“Information may be freely available online, but it is locked in Western languages. How can we contribute content about our cultures in our own languages?”

Right to Research conference participant

This question speaks to the heart of the issues that prompted the “A Right to Research in Africa?” (R2R) conference, which brought together policymakers, academics, artists, and activists from across the African continent for a week of debates on how copyright legislation impacts access to research and culture in Africa.

ReCreate South Africa, a nonprofit that exists to advocate on behalf of South African creatives regarding copyright legislation, organized and held the conference from 23 to 27 January, 2023, in Pretoria and Cape Town. ReCreate represents users and creators of cultural products or, as they put it, those “disadvantaged by an exploitative system which fails to pay us for our work.” At the heart of the discussion was the issue of information justice, a topic that is as deeply embedded in the history of South Africa as in the DNA of the Wikimedia movement.

Copyright law forms the basis for who can access creative works, how they can access it, and in the case that they can, how they can interact with and use that information. South African copyright law has historically evolved within racist political regimes that leveraged access to information as a tool for power and control—first in the British colonial era, and then during the Apartheid regime. Nowadays, that legacy still presents obstacles for people as different as researchers, DJs, and global health experts, since South African copyright laws place them at a disadvantage when compared to their counterparts in countries with flexible copyright laws supporting creativity in the digital information economy. That disadvantage manifests in various forms, which extend from paywalls to exploitative relationships between those who create knowledge and those with the rights to own and profit from it. 

Members of Wikimedia South Africa, Wikimedia Deutschland, and the Wikimedia Foundation were active participants in the conference discussions, which offered important lessons for others in our movement who wish to advocate for copyright reform, including: the diverse mix of attendees; the multiple aspects of copyright that were considered (e.g., freedom of panorama, text and data mining, and Open GLAM, to name but a few); and, the overarching message that copyright reform is necessary to break down the social, political, and legal structures that sustain information injustice across Africa.

We summarize those takeaways by covering how the conference helped to build a coalition of allied organizations that represent very different parts of society and aspects of copyright. We illustrate why this diversity allows us to better share how the current copyright regime impacts them all. Then, we cover how promoting copyright reform in a specific country can help promote knowledge equity worldwide, and how the wider open knowledge movement fits into these discussions—including Wikimedians like you! Lastly, we offer some suggestions on how the Wikimedia communities can support the South African Copyright Amendment Bill (CAB).

I. The Fight for South Africa’s Copyright Amendment Bill Sits at the Intersection of Intellectual Property and information justice

“Africa is putting into the knowledge economy but getting very little back. To access our own data, we need to pay. But they have access to our data for free.”

Conference participant

The timing of the conference was strategic. For the past decade, Wikimedia South Africa and allies have been pushing to amend the South African Copyright Act of 1978. The draft Copyright Amendment Bill (CAB) was finally introduced in 2017, passed by the National Assembly in September 2022, and went to the National Council of Provinces (respectively, the lower and upper houses of Parliament) in October of the same year, and will return to the Parliament for finalization before being submitted to the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, for his signature. Put simply: 2023 could make or break the reform. 

The conference was a tactical way to prepare policymakers, allied organizations, and policy influencers for the upcoming debates at the provincial and national levels. It provided them with knowledge and stories about how existing copyright laws hamstring South Africans’ access to knowledge and voices. 

Attendees came from across Africa and a variety of industries. They included a DJ and gospel singer, Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers, an internationally famous South African actress, rock art curators, librarians who witnessed a historical library catch on fire, public health experts, and copyright lawyers. Although their backgrounds and perspectives were diverse, their message was the same: existing copyright regimes are holding African voices back from the global exchange of culture, research, and innovation. 

Paywalls Blocking Access to Global Health Data and Vaccines Cost Lives

Dr. Glenda Gray, the President of the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC), discussed how difficult it is for African countries to predict and respond to the next pandemic if epidemiologists do not have access to the large datasets necessary to model predictions, or if vaccines cannot be replicated at scale due to intellectual property blocks.

South Africa has experienced these grim realities during the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis, with pharmaceutical companies refusing to lower the costs of antiretrovirals. South Africans were hit again during the COVID-19 pandemic, when members of the pharmaceutical industry and many high-income countries refused to suspend the intellectual property rights of vaccines, medicines, and other new technologies needed to control the pandemic.

Research exceptions to copyright are essential so that South Africa and other countries have an increased capacity to undertake their own research and, thereby, better serve their citizens.

Copyright Laws Perpetuate the Absence of African Participation Online

AI researchers shared how their work is trapped in a vicious cycle of exclusion. Limited access to affordable or freely available data—for example, on climate change—makes it difficult for researchers to make forecasts and better inform national environmental policy. For this reason, they depend on collaborations with external research partners who can access such data: partners who are largely located in North America and Europe.

Even when information is freely available, it tends to be locked in Western languages. For representatives from Masakhane, a grassroots organization whose mission is to strengthen natural language processing (NLP) research in African languages, this structural barrier meant that “We as Africans […] are then second-class citizens on the internet and on digital platforms.” In order to diversify the languages represented online and open the internet to speakers of indigenous languages, organizations like Masakhane need access to databases and archives to enable text and data mining.

Relatedly, once local language is digitized, these databases then need to be protected by copyright guardrails. Without them, open access information data stores can be exploited, with the greatest beneficiaries being those who already have the tools and resources to take advantage of existing information. Copyright law needs to be reformed to keep up with the digital age and in order to both facilitate and provide equal access to research.

Copyright Should not Prevent Us from Digitizing our Heritage to Preserve It and Educate Future Generations

Advocates from Blind SA, the South African Democratic Teachers Union, and members of archives, libraries, and museums pointed out how important copyright exceptions are to preserve cultural heritage and use it for educational purposes. Raw in the memory of South Africans are the 2021 images of the Jagger Library in flames—when a vast fire that started in Table Mountain destroyed historical monuments and heritage in Cape Town. Permitting digitization and shared access to archives housed in such institutions can ensure they are preserved even after crises. 

The Wikimedia community is rife with examples of how digitizing archives under open licenses offer a positive contribution to preserving culture and heritage around the world, especially during or after moments of crises like fires, wars, floods, and other natural or social and political disasters—we discuss these in detail in the next section. There is even an article dedicated to the topic of losing knowledge in a permanent way on English Wikipedia: Wikipedia:There is a deadline.

II. Wikimedians Promoting Copyright Reform in South Africa Help Promote Knowledge Equity Globally

“If knowledge is behind paywalls separating the Global North and South, then we will never move towards knowledge equity.”

Conference participant

The fact that those who attended the conference from other African countries experience the same challenges highlights the ripple effect that copyright laws in one country can have throughout a region. Legislation can be a barrier for Africans to access knowledge, but copyright reform, even in a specific country, can empower and amplify access to knowledge as well as creative output throughout the continent.

Douglas Scott, a founding member of Wikimedia South Africa who helped to organize the event and hosted several of its sessions, gave a presentation on how important the right of freedom of panorama is to document South African history and cultural heritage. Freedom of panorama is a provision in copyright law that makes it possible to go outside, take a picture or video of a scene, building, sculpture or other work of art that is located in a public place, and publish it online.

There is a fundamental injustice, he argued, when copyright law clearly allows for images of public monuments from the country’s colonial era to be shared online, yet the law is not clear when it comes to taking and uploading photographs of more contemporary monuments online. As a result, monuments from the colonial era are available on the internet and can be used for educational purposes, while memorials commemorating the country’s freedom struggle remain absent. Copyright laws should not skew how history is remembered. The cover image for this blog post demonstrates that very point. The statue of Nelson Mandela has to be blacked out in order to comply with South African law, which lacks freedom of panorama. Douglas’ presentation brought forth crucial questions: When we allow such legal restrictions to persist, which history are we choosing to digitize, preserve, and make accessible? Do we not owe it to those who struggled for democracy to reform such limiting policies and laws? 

The destruction of physical cultural heritage and artifacts in moments of crises, such as the fire that ravaged Jagger Library, only heightens the urgency to adopt freedom of panorama in countries where the copyright provision does not yet exist. In Ukraine, for example, the lack of freedom of panorama has made it more difficult to create records of important cultural heritage—including monuments and other structures that, according to UN-appointed experts, are being targeted in the Russo-Ukrainian War. Nonetheless, Wikimedians are working hard to document and share Ukrainian knowledge on Wikimedia projects before it is destroyed, especially in collaboration with the Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) initiative. 

In Brazil too, the efforts of Wikimedians have been monumental in preserving precious cultural heritage and artifacts. Similarly to the Jagger Library, the National Museum of Brazil was engulfed in flames in 2018. In response, Wikimedians launched a crowdsourced initiative to collect, organize, and share images, data, and other valuable information about the millions of items that the institution housed. This was essential because the museum neither had an online database nor had it digitized most of its objects. Without the crowdsourced initiative, many of these items would have been lost forever, leaving no physical or digital traces that they ever existed. Importantly, Brazil had copyright laws that allowed these actions when they were most needed. 

The natural alliance between free knowledge advocates across cultural contexts was captured by Jan-David Franke from Wikimedia Deutschland, who gave a five-minute presentation on the chapter’s “PUBLIC MONEY – PUBLIC GOOD” campaign. He echoed a key sentiment that had come up frequently during the the conference in the days before his talk:

Monumental digitization efforts make knowledge and cultural artifacts, tokens of our past and modern society, visible. But this isn’t just a grand and benevolent gesture. In fact, the public has every right to use and reuse its own cultural heritage. […] Anything that has been significantly funded with public money must be freely available to the public, […] including educational content from public broadcasters, […] data from government agencies, public commissioned studies, digitized collections from publicly funded cultural institutions.

Jan-David Franke, Wikimedia Deutschland

The R2R conference showed that organizations and groups as different as Wikimedia Deutschland and AI researchers from Kenya coincide in their review that copyright reform, be it in South Africa or elsewhere, reflects the importance of working towards change as a collective rather than as a set of individual actors. Many participants have ties to the Wikimedia movement. ReCreate is a recipient of the Wikimedia Alliances Fund, which supports mission-aligned organizations in regions and communities that are underrepresented in our movement, and is also a trusted partner of Wikimedia South Africa, another participating organization. Over the past few years, the two organizations have amplified each other’s work. Yet another organization, Masakhane, the research group making the internet more accessible in non-Western languages mentioned earlier, won the Wikimedia Foundation Research Award of the Year in 2021 for their contribution to online knowledge equity.

III. Get Involved: Support Knowledge Equity, Information Justice, and the Free Knowledge Movement Worldwide!

Copyright reform in one country does not just influence the surrounding region: it can set a precedent for free knowledge advocates globally, including the Wikimedia movement. Because the projects are part of the larger online information ecosystem, it is essential for Wikimedians to work with allied organizations to be able to have an impact beyond the movement and its projects and be able to shape a policy environment that enables all kinds of free knowledge projects to thrive. 

If you are interested in contributing to that achievement, here is how you can get involved. 

Support the CAB in South Africa

• Follow Wikimedia South Africa and ReCreate on Twitter as well as keep track of the CAB’s progress via the ReCreate website or this Meta-Wiki page to show your support.

• Write to the media in South Africa. You can submit an opinion article to South African newspapers and news agencies like Business Day, Daily Maverick, and GroundUp, where you explain why it is important to have freedom of panorama in the law—like Douglas Scott does in this letter and op-ed. To get in touch with them, just email their editorial team using the contact information shared on their websites. If you come from a country that has fair use like the US, Singapore, or Israel, you can focus on how helpful that legal doctrine has been in helping your country promote innovation and free knowledge. Check if your country has legal exceptions for fair use and/or fair dealing. Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL), a nonprofit that works with libraries to enable access to knowledge in developing countries, provides an example of how to help through media support. EIFL explains how they delivered comments on South Africa’s CAB and the significance of the process. More resources and useful links about the Bill and its opposition can be found here.

• If you are from the US or the European Union (EU), write to your representative and urge them to support South Africa passing its own laws without having to worry about pressure and misleading claims from lobbying groups and self-interested actors. The CAB will do no more to infringe the copyrights of US and EU companies than US fair use currently does. Find contact details for US representatives here, and for EU representatives here. 

Participate in the Wikimedia Foundation’s copyright advocacy mapping project

Have you or other Wikimedians launched a campaign for governments to preserve or change copyright policies because of how they impacted your work on Wikimedia projects? We’re mapping this work across the movement, so please let us know! Here is how to do so:

1. Send an email with the subject “Copyright advocacy mapping” to Valentina Vera-Quiroz, our Human Rights, Policy, and Tech Fellow (vveraquiroz-ctr@wikimedia.org) and CC Ziski Putz (fputz@wikimedia.org), our Movement Advocacy Manager. Let us know the time zone in which you are based.
   
2. Wait for a follow-up reply from either Valentina or Ziski.
   
3. Schedule a time to meet with us!

The #WikiForHumanRights campaign is an exciting opportunity to contribute to strengthening knowledge on climate and sustainability across the Wikimedia movement. In 2023, we are excited to  invite volunteers to write and improve content on Wikipedia about human rights, environmental health, and the impact of environmental crises on diverse communities around the world. You can join events and writing contests from 14 April – 30 June 2023.

To enact the right to a healthy environment, those most affected by environmental degradation need up-to-date knowledge to inform their approaches to defending the environment, participate in decision-making, and access justice.  Ensuring that everyone has access to updated information also helps us better mitigate these crises while we work collectively to adapt strategies to ensure a healthy future for all. Filling gaps on Wikipedia about these topics helps the public make the thousands of decisions needed to address these pressing environmental crises.

Join Us

We need your help to contribute to strengthening knowledge on climate and sustainability across the Wikimedia movement! To lend your hand during the campaign, you can participate in the  following actions: 

• Join the April 18 Launch Webinar —  learn more about the role of information in preserving human rights in the context of the global pollution crises
• Join the Writing Contest — help us create local knowledge on key human rights and environmental knowledge topics in more languages, this year the special focus is on 
• Connect with Local Communities —  Join an event in your language or community
• Join the Human Rights Interest Group — advise the Wikimedia Movement on addressing human rights

Join the Launch Webinar! 

On 18 April at 14:00 UTC, we invite you to join  the launch of this year’s #WikiForHumanRights campaign, with a special focus on the Pollution crisis. Register here on Zoom.   

Pollution can be found in all corners of the world. The true cost of pollution is foisted on everyone; however, it has disproportionate impacts on persons, groups and peoples in vulnerable situations such as children, women, Indigenous Peoples, coastal communities, people living in extreme poverty, surrounding communities affected by production facilities, and workers at heightened risk of occupational exposure, including waste-pickers. 

This panel explores how improved public knowledge, through platforms like Wikimedia projects, can help both global and local communities better understand and exercise their right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment in efforts to prevent, minimize and remedy pollution. Join panelists  Monika Stankiewicz (Executive Secretary of the Minamata Convention on Mercury), Jo Banner (Co-Founder & Co-Director, Descendents Project)  and Soledad Mella Vida (Asociación Movimiento Nacional Recicladores de Chile) as they discuss how public knowledge can play an important role in protecting human rights and the environment.

The event will include live translations in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Arabic.

Register here on Zoom.   

Join the Global Writing Challenge

From 17 April to 17 May 2023, Wikimedians everywhere are invited to join a global writing challenge aimed at bridging content gaps on human rights, environmental health, and the impacts to diverse communities across the world. The theme for this year’s writing contest explores the impact of  pollution on our human rights, health and environmental well being. 

Join the Challenge

Join Community Events

There will also be a variety of activities and events happening across different regions in the movement, including webinars, edit-a-thons, workshops, and local writing contests. Lend your voice and your hand to this important work by finding and joining an event on an event on Meta.

This year, the campaign is being coordinated regionally in 7 communities: the Maghreb, Arab-Speaking Communities, Francophone Africa, Spanish speaking communities,  Lusophone Communities, Anglophone Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe. If you need help organizing an event or helping the regional team, reach out to your regional coordinator. It’s not too late to host something! 

Become part of the Human Rights Interest Group by signing up here!

Are you interested in addressing human rights related content gaps on Wikimedia projects? Do you want to make your community’s human rights concerns and challenges more visible to the Foundation? Are you unsure how to stay safe when contributing from a hostile editing environment? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then the Human Rights Interest Group (HRIG) might be the right space for you! Join the HRIG, a loose group of community members who meet with the Wikimedia Foundation’s Human Rights Team on a semi-regular basis. The HRIG provides a safe space to address and discuss topics such as:

• Foster human rights awareness when creating content: Both Wikimedia contributors and people they may have contributed about can face real life harm because of their involvement with Wikimedia projects.
• Fill content gaps on human rights: The amount and diversity of human rights related content on Wikimedia projects is relatively slim. The HRIG is a space to express the human rights concerns of your country and region, so that they are heard within the broader community and understood by the Foundation. 
• Stay in touch on human rights: The HRIG creates a platform for ongoing cooperation and dialogue between community members and the Foundation on human rights related issues and how to increase community safety.

Does this sound interesting to you? Sign up for the HRIG here, reach out to talktohumanrights@wikimedia.org or read more via meta.

Share the story and learn more!  

Follow us on Twitter @Wikipedia,@Wikimedia, and @WikiSusDev or join the WikiForHumanRights Telegram Channel for event details and updates as the campaign continues through the 30th of June 2022 and check back for updates on the event page. Use the campaign hashtag #WikiForHumanRights to spread the word. You can also write to campaigns@wikimedia.org if you have questions. 

In February 2023, the Glocal Inquiry Results Presentation was held at Saitama Omiya High School. Glocal Inquiry is a new form of education in Japan based on the acquisition of 21st century skills. Glocal Inquiry is a programme in which each student discovers local issues and thinks about what is needed to solve them. We have previously introduced an attempt by several high schools to hold a Wikipedia editing event at the same time, which is one of these initiatives.

How the programme started

A collaboration agreement between Saitama Prefecture and Shimane Prefecture led to the assignment of the teacher in charge, Rina Tanaka, to Shimane Prefectural Oki Dozen High School. The school is located in Ama town in the Oki Islands, 600 km from Tokyo, and defines the entire island as an educational field where various initiatives are being developed. Tanaka says: “I wanted to broaden my horizons by learning and thinking about what values and issues the people living on the island have in an environment surrounded by the sea.” The idea of Glocal Inquiry Learning stems from ‘trying to put a global perspective into a local perspective’.

Around 20% of the population are I-turners, i.e. people who have chosen to move to another place other than their place of birth to work. In addition, the high schools themselves are working to make the islands more attractive, for example by actively accepting high school students to live away from their parents’ homes as ‘island study abroad’. At the same time, it is also working to increase the number of adults who stay on the islands, not only high school students but also adults.

She considered how she could return these studies in Shimane Prefecture to Saitama Prefecture, a bedroom town of Tokyo. As one such example, she planned fieldwork for students from Omiya High School to visit Ama in August 2022, but due to the impact of the spread of the new coronavirus infection, the programme was held in the form of an online exchange. At the briefing session for the online Glocal Exploration Programme, the students were given an explanation about the island by Ama Town Hall staff, and nine students eventually raised their hands. After the start of the programme, we also collaborated with Karuizawa in Nagano Prefecture and created an opportunity to learn about the history of Karuizawa, one of Japan’s leading summer resorts and tourist destinations, and how the town is being developed today.

In his opening address at the presentation, Katsuyuki Kamata, Principal of Omiya Prefectural High School, said: ‘The desire to put into practice the various initiatives implemented at Oki Dozen High School and other schools in Omiya led to the realisation of the project. After an internship at a publishing company, interviews at Karuizawa FM and an exploration of their own school’s history, today’s final presentation was held” and “In the process of thinking, they found issues and proceeded with their exploration. If the students themselves were able to search for and discover new questions, we consider it a success as far as education is concerned. In other words, I think that the repetition of questions and the discovery of challenges is exploration”.

Participating pupils’ thoughts and programme activities

Many of the pupils who took part in the programme were interested in ‘town planning’. After further questioning and dividing the themes of exploration for each individual, three groups were formed: ‘tourism’, ‘nature’ and ‘policy’. The Wikipedia Town held in 2022 at the Saitama Municipal Omiya Library was part of the glocal exploration. What is the history of the town where we live and study? The idea was to discover new things with their own eyes and to verbalise what they had discovered about their hometowns, whether it was true that they had said with their own mouths that they were ‘in the middle of nowhere’.

Each of the participating pupils identified a challenge and presented to the participants how they should work towards solving it. The following are the titles of each of these presentations.

• Tourism
  • Commonalities and applications of tourist destinations
  • Saitama Prefecture and tourist destinations
  • Conditions in tourism for long-term migration
• Nature
  • Links between nature and Hikawa Shrine
  • Local cuisine
  • Connection between nature and cuisine
• Policy
  • Migrant jobs
  • Town development
  • Attractiveness plan

One student in the policy team actually visited the municipal office where she lives to hear about what issues are currently being addressed in the policies she is working on, and to discover new issues from them. She focused on the cost of childcare because of the declining birth rate and ageing population in her municipality of residence, and the fact that her junior high school was set to close in four years’ time. As she spoke with city hall staff, she got a glimpse of the reality that despite various policies, they were not reaching the citizens at all. By actually visiting the city hall and listening to what they had to say, she discovered many things that she could act on.

Representative student feedback: Ms. Yumeka Araki

There were many opportunities for values and ideas to be shaken up in the course of many experiences. It was an opportunity to look at things I hadn’t thought about, to look at things I hadn’t paid attention to, to know more deeply. At the same time, I thought it was good to move on my own. It would be a waste to just end up researching the internet, and I want to make use of what I have researched. I want to continue to look into things I want to look into from now on.

Prepared critique

Finally, a general comment was made by a supervisor from the Saitama Prefectural Board of Education and a representative of the publishing company that hosted the programme’s interns.

General comment: Mr. Miki Kuwabara, guidance officer, High School Education and Guidance Division.

I think it’s unfortunate that we don’t notice things in our daily lives, for example, when we have an idea but don’t tell it to the people around us, or when we live our lives only by conforming. I think that by going to see someone in real life and listening to them, you could feel this. I think this programme was a good opportunity for people to experience that you don’t give up somewhere. Raising your antennae will change the way you look at things. There are many ways to fulfil the dreams you have at the moment. I think this will continue for the rest of your life, so I want you to explore a life of happiness.

Mr Kuwabara is responsible for providing guidance to schools and teachers on school education at the Saitama Prefectural Board of Education, which is the high school establishment.

General comment: Mr. Eiji Harada, Eiji Publishing Inc.

Exploration begins with what is familiar. What is important is not just thinking with the head, but what the heart feels, what the body feels, the thought of wholeness, 100% thinking. I would love you to turn what you feel with your body and heart into an original idea when you think about it again with your head. Creating and thinking without anyone teaching you is fun, I urge you to try it. Even if you find it somewhere else, I want you to make something beyond that.

I don’t want you to think with your head, I want you to feel with your heart/body.

Mr Harada is the head of a publishing company that publishes a number of business books in Japan.

Holding the next Edit-a-thon and beyond

The month after this presentation, on 19 March, Wikipedia Town in Kazo was held in Kazo City, where Saitama Prefectural Fudoka High School, which jointly hosted the previous Wikipedia Town, is located. More than 30 people involved, including not only students from both schools but also local residents and library staff, participated in the event and had a fruitful time editing articles on Kisai Castle.([[ja:騎西城]]) and other places and uploading photos to Wikimedia Commons.

One student remarked in her presentation of her impressions.
I wanted to absorb new things and to be able to cooperate with both schools. I was interested in the long shovel moat and the excavated items until the visit. I would like to continue this even if I actually go to university.

In Japan, March is the end of the school year; April is the new school year, when many students leave their alma maters, and teachers at prefectural high schools also change jobs. Activities for the next school year will be discussed in the future, but the company hopes to continue its activities.

Sitting in my hotel room, wide awake at 1:30 am I am thinking about the planned sessions for the day and evaluating my contributions and capacity given the challenges not pertaining to the work associated with the charter drafting, but other aspects to me being from an underrepresented region and gender. 

I am Manavpreet Kaur (she/her), South Asia representative on the Movement Charter Drafting Committee. I assumed this responsibility not from the day we officially onboarded, but from the very moment I considered to be a part of this work. I joined the movement in 2013 as an academician, working on contributing content related to Forensic science with my students in a set-up which is now well known as “Wikipedia in Classroom”.

My first exposure to the larger conversations beyond Wikipedia project was at WikiConference India 2016. As a coordinator for the conference, I was nominated by my affiliate to attend the following Wikimedia Summit in 2017. The summit was a mind boggling experience for me, as everyone was discussing the state of projects, strategy and future, here I was struggling to prep for the discussions. After the meeting, I got hooked to all the updates and community sessions  as I didn’t want to lose the value of engagement with this strategic process. Later when the call was announced for working groups, I relied on someone else to evaluate my capacity and ability to contribute, and ended up not applying! 

Even though I wasn’t a part of the active groups, I was actively reading and even organized regional strategy salons with other community members. As someone who was interested in this work and as an outsider observer, I could clearly see how limited participation was impacting the representation of the regional challenges and needs in the summaries. When the strategic recommendations were released, I was a part of extensive discussions as a member of AffCom.

From 2020-21, in a professional capacity, I was liaising and supporting the strategic discussions and updates for AffCom with the Movement Strategy and Governance team. Given my interest in strategy, when the call for MCDC membership was out, I reached out to the MSG team to discuss my tricky position as staff and volunteer. After a thorough review of my position, and upon receiving a clearance, I submitted my nomination to join the committee. 

Ever since I nominated, I have learned about the hesitations and uncertainty around my position. So, when I was selected to the committee, I came with the self inflicted burden of expectations to make substantial contribution with cautiously observing any existing or perceived Conflict of Interest.

The participation in the charter discussions have been limited from the region I represent, which was a concern as the Charter when ratified and implemented, is going to impact all communities, irrespective of their participation in the process. MSG team worked on the Ambassadors program to bridge this disconnect. With individual conversations with wikimedians from the region, extended network, regular community sessions and MSG support, there has been appreciable participation from the region.

Apart from the drafting work, community review and discussions, there have been some undocumented challenges that hugely impact one’s participation and engagement but often go unnoticed. As MCDC members, we are in constant pressure to contribute, add experience and perspectives, ultimately delivering the expected drafts. For me, participating in offline meetings has been fiendishly difficult. For all the meetings, I have attended, I have to do at least two 500kms+ journeys to the capital city for visa application on top of the usual 27+ hours of travel. The highlight is me receiving my passport hours before my scheduled flight every single time I am travelling.

For this New York meeting, where MCDC has been invited to join the Board of Trustees meeting, the committee decided to use the pre-meeting days for drafting work, the days otherwise reserved for individuals to acclamatize themselves to the weather and timezone. In order to prepare for the discussions and for the respective Chapter drafting, the committee was meeting various staff members and there were numerous subcommittee meetings, brainstorming sessions, notes and recordings to review along with the regular drafting work. We are also reviewing shared community feedback and making changes to the initial drafts as we are doing the preparatory work.

I joined this meeting with the fatigue from contracting covid and exhausting process of proving capacity, explaining relevance and importance of strategy to the fellow organizers of Wiki Conference India 2023. As the national conference is being organized after a gap of 7 years, this was an ideal space for community to gather and discuss the future of the movement in the region, strategy seemed to be an obvious thematic choice. Because of the limited engagement of others involved, we had to invest hours in gathering data, categorization of submitted programs and drafting a proposal for consideration. Proving the capacity to support the discussions was a challenge I could not overcome. 

Busy days, sleepless nights, 5 cities and 7 seas later, I reached NY! The moment I met the fellow MCDC members, the passion and excitement of everyone for the work overtook the exhaustion and we were in work-mode. I can safely claim that the two drafting days here have been most productive especially for the Roles & Responsibilities subcommittee. It isn’t easy to touch all existing and possible workflows with conscious commitment to keeping the text high-level and easy to consume. We have managed to create a matrix to gather inputs from MCDC members for general overview of how we see the workflows continuing or evolving. While we do this, we are continuously being supported by the MSG and Legal staff members to ensure we are not falling off tracks in our observations.

MCDC members are really appreciative of the extended invitation to join the Board strategy retreat. This meeting gave us all an opportunity to learn more about fundraising, endowment project and participate in planning and prioritization discussions.

As we wind up the work here, we are going back with a lot of planned actions and an extensive to-do list of asynchronous expansion of initiated drafts, drafting group drafts’ review, review of interests expressed for advisors, and meetings with different stakeholders for experiential consultation.

In January-February, Wikimedia Ukraine held our annual Wikimarathon, a campaign dedicated to the birthday of the Ukrainian language section of Wikipedia, which is traditionally celebrated on January 30th. Wikimarathon held every year since 2015, and the goal is to recruit as many volunteers as possible to editing Wikipedia by organizing an online campaign and supporting offline events.

Overall, almost 350 participants created over 1900 articles over the course of the campaign, and we supported over 35 events in Ukraine and abroad with over 500 participants. In this article, we will talk about the results and share our observations.

Wikimarathon’s offline events in Ukraine and beyond

Every year during Wikimarathon in Ukraine we support many offline events where people get together to write articles and teach beginners. They are organized by local volunteers with support from Wikimedia Ukraine. Before the pandemic, some 60 events were typically held annually over the course of several days across most of Ukraine’s regions.

This year’s Wikimarathon was different because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Many people were forced to leave Ukraine and become refugees, so this year Wikimarathon was held in other countries as well, so that Ukrainians who found temporary asylum abroad could join it.

In total, more than 500 people took part in Wikimarathon offline events. The events took place in Ukraine and 4 other countries. Events abroad were supported by local affiliates, such as Wikimedia Poland and Wikimedia Netherlands, and led by Ukrainian volunteers who live in respective countries.

In Kyiv, despite Russian shelling and blackouts of electricity and the Internet, 8 offline trainings were held, where almost 200 people took part.

Training sessions were held not only in large cities of Ukraine, but also in small towns and villages, so that as many people as possible could take part. Very different people became participants and participants – from lyceum students to librarians and journalists. This shows the interest of a wide audience in contributing to the editing of Wikipedia.

In different cities of Poland, four offline trainings were held at once, which were conducted by a Ukrainian Wikipedian who is in evacuation, 25 people took part in them.

The offline event was also held in the Netherlands, Israel and Spain.

Wikimarathon’s online campaign

Apart from offline events, everyone could join Wikimarathon online by creating at least one article on Wikipedia during campaign dates and marking it with a template on the talk page.

During the marathon, 346 participants and participants wrote almost 1900 articles on various topics in Ukrainian.

According to our data, the majority of online participants and participants took part thanks to the CentralNotice Wikipedia. And at least 80 new participants registered for the first time to take part in the Wikimarathon. Many other participants and students are long-term volunteers who take part in the competition every year.

We also held 3 online webinars, during which we taught beginners how to edit Wikipedia.

As part of the Wikimarathon, we had an online quiz dedicated to Wikipedia, in which 70 people took part.

Everyone who participated can receive a souvenir via post; now, after Wikimarathon has ended, the organizers are working on getting the souvenirs out to some 170 people who signed up to receive them.

Holding Wikimarathon during the war

The Wikimarathon was in jeopardy due to constant shelling targeting critical infrastructure, so many people had no electricity or internet at the time. Our online contributors and contributors had to find time between power outages to publish articles. Many of them were looking for places where there are generators to work there and it was very difficult.

Yet, people found a way to contribute nevertheless. “A person can adapt to everything: there is no light – you go to bed, it appears – you work! It was much more difficult to live and work during the occupation and siege of the city, but that is already behind us!”, says librarian Hanna Makarenko, a participant in the #1Lib1Ref campaign

It became a challenge for us to ensure the security of offline events, because there was a constant threat of shelling. We have decided that in cities where the danger is the highest, all offline events should take place in bomb shelters, and in cities where the danger is smaller, there should be a shelter near the venue. In the event of an air raid alert, all participants had to go to shelter immediately. At all offline events, we adhered to these principles.

Despite the difficult security situation, though, we managed to hold Wikimarathon. This year more people took part in it than in the previous one, and we hope that now the newbies who joined in 2023 will become long-term Wikipedia volunteers.

This is a summary of the Movement Charter Drafting Committee’s responses and next steps based on the feedback from the community consultation. For detailed responses to specific comments, see the full feedback doc.

Read responses on Meta

General response

• Readability and clarity: The MCDC is implementing a number of revisions in reaction to comments about the clarity of language, including:
  • Adding a glossary with definitions to terms seen as ambiguous in the feedback.
  • Adding notes explaining the intentions for translators behind certain passages that seem difficult to translate according to the feedback.
  • Implementing many suggestions for simplifying terms and sentence structures (see the detailed response for more).
• Enforcement: The questions about how the Movement Charter will be implemented, and on the consequences of not adhering to it, will be addressed in a later chapter about “amendments and implementation” (for more, see: the Movement Charter outline).
• Making pages editable: The MCDC is chosen to propose the drafts, others making changes can confuse people and misalign all the translations prepared. Community members are welcome, though, to copy the texts and make alternative versions with proposed changes.

Preamble responses

• Paragraph 1: Further explanation of the Movement Charter and the Wikimedia movement will be added in the next drafts, with a more clear paragraph structure.
• Paragraph 2: Terms like “members”, “participants”, “entities”, and “wikis” will be defined or further clarified in their use.
• Paragraph 3 (including question based on Wikimedia Foundation Legal’s feedback): The description of the Wikimedia projects as “largely self-governed” will be retained in the next draft, but other proposed rephrasing will be implemented. The term “knowledge repositories” will be reconsidered.
• Paragraph 4 (“infrastructure”): The paragraph will be significantly rewritten based on the recurring feedback about its current ambiguity and difficulty.

Values & Principles responses

• Potentially missing principles: The drafting group is going to re-assess the Movement Strategy principles and consider what may be missing. The Movement Charter principles aren’t intended to be a duplication of those, but to complement them, as well as to highlight principles that are relevant to the purpose of the Charter.
• Introduction: Emphasis will be put on clarifying and paraphrasing various parts in the next draft, including the movement’s approach to knowledge as “fact-based”, which was a recurring topic in the feedback.
• Subsidiarity: The terms of “Subsidiarity” and “Self-management” will be specifically defined.
• Accountability: The term “Accountability” will be specifically defined and expended upon.
• Resilience: The term “Resilience” will be specifically defined and expended upon.

Roles & Responsibilities responses

• The drafting group will take in mind the feedback on the intentions statement and the overall topics of roles & responsibilities when moving ahead with their drafting work. Some more particular responses to questions and possible topics to cover are included in the detailed response.
• The drafting group is looking into how to use visuals and tables to make the upcoming July draft understandable, practical and accessible.

Other responses may also be found by referring to the Frequently Asked Questions page (the questions in which are all based on the community consultation). Some detailed responses are also available in the full community feedback.

WikiGap in Malaysia has entered its third year in 2023 starting from 2021 via Zoom and 2022 physically in the Kuala Lumpur Library. This year’s edition was special as it was held in four districts all over Malaysia covering four indigenous languages which were Malay, Bajau Sama, Kadazandusun and Semai. These four series of events were successful in collaboration with the Embassy of Sweden in Kuala Lumpur and local co-organisers for each series.

WikiGap Malaysia 2023 started off on International Women’s Day in the National University of Malaysia (UKM) focusing on Malay Wikipedia, the national language of Malaysia. The gender gap in Malay Wikipedia is quite concerning which is only 19.74% women articles written in the language edition. Malay Wikipedians volunteered in organising the event with the help of the co-organiser, Tun Fatimah Hashim Women’s Leadership Centre (PKWTFH). Most of the participants were lecturers and students who were first-timers in editing Wikipedia. Having academic background, they saw some similarities when writing academic articles and Wikipedia articles, which is citation from reliable sources. Some of the lecturers even told us that they now know what to do during retirement which is editing Wikipedia. The co-organiser has been discussing with the user group to organise more events to empower women academicians in Malaysia.

The next week, three series of WikiGap events were held in three districts and three indigenous languages. These languages, however, do not have their own Wikipedia yet. Hence, these three events focused on Wikimedia Incubator. The Bajau Sama community, the second largest indigenous community in Sabah, Borneo wrote many prominent Malaysian women articles in the University College Sabah Foundation (UCSF), Kota Kinabalu, despite having the least participants compared to the other three series. The Bajau Sama community has been with the user group for years since the pandemic to start the Bajau Sama Wikipedia through the Bajau Sama Language and Culture Association (BSBB). They aim to release the language from Incubator by the end of the year in their annual cultural festival.

The third event was part of a week-long event organised by the Institute of Education Teacher (IPG), Kent Campus. A day was given to the user group to have the lecturers and teachers-in-training write as many as women articles in the Kadazandusun language. All of the Kadazandusun Department students were given a day off from lectures just to join the WikiGap event. We were overwhelemed with many participants that filled the large lecture hall. The Kadazandusun language, the only indigenous language taught in Sabah public schools, has its Incubator since 2011 but have been long abandoned. This event broke the years-long hiatus and the participants were determined to release their indigenous language in the near future under the effort of a future wiki club.

The final event was held in an Aboriginal village in Tapah, Perak for the Semai language. The event was just held in a small village hall that could fill a medium-size classroom. The event was helped by the Bajau Sama volunteers who are familiar with editing Wikipedia in Incubator and the co-organiser Batang Padang Aborigines Welfare Association (PEROABP). It was the first time that the Semai Wikipedia in Incubator was written and now it is filled with many women articles. Some of the participants were familiar with editing from last year’s Wiktionary training with the state education department. The event was officially closed by one of the Swedish embassy staff that observe the event.

One common issue that we faced throughout the events was Internet connection. The Semai participants had to share their Internet data with their friends. Even one of the Wikimedian volunteers had to share Internet with the participants to train the participants. In the future, the user group would like to support these communities by providing Internet connection during edit-a-thons to ensure smooth progress of the events. Other than that, March was a school and university semester break. Hence, the user group was not able to organise the events in some schools and universities.

With WikiGap Malaysia 2023 came to a close, the four edit-a-thons attracted 103 editors from all over Malaysia with 272 new woman articles created in four indigenous languages of Malaysia. Hopefully by the next edition of WikiGap next year, we could see some languages hatched from Incubator. We are looking forward to organise more WikiGap edit-a-thons for next year with the Embassy of Sweden in Kuala Lumpur and existing or new partners.

The 80’s were all about the computer, even bigger than our imaginations. The 90’s introduced us to the internet, that nostalgic dial-up song. The 2000’s ushered in mobile everything. The 2010’s took us to “streams” and “clouds.” The 2020’s are ushering in the age of AI, and all the while, audio as a medium has remained in tune with the times.

The past few years have seen an increasing diversification of content in the realm of audio, from podcasts to virtual voice assistants. For many, seeking information–from quick trivia to a metaphysical conundrum–has transpired to a listening experience. Wikimedia content– whether accessed directly, via search engines, or behind the scenes–is everywhere too, forming the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of knowledge. However, our content, the contributions of thousands of volunteers for more than twenty two years, is not often identified correctly. A sound logo is a brief and memorable collection of sounds usually between 1 and 4 seconds. Our sound logo will be a new way to identify Wikimedia content across a range of auditory uses and devices.

The search for the Sound of all Human Knowledge

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees gave a mandate to improve the identification of our content on audio devices. A global contest like no other was set up to achieve this goal. Shani Evenstein Sigalov, Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees and Chair of the Community Affairs Committee, shares: “The way people engage with information and knowledge is always evolving. As a long time community member and academic, I take attributing content and identifying sources seriously. This is also an important movement value for all Wikimedians. From the Board’s perspective, it is essential that listeners on audio devices have an opportunity to learn about the trusted source of their information, especially when it comes from our movement and is contributed by thousands of volunteers. As a trained musician, I personally had a keen interest in this effort since its conception, and was grateful to take part in contributing to it. It is wonderful to see it come to fruition in the same collaborative and open spirit that defines our movement. Having a sound logo is an important milestone, one that will play a critical role in giving our volunteers the recognition and credit they deserve.”

In a process spanning more than a year and inspired by the movement’s experience of visual logo contests, the Sound Logo team together with Wikimedians, engaged with audio professionals and sound enthusiasts around the world, created an online collection of sounds, had on-wiki conversations, hosted community calls, organized workshops in sound editing and audio production, attended virtual and in-person community events, and even created listening booths.

Contest for the Sound of all Human Knowledge

Global contest, community vote

During the month-long contest between September and October, 2022, 3,235 sound logos were submitted by 2,094 participants in 135 countries. Per community curiosity, we shared random batches of submissions weekly as they were coming in. The interpretations of the creative prompts were just fascinating – sounds of crowds and birds, pages turning, knocking on doors, drums, chimes, and gongs, vocals, mouse clicks, and typing on keyboards. 

Luckily, we had help!!! Community members volunteered to screen submissions as they were coming in, and at the end, a selection committee of Wikimedians, in collaboration with audio professionals from the MassiveMusic network, presented us with 10 sound logos to vote on. 

We thought to give the finalists a fair chance and prompted voters to listen to all 10 and order them according to their preferences. A strong method previously used in Wikimedia visual logo contests was selected to determine the winning sound. 2065 votes were cast with 76.7% of voters registered on Wikimedia Commons for more than a year. And now, officially, we have the winning sound.

Meet the creator of the winning sound: engineer by day, audio enthusiast by night

Thaddeus Osborne (he/him) is from Norfolk, Virginia, USA; nuclear engineer daytime and music producer otherwise. Music has comprised a large part of Thad’s life and imagination. With music, as a child, he could travel the world right from his parents’ smalltown backyard. So creating a sound logo for the global projects attempting to share the sum of human knowledge was a natural endeavor. 

Like many, Thad uses Wikipedia regularly, whether to look up trivia or learn more about an important topic at work. To him, the Wikimedia movement represents salvation: “Without reliable and accessible knowledge, we as a species will not be able to live up to our full potential. The more answers and information available to us the better we can tackle big problems,” he wrote for his contest submission.  

Amongst the creative prompts, “Knowledge Growing” was one that resonated the most with Thad. He conceptualized the sound logo based on what knowledge consumption and seeking information mean to him, with the growing crescendo effect of wanting more, that unquenchable human thirst for learning. Thad also wanted to create a sound logo beyond just a catchy melody, rather one that combined multiple elements and painted an auditory  picture. He recorded himself flipping through textbooks and novels, typing away on his keyboard, and clicking his mouse, added a C-major chord, and finished off with a melody that to him sounded like “Wikimedia.” In his own words: 

“My sound logo welcomes its audience into a world of information. The sound of a page turning quickly becomes a library like a whirlwind of typing, clicking, and paper rustling that promises vast stores of wisdom followed by a friendly invitation. This is what I perceive the Wikimedia movement to be about, the open and encouraged sharing of knowledge. Lots and lots of knowledge.”

What’s next?

Now the Sound Logo Team will work with our partner MassiveMusic to professionally re-record the winning sound with the winner Thad. Later this year, we will continue working with voice assistant and technology partners to adopt the winning logo to better identify Wikimedia content worldwide. As well, we will prepare the sound logo for deployment and create different audio specifications for varied usages. For example, a 2-second version, perfect as an audio footnote on social media content, or a longer 60-second version that communities could use for event videos and outreach.

The sound logo will join a suite of more than 2500 protected trademarks alongside the “Wikipedia” and “Wikimedia” community designed visual logos. This is an obligation of the Wikimedia Foundation as the movement’s brand steward and an important first step towards ensuring that our sound logo is not only reflective of Wikimedia’s reputation for trusted, human-centered, reliable, and accessible knowledge for the world but also legally protected. 

There is a wealth of information and resources to explore on the sound logo hub on Meta Wiki. Watch this space for updates. Thank you for helping us reach and celebrate this moment together. 

Other languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Deutsch, English, Tiếng Việt, Türkçe, español, français, italiano, polski, suomi, svenska, čeština, русский, українська, עברית, العربية, हिन्दी, ಕನ್ನಡ, ไทย, 中文, 日本語, 粵語, ꯃꯤꯇꯩ ꯂꯣꯟ, 한국어

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The AbuseFilter condition limit was increased from 1000 to 2000. [1]
• Some Global AbuseFilter actions will no longer apply to local projects. [2]
• Desktop users are now able to subscribe to talk pages by clicking on the Subscribe link in the Tools menu. If you subscribe to a talk page, you receive notifications when new topics are started on that talk page. This is separate from putting the page on your watchlist or subscribing to a single discussion. [3]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 March. It will be on all wikis from 30 March (calendar).

Future changes

• You will be able to choose visual diffs on all history pages at the Wiktionaries and Wikipedias. [4]
• The legacy Mobile Content Service is going away in July 2023. Developers are encouraged to switch to Parsoid or another API before then to ensure service continuity. [5]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

The 80’s were all about the computer, even bigger than our imaginations. The 90’s introduced us to the internet, that nostalgic dial-up song. The 2000’s ushered in mobile everything. The 2010’s took us to “streams” and “clouds.” The 2020’s are ushering in the age of AI, and all the while, audio as a medium has remained in tune with the times.

The past few years have seen an increasing diversification of content in the realm of audio, from podcasts to virtual voice assistants. For many, seeking information–from quick trivia to a metaphysical conundrum–has transpired to a listening experience. Wikimedia content– whether accessed directly, via search engines, or behind the scenes–is everywhere too, forming the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of knowledge. However, our content, the contributions of thousands of volunteers for more than twenty two years, is not often identified correctly. A sound logo is a brief and memorable collection of sounds usually between 1 and 4 seconds. Our sound logo will be a new way to identify Wikimedia content across a range of auditory uses and devices.

The search for the Sound of all Human Knowledge

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees gave a mandate to improve the identification of our content on audio devices. A global contest like no other was set up to achieve this goal. Shani Evenstein Sigalov, Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees and Chair of the Community Affairs Committee, shares: “The way people engage with information and knowledge is always evolving. As a long time community member and academic, I take attributing content and identifying sources seriously. This is also an important movement value for all Wikimedians. From the Board’s perspective, it is essential that listeners on audio devices have an opportunity to learn about the trusted source of their information, especially when it comes from our movement and is contributed by thousands of volunteers. As a trained musician, I personally had a keen interest in this effort since its conception, and was grateful to take part in contributing to it. It is wonderful to see it come to fruition in the same collaborative and open spirit that defines our movement. Having a sound logo is an important milestone, one that will play a critical role in giving our volunteers the recognition and credit they deserve.”

In a process spanning more than a year and inspired by the movement’s experience of visual logo contests, the Sound Logo team together with Wikimedians, engaged with audio professionals and sound enthusiasts around the world, created an online collection of sounds, had on-wiki conversations, hosted community calls, organized workshops in sound editing and audio production, attended virtual and in-person community events, and even created listening booths.

Contest for the Sound of all Human Knowledge

Global contest, community vote

During the month-long contest between September and October, 2022, 3,235 sound logos were submitted by 2,094 participants in 135 countries. Per community curiosity, we shared random batches of submissions weekly as they were coming in. The interpretations of the creative prompts were just fascinating – sounds of crowds and birds, pages turning, knocking on doors, drums, chimes, and gongs, vocals, mouse clicks, and typing on keyboards. 

Luckily, we had help!!! Community members volunteered to screen submissions as they were coming in, and at the end, a selection committee of Wikimedians, in collaboration with audio professionals from the MassiveMusic network, presented us with 10 sound logos to vote on. 

We thought to give the finalists a fair chance and prompted voters to listen to all 10 and order them according to their preferences. A strong method previously used in Wikimedia visual logo contests was selected to determine the winning sound. 2065 votes were cast with 76.7% of voters registered on Wikimedia Commons for more than a year. And now, officially, we have the winning sound.

Meet the creator of the winning sound: engineer by day, audio enthusiast by night

Thaddeus Osborne (he/him) is from Norfolk, Virginia, USA; nuclear engineer daytime and music producer otherwise. Music has comprised a large part of Thad’s life and imagination. With music, as a child, he could travel the world right from his parents’ smalltown backyard. So creating a sound logo for the global projects attempting to share the sum of human knowledge was a natural endeavor. 

Like many, Thad uses Wikipedia regularly, whether to look up trivia or learn more about an important topic at work. To him, the Wikimedia movement represents salvation: “Without reliable and accessible knowledge, we as a species will not be able to live up to our full potential. The more answers and information available to us the better we can tackle big problems,” he wrote for his contest submission.  

Amongst the creative prompts, “Knowledge Growing” was one that resonated the most with Thad. He conceptualized the sound logo based on what knowledge consumption and seeking information mean to him, with the growing crescendo effect of wanting more, that unquenchable human thirst for learning. Thad also wanted to create a sound logo beyond just a catchy melody, rather one that combined multiple elements and painted an auditory  picture. He recorded himself flipping through textbooks and novels, typing away on his keyboard, and clicking his mouse, added a C-major chord, and finished off with a melody that to him sounded like “Wikimedia.” In his own words: 

“My sound logo welcomes its audience into a world of information. The sound of a page turning quickly becomes a library like a whirlwind of typing, clicking, and paper rustling that promises vast stores of wisdom followed by a friendly invitation. This is what I perceive the Wikimedia movement to be about, the open and encouraged sharing of knowledge. Lots and lots of knowledge.”

What’s next?

Now the Sound Logo Team will work with our partner MassiveMusic to professionally re-record the winning sound with the winner Thad. Later this year, we will continue working with voice assistant and technology partners to adopt the winning logo to better identify Wikimedia content worldwide. As well, we will prepare the sound logo for deployment and create different audio specifications for varied usages. For example, a 2-second version, perfect as an audio footnote on social media content, or a longer 60-second version that communities could use for event videos and outreach.

The sound logo will join a suite of more than 2500 protected trademarks alongside the “Wikipedia” and “Wikimedia” community designed visual logos. This is an obligation of the Wikimedia Foundation as the movement’s brand steward and an important first step towards ensuring that our sound logo is not only reflective of Wikimedia’s reputation for trusted, human-centered, reliable, and accessible knowledge for the world but also legally protected. 

There is a wealth of information and resources to explore on the sound logo hub on Meta Wiki. Watch this space for updates. Thank you for helping us reach and celebrate this moment together. 

After more than two years of work, trial and thought, we are glad to announce the launching of Wikeys, a classroom game designed by Wikimédia France. Created with the help of Prismatik and financed by the French Ministry of Culture, this open-licence board game is available for free to print and play. It is meant as an introduction to Wikipedia for children as young as twelve and everyone else above. By encouraging player cooperation to create the best Wikipedia article possible, Wikeys is the perfect tool to learn about open knowledge sharing on the Internet.

To download the print and play version from Wikimedia Commons, click here.

Genesis

Since its creation, Wikimédia France has always been alongside teachers who wish to use Wikipedia or Vikidia as both a learning and a teaching tool. Obviously, Wikipedia is the perfect place to learn. However, the inner workings of the free online encyclopedia can prove difficult to master. As the fifth most visited website worldwide, it has its own rules and community. These are not always easy to understand or follow, and even harder to explain or teach to students whose internet usage is centered around social media.

After organising nine editions of the Wikiconcours lycéen, in partnership with the French center for media and information literacy (Centre de liaison de l’enseignement et des médias d’information), we have gathered many teachers’ testimonies regarding their use of free encyclopedias in their classrooms. We then asked ourselves what would be the best way to teach students the inner workings of Wikipedia, from fourth grade to final year. Writing and editing Wikipedia in class is a time-consuming activity, and explaining what is Wikipedia and its five main pillars can also be challenging. This is why we came up with the idea of a classroom game.

A game

Every teacher looks for a balance between active learning, entertaining and motivating content as well as serious courses. Classroom games are great tools to reach that balance. As a multiplayer experience, they encourage collaboration and help students acquire better social skills. They also allow better knowledge acquisition, especially by involving players actively. The fun aspect can also arouse a student’s curiosity about a subject that would otherwise put them off. Moreover, games motivate learners, consolidate their knowledge, foster problem-solving skills and positively influence young people’s behaviors. All the more reason to create an educational game to teach the founding principles of Wikipedia!

With funding from the French Ministry of Culture, Wikimédia France launched a call for bids back in July 2021. Our organisation requested that bidders conceive a physical game that would be available in print and play for free and in free license, just like the contents of Wikimedia projects. We have received many ambitious proposals and it is Prismatik’s (workers co-op specialised in the design of educational games) that caught our attention. From the start, Léo Capou, the game designer, came up with a collaborative board game in which your objective consists in writing the best possible article for the free encyclopedia. The realisation of the prototype took into account the opinions of a working group made up of four teachers and a comic-book writer who also teaches game design.

After multiple back and forths as well as many playtest sessions, the game is finally available under CC BY-SA 4.0 licence on Wikimedia Commons!

Pedagogical objectives

By demystifying Wikipedia, the educational game is a playful way to approach media and information literacy. The founding principles of free encyclopediasare similar to many other great media structures. These principles are information sourcing, a neutral point of view, furnishing knowledge online and formatting it, as well as fighting plagiarism. In the end, to understand the editorial process behind Wikipedia is to better adopt a critical mindset towards the creation of knowledge on the Internet.

The goal of the game is to create the best Wikipedia article by cooperating with the other players. Together, players will have to: source the information, balance the points of view, strengthen the structure of the article, while avoiding mistakes to score as many points as possible without triggering an edit war.

Gathered in teams of two to seven for a game lasting an average of twenty minutes, players put themselves in the shoes of Wikipedians when they write an article and structure the content by placing cards on the board. They take on different roles representing the variety of profiles in the community of contributors, and deal with more or less delicate subjects, as is the case on the free encyclopedia. Without realizing it, the players adopt encyclopedic reflexes and use a lexicon that is essential to the creation of knowledge.

Encouraging early results

Before the game’s official launch and following the playtest phase, we were invited to show Wikeys to the Canopé Network, a branch of the French Ministry of Education whose goal is to provide tools and formations to teachers all around France in order to facilitate their job. Teachers of the Network played multiple games of Wikeys and their feedback was encouraging, with many saluting the efficiency and design of the game.

Moreover, on Saturday, November 19th, we had the opportunity to introduce Wikeys at the French Wikiconvention. The community responded extremely well and the concept of a free educational game for all to play perfectly resonated with the Wikimedians. Several workshops took place to allow Wikiconvention participants to experience the game first hand and the reviews were stellar. This once again cemented our belief that learning with games is both efficient and enjoyable.

Now it’s your turn!

To play with your students nothing could be easier: just download the free pdf file on Wikimedia Commons.

Once the game is printed, all you have to do is cut out the cards following the cutting instructions in the file, and that’s it!

We invite you to send us your feedback, as it will help us improve this first version. You can also help us translating the game, like the Albanian user group who created an Albanian version!

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the members of the working group: a big thank you to Agnès, Alejandra, Diane, Jérôme, Pauline and Perrine! The time you were kind enough to give us and your feedbacks, were essential for the realisation of this project (which is just beginning!)

Also many thanks to the Albanian user group for helping us reaching the movement. Let’s hope this resource will be useful for as many Wikimedians as possible!

There are many ways you can celebrate Spring in Central and Eastern Europe. In some places you drown or burn Marzanna, in others you wear an adornment made of yarn, until you see a blossoming tree. And in Wikipedia, you write articles about the countries of the region during the CEE Spring writing campaign!

Since 2015 each Spring the Wikimedia communities of Central and Eastern Europe collaborate in sharing knowledge about the region. The rules are simple: starting March 21st for ten weeks all participating communities write articles about each other. To help in creating meaningful content, all participating communities create lists of articles related to their country, community or language, which they feel should exist in all languages of the region. 

And since the new campaign is ready to blossom, let’s celebrate, by sharing some lesser known facts about the campaign!

• Since its start in 2015 the contest has brought in more than 77400 (!) articles to different language versions of Wikipedia. The most fruitful year was 2020, when more than 17000 were created!
• Traditionally the most active community participating in the campaign is Ukraine. Since the campaign started, Ukrainian Wikimdians wrote more than 10800 articles about different countries and communities of the region (with a record number of 4500 in 2020). Maybe this year, in return, 4500 articles about Ukraine can be crated by other communities?
• CEE Spring and CEE bots! Getting the right statistics for the contest is always challenging and takes a lot of time, if it is done manually. Therefore, from the beginning of the CEE Spring, the International team aims to have bots in helping to count the results. We can mention BaseBot and MastiBot tirelessly creating different useful stats for the contest. Thank you, bots and bot operators!
• CEE is a region of many notable women: scientists like Maria Skłodowska-Curie, writers like Svetlana Alexievich, athletes like Anastasiya Merkushyna or singers like Katie Melua. But many of the CEE women still lack articles in Wikipedia. This is why CEE Spring also aims at closing the content gender gap – through organizing CEE Women subcampaign and encouraging local organizers to include women biographies at the articles lists. In result more than 11000 CEE women biographies have been created!
• CEE Spring includes not just big Wikipedia language editions. It also welcomes other underrepresented groups as well. It has always been open even for the smallest Wikipedia language editions, such as Crimean Tatar, Erzya, Võro. 
• It’s not only Wikipedia, but also other Wikimedia projects. In some languages there have been attempts to bring CEE Spring to other projects, like Wikivoyage or Wiktionary. There is also a lot of potential for Wikidata. So – the Spring will be expanding!
• In 2015 a Wikimedian from the CEE region, Vassia Atanassova created 100wikidays, a personal challenge to create Wikipedia articles for 100days straight. The challenge has been taken up by many brave wikipedians in all regions of the wikiworld. And a popular practice was to connect it with CEE Spring and write articles during the contest. For example about CEE Nature or CEE Women.
• The CEE region loves connections, whether it is connections between communities or – between campaigns. This is why since 2022 the WikiForHumanRights campaign is a part of the CEE Spring. 
• For years CEE Spring built connections, networks and joyful collaborations and friendships across the region. On these foundations the first ever regional hub in the Wikimedia movement has been created. This shows that campaigns, while being about content, are about so much more than that. 

So go ahead and celebrate the Spring with us, by writing an article about a CEE country or language. There are already lists of red links to fill and topic to write about waiting for you!

The latest chapter of the Universal Code of Conduct process continues with some promising development. After the Universal Code of Conduct was ratified by the Board of Trustees in February 2021, the next step meant identifying Enforcement Guidelines. The first time the community voted on whether the draft Enforcement Guidelines were ready to implement in March 2022, there was majority support, but based on areas of concern identified by volunteers, the Board asked for further review of several sections of the Enforcement Guidelines. This led to where the UCoC process is now: following a vote where 76% of voters are in support of using the Enforcement Guidelines as revised. As such, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees unanimously voted to ratify the Enforcement Guidelines earlier this month. But what happens next?

First, let’s take a look at what brought us to this point in the process. During the Wikimedia 2030 discussions, a Universal Code of Conduct repeatedly came up in the conversation. Increasing the understanding of safety, harassment and the collaboration it would take to build the world’s knowledge meant a future of inclusion of both people and knowledge. Identifying acceptable behaviors across a globally distributed community with diverse values and perspectives proved challenging but not insurmountable. Communities from across the Wikimedia movement came together to create a UCoC with respect to context, existing local policies, as well as enforcement and conflict resolution structures. 

After the Board ratified the UCoC, the next step included creating an enforcement framework for the code of conduct policy. The process for developing the Enforcement Guidelines began in February 2021. A committee came together with deep experience in policy development and the support and enforcement of community policies. This committee combined the broad knowledge from various stakeholder groups in our movement by including volunteers from the smallest and largest communities and Foundation staff members. In March 2022, the Enforcement Guidelines underwent a community review and voting process. Fifty-eight percent (58.6%) of total voters (2283) voted yes on the Enforcement Guidelines. Of the total voters, 657 left comments. After reviewing the comments, the Board of Trustees asked the staff and Enforcement Guideline Drafting Committee to review and consider comments impacting  several areas of the Enforcement Guidelines. After months of discussion and engagement with the community about the Enforcement Guidelines, the most recent vote in January 2023 led the UCoC to where it is now.

Striving for equitable engagement

As part of our efforts to make the UCoC and the Enforcement Guidelines texts accessible and have a wide and inclusive reach, the Foundation invested efforts in translating all texts into 35 languages, with 32 of them outside North America, Western and Northern Europe. This included translations into about 25 medium and small-sized languages. In addition to this, the UCoC Project team reached out to fellow staff and volunteers to get the SecurePoll text translated into about 25 more languages. Translations were also completed by community members who are familiar with and understand wiki terminologies and context. The Trust and Safety Policy team carefully curated this language list to have a wide and inclusive reach through gathering insights from experienced community members and facilitators seasoned in community engagement. 

The UCoC project team held numerous panels and consultations with community members to discuss the relevance of the UCoC and Enforcement Guidelines, particularly to small and medium-sized wikis. One of these sessions was published on Youtube and shared on a Diff post. Foundation staff shared the video with leadership of community groups interested in diversity, equity and inclusion so they could better educate their members about the Enforcement Guidelines and vote process. This outreach likely led to increased participation in both voters and wiki communities represented.

The vote was held using SecurePoll, a MediaWiki extension allowing for encrypted votes and elections. It is usually used for large elections around the movement, most notable being the Board of Trustees selections. For this vote, eligible voters — those with a certain number of edits on the projects, or who met other criteria — were asked whether or not they supported the enforcement of the Universal Code of Conduct based on the revised guidelines. The vote was open for two weeks, after which a group of volunteer scrutineers reviewed the votes for inconsistencies, like duplicate votes or ineligible voters, before the vote was tallied.

All of this preparation resulted in 3097 votes from 146 wiki communities. Like all statistics, there can be nuance behind the numbers. The 146 wiki communities may be inaccurate because SecurePoll captures the home wiki of the voters. The home wiki is the wiki where people first signed up for an account, which may be different from their actual home wiki. A person may edit on a certain wiki, but may not consider that wiki their ‘home wiki.’ The Movement Charter Drafting Committee has asked for the functionality for voters to select their home wiki in SecurePoll when submitting votes. While the number of home wikis is not a precise measure at this time, this information indicates the number of communities participating in the vote increased by nearly 20.

What is next for the UCoC and the Enforcement Guidelines?

The Board of Trustees met in-person in mid-March. During this meeting, they discussed the results of the Enforcement Guideline vote and the comments collected during the voting process. The Board moved to ratify the Enforcement Guidelines as they are currently written and the decision to ratify the Enforcement Guidelines was unanimous. Next steps will be announced in April 2023. In the meantime, staff will continue to prepare for the work to come. A large part of the work includes developing training materials for the community to use. These training materials must be accessible and supportive of a global community. Similar to the other parts of the UCoC process, community members will be integral to the development of these training materials.

How amazing it is to confidently say the Universal Code of Conduct is moving forward. Stay informed about what comes next and how you can get involved by watching the Universal Code of Conduct page on Meta-wiki.

The Wiki Advocates Philippines User Group is now officially recognized!

The Wiki Advocates Philippines User Group is a group of volunteer Filipino Wikimedians who support the open sharing of knowledge through the various Wikipedia projects, as well as the use of these sites for education and the advancement of gender equality,  organizing initiatives to advance the open knowledge ecosystem, supporting global human rights advocacy, and empowering communities through project development.

We have started to informally organize as a group since 2019 in a stagnant incubator project, which is now the Central Bikol Wiktionary. There were only four active community members back then, working hand in hand with translating the main pages, fixing the templates, and ensuring that the Catanalysis tracked consistent editing activities. As active participants in WikiGap, we have come across another annual campaign that addresses the gender gap in various wiki projects in 2020, the Art+Feminism campaign. From there, gender equality has been another part of our objectives. During the pandemic, while we are confined in our own homes, the group has still managed to delve into other projects ranging from education and the possibility of installing open-access learning portals to remote communities; thus, we have conducted the distribution of Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom modules and donated a Kiwix device to another island. By October 26, 2020, the Philippines was struck by a signal number 5 typhoon Goni. We then organized the Philippines Climate Change translate-a-thon, and later joined the global initiative of WikiForHumanRights campaign, which also tackles the impact of climate change in our world. As we moved forward and grew in number, we were joined by young volunteers, who were also featured during the Wikimania 2022 presentation of the Hatch-A-Wiki project. Our application for the user group took work considering the technicalities, especially in our geographical location. Still, we are lucky enough to be supported by friends in the movement who have been there since our early days.

It was made possible with the efforts of the community members who have been with us since we started small, our fellow Wikimedians around the globe who have shared their knowledge on organizing and leadership, the ESEAP community, and other support staff of the WMF who have believed in our capabilities and strength as a group. It is not only a triumph for our group, but we would also like to share this with those who have stood with us during the long years of being community organizers. We give special thanks to the Art+Feminism group, Wiki World Heritage User Group, Alex Stinson for his guidance on our WikiForHumanRights campaign, Wikimedia Education for providing us a space for our education-related news, Anthere, and the whole Wiki Loves Women Group for letting us be part of the SheSaid Campaign, Butch Bustria, our group adviser, the Language Committee Members for guiding us in the development of our incubator projects, our Program Officer for grants in the ESEAP region and its committee members, the rest of the Community Resources team for never doubting our capacities for the edit-a-thons and campaigns we have run, the previous and current members of the Affiliations Committee, and lastly, the whole Wikimedia Community. Congratulations to all of us!

Other languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Deutsch, English, Tiếng Việt, Türkçe, español, français, italiano, polski, suomi, svenska, čeština, русский, українська, עברית, العربية, فارسی, हिन्दी, বাংলা, ಕನ್ನಡ, ไทย, 中文, 日本語, 粵語, ꯃꯤꯇꯩ ꯂꯣꯟ, 한국어

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems

• Last week, some users experienced issues loading image thumbnails. This was due to incorrectly cached images. [1]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 March. It will be on all wikis from 23 March (calendar).
• A link to the user’s Special:CentralAuth page will appear on Special:Contributions — some user scripts which previously added this link may cause conflicts. This feature request was voted #17 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
• The Special:AbuseFilter edit window will be resizable and larger by default. This feature request was voted #80 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
• There will be a new option for Administrators when they are unblocking a user, to add the unblocked user’s user page to their watchlist. This will work both via Special:Unblock and via the API. [2]

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on 24 March at 17:00 (UTC). See details and how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

The Wikimania Steering Committee, the 2024 organizing team, and the Wikimedia Foundation Movement Communications team are happy to announce that the city of Kraków in Poland will host Wikimania in 2024.

We are grateful for the expressions of interest received for hosting Wikimania in 2024, 2025, and 2026. Bringing our movement’s beloved event to life is not simple and we took many criteria into consideration. Kraków had a strong submission and an experienced and enthusiastic team from across the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region supporting it, ready to get going. We were also long due in this vibrant region – the previous Wikimania in CEE was Gdańsk in 2010.

Kraków is a timeless city blending innovation and modernity with ancient gems of culture and heritage, an ideal fit for Wikimedians. Supported with a robust, collaborative design, we are confident that the impact of Wikimania 2024 will be great for our projects, the movement in general, and local communities in the CEE region. Wikimania usually takes place in July or August. Get ready, get excited!

We appreciate the collaborative approach to hosting Wikimania, a new approach inspired by the distributed virtual Wikimanias in 2021 and 2022, and the great work of the 2023 Singapore Wikimania regional ESEAP organizers. In addition to the support we provide as the stewards of Wikimania, together with the Foundation’s Movement Communications team, we plan to facilitate more time for Wikimania organizers so they can learn from each other in practice. That’s why we hope to announce the hosts for 2025 and 2026 in the coming months. So, if you and your community have been thinking about hosting Wikimania, please review the criteria and reach out to us as soon as possible, wikimania@wikimedia.org.

Wholehearted congratulations to the 2024 Wikimania team. Together we look forward to what will surely be a memorable event, welcoming you all, whether in-person or online, to Kraków.

Meet Essenam, Mermoze, Fatima, and Valentin, four volunteers from the French-Speaking community building the bridge between the Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC) and their communities.

The MCDC is responsible for drafting the content of the Movement Charter, and the communities hold the responsibility of reviewing it and suggesting improvements. This collaborative process requires some effort and time.

Essenam and Fatima: My name is Fatima Oury Sow Gueye, a librarian-documentalist in Senegal. With my colleague Essenam, an archivist-librarian, we represent “The Librarian and Archivist Sister’s” to share our passion for books, libraries, archives, and of course Wikimedia projects via different communication channels that we join since 2020.

Since 2021, we have been organizing online and in-person events to introduce Wikipedia and its sister projects to the community in Senegal and beyond. We participate in several projects, including Wiki Wake Up Africa with our colleagues in Benin who helped us implement the program in Senegal through weekly learning webinars about Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Commons among others.

With our participation to Wiki Indaba 2022, we were able to make new contacts with members of the movement and learn about various projects, especially the Charter of the Wikimedia movement. We, therefore, felt it necessary to organize conversations about this charter to allow the small community of Wikimedians in Senegal and Togo, the two respective countries of the two organizers who reside in Senegal, to know better the movement, its functioning and to give their opinions about this charter.

We have organized three community conversations in Senegal and Togo: one in-person in Dakar with the Senegalese community and two online with the Togo community and another one with both communities together.

It was a very enriching experience where two communities (Senegal – Togo) got to know each other and were able to discuss and exchange the understanding of the movement’s charter in a West African context.

Valentin: I am Valentin Nasibu, Wikimedian from the DRC and contributor since 2017. I am the co-founder of the Democratic Republic of Congo User Group. I am a trainer and coordinator of the French-speaking Africa zone of the Wiki for Human Right project (2023) and an Ambassador of the Movement Charter for my community.

I organized in-person and online conversations on the first three chapters of the movement’s charter to gather and publish feedback from my community members and I also translated these three chapters into Lingala.

Mermoze: I am a founding member of the Wikimedia Benin user group. We have joined several profiles, members of NGOs, experienced and new contributors, and those of our national languages. We held several online and in-person meetings with a wide range of participants. Furthermore, we received many feedback about the content and format of the document presented, and the participants felt very valued and happy to have been part of those conversations.

Most people are interested in participating in future discussions as long as they are informed earlier.

Dear WLE community! Something exciting is coming!

The 11th edition of the Wiki Loves Earth 2023 photo contest is on its way! 

What is it?

Wiki Loves Earth is an annual international photographic competition. Participants take pictures of local natural heritage in their countries and upload them to Wikimedia Commons, a sister project of Wikipedia. For all participating countries there are separate competitions organized by local teams.

For more information follow our page!

When? 

This year WLE will take place between 1st May and 31st July. We have a flexible approach regarding local dates, and local organizers decide when exactly to hold their contest within the international timeframe.

How you can join a contest this year as an organizer?

For that you need:

• Team of volunteers with clear roles and timelines;
• Defining eligible natural sites (must be officially protected);
• Preparing a landing page for the local contest;
• Promotion for the contest in social networks;
• Jury to evaluate the photos (select top-15 local winners for an international contest);
• Awards for your winners.

Find out more about the process in our detailed guidelines for the local teams.

And if you want to upload your photos and become a participant, check out all the details in our rules.

Follow our channels for local organizers to be first updated about the main news:

• Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/wlecommunity/
• Telegram chat: @WLE organizers 2022
• A mailing list for local organizers: wikilovesearth@lists.wikimedia.org

Also, subscribe on our social media channels:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wikilovesearth/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/interwle
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/WikiLovesEarth
• Website: https://wikilovesearth.org/

If you have any questions, please contact the international team at wle-team@wikimedia.org.ua. We are always happy to answer your questions!

Take time for the preparation and stay tuned for Wiki Loves Earth 2023!

*Find Spanish and Arabic translations here*

We are the largest open, collaborative ecosystem of projects in history and we exist because of the contributions of countless volunteers over more than twenty years. Here is a lightweight, collaborative way to celebrate them. 

Wikimedia is a living, digital repository of information, media, and knowledge, and we wouldn’t be here without thousands of Wikimedians. Piece by piece, they – you – have been building the puzzle striving to capture the sum of all human knowledge, and it grows everyday … OK, sometimes it shrinks when your article is deleted for lacking verifiable sources or that photo you loved infringed on copyrights, but to acknowledge the incredible achievements of the Wikimedia movement, we have decades worth of people to celebrate and here is one attempt to do that!

Introducing WikiCelebrate – an initiative to celebrate exceptional Wikimedians 

Each month we will celebrate a different Wikimedian, acknowledging the great people that have contributed so much to bringing us to where we are today, and the thousands that continue to do so. This recognition is as important as our passion for facts, sources, copyleft images, lists, tables, and tables and lists of lists. 

Celebrated Wikimedians are the cornerstones and the pillars of our movement, holding up entire spans of the movement on their own, adding a bit of mortar here, smoothing a bit of paint there. Wikimedians that inspire and support others, trusted project leaders, seasoned functionaries, or the everyday fixers. 

The Movement Communication team is kicking this off and we’d love to collaborate with you – community groups and other teams at the Foundation – to celebrate more. We warmly invite you to write about the people celebrated each month. If you know them, share some love. If there’s an outstanding Wikimedian that you think should be celebrated, recommend them. We will also ask each Celebrated Wikimedian to nominate other community members. What’s a celebration without inviting others?

And without further ado, we kick off WikiCelebrate with:

Penny Richards!

Finding joy in what she contributes to Wikimedia and how she accomplishes that is fundamental for Penny Richards (userpage). Penny loves that she can make connections with folks around the world and join efforts with a large global project like Wikipedia all the while from home and in her pajamas. 

“It’s a chance to use my research and writing skills every day. I don’t have an academic job and I don’t have space in my life for a big independent research project right now, but a daily biography is manageable and satisfying. My usual project on Wikipedia is WikiProject Women in Red; that’s where I put most of my energy and find most of my community.” 

Leafing her way through history

Penny has a passion for learning about people and leafing through old newspapers, yearbooks and journals. Naturally, biographies comprise a large part of her contributions to Wikimedia. Penny tries to edit an article a day, most days–whether to create anew, improve or add images. She also shares her own and the work of her community on other platforms, like Pinterest, Twitter, and more recently, Mastodon. The portrait of Alberta Virginia Scott is one of her favourites and she loves to do justice to the stories behind such powerful photos.  

“I have loved biographical dictionaries forever–my grandmother had Webster’s Biographical Dictionary, and I liked looking at all the names and stories in it, even as a kid. When I was teaching school, I’d have students write short biographies, for example about women in the French Revolution.”

Encouraged by Wikimedian Cliotropic, Penny started her Wikimedia account in 2011. Even when historical sources are incomplete, she believes in using whatever is available (and reliable), and is grateful to the Wikipedia Library for that. However, this isn’t just a problem of the past. The inequalities in available resources are very much alive today. Penny dares us to “imagine a media landscape where, instead of constant celebrity updates, there’d be abundant, accessible, and informative articles in local and national outlets about what engineers or microbiologists are doing, or poets, educators, nurses, or archaeologists. If we had more diverse news stories and magazine articles, we’d have the secondary sources for a wider range of Wikipedia articles too.” 

Penny also likes to contribute to WikiQuote as a way to represent more voices and add more accurate sourcing for them. Penny shares a quote about Florence Foster Jenkins who, like her, was from Pennsylvania: “Critics have long wondered whether Coloratura Jenkins’ art can be described as singing at all. But she will intrepidly attack any aria, scale its altitudes in great swoops and hoots, assaying its descending trills with the vigor of a maudlin cuckoo.” (Time magazine, November 2, 1942) 

Connections around the world

If she’s not working on something for WikiProject Women in Red, she might be supporting WikiProject Disability or the Los Angeles group. Making connections is another encouragement for Penny to keep contributing. The social side of Wikimedia is integral to our existence, whether participating in a project or edit-a-thon or engaging in civil discourse online to improve articles, and it can reverberate far beyond. Penny was working on an article about a Paris-based dancer, Nyota Inyoka (1896-1971), and had mentioned that the Getty Institute had videotape of her dancing, with a link to their catalog record. A dance historian in France contacted her, excited to learn this, and wondered if Penny could help her see this video. A few emails later, the historian in France was viewing moving images of her research subject. That made Penny happy. 

Everyone can share in the sum of all human knowledge and Penny recommends newcomers to start small. “If you enjoy learning about, say, Canadian writers, maybe don’t start with editing the actual article titled “Canadian literature,” Penny says. “Instead, look for an article about a writer or a genre that you can improve, make small edits at first, learn something new each time. When you’re feeling comfortable, try starting an article about a writer or a book that’s on a “redlist” (so you know at least one other editor thinks it might be a good topic!).” Penny even recommends editing about topics one is somewhat unfamiliar with, to truly rely on sources and learn something new in the process. “As a bonus,” Penny says, “if you’re not too attached to your edits, it won’t feel personal if/when they get deleted or changed.”

Weaving the web of Wikimedia

For Penny, pressing publish on a new article is only halfway done, it’s a whole other beginning. That’s the time to weave the new information into the fabric of Wikipedia by creating links, adding the article to appropriate lists, and connecting with related projects. Watching changes happen to an article can help one learn too. Asking for help is another and Penny believes in it. There are many ways to make connections with others inside and outside the movement by contributing. Gardening is a metaphor used sometimes in relation to contributing to Wikimedia. For many, pruning and trimming their articles or watching them blossom and grow is the joy of it all.

“Small contributions add up. You don’t have to learn everything before you jump in. It’s not “all done already.” There’s a lot of community to be found, by joining a WikiProject or an edit-a-thon, and working towards a goal together with other editors all over the world.”

Learn more about WikiCelebrate and Penny Richards, share some love, and nominate others. 

Year 2023 marks the 20th anniversary of the UNESCO 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. 

Living heritage represents a constantly evolving continuum of customs, arts, and traditions that bridge the past and future generations. While it is diverse and colorful, the expressions of living heritage are also a valuable resource for learning to live sustainably and peacefully in our environment.

The Wiki Loves Living Heritage campaign invites Wikimedia volunteers, cultural institutions and heritage practitioners to come together to document and celebrate living heritage around the world.

Launch event

The online Launch Event on Friday 17 March 13–14.30 UTC starts the global campaign. It will be opened by Tim Curtis (UNESCO), Satdeep Gill (Wikimedia Foundation), Leena Marsio (Finnish Heritage Agency) and Jorijn Neyrinck (Workshop Intangible Heritage Flanders) representing the ENFP European Network of Focal Points in the UNESCO 2003 Convention and Sergei Bazarya (Council of Europe).

Examples of Wikimedia activities bringing intangible cultural heritage online illustrate different ways of contributing to the project. There will be time for questions and answers.

Browse Living Heritage around the world

The project website displays intangible cultural heritage elements from around the world in all Wikimedia languages. In addition to the elements inscribed by UNESCO, items inventoried nationally or selected manually are displayed in the pages. The listings on the website can be used as a starting point for uploading media or gathering items for editathons or translation campaigns. Additionally, a dedicated page for any element collects resources for editing articles in all languages. Toolkits supporting various activities can also be added to the website throughout the year.

Focus on Living Heritage

The website’s main page will function as a publication and a window to events taking place around the world. It is a space for writings and reports, galleries and videos. Materials will be archived and made translatable.

The project explores ethical considerations around documenting living heritage. The Ethical sharing webinar in April will take a closer look at the topic.

One particular topic encourages contributions on the preservation and revival of cultural heritage in times of crisis through Open Access. The other area of focus is on cultures of diaspora communities.

Join the activities!

We are inviting affiliates and volunteers to join the activities.

• Start organizing: Team up with the local heritage communities and UNESCO intangible cultural heritage coordinators and create bigger or smaller activities together. Find your local contacts here or request assistance in making contact from the organizers.
• Share widely: Use the Wiki Loves Living Heritage site and all the social media channels of the project and the partners to share your activities online. The campaign highlights living heritage around the world throughout 2023.
• Contribute to Wikimedia projects: Make living heritage more visible on Wikimedia projects by adding data to Wikidata, photographing and adding media to Wikimedia Commons and editing Wikipedia articles. We are looking for people to help import the national inventories of living heritage to make the local heritage elements visible in the project.
• Inspire and be inspired: Help others contribute to Wikimedia projects by sharing your learnings and models with other affiliates, communities and heritage coordinators.

Stay updated!

• Follow the Wiki Loves Living Heritage website.
• Watch the videos on the YouTube channel or join the regular planning meetings!
• Subscribe to the Wiki Loves Living Heritage newsletter
• Follow Wiki Loves Living Heritage on Twitter • Facebook • Instagram • YouTube • LinkedIn
• Email wikiloveslivingheritage@gmail.com
• In 2023 Wiki Loves Living Heritage reports in a monthly section of This Month in GLAM.

We wish to thank the following organizations for their support: European Heritage Days, Workshop intangible heritage Flanders & Flemish Commission for UNESCO in Belgium, Quebec Council for Living Heritage, Finnish Heritage Agency, Culture Ireland, Dutch Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage, and Federal Office of Culture Switzerland.

The project is initiated by the European network of focal points for the UNESCO 2003 Convention (ENFP) and AvoinGLAM.