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News from inside the Wikimedia Foundation.org

Results from the Japanese Editor Survey

We have blogged recently about the results from our semi-annual editor survey. Although the survey was conducted in 22 languages, it didn’t include Japanese, due to the March earthquake and ensuing Tsunami in Japan.  It is with great pleasure that we would like to share toplines from a survey of editors conducted recently on the Japanese Wikipedia. We fielded it for about a week in the end of July, and got 208 complete responses.  Like the semi-annual editor survey, the Japanese editor survey was available only to registered users of the Japanese Wikipedia and every editor saw the invitation to participate in the survey only once. The latter was done to control for bias towards more active editors.

The topline data covers all the questions from the survey: demographics, interactions with community members, technology ecology, and editing behaviors.  We are hoping that the Japanese community (as well as others) will check the data, conduct some analysis and provide feedback to us.

Please also check out the graphs for some key demographics of Japanese editors. The results from the editor survey in the Japanese Wikipedia show that the Japanese editing community is similar to others demographically: predominantly male, highly educated and slightly older than what we imagined our community to be before we conducted the survey.

 

 

Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research

(This is the ninth in series of blog posts where we previously shared insights from the April 2011 Editors Survey.)

 

Regional Ambassadors recruit new Education Program participants

As we make the transition from the Public Policy Initiative to the Global Education Program, we are relying more on volunteers to keep our project sustainable. In the United States, some of the Global Education Program’s most hard-working volunteers this summer are the Regional Ambassadors.

As we expand the U.S.-based offerings in the Global Education Program, the Regional Ambassadors play the critical role of recruiting for campus-based activities. They help instructors interested in having their students edit Wikipedia for class learn more about what the program can offer, and they work to recruit people for the Campus Ambassador role and also coordinate getting the Campus Ambassadors all adequately trained. At the moment, Regional Ambassadors are taking the main leadership role in planning nine different Campus Ambassador trainings that will happen across the United States over the next few weeks.

Regional Ambassadors

Regional Ambassadors plan activities to encourage professors in their regions to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool in higher education classrooms.

Meet the current crop of Regional Ambassadors:

  • Chanitra Bishop (User:Etlib) is the Instruction & Emerging Technologies Librarian at Indiana University Bloomington and an experienced Campus Ambassador who has helped with two terms of classes at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a co-leader of the Great Lakes region.
  • Tom Cloyd (User:Tomcloyd) is an experienced Wikipedian with professional training in human psychology (which he has found highly useful in his recruitment efforts!). He leads the Great West region.
  • Derrick Coetzee (User:Dcoetzee) is an experienced Wikimedian, a Campus Ambassador who supports San Francisco Bay Area classes, and the unofficial photographer for recent Wikipedia Global Education Program events. He is a co-leader of the Pacifica region.
  • Bryan Cox (User:Manumitany) is a law student with extensive experience in community/political organizing and in coordinating volunteers. Bryan leads the Skyplains region.
  • Max Klein (User:Maximilianklein) participated in the Public Policy Initiative as both a course instructor and a Campus Ambassador in the San Francisco Bay Area, and has contributed many creative ideas to the program. He leads the New England region.
  • Richard Knipel (User:Pharos) is actively involved with the Wikimedia New York chapter, and served as a Campus Ambassador to New York University in spring 2011. He leads the Metropolis region.
  • Rob Pongsajapan (User:Pongr) is a new media designer at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown University, where he has also been a Campus Ambassador for two terms. He leads the Nation’s Capital region.
  • Rob Schnautz (User:Bob_the_Wikipedian) is an experienced Wikipedian with stunning organization abilities. He’s a co-leader of the Great Lakes region.
  • Matt Senate (User:Mattsenate) has, like Max, served as both a course instructor and a Campus Ambassador in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is very active in the free culture movement. Matt co-leads the Pacifica region.
  • Dylan Staley (User:Dylanstaley) is a peer mentor at Louisiana State University’s Communication Across the Curriculum office, while also serving as a Campus Ambassador at that university. Dylan leads the Texarkana region and is serving as the interim Regional Ambassador for the South as well.
  • Alex Stinson (User:Sadads) is an experienced Campus Ambassador at James Madison University, a longtime Wikipedian, an Online Ambassador, the founder of a Wikipedia student club at James Madison University, and a key player in outreach activities to universities in the U.K. He leads the Greater Chesapeake region.

We honestly couldn’t do it without them, so a HUGE round of thanks to our Regional Ambassadors!

The Regional Ambassador model is debuting with the United States, but as we start to grow our programs in CanadaIndia, Germany, Brazil, the U.K., and other countries around the globe, we anticipate developing Regional Ambassadors for those locations as well. In the U.S., the plan is to gradually reduce the size of each region so that activities in each region are more local and less time-intensive.

If you’re interested in learning more about using Wikipedia in higher education classrooms, fill out this interest form and the appropriate Regional Ambassador will get in touch. Fill out the form, too, if you’re interested in becoming a Regional Ambassador yourself.


LiAnna Davis
Global Education Program Communications Manager

Dispatch from a far flung corner of India

Hindi Wikipedia logo(This is the fifth installment in a series of updates from the WikiHistories summer research fellows, who will be studying the virtual community history of different Wikipedia editing communities.)

A towel, as any Douglas Adams fan will tell you, is a necessity for galactic travel. One would likely be helpful in India as well, but more useful is a copy of The New York Review of Books. Surprisingly, this publication, which was passed onto me as a hand-me-down of a hand-me-down has proven the most vital instrument in a backpack full of useful things. Forget the snacks, scarf, Hindi grammar book, and hand sanitizer, NYRB is the most versatile, acting as a fan, shooing away bugs, and many articles are interesting enough to pass large amounts of time with little effort while others are so exceptionally dull they promote sleep in even the noisiest of circumstances. Clearly, I have found the perfect travel companion.

My backpack might make me look like every other twenty- or thirty-something traveler trying to find the answer (man) but what I’m looking for is a little different than the tour-led culture or the off-the-grid spirituality.

While the Hindi-language Wikipedians I’ve tried to meet with have been timid – understandably, as there are only 2 active administrators and fewer than 250 active editors (compare that to English Wikipedia’s 1,500 administrators and 144,000 active users) – it’s been quite easy to explain the fellowship project to those I’ve met. My fellow travelers, the ex-pats I’ve met and many of the locals all seem intrigued by the project.

Several of the middle-class non-Wikipedian locals I spoke to didn’t know there was a Hindi-language version of the Wikipedia but thought it made sense and one journalist even said he’s considered looking at the community of Indian Wikipedians himself. Of course, when a debate came up about the ages of Bollywood stars this didn’t stop anyone from searching in English on their mobiles.

That, of course, is one of the biggest challenges to the Hindi-Wikipedian community, how do they compete for readership with the English-language version when cellular and computer technology is sold to consumers with Roman alphabet keyboards and pre-installed English-language web browsers? There is, of course, also the question where Hindi Wikipedia fits into the urban/rural landscape of India.

Surprisingly, it was in Khajuraho, a small town of fewer than 20,000 residents in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh that people seemed less willing to speak to me in Hindi. The taxi drivers and train passengers of Delhi and Rajasthan were surprised when I used the language, but in rural Madhya Pradesh the local pride is in their ability to use English. Not only has this been unexpected but it makes me wonder about the intended audience for a Hindi Wikipedia.

Clearly, for the rural residents of Khajuraho, English is the language they use to demonstrate their education while the urban editors of Hindi Wikipedia are trying to retain a linguistic heritage. It was only an elderly security guard at Khajuraho’s temples who finally engaged with me in his language after he used all the English he appeared to know. One might assume, as I did, that it would be the urban elites who wish to speak in English while the rural residents would focus on Hindi but in fact the opposite was true. Everywhere I went middle and upper class urbanites switched easily from one language to the other, perhaps aware of the colonial implications of English in a way their rural counterparts aren’t.

Even more surprising in Khajuraho than the refusal to use Hindi by the young people when speaking to a Westerner is the access to the Internet. For three days in Delhi I scrambled to get a SIM card that would offer me access to the Internet (turns out you need a passport photo here to get connected, or know the right people). Wifi was almost nowhere, even several high-end hotels told me one could plug into the ethernet but there was no wifi available. Jaipur, a city of more than 2.5 million has intermittent and very slow internet and my cellular internet is useless. In tiny Khajuraho however several restaurants announce free wifi and jewelry shops double as Internet access points, not that I’ve yet actually seen anyone taking advantage of these technological options, and I image they are also exceedingly slow.

As an outsider I can only make educated guesses about both the language and internet usage questions that I have. Rather than speculate, I turned to Ajay Awasthi, a local documentary filmmaker and cofounder of an educational and environmental charity called Global Voices. Awasthi confirmed my suspicions that in the rural community English is the language that designates education, which is why everyone here insists on speaking to me in my native tongue. Because Khajuraho is a center of tourism in an area largely dependent on agriculture, students here also learn a little French and a little Spanish alongside English and Hindi to allow them access to the tourist rupees. While initially it may seem positive that local kids are given an alternative to agriculture, Awasthi warns that many young people leave school as soon as they’re able to earn a living and are not truly becoming educated. Of course, here lies the moral dilemma for the tourist as well. When a young person asks for money for his education it feels terrible to look the child in the eye and say no, but one does just this in hopes that the same child will stay in school longer. Providing access to information in the local, native language is exactly why Wikipedians are working in Hindi (as well as a handful of other Indic language Wikipedias). Their work demonstrates and reminds us that these languages have a long history that is deeply tied to the communities who use them.

As for internet, Awasthi says the majority of the computers in town are internet only machines set up for tourist use. When locals do use computers, he says, they do so in English and mostly as communication devices. These young people aren’t searching the web for information, they’re simply logging on to connect with friends. That the technology they have is in English is telling. In fact, even the small coins, worth one and two rupees, don’t carry Devanagari numbers, and instead are emblazoned with the familiar 1 and 2 numeral, accompanied by the image of a hand holding up the corresponding fingers for those without basic numeral literacy.

For those working on Hindi Wikipedia this means the rural population, which could benefit from the efforts of these Wikipedians, are unlikely to ever come across the project. Of course, this doesn’t mean the project is doomed or the work done isn’t important. As internet usage and media expands into rural areas young people are more and more likely to experience urban lifestyles and in time many of these same people may begin to seek out more information about those other walks of life.

Thus far, every step of my trip has benefited from the generosity and knowledge of others. Before long I’ll have read the entire New York Review of Books and its usefulness will diminish but I have no doubt that something unexpected will sneak in to take its place as just the thing I need at just the moment I need it.

Patricia Sauthoff
Wikimedia Summer Fellow
Masters candidate, History, University of London

Is Wikipedia about being a member of a club, or is it about building an encyclopedia?

It’s good that some people (and I consider myself part of this group) get hooked on editing Wikipedia. We stay around for years, we become part of the community, we go to meetups, and most of all, we do an amazing amount of work to make Wikipedia better. Let’s get this out of the way first – Wikipedia can’t exist without those dedicated people.

Is this the only way of being a part of Wikipedia? My answer is no. I truly believe that there are also other ways of helping Wikipedia to get better.

Back in 2005, when I started to think about ways how to improve Wikipedia, I was asking myself: how can we encourage a larger number of knowledgeable people to edit articles? People who stick around, who become Wikipedians, people like me and all the others who spend endless hours on research and writing.

Over the years, we tried many different things to make this vision come true. We held workshops, organized Wikipedia Academies, gave presentations and offered prizes for outstanding articles. We reached out to academics as well as to senior citizens. Most of these things didn’t work as well as we initially thought.

When we started reaching out to university students last year, we tried something different. It was explicitly not our goal to turn all those students into Wikipedians. We knew they would edit Wikipedia as part of their class and only a couple of them would stay. Because being a long-term member of the community requires a specific kind of mindset – and honestly: not everybody has that mindset. Some people just enjoy editing Wikipedia for a short time of their life and then carry on with other activities.

What we are attempting in our Global Education Program instead, is to institutionalize the use of Wikipedia in the classroom. Our goal is to explain to as many teachers as possible what the benefits of using Wikipedia of a teaching tool are. Students are much more motivated when they write for a global audience, instead of just writing for their professor. Some of the students participating in our program over the last year were so proud of their work that they sent links to the articles they improved to their grandparents. Amazing! When have you heard of students who sent their term papers to their grandparents? And not only are those students more motivated, they also improve their media literacy skills, they learn how to use a wiki, and they improve their research, writing, and critical thinking skills.

As we carry on with the Global Education Program, every semester a new cohort of students will learn how to edit. They will upload pictures, improve articles, and learn how to use talk pages. Some of them will come back later and apply those skills. They will help us to take another step on the way to make Wikipedia better. Most of them will never become members of the community. I believe that’s ok. Because Wikipedia is not only about being a member of the club – it’s about building the biggest and best encyclopedia ever.

Frank (club member)

Tagalog Wikipedia’s Quiet Editor

(This is the fourth installment in a series of updates from the WikiHistories summer research fellows, who will be studying the virtual community history of different Wikipedia editing communities.)

Eric Andrada-Calica examines himself.

Did you know that Tagalog Wikipedia’s first active editor doesn’t speak Tagalog as his first language? This is one of a number of unusual things about Eric Andrada-Calica, who I first noticed at an all-day Wikimedia Philippines meeting in part because he did not utter a single word, except during lunch. I was even more surprised when I learned that after seav began Tagalog Wikipedia in early 2004 but continued to focus on English Wikipedia edits and administration, it was Eric who took the reins in September when he became a sysop and began to manage a project that, at the time, had less than one hundred articles – to one that now has more than 50,000 and counting. And because he does err towards silence, it was even more exciting to interview him and find out some of his interests and motivations for being such an active editor.

The first striking thing I learned is that Eric is from La Union, a Philippine province where Ilocano, rather than Tagalog is typically spoken as a first language. He explained the reason why he edits primarily in Tagalog: “I’m a native Ilocano speaker, but the problem is that I can’t write in Ilocano. I write more often in Tagalog.” Eric makes occasional edits in Ilocano and English, though he is not nearly as active in those two languages than in Tagalog, where he has made his most substantial contributions.

An examination of those contributions reveals that he is not primarily focused on article creation, even though he admits to timing his contributions so that the article he created on his home province of La Union was the 100th article on Tagalog Wikipedia. When asked about his motivations for starting to edit so actively, he recalled simply that as a self-professed “Internet addict” with a lot of downtime at his job, he saw many missing articles in Tagalog Wikipedia when he started around September 2004, and felt an urge to work on expanding the site.

“I am more of a general editor,” he says. “I sometimes translate articles but I usually don’t originate.” Thus, he ensures Tagalog Wikipedia’s functionality as he encounters new articles and edits to make sure that they conform to the site’s policies, while also watching out for vandalism, an increasing problem as the site becomes larger. Among the policies he enforces are source citation, image copyright, as well as the site’s controversial and often-discussed language policies. Though in the beginning, he did create or expand articles pertaining to provinces of the Philippines and then countries in the world, he also created articles based on the list of 1,000 articles all Wikipedias should have.

However, his role as a Wikipedia editor and administrator has diminished over the years, he says, “because I was a Junior Programmer when I started. Now I manage a segment of the software so I don’t have time.” Also, other administrators  have increasingly played larger roles in the organization. But as others have noticed, there seem to be fewer active editors and administrators to replace ones who have become less active.

While others editors are attempting to attract new Wikipedians through outreach related to Wikiemdia Philippines, Eric seems to prefer to stay behind the scenes. In fact, he is perhaps one of the few Philippine-based active Tagalog Wikipedia editors who is not a Wikimedia Philippines board member, though he is becoming more involved with the organization and regularly attends meetings. While other Tagalog Wikipedians are playing a more active role in Wikimedia and are meeting Wikipedians from other countries through Wikimania, chapter meetings, and other opportunities, Eric seems relatively content playing the important role of monitoring and maintaining the day-to-day activities of Tagalog Wikipedia.

Meredith Ramirez Talusan
Wikimedia Summer Fellow
and PhD Candidate, Comparative Literature, Cornell University

 

Shalom from Wikimania 2011!

It’s that time again: Wikimedians from all over the world have descended upon Haifa, Israel for Wikimania 2011. From the conference, the Wikimedia Board of Trustees have announced the 2011-2012 Board members and elected officers which include:

Ting Chen, Board Chair
Jan-Bart de Vreede, Vice-Chair
Stuart West, Treasurer
Phoebe Ayers, Secretary
Samuel Klein
Bishakha Datta
Matt Halprin
Arne Klempert
Kat Walsh
Jimmy Wales

The decisions were made following a series of Board meetings coinciding with the seventh annual Wikimania conference, held in Haifa, Israel. The Board meets every year during Wikimania, the annual international conference, run by the Wikimedia community, and organized by a different local team each year.

This year, 650 Wikipedia editors, Wikimedians, researchers and educators from 56 countries plan to attend the conference. Keynote speakers this year include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director, Sue Gardner, Deans from the University of Haifa and Bar-Ilan University are planned speakers along with Prof. Yochai Benkler, professor of law at Harvard University, and Joseph Reagle, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and author of Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia.

Congratulations to the 115 participants who received full scholarships and the 60 attendees with partial scholarships to attend the conference. Scholarships were awarded by the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikimedia Italia, Wikimedia France, Wikimedia Poland, and Wikimedia Austria. Wikimania is celebrating its seventh year in Haifa, Israel, previously held in Egypt, Argentina, Germany, Poland and Taiwan. In 2012, Wikimania will take place in the United States in Washington, DC.

Shalom from Haifa!

Moka Pantages
Global Communications

Does your Wikipedia mobile App expect our full content layout?

If so we have an upcoming change this week that you should be aware of. We’re in the final part of our new device detection testing that will automatically redirect any mobile agent we recognize over to its corresponding .m mobile gateway.This means that if your app declares a mobile UA as recognized by WURFL and connects directly to us we will redirect that traffic to .m.wikipedia.org and NOT .wikipedia.org.

Those apps that use an intermediate gateway which don’t have a mobile user agent will not be affected. If on the other hand your app does all of your logic then you will need to explicitly identify your UA to us.  Or, ensure that your UA contains “bot” to bypass redirection.

If this is not the behavior that you want then please let us know at know on meta or come find us on freenode #wikimedia-mobile.

Tomasz Finc

Director of Mobile and Special Projects

Global Education Program A–Z

Our new Global Education Program brings with it a lot of new terminology. What better way to organize an overview than in A–Z?

Ambassadors: When we started thinking about how to involve universities in the improvement of Wikipedia articles back in 2009, it became clear that we won’t be successful without offering various kinds of support. We decided to create a new role for people who are both eager and qualified to help new contributors to get around the many difficulties of editing Wikipedia. The Wikipedia Ambassador Program started in the summer of 2010, when we recruited the first Campus and Online Ambassadors for the English Wikipedia. Today it’s a great way for people to become engaged even if they don’t have a long history of Wikipedia editing. All you need is an affinity to teaching, the willingness to help others and a friendly attitude. That opens the Wikipedia movement up for people who are eager to help and who had few opportunities for doing so in the past.

Bookshelf: Teaching students how to use Wikipedia is hard without instructional materials. Back in 2006 we only had the “Wikipedia Cheatsheet,” a one-pager that listed the most common wiki markup tags. That’s why we started the Bookshelf Project in 2009. Now, it contains a wide variety of brochures and videos that explain how to start editing. Most popular among teachers are the “Welcome to Wikipedia” and “Evaluating Wikipedia article quality” brochures. By the way: all printed materials have been created with Scribus, an open source desktop publishing application, so they can be translated and adapted by people all over the world.

Campus Ambassadors: Campus Ambassadors provide in-person support on the university campus. They get a 2-day training to learn all the nuts and bolts of what they have to teach. Our Campus Ambassadors come from a variety of different backgrounds. Some of them are librarians, some are students, and some are teachers. They all share a common goal: to help newcomers with their first steps on Wikipedia.

Fellows: We started a Wikipedia Teaching Fellows Program for educators participating in the Public Policy Initiative in 2011. Professors who fulfill the Teaching Fellow requirements are able to put the distinction on their C.V. to indicate the work they’ve done with Wikipedia in their classrooms. At our Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit in July 2011, we were able to honor the first 20 official Wikipedia Teaching Fellows.

Global Education Program: The class-based university program as explored in the Public Policy Initiative has been highly successful in turning students into Wikipedia contributors. We have built a strong knowledge base about running a class-based program as well as the tools needed to implement it (training handbooks, brochures on how to start editing, how-to videos, sample syllabi, etc.) We are now at a point to make these investments pay off. That’s why we are starting a Global Education Program. The Global Education Program will support the Foundation’s strategic goal to grow and strengthen the Wikipedia editor community.

Higher Education Summit: Our first Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit took place on July 7–9, 2011. More than 120 teachers, librarians, Wikipedia Ambassadors, and Foundation staff members came together in Boston to celebrate the successes of the Public Policy Initiative. For the participants, the three days were a great opportunity to share their skills, best practices and success stories with each other. We received a lot of positive feedback and we hope that this was the first of many Wikipedia Higher Education Summits to be held in different countries around the globe.

India Education Program: In June 2011, we started our India Education Program in Pune, Maharashtra. Pune is a vibrant university city with more than a hundred educational institutes. We quickly learned that the interest from Indian teachers in our program is as big as the interest in the U.S. That’s why we are estimating that more than 700 students will participate in Wikipedia-editing activities in the first semester. Most of them will edit the English Wikipedia, but some of them are also planning to write articles on the Maharati Wikipedia.

K-12: We know that university students make great contributors to Wikipedia. Some say, “students are the fuel of Wikipedia.” But what about high school students? We’ve received some inquiries from high school teachers who would like to adopt our model and let their students edit Wikipedia as part of the classroom activities. That’s why we will run a small pilot in the spring term 2012 to see whether this idea is worth further exploration.

Numbers: In the first two semesters of our educational program activities, more than 800 students contributed about 5,600 pages of high quality content to the English Wikipedia. Our research has shown that Wikipedia articles written by those students improved by an average of 140 percent. By 2013, we are planning to have more than 10,000 students enrolled in our Education Program.

Online Ambassadors: Whereas the Campus Ambassadors provide in-person support, the Online Ambassadors help students on wiki and on a dedicated IRC channel. Most of our Online Ambassadors are long-term Wikipedians who can answer almost every question related to the technical aspects of editing, Wikipedia culture and processes. Students have told us that the mentoring from Online Ambassadors has been “tremendously helpful” for understanding Wikipedia and for making the first edits.

Public Policy Initiative: A 17-month experimental pilot program that started in the summer of 2010. We decided to run our pilot with a narrow topical focus (“If we can do it with public policy, we will be able to do it with any other topic as well”) and limited to U.S. universities. Now, as we are flooded with requests from educators outside of public policy, and we have a model that works effectively, we are transitioning the Public Policy Initiative to the new Global Education Program. Our goal is to apply our learnings in the U.S. to other disciplines and countries and to expand the use of Wikipedia in higher education globally. We see this as a continuous effort to strengthen and diversify Wikipedia’s editing community.

Regional Ambassadors: When we started the Public Policy Initiative, one of our main goals was to make the program self-sustainable. That’s why we created the role of Regional Ambassadors. Whereas Foundation staff members recruited professors and Campus Ambassadors in the beginning, it’s now up to the volunteers. The Regional Ambassador role is a leadership role with great opportunities for developing team management, community organizing, and public outreach skills. It also provides participants with significant professional-networking opportunities, especially in the education community and the open-source community.

Student clubs: Wikipedia student clubs pretty much emerged without the Foundation being involved. The first student club in the U.S. started at the University of Michigan in June 2010. Most student clubs hold monthly meetings where students can have a place to both learn and teach each other how to edit Wikimedia projects, and to discuss their edits with each other.

Trainers: Some of our Campus Ambassadors get an additional 2-day training so they can train the next generation of Campus Ambassadors. Those Campus Ambassador Trainers play an important role in our program activities: as volunteers they organize and lead local training events to ensure that the next cohort of Ambassadors acquires the same skills as they did. They also provide valuable feedback that helps improve the training.

Women: One of our strategic goals is to encourage more women to start editing Wikipedia. Our activities at universities offer a great opportunity to do so: more than half of the students in the U.S. (as well as in a large number of other countries) are female. And, of course, we are proud that more than 45% of our Campus Ambassadors are women as well.

Join the discussion about Wikimedia and education by subscribing to the Education listserv.

Frank Schulenburg
Global Education Program Director

Wikimania 2011 Scholarships

The Wikimedia Foundation is thrilled to announce the sponsorship of 77 full scholarship recipients and 52 partial scholarship recipients for the 2011 Wikimania!  Wikimania – an entirely community driven conference since 2005 – is an important annual event for the Wikimedia movement, bringing together Wikimedia advocates from all around the globe for four days. We are proud to be able to facilitate the attendance of representatives from different countries, chapters, languages and/or projects at this international conference.

Scholars were selected based on their (a) activity on Wikimedia projects, (b) activity in compatible projects outside of Wikimedia, and (c) future goals for participation in the Wikimedia movement. A group of nine volunteers formed the scholarship review committee, which pored over the more than 1100 applications in order to select a diverse pool of candidates, with the following goals in mind:

  • Make Wikimania 2011 a successful and productive international conference
  • Support the Wikimedia projects by encouraging participation
  • Enrich the conference with attendance by a diverse group of participants in the Wikimedia movementScholarship regions

This year’s group of full scholars represents the most diverse we have ever had! Female scholarship recipients are up to 18% of the total full scholarships, and 53% of full scholarship recipients hail from the Global South (representing 62% of the funding). Moreover, recipients are coming from all regions of the world.

Of course, the selection of these individuals has been made possible only thanks to the dedicated scholarship review committee as well as the generosity of Wikimedia Germany, which donated directly to the funds. In addition, a variety of other chapters has generously provided self-administered scholarships, opening the opportunities for participation even more.

We are delighted to sponsor such a passionate and diverse group of individuals who not only have demonstrated commitment to our projects in the past, but who also are committed to the future of the Wikimedia movement. We anticipate great things from the conference!

Shedding light on board of trustee elections

As most of the readers of this blog are aware the Wikimedia foundation board of trustees  ”manages the foundation and supervises disposition and solicitation of donation.” The community elects three members to the board of trustees. The rest of the seats on the board are shared between community members appointed by chapters, community founder and trustees with specific expertise appointed by the board.  If you are interested in finding out more about the structure of the board of trustees, please check out this diagram here. 

The elections to the board of trustees have been held annually since 2004. You can find out more details about the elections here.

But according to the Editor Survey, April 2011, only a small minority of editors has voted in the board elections. Thirteen percent of editors in the survey pointed out that they had voted in WMF board of trustee elections.  Among those who had not voted in the election, the number one reason for not voting in the election was they (45%) had never heard of the elections.  Thirty-four percent said that they were not interested in participating in board elections. We also asked the editors who stated that they had never heard of the elections if they would vote in the future since they now know about the board of trustee elections A majority (54%) of them said that they would be interested in voting in the future. In addition, 9% of editors pointed out that they had run or would like to run in the board of trustee elections, and the rest said they were not interested (84%) or were not eligible to run for elections (8%).

Reasons for not voting in board elections

We would like to take this opportunity to call upon all our community members to have their voice heard and participate in large numbers in the next board of trustee elections. The data also shows that there is a need to raise awareness about the board elections. We welcome your ideas about how we can do this. Please share your ideas through comments to this blog post.

Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research

(This is the eighth in series of blog posts where we will share insights from the April 2011 Editors Survey. Later in August we will be providing raw data from the survey and a final report to the community. )