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News from the Wikimedia Foundation and about the Wikimedia movement

Posts Tagged ‘Wikimedia Sverige’

Translatewiki.net in the Swedish spotlight

This post is available in 2 languages:
English  • Svenska

English

Translatewiki.net’s logo.

Most Swedes have a basic understanding of English, but many of them are far from being fluent. Hence, it is important that different computer programs are localized so that they can also work in Swedish and other languages. This helps people avoid mistakes and makes the users work faster and more efficienttly. But how is this done?

First and foremost, the different messages in the software need to be translated separately. To get the translation just right and to make sure that the language is consistent requires a lot of thought. In open source software, this work is often done by volunteers who double check each other’s work. This allows for the program to be translated into hundreds of different languages, including minority languages that commercial operators usually do not focus on. As an example, the MediaWiki software that is used in all Wikimedia projects (such as Wikipedia), is translated in this way. As MediaWiki is developed at a rapid pace, with a large amount of new messages each month, it is important for us that we have a large and active community of translators. This way we make sure that everything works in all languages as fast as possible. But what could the Wikimedia movement do to help build this translator community?

We are happy to announce that Wikimedia Sverige is about to start a new project with support from Internetfonden (.Se) (the Internet Fund). The Internet Fund supports projects that improve the Internet’s infrastructure. The idea of translating open software to help build the translator community is in line with their goals. We gave the project a zingy name: “Expanding the translatewiki.net – ‘Improved Swedish localization of open source, for easier online participation’.” This is the first time that Wikimedia Sverige has had a project that focuses on this important element of the user experience. Here we will learn many new things that we will try to share with the wider community while aiming to improve the basic infrastructure on translatewiki.net. The translation platform translatewiki.net currently has 27 programs ready to be translated into 213 languages by more than 6,400 volunteers from around the world.

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The Umepedia Challenge has now ended!

This post is available in 2 languages:
svenska  • English

English

The Umepedia Challenge is the latest part of the work done in the QRpedia project Umepedia.

The winner will, amongst other things, be able to showcase this on her/his user page.

Everybody who takes part in the Challenge and through their efforts helps us once again to show how fantastic Wikipedia is will be able to showcase this beautiful award on her/his user page.

A graph listing all the different language versions of the 40 original articles.

The Umepedia Challenge has now come to an end and we are extremely happy with the results! The contest took place between May 1-31 and has been focusing on creating (initially) forty Wikipedia articles about the Swedish city of Umeå in as many languages as possible. These forty articles have been expanded over the last year by a group of Swedish volunteers and translated into English in the weeks before the contest.

Based on other previous online contests we had set our hopes low with only 25 contributions, but this was reached and surpassed on the very first day of the Challenge! As I am writing this (May 27) we have a stunning 551 contributions by 37 participants! It’s also great to see that 11 languages now have all 40 articles available, making them an excellent source of information about the city of Umeå. We are blown away by this! Because so many languages already had all of the 40 articles created, we decided, 20 days into the contest, to add six more bonus articles. We want to sincerely thank all of you for the hard work on Wikipedia and for spreading information about the contest (and to Amical Wikimedia for the idea of using the simple and elegant WLM design in online writing contests) and to Wikimedia CH for sponsoring a number of special prizes!

So why did we limit ourselves to 40 (+6) articles? Well, the idea was that we wanted to focus the efforts and make it possible for the participants to see how much work was left. During the year we will place signs with “QRpedia codes” next to these 40 historically and culturally important places in Umeå (which is currently the European Capital of Culture). You might already know this, but a QRpedia code is a smart form of a Quick Response (QR) code, which automatically identifies what language you are using on your phone and directs you to the right language version on Wikipedia, so that you can read the article in your native tongue. This is an excellent way for immigrants, international students and tourists to enjoy and learn more about the city. Having all of these articles ready will make it easier for us to come to an agreement with the house owners to put signs on their buildings, so in that sense, the volunteer effort is extremely valuable.

One problem is, for example, that tourists have to pay a lot for the roaming charges, but luckily Umeå already has a city-wide Wifi network that is free to use for 15 minutes per day. On top of the 40 places, we also have QRpedia codes in the exhibits in Guitars – the Museum, connected to famous musicians. Perhaps our next challenge will include these, and Umepedia Challenge 2.0 will surely include other important articles that will support the 40 Umepedia Challenge articles in order to give them more depth. In future contests we will also do our best to improve the point system further to make it even more fair, while keeping it fun and easy.

For anyone interested in organizing translation challenges in the future please feel free to use the handy tool that we developed, where the number of languages an article has been translated into can be counted using calls to the Wikidata API.

The winners of the main prizes in the Challenge are:

1st: User:Satdeep gill = 828 points
2nd: User:Artificial123 = 763 points
3rd: User:ANKAN GHOSH DASTIDER = 710 points
4th: User:Semso98 = 574 points
5th: User:DirkVE = 526 points
6th: User:Stryn = 396 points

Congratulations to all of you!

Warm regards,

John Andersson, Project Manager, Wikimedia Sverige. John.Andersson@wikimedia.se

Swedish

Umepedia Challenge är nu över!

Umepedia Challenge är den senaste delen inom QRpedia-projektet Umepedia.

Vinnaren kommer bland annat att kunna visa upp det här fina digitala priset på sin användarsida.

Alla som har deltagit i tävlingen och genom deras insatser än en gång visat hur fantastikt Wikipedia är belönas med det här vackra priset att visa på sin användarsida.

Ett diagram som visar hur många av de ursprungliga fyrtio artiklarna som finns på de olika språken.

Umepedia Challenge har nu kommit till sitt slut och vi är extremt glada över resultatet! Tävlingen ägde rum maj 1-31 och fokuserade på att skapa (inledningsvis) fyrtio artiklar om Umeå på så många språk som möjligt. Dessa fyrtio artiklar har utökats under det gångna året av en grupp svenska volontärer och översattes till engelska under veckorna före tävlingen.

Baserat på andra online-tävlingar satte vi våra förväntningar lågt med enbart 25 bidrag. Detta resultat nåddes och överskreds dock redan första dagen på tävlingen! I skrivande stund (27 maj) har vi imponerande 551 bidrag av 37 deltagare! Det är även fantastiskt att se att 11 språk nu har alla 40 artiklar tillgängliga vilket gör dem till en utmärkt källa för information om Umeå stad. Vi blev verkligen helt överväldigade av detta! Eftersom så många språk redan hade skapat alla 40 artiklar bestämde vi oss för att, 20 dagar in i tävlingen, lägga till ytterligare 6 bonusartiklar. Vi vill rikta ett stort tack till er alla för ert ihärdiga arbete på Wikipedia och för att ni hjälpt till att sprida informationen om tävlingen (och till Amical Wikimedia för idén om att använda den enkla och eleganta WLM-designen för skrivtävlingar online) samt till Wikimedia CH för sponsringen av flera specialpriser.

Så varför begränsade vi oss till 40 (+6) artiklar? Jo, idén var att vi ville fokusera insatsen och göra det enkelt för deltagarna att se hur mycket arbete som återstod. Sedan kommer vi under året att sätta upp skultar med “QRpedia-koder” intill dessa 40 historiskt och kulturellt viktiga platserna i Umeå (som för närvarande är Europeisk kulturhuvudstad). Du kanske redan vet detta men en QRpedia-kod är en smart typ av Quick Response (QR)-kod vilken automatiskt identifierar vilket språk du använder på mobiltelefonen och tar dig till den språkversionen av Wikipedia, så att du kan läsa artikeln på ditt modersmål. Detta är ett utmärkt sätt för invandrare, internationella studenter och självfallet turister att ta del av och lära sig mer om staden. Att ha alla dessa artiklar redo kommer att göra det enklare för oss att komma överens med husägarna om var skyltarna ska sitta så även för detta har volontärinsatsen varit extremt värdefull.

Ett problem är självfallet att exempelvis turister måste betala höga roaming-avgifter, tursamt nog har Umeå redan ett stadstäckande wifi-nät som är fritt att använda 15 minuter om dagen. Utöver de 40 platserna har vi även QRpedia-koder i utställningarna i Guitars – the Museum, kopplade till artiklar om kända artister. Vår nästa utmaning kommer kanske inkludera dessa och Umepedia Challenge 2.0 kommer säkerligen att innehålla mer viktiga sidoartiklar så att de nuvarande artiklarna får mer djup. Då kommer vi även att arbeta vidare på att utveckla ett ännu rättvisare poängsystem som dock kommer att vara fortsatt enkelt, då det är en central aspekt för att göra det roligt.

För den som är intresserad av att organisera översättningstävlingar i framtiden kan vi tipsa om ett bekvämt verktyg som vi utvecklat där antalet språk en artikel har översatts till automatiskt räknas ihop genom anrop till Wikidatas API. Det sparar en hel del tid!

De sex vinnarna i Umepedia Challenge är:

Första: User:Satdeep gill = 828 poäng
Andra: User:Artificial123 = 763 poäng
Tredje: User:ANKAN GHOSH DASTIDER = 710 poäng
Fjärde: User:Semso98 = 574 poäng
Femte: User:DirkVE = 526 poäng
Sjätte: User:Stryn = 396 poäng

Ett stort grattis till samtliga!

Med vänliga hälsningar,

John Andersson, projektledare, Wikimedia Sverige. John.Andersson@wikimedia.se

“No interviews. Except for Wikipedia!” – Documenting the Eurovision Song Contest on Wikimedia Commons

One of my photos of Conchita Wurst. A few days ago this photo was selected as a “Quality image

I like to illustrate Wikipedia articles, and I like to take unique photos. When Swedish singer Loreen won the Eurovision Song Contest 2012 in Baku, Azerbaijan, it meant the Eurovision was coming to Sweden, my own country, and that meant I had the chance to take unique photos. I uploaded about 870 media files to Wikimedia Commons from the Eurovision Song Contest 2013. My plan was to show the Wikipedia community what was possible, and that the following year (this year) people from the new host country would continue the project that I started. Emmelie de Forest from Denmark won in 2013, and the competition moved across the Øresund and is held in Copenhagen this year. So I thought I could continue the project myself.

As I’m writing this, there are Wikipedia articles about the Eurovision Song Contest in 95 languages, and about the Eurovision Song Contest 2014 in 52 languages. Tonight, on 10 May 2014, over 180 million people will be watching the show broadcast live from Copenhagen. People write about it on Wikipedia, and many more read about it. After the winners from a semifinal are announced, the Wikipedia articles are updated in seconds. But there have been almost no photos from any of the competitions.

The sign I brought to Copenhagen, and showed to all the artists.

Compared to last year, I am better prepared this time. I printed a sign with the lines I wanted the artists to say, and I even got it laminated. Also, I arrived in Copenhagen two weeks before the grand final, instead of one week. Last year I didn’t even know that there were a lot of photo opportunities in the first week. I attended the press conferences after the semifinals, and got photos of the twenty artists that qualified from each of the two semifinals, and after that I tried to get video presentations with as many of them as possible. I managed to get twelve of them, and there were a total of 39.

The first days of the first week consists of “Meet & Greets” with all the artists. This year I knew that, and on Monday (April 28) I took photos of the artists in the press conference room, and then I waited in line outside the interview rooms. There are so many reporters who want to do interviews. “Only 5 minutes”. “Only 10 minutes”. When it was finally my turn, I showed the artists my laminated sign, made them present themselves and their song in English, and then in their mother tongue (and in some cases one or two other languages), and then I was done. I got out of the interview room after about 30 seconds, and the other reporters always looked so surprised that I was done so quickly.

After I was done, I rushed back to the press conference room to take photos of the next artist, and then back to the interview rooms. Between some of the meet & greets there were breaks, and after the breaks the host of the next meet & greet would say “I hope you all had a great lunch”. But I never had time for lunch. I had just been standing in line outside the interview rooms.

Me holding the Wikipedia microphone from Wikimedia Sveriges technology pool.

On Tuesday, things got better. I learned that I could wave my microphone (with the Wikipedia logo) and show my laminated sign to the “head of press”-people and explain that I only need 30 seconds. I quickly noticed how differently I was treated. There is one head of press for every competing country, and they all have different rules. But it was obvious that almost all of them knew that when people google the artists, they are very likely to end up on Wikipedia. And the Head of press-people want the Wikipedia articles to be as good as possible. Suddenly they let me cut the line, and the other reporters weren’t that annoyed, since I only needed 30 seconds. Some even said “only the biggest newspapers” or some only allowed interviews with reporters from their own country. “And the guy from Wikipedia.” (That’s me). There were even those who said “No interviews. Except for Wikipedia!”

For example, when I was standing in line to interview the wonderful Conchita Wurst from Austria, her head of press said that this day they only did interviews with the biggest newspapers. One reporter was inside the interview room, and while we were waiting the head of press said with a smile on his face, as a joke “So, who of you comes from the biggest newspaper?”. I raised my Wikipedia microphone and said “Seventh largest website in the world!”. That was actually quite popular, and one of the other reporters said “Good point”.

As I’m writing this, the grand final will be over in approximately 24 hours, so I have no idea who will win or where the Eurovision Song Contest will be held next year. All I know is that there are already photos of the winner on Wikimedia Commons, and also a video presentation. I have taken photos of all the artists in the press center, and also on stage. Right now I have uploaded 835 files from this year’s competition, and I have many more to upload.

This year I have also managed to get a video presentation of all of the 37 songs! I actually recorded the last one today. For two weeks I have chased the artists like Pokémons (although I have never played Pokémon) and I finally caught them all. Yesterday I had all but one. Molly from the United Kingdom never had the time for interviews, and today the head of press said that they weren’t giving any interviews, because Molly had to save her voice. But of course he said she could do a short presentation for Wikipedia!

Molly presenting herself and her song in the Eurovision Song Contest 2014.

Albin Olsson, Wikimedian mostly active on Swedish Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons

Wikipedia helps immigrants learn Swedish

Some of the SFI students in Värnamo during their introductory Wikipedia workshop.

To start using the Internet as an adult can be hard. In 2013 Wikimedia Sverige decided to reach out to a very underrepresented group of people – immigrants. In Sweden, research has shown that immigrants learning Swedish as a new language are very interested in learning how to use the internet and incorporating that into their education. However, teachers find it tricky to integrate web participation into the curriculum. We figured (surprise surprise) that multilingual Wikipedia would make a great tool for teachers to use! Both to teach the students basic Swedish language skills and to naturally integrate computer use into their education.

We partnered up with GR Utbildning and managed to find external funding from the Internet Infrastructure Foundation (.SE) for a project aiming at changing the current curriculum, one teacher at the time. (We strongly suggest that you look around for funds available in your country too –  feel free to ask us for pointers). We teamed up with three Swedish for Immigrants (SFI) teachers in two different schools and started teaching them about Wikipedia.

In order to work efficiently on Wikipedia, it’s necessary to know the basics of writing. After a discussion with the teachers, we decided focus on students who possessed academic backgrounds. It turned out these students were still more proficient in reading than writing Swedish. We decided that the most suitable way for them to contribute would be to have them translate from Swedish into their respective native languages.

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Brainstorming about Wikipedia’s diversity

This post is available in 3 languages: English  • Svenska Deutsch

English

A large group of people from all over the world gathered in Berlin to find ways to improve our diversity.

It was a busy schedule (my workshop is the second one from the bottom in the middle).

Recently I was able to participate in the Wikimedia Diversity Conference in Berlin as part of a cooperation that Wikimedia Sverige has with Europeana, where we worked to create new collaborations and share experiences with GLAMs and Wikimedia Chapters.

During the fantastically well-organized conference (kudos WMDE, WMF, WMUK and WMNL for your hard work) I gave a thirty minute presentation, followed by a workshop on how the Wikimedia movement can use thematic edit-a-thons to attract under-represented groups to Wikipedia. This is something that we have already tried at Wikimedia Sverige during our three thematic edit-a-thons, where the focus was to encourage more women to get involved in topics like women’s history, female scientists and fashion. Thematic edit-a-thons differ from general edit-a-thons, as they focus on one particular topic, producing a burst of improvements within a field that is particularly weak. Thematic edit-a-thons also foster a sense of team spirit among participants since they usually share the same interests and expertise, which in turn facilitates cooperation.

Drawn from survey answers and conversations, the major conclusions that we have drawn from these events are (and remember that these are based on a small sample that might be culture specific, so it might very well differ from other chapters):

  • Cooperate with organizations that already have a a lot of women connected to them. They can help invite their members and share material and expertise (don’t forget the universities)!
  • There seems to be a great interest to be involved, we just have to find a good way to meet the female volunteers halfway. A central point seems to be to host events on a regular basis, but also try to add other fun additions like speakers, snacks, mingling and guided tours etc. (however these should not take too much time away from writing, as volunteers usually want to finish what they started during an edit-a-thon).
  • There are different subgroups within groups of specific interests and expertise. The different subgroups might not necessarily care to participate in the other groups events.

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Swedish Museums freely sharing images from their collections

This post is available in 2 languages: Svenska  • English

English

Porträtt, Rudolf II som Vertumnus. Guiseppe Arcimboldo – Skoklosters slott – 87582

(This is a post by Karin Nilsson and Fredrik Andersson of  The Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and The Hallwyl museum in Sweden to announce the release of images in their collections and the addition of many of them to Wikimedia Commons.)

Today, the 23rd of October, The Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and the Hallwyl museum together with Wikimedia Sweden announced the release of more than 12,000 images. At the beginning of this year, the three Swedish museums The Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and the Hallwyl Museum (which together constitute a National Agency, accountable to the Ministry of Culture) took an important step toward increased openness when we released our high resolution, digital image archives to the public on the museum’s own website. In October we started uploading images to Wikimedia Commons. In this first stage about 19,000 images were uploaded, 7,000 of which are negative files. The number is expected to increase as the digitization proceeds.

The images have been produced over a long period of time and were created for documenting the collections and planning exhibitions as well as for publications and marketing purposes. The original formats range from digitized glass negatives (with their negative file) to completely new images.

We see this contribution as beneficial in several ways:

  • We increase the reach of our images nationally as well as internationally, when publishing our images on a platform which is used by many millions of people every day.
  • Information about the museums’ collections and images is enriched when we use the possibilities of creating links between images, people and historic events on both Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia.
  • Anybody can edit information and contribute to a fuller and better context to the images.

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WikiSkills helps teachers use Wikipedia in their courses

WikiSkills is a part of the European Commission’s Lifelong Learning Programme, and its purpose is to teach teachers how to use collaborative tools like wikis for teaching. Wikimedia Sverige, the official Wikimedia chapter in Sweden, is one of eight partners involved in WikiSkills, and though the project will end in December, we would like to present the experiences of five teachers in the WikiSkills courses that we arranged in Sweden. As a representative of Wikimedia Sverige, I felt it was natural to make Wikipedia part of the education.

WikiSkills is mainly financed by the EC through the Lifelong Learning Programme. Official website.

Wikimedia Sverige has operated three courses during the spring, each two days long. Course events have been localized to both small and big cities, from north to south in Sweden, specifically at Skellefteå, Stockholm and Helsingborg. The courses have been about wikis in general and Wikipedia in particular.

In total, 23 excited participants have invested their time: particularly vocational teachers and secondary school teachers, teacher educators, project leaders from folk high schools and UR, mentors from SeniorNet, an entrepreneur and a communicator of an environmental organization. We course leaders have really been trying to bring about a dialogue between all participants and instructors. Participants are supposed to contribute actively before, during and hopefully after training days.

We started with preparative tasks on and about Wikipedia because Wikipedia is a concrete example that illustrates how a wiki engine and a wiki project can work. The tasks were sent out one week before each face-to-face meeting in order to let participants get up to speed. During the first day, the participants together with the instructors went through the basics of wikis and Wikipedia. Participants presented their preparative tasks in a way that they themselves thought was appropriate; instructors lectured partly by presenting facts and partly by trying to guide discussions among participants to important topics and by using the participant’s thoughts and findings as a basis for facts about wikis and Wikipedia.
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A series of parallel WWI edit-a-thons in seven countries

This post is available in 3 languages: Svenska7% • Ελληνικά 7% • English 100%

English

This postcard was uploaded from Europeana by a volunteer and it now illustrate the English GA article SMS Hessen. This is just an example of the beautiful images of old ships uploaded during the day.

This image is now used on plenty of language versions and it is one of two Europeana images used in the Greek article about Chemical weapons in World War I (el:Χημικά όπλα στον Α΄ Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο), it was uploaded by yours truly in advance of the pilot event we had in Sweden last November.

Hard working volunteers created and improved a bunch of different articles during the day. Here you see some of them in Stockholm, Sweden.

On Saturday 29 June 2013, a series of parallel World War I edit-a-thons was organized throughout Europe and Australia by Wikimedia Sverige as part of the Europeana Awareness project. To get people involved, we contacted a bunch of Wikimedia Chapters and individual volunteers, including many at the GLAM-WIKI 2013 conference, which just goes to show the great value of physical meetings. We told them about our plans and we were happy to receive great interest and positive responses, not to mention a few great suggestions for improvements!

Physical WWI edit-a-thons took place in five countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, Serbia, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Successful online edit-a-thons also ran in Australia and Greece. All in all, well over 50 volunteers took part in the edit-a-thons.

We had four reasons for holding these events. First, there is always a spike in Wikipedia visitor numbers around the dates of a major event and we wanted Wikipedia’s articles about the First World War to be as good as possible before the centennial anniversaries. Given that many articles were created and improved during the edit-a-thons, we believe this to have been a step in the right direction.

Second, we looked at an edit-a-thon as a perfect way of getting representatives from different galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) to cooperate with each other and with us, and a great way of engaging experts. The idea was that this would give us a chance to approach the GLAMs and initiate collaborations to urge them to release pictures from their collections and to work with us in other ways during 2014. At the European level, we are already cooperating with Europeana and the Europeana Network in order to reach even more GLAMs. Europeana’s material was frequently used in the edit-a-thons, so the events further strengthened our partnership with them and the GLAMs participating in their Network. As part of the events, several Wikimedia Chapters also initiated new relationships with their local GLAMs.

Our third reason behind hosting the edit-a-thons was that we wanted to increase the use of Europeana’s enormous digital collection on Wikipedia, while making the community aware of this partnership and the many similarities between our two organizations. Europeana has thousands of pictures connected to WWI that have the free licenses that enable their use on Wikipedia. It would be a shame not to have these amazing pictures illustrating Wikipedia articles. The pictures come both from the public and from Europeana’s vast network of content providers. During these events, we showed GLAMs why they should use a truly free license (suitable for use on Wikipedia) and what the end users–Wikimedians–could do with their content.

The edit-a-thons were very successful with plenty of images from Europeana used and contextualized in our articles. We were all happy to see that volunteers explored Europeana’s material themselves and uploaded many more great images during the day. Also, there was a lot of work done in London with bringing more Europeana material to our projects from the British Library.

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A successful “Collection Days” edit-a-thon in Warsaw, Poland

This post is available in 3 languages: Svenska 7% • Polski 100%English 7%

English

en:Sarmīte Ēlerte from Latvia was one of the VIPs present at the Collection Days’ kick-off event.

Six hardworking Wikip/medians.

Finding great images to illustrate articles were a central part of the event.

It has already been a couple of weeks, but I wanted to explain and share some lessons learned about an edit-a-thon that Wikimedia Sverige and Wikimedia Polska organized in conjunction with the Europeana 1989 Collection Days in Warsaw, Poland.

The Collection Days are a series of events continuing through the end of 2014, where the public is invited to come and share their memorabilia of 1989, and have it digitized and uploaded online under a CC-BY-SA license. When I heard about this topic, I thought that the first Collection Days would be a perfect event for the Wikimedia movement to participate in because of the similarities of involving the general public and the use of the license. The idea was that we could try out the concept and see what worked and didn’t work, and by sharing this experience and gaining these contacts, we could help other European chapters in the Wikimedia movement to organize events in connection to future Collection Days.

With this blog post, I hope to do just that.

The goal with the edit-a-thon, in addition to writing articles together and making Wikipedia better, was to get new people and new organizations involved in the work of the Wikimedia movement. The idea is that the people who bring their objects to the Collection Days easily could stop by and learn how to edit Wikipedia and learn that their memorabilia of 1989 also might appear on Wikipedia.

The day before, I arrived with another Swedish volunteer to attend the kick-off event (with a bunch of VIPs present, who now have images on Commons!). We met with the Polish Collection Days’ organizers, prepared the venue and uploaded images that had been digitized during the day. The Polish chapter had been great at promoting the event in advance and had translated the event page to Polish.

On 9 June, six experienced Wikimedians from Poland and Sweden gathered in Warsaw for this international edit-a-thon to write about both Polish history in general and especially about the events that took place in 1989. Our goal was to use as many images that were digitized during the Collection Days as possible. I gave a short presentation about what we hoped to achieve there and then we started with fixing up some of the images uploaded the night before and writing articles (a few more images were uploaded from the event throughout the day that we worked on). The catering had some issues, but we had a great time and we were very productive, with nine new articles and 15 articles expanded on the Polish, Swedish and English Wikipedias.

We hope that other chapters will take the opportunity to organize edit-a-thons in their countries in connection with these events. After Poland, the Collection Days will be organized in the Baltic states (the plan is August, but the exact dates are still to be decided). So Wikimedia Eesti and all you volunteers in Latvia and Lithuania, be sure to contact me and I’ll help you to get in contact with the right people!

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Wiki Loves Public Art 2013 contest sees good participation

This post is available in 2 languages: Svenska7% • English 100%

English

Participating countries 2013.
Lokal_Profil, CC BY-SA 3.0

I wanted to give you all a short update about how Wiki Loves Public Art turned out this first year. As you might know, five countries participated, but with the exception of Israel, the focus was on only one or a couple of the major cities in the countries. This was due to a lack of national databases of public works of art. So we saw this year as a tryout to set things in order, and as it turned out, we are very happy with the results!

By the end of the contest, participants photographed nearly 75 percent of all the works of art that were listed! All in all, more than 9,250 images were uploaded as part of the contest by 225 uploaders, of which 57 percent were first time contributors.

In Sweden, where for different reasons we focused on working with museums to photograph their public domain art collections, we had nine museums taking part. We organized five meetups and photo safaris, where a lot of newbies showed up. Many of them did not upload their images in time for the contest, but still appreciated the opportunity to come and talk to us about Wikimedia’s different projects.

The juries in each country are now in the process of selecting the winning pictures. These finalists will then be submitted for consideration by the jury of the international competition. Once the winners have been chosen, we will return with another update.

We have had a lot of fun and we are very happy with the results of what is hopefully the first of many years of Wiki Loves Public Art.

John Andersson
International Coordinator Wiki Loves Public Art
Wikimedia Sverige

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isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-23
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for July 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf