Wikimedia Foundation

“ At the same time, at community level, there are no processes set to revise the help pages and simplify their language, encourage interface improvement, or any other change that would demonstrably help newcomers survive the first days.
We believe that coordination between the organized and non-organized structures of the Wikimedia movement, i.e., on the one hand, Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia affiliates, and communities, on the other hand is essential to growing larger and more diverse communities. ”

“ Wikimedia Foundation staff and board, Wikimedia volunteers, and Wikimedia organizations work together to find and fund innovative and impactful projects, and to evaluate and share the impact and the learning of the work being done across the Wikimedia movement. ”

“ In 2013-2014, the team was able to fund and facilitate experiments and established programs to individuals, small groups and organizations in over 60 countries around the world, focusing on at least 30 diverse Wikimedia language and issuebased communities. This culture of experimentation and innovation yields thoughtful risk-taking, a willingness to make mistakes, and meaningful learning. At the Wikimedia Foundation, all grant proposals, committee and staff assessments of proposals, and grant reports are public. ”

“ The Wikimedia Foundation Grantmaking process is uniquely designed to reflect the ethics, methods, and agreements that are core to the overall Wikipedia model. Proposals are workshopped on public wikis and improved by volunteer editors. Decisions about which proposals to fund and how much funding to offer are made publicly on wikis, in cooperation with volunteer committee members, Board members, and staff, and with input from the larger community. Wikimedia Foundation Grantmaking has the largest peer-review participation of any funder of its kind in the world. ”

“ At Wikimedia Foundation, a large percentage of total funds are raised from readers and contributors to Wikimedia projects, and therefore require a high level of community-wide accountability, transparency, and visibility - yielding a grantmaking process that is widely participatory from income to expense. Because Wikimedia is one of the top global websites, the Foundation is able to actualize the vision of a social justice movement funded and supported by its community. ”

“ Also, MediaWiki development is backed by Wikimedia Foundation with strong financial support. It is very unlikely in the foreseeable future that there will be any development and maintenance problem with the codebase of Mediawiki. ”

“ Potentially disruptive software changes were out of the question, and technical work focused on core functionality (UI, account management, discussion pages, backend performance) . Even those more meager innovations were not always welcomed by the growing community, resulting in conflicts between the Wikimedia Foundation and contributors. Adding data management to Wikipedias’ core tasks seemed a huge risk, especially as some communities became more conservative and less open to such changes. ”

“ In November 2019, for example, the BDCV created a series of workshops for public libraries in Mexico City. One of them was about Wikipedia, and Claudia Escobar and I were in charge of it. We created a round of presentations where we asked participants to talk about their responsibilities in their library expecting to use those answers as a bridge between their activities and the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission: “to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license” (Wikimedia Foundation, 2018) . ”

“ Because of the commitment to open licensing and open software, the projects and their content can be exported or replicated by non–Wikimedia Foundation organizations for any reason at any time. Moreover, the Wikimedia Foundation as of 2018 is developing an endowment to indefinitely keep the projects online regardless of current fundraising ability (see the Wikimedia Endowment website, accessed April 10, 2019, https://wikimediaendowment.org/) . ”

“ As of June 2014, 54 community members were involved in the IEG, PEG, and APG committees. These committees are intentionally designed to be geographically and gender diverse, and include community members involved in different Wikimedia projects. In addition to committee members, grantmaking processes include open comment periods, and as of December 2014, over 1,500 unique Meta-wiki users have contributed by submitting requests, commenting, editing, etc. [6] Just as anyone can become a Wikipedia editor, anyone who edits Wikipedia can make a proposal to the Wikimedia Foundation. ”

“ We are certain that the review will lead to our charity and our movement being in a much stronger position.’
The Wikimedia movement as a whole expects the highest ethical standards in public governance and conduct of movement organisations, including chapters. The Wikimedia Foundation board states that ‘every organization in [the Wikimedia] movement must go beyond local regulatory requirements and adopt our movement’s unique principles and best practices around governance, transparency, and accountability’. ”

“ Using Wikipedia as the central movement brand rather than Wikimedia. Providing clearer connections to the sister projects from Wikipedia to drive increased awareness, usage and contributions to all movement projects. Retaining Wikimedia project names, with the exception of Wikimedia Commons which is recommended to be shortened to Wikicommons to be consistent with other projects. Exploring new naming conventions for the Foundation and affiliate groups to use Wikipedia rather than Wikimedia. ”

“ In a 2012 evaluation, by the Oxford Internet Institute, they found that more than half of the articles on Wikipedia are about places, events, and people, that only represent 2.5% of the world’s land area. And of all the geo-tagged articles on Wikipedia, only 2.6% actually represent anything on the continent of Africa, which holds 14% of the world’s population. At the Wikimedia Foundation we know that representation and quality of articles improve when more people contribute, and when more diverse people contribute. ”

“ Most critically, only 20% of Wikimedian contributions and contributors currently come from the Global South or 80% of the world, and only 1 in 10 contributors worldwide is projected to be female. For the largest free knowledge platform in the world, this implies a significant set of knowledge gaps on Wikipedia and its sister sites that the Grantmaking team is trying to address, in partnership with Wikimedia communities. ”

“ This means targeted grantmaking priorities to increase the community of editors, the content, and the readership in alignment with WMF goals. Staff know that meeting the strategic goals will require significant cultural and structural shifts at Wikimedia Foundation and throughout the movement. Meeting the organizational goals will require expanding the community to welcome new contributors who don't share same the technical or cultural backgrounds of those already present, says Anasuya Sengupta, "in a way that continues to keep our values, and does not get us co-opted." ”

“ She continues, "What does it mean for the Wikimedia community that has largely been self-propelled and self-organized from the Global North - primarily the US and Europe - to see itself as being facilitators of a truly empowered emerging conversation in the Global South? How do people step in, step back, step away, step sideways? How do you share power in a way that truly can be transformative?" ”

“ Some eligible data describes when GLAMs release some digital surrogates of public domain works under open licences and tools on an individual project or output basis as a matter of practice.
Open GLAM is an independent movement associated with the Open Knowledge Foundation, Wikimedia Foundation, and Creative Commons. Open GLAM relates to and overlaps with other open initiatives, like open access, open culture, open science, open data, open source, and open innovation. ”

“ Coaching and mentoring our grantee partners Deepening our support of emerging and Global South communities, and greater female contribution Recognizing differences in contexts and approaches Innovating and Experimenting Balancing accountability with simplicity and ease Seeking good outcomes and high impact How do these well-matched core qualities and design principles play out in the actual operations of Wikimedia Foundation Grantmaking programs?
Innovation, Flexibility, and Experimentation
"Encourage Innovation" is one of Wikimedia's Five Strategic Plan/Movement Goals, established in 2010. ”

“ A Natural Language Query Engine without Machine Learning, on A Young Programmer's blog The Wikimedia Foundation will now directly fund basic expenses for Wikidata software development, on WMF blog People buried on cemetery and if they have a picture of the grave or not by Magnus Sälgö Sunday Query : où meurent les Bretons ? (fr) by Ash_Crow Charts and data about Brexit & US Elections, by Hector Perez Other Noteworthy Stuff Proposition for upgrading the default copyright license for Wikimedia projects to CC-by-SA 4.0 (does not affect the structured data part of Wikidata, which uses CC0) . ”

“ The Wikimedia community is at a critical point in time: a very slow decline in active contributors on Wikimedia projects, from a peak of participation during 2007-2009, has recently leveled off, but during that time, the content on Wikimedia projects has more than doubled. [1] Developing communities of knowledge seekers and preservers ready to build the next stage of quality improvements, as well as finding knowledge stewards who can ensure the long-term reliability of Wikimedia content, is a strategic investment in the broader availability of information for the public. ”

“ Moreover, thematic or project focused communications provide platforms for highlighting the importance of institutional work in that field to local media.
Online programs for the Wikimedia community can also draw participation and collaboration with contributors outside of the geographical scope of the organization, especially on topics of broader interest than local history and culture. Typically, contribution campaigns focus on a theme or topic that the institutions offers digital collections on, and require a fair amount of online Wikimedia community skills. ”

“ When supported by a broader community of Wikimedians through an affiliate or network, it's even possible to develop effective programs with someone with no Wikimedia experience: for example, West Virginia University Libraries hired Kelly Doyle, a community organizer and educator, who had no previous experience working with the Wikimedia community. ”

“ The first obvious, and relatively cost effective, way to integrate Wikimedia projects into the strategy of a GLAM is to formalize the role of staff for organizing activities and working on Wikimedia project within the course of their work. Staff can allocate a certain amount of their work hours to work on Wikimedia projects, typically with a broader public access or outreach mission in mind. ”

“ To find the folks most invested in the broad maintenance of the projects, we need to look at different numbers: folks who contribute 100+ edits per month, which includes about 14,000 people per month across the Wikimedia projects. On English Wikipedia, still the biggest highly active community, this includes about 3,500 individuals during any given month. For a top 10 website, this is actually a rather small community with relationships and community dynamics that have evolved over the 16 years of Wikipedia’s existence. ”

“ Wikipedian in Residence roles are high risk/high reward roles for institutions: they cost a fair amount of money, in terms of the role itself and supervising the role, but it ensures that someone in the staff has the energy and time to integrate Wikimedia, either through its projects or at the least its values of openness and public access, into the organizational strategy. However, when an organization isn’t ready for that kind of strategic commitment, it’s still worth designating an advocate from outside the organization, to experiment within existing collections or resources. ”

“ For formal organizations, such as libraries, wanting to not just contribute small amounts of content, but to take advantage of and participate in the Wikimedia community, navigating the community and culture of the Wikimedia projects can be complicated. Working with affiliates or at least finding an individual Wikimedia contributor to help interface with other experienced volunteers lowers the barrier for participation in the community, allowing the Wikimedia-experienced partner to provide community expertise while the organizational partner brings their knowledge and network. ”

“ Engaging new volunteers with Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects has its challenges. Some first time editors lack the confidence to publish on such a visible and far reaching platform as Wikipedia. Others struggle with the technical aspects of editing. ”

“ Increasingly, institutions are turning to the concept of a “Wikimedia Visiting Scholar”: someone whose real expertise is on creating Wikimedia content and exposing the institution to the relationship between institutional knowledge and Wikimedia, while not focusing on capacity development. ”

“ An instance of a reference is limited to its article and cannot be shared among articles; more importantly, it is difficult to move a reference between different-language Wikipedias, even with the support of translation tools.
Wikidata is a free, collaborative knowledge base (Vrandečić & Krötzsch, 2014) , and it can be used to overcome existing inefficiencies in the Wikipedia referencing model. The creation of items for scholarly articles and other periodical literature for a Wikimedia project is a useful contribution in its own right. ”