikiDienstag

The WikiDienstag (“WikiTuesday“) is a weekly meet-up in the WMAT office. Volunteers share their knowledge and work together on improving the content of Wikimedia projects.

Topics in January 2016:

January 12th: Preparation Wikipedia's 15th Birthday
January 19th: Preparation Wiki Loves Earth
January 26th: Transferring a Wikiversity article to Wikipedia

Individuals involved: 15 (active editors: 14, WMAT staff: 1). - WMAT support: infrastructure, co-organisation, promotion.

→ WikiDienstag in the German-language Wikipedia

Free Content

ADEQUATe project

In the context of WMAT's Open Data Portal (ODP) we are currently part of a new research project called ADEQUATe Open Data: Analytics & Data Enrichment to improve the QUAliTy of Open Data. The aim is to bring open data to the next level identifying crucial issues that need to be tackled to fully exploit the value of open data and the efficient integration with other data sources:

the overall quality issues with meta data and the data itself
the lack of interoperability between data sources

The projects approch is to address this point in an early stage – when the open data is freshly provided by data donors such as governmental organisations, companies or others. The ADEQUATe project works with a combination of data and community driven approaches to address the above mentioned challenges. This includes

the continuous assessment of Data Quality of Open Data Portals based on a comprehensive list of quality metrics,
the application of a set of (semi)-automatic algorithms in combination with crowdsourcing approaches to improve identified quality issues, and
the use of Semantic Web Technologies to transform legacy Open Data sources (mainly common text formats) into Linked Data.

Im sum the project intends to research and develop novel automated and community-driven data quality improvement techniques and then integrate pilot implentations into existing Open Data portals. The ODP will serve as a testbed for the development of these tools, the results will be freely available and could also be used for Wikimedia projects such as Wikidata. As a first step a survey was launched among open data experts January in order to assess challenges and opportunities of open data, the results will serve as a basis for the further development and next steps of the project.

The project is a collaboration with the Institute for Information Business of Vienna University of Economics & Business, the Department for E-Governance and Administration at the Danube University Krems, and the Semantic Web Company. The project is funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT) in the context of their ICT of the Future is the funding programme.

Individuals involved: 10 (WMAT staff: 1). - WMAT support: Coordination with the ODP team.

→ ADEQUATe

Gallery: Equipment/accreditation support

We support Wikimedia Commons photographers with equipment from our tech pool and with accreditions for events. This gallery highlights some of the activities in January 2016.

Individuals involved: 6 (active editors: 4, WMAT staff: 2). - WMAT support: equipment and/or accreditation.

Reach / Free Knowledge Awareness

Wikiversity: New Media in History and History Education

Wikimedia was part of a university course by Prof. Andrea Brait and Prof. Christian Wagner at the University of Vienna which dealt with new media in history and history education. The course was designed for future teachers. It lasted from October to January and was attended by 21 students, of which 6 (29 %) were male and 15 (71 %) were female. One of their tasks was to write a Wikipedia article collaboratively which was organised and done on Wikiversity. Later on, this article about Niederländischer Aufstand (the Dutch revolt in the 16th century) was tranferred from Wikiversity to the German-language Wikipedia. Its size was 55,537 bytes at this time. In order to achieve this result the students were supervised by 5 experienced Wikipedians (4 volunteers, 1 WMAT staff member).

Bytes and edits of 21 students
Metric start date	Metric end date	Metric namespaces	Bytes absolute sum	Bytes positive only sum	Bytes negative only sum	Bytes net sum	Edits
2015-10-01	2016-01-31	0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 106, 107	197691	192190	-5501	186689	463

Individuals involved: 28 (new editors: 23 (20 that edit a Wikimedia project after four weeks after their registration), active editors: 4, WMAT staff: 1). - WMAT support: co-organization, lectures, information material.

→ Wikiversity course (in German)

Press campaign: Wikipedia 15

Wikipedia 15 Austria mark

A press and social media campaign accompanied our birthday festivities (see above). Around the birthday we sent out a series of fun facts about Wikipedia in Austria (number of editors, first article on Austrian topics ever etc.) on our social media channel. Classical mass media was addressed with a press release which was picked up by diverse media: tv, radio and print - national and local. Many journalists requested interviews with volunteers and staff or visitied us in our office - a great way to explain our work to a broad audience and to expand our media database with valuable contacts!

TV news item: 1
radio news items: 3
printed media: 5
online media: 14

Individuals involved: 10 (active editors: 2, WMAT staff: 2). - WMAT support: Press release, social media, coordination.

→ wikimedia.at: 2016 press review (in German)