Global South Meeting/Notes
1 August, 2011 Wikimania Global South Meeting
Global_South_Meeting#Strategy_Workshop.2C_Developer
Attendees
- Asaf Bartov (WMF)
- Marjolein Gelauff (Netherlands)
- Jessie Wild (WMF; Contact: m:User:Jwild)
- Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton (rodrigo.argenton@gmail.com, http://br.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usu%C3%A1rio_Discuss%C3%A3o:Rodrigo_Tetsuo_Argenton, Mutirões http://br.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mutir%C3%A3o , Brazil)
- Juandev (Wikimedia Czech Republic, editing Czech Wikiversity)
- Contact: juandevojnikov@gmail.com, user:Juandev
- Alex Wafula (Kenya, Swahili Wikipedia, offline wikipedia) contact: xelawafs@yahoo.com
- Beatriz Busaniche (Wikimedia Argentina) contact: bea@wikimedia.org.ar
- Srikeit Tadepalli (Fellow, Campus Program Pune, India) Contact : srikeit@gmail.com
- rupert.thurner@gmail.com (Switzerland)
- Juan Carlos Gentile (Italy-Uruguay-Argentina)
- Richard Farmbrough (UK, Oxford Internet Institute Richard@farmbrough.co.uk)
- Josh Lim (Wikimedia Philippines, Tagalog Wikipedia; Contact: jamesjoshualim@yahoo.com/josh.lim@wikimedia.org.ph, User:Sky Harbor)
- Ruben Hilare-Quispe (Bolivia, Aymara language (Wikipedia))
- Gerard Meijssen (Netherlands, Localization Team "indigenous" languages tech support) gerard.meijssen@gmail.com
- Marta Ramos (Spain, OpenZIM group)
- Ting Chen (WMF, Chinese Wikipedia)
- Jonas Xavier (Brazil) - Contact: jonas.agx@gmail.com
- Rajesh Pandey (Nepali Wikipedia, FOSS, Nepali and other indigenous languages)
- Pierros Papadeas (Community Manager EMEA, Mozilla, Greece) pierros@mozilla.com
- Taweetham (Thai Wikipedia)
- Ziko van Dijk (Wikimedia Netherlands), zvandijk@googlemail.com
- Benny Lin (Wikipedia, wikisource, wiktionary Indonesia) bennylin.idwiki@hotmail.com
- Catherina (Russia, now Israel), linguistic and legal background
- Dovi (Hebrew wikisource)
On-line attendees
- Limojoe (Chairman - Wikimedia Czech Republic)
Peoples notes online
Presentation
- group members present themselves
Ideas for GS Meeting Agenda
- How information can best be shared across Global South and Global North)
- grants and use of it (e.g., Offline, University, local conferences)
- University outreach
- Information sharing between different Wikipedias
- Benefits of local "mini" conferences in native languages (e.g., WikiConference India, IberoAmericano)
- Importance of physical/offline meet-ups (i.e., social component to Wikipedia experieneces)
- set financial targets, like "15% of the budget goes to global south"
- How to educate communities on purpose of Wikipiedia and what it is
- community building with "fun factor" - competing with facebook, ... or not?
- How to encourage the editing in local languages; what types of content are people wanting to read in their local languages?
- (User) Interfaces
Question for discussion
- Can the Mutirões model work elsewhere? Can Mutiroes prepare a "recipe book"?
- Can relatively-stronger Wikimedia presence in region A be used to bootstrap/inspire regions B,C,D around it? If so, how can this be done effectively?
Observations
- Weak participation is not due to lack of resources/infrastructure *only* -- it is also because of lack of awareness. I.e. there is a lot of *untapped potential*.
- people dont like the term Global South: implied monolithic nature of the GS very misleading -- "there is some Global South in the global north, including the United States"
- Much of the Global South would have difficulty participating in the English discourse
- The scale of people involved with opportunities in the Global South is often very large (e.g. a single Pune university with 100,000 students). --> Great "bang for the buck" value, for every hour and every dollar spent.
- main languages like English are promoted in many countries, native languages have a hard time to get editors
- In Bolivia, the Jaqi-Aru group actually needs to buy Internet time in Internet cafes just to be able to do their Aymara content creation activities.
- New Localization dev. team at WMF -- GerardM is a good first contact for reporting any bugs or difficulties with using _any_ language in contributing to Wikimedia projects
- Kiwix should be localized at Translatewiki.net
- Access for non-literate, for extreme minority languages, for those with limited or no access.
Increasing Reach (more readers)
- Gerard's comments
- use data! Statistics -- see what people are looking for; see what people write about; take pride in areas of strong coverage; publicize
- statistics can be further specified by region / locality
- still missing statistics: articles sought for (also source Google for that datum); Zeitgeist; ultimately a real-time statistics server; potential monthly recognition -- who wrote the article that was most-read last month.
- Asaf: this is an example of an *implicit* partnership -- Wikipedians unilaterally deciding to support education through the creation of resources for the education system -- even turning ultimately into an *explicit* partnership, with the University of La Plata
- GerardM: why was this not published on the Wikimedia Blog? We need to *celebrate* our successes!
- use data! Statistics -- see what people are looking for; see what people write about; take pride in areas of strong coverage; publicize
- Mobile
- Benny: mobile gateway needs improvement; Facebook and Twitter get free advertising by the mobile providers. Maybe we can get the same.
- Richard: look into bundling openZIM-based offline Wikipedia on mobile devices. Even defunct devices (i.e. not connected to a mobile provider, older generation smartphones) can be used as cheap mobile offline browsers of Wikipedia
- Social Media / Communication
- @DYKIndia: Srikeit will produce a blog post on the "DYKIndia" twitter account and reaction/traction it got
- Asaf: it helps to have at least one person in the community/chapter monitoring the global movement's communication channels: the Wikimedia Blog, chapter reports, foundation-l, etc.
- GerardM: technical know-how helps automate updating Twitter/FB/G+ etc. whenever a blog post is made
- An "open day" of Q&A (using a hashtag on Twitter) offered through a 3rd-party network (e.g. Telefonica's network of educators) -- "Ask Wikipedians everything you always wanted to know about Wikipedia!"
- e.g., Telefonica Foundation hosted one in early 2011 (details (in Spanish): http://www.educared.org/global/premiointernacional/noticias/encuentro-wikimedia)
- Partnerships
- For example, governments, Academic institutions, NGOs local and int'l, GLAM
- partnership example CH: take a group which is not represented on wiki*, and do something to attract them. in CH case, seniorweb, wiki loves monuments photo competition, combined membership wikimedia.ch + seniorweb. result: new wikimedia commons uploaders. cost: negligable.
- Asaf is creating a Program Catalog to centralize movement knowledge and experience on programs and partnerships
- Asaf: partnerships are "low-hanging fruit" -- the potential is so vast, the number of potential partners is so large, we can just go for easy/obvious partners first -- educators, academics, free culture organizations, governments, publishers, public-minded businesses, etc.
- do your homework: study your potential partner's mission, their strengths and weaknesses
- tailor your pitch/proposal to your partner's mission (and public strategy/plan if available) -- spell out what may be obvious to us -- how Wikipedia's free knowledge benefits your partner
- don't expect your partner to magically realize what partnership makes sense with your group
- Asaf: agenda-driven organizations can often be talked into contributing on articles on the subjects they care about, once NPOV is properly explained and defended.
- GerardM asks: how do we kickstart tiny Wikipedias? How do we get the Hausa language Wikipedia (25M native speakers as first language, 43M total speakers) going?
- Asaf: we find a group of dedicated volunteers who would be interested in attempting this in an "against all odds" kind of effort, until the first 1000-2000 articles are ready. Then the potential for outreach exists.
- Where do we find such a group? Universities are the best recruiting grounds -- students have time and opportunity (free Internet access)
- Asaf: and if we can't find enough educated speakers who are also *literate* in the language, maybe there's no hope for a Wikipedia in that language *as* a Wikipedia -- i.e. a collaboratively-edited encyclopedia based on reading and writing.
- GerardM: we should still deliver free knowledge to Hausa speakers in their language
- Asaf: I agree, but maybe a living Wikipedia is not the way to do it. Maybe we would need to do it by e.g. finding funding for paid translation of ~1000 articles into Hausa, subsequently read out loud and recorded for distribution as free knowledge in audio.
- Asaf: we find a group of dedicated volunteers who would be interested in attempting this in an "against all odds" kind of effort, until the first 1000-2000 articles are ready. Then the potential for outreach exists.
- Driving participation in the projects:
- Wikipedia Campus program, e.g. w:en:Wikipedia:India_Education_Program
- Gender Gap -- in the Global South -- particular opportunities, challenges, etc. Question: did facebook address the "gender gap" especially, or it just did never have it?
Offline Wikipedia
More information
- m:Offline_Projects
- http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Main_Page
- Google Summer of Code (tools for content selection): mw:User:Yuvipanda/GSoC
- Mailing list: mail:offline-l
Notes
- Alex: Issues with offline distribution:
- CONTENT: not perfectly relevant to Kenyan schools (lacked Kenyan content)
- INDEXING: takes a long time (solution: download an already indexed version onto the computers)
- Challenges:
- old computers which was really difficult to upload
- must have approval from ministries of education
- Method for updating articles
- Ship only "changed articles"
- Merge zim files
- Gerard: Is it possible to make a package out of it?
- Editing offline
- Gerard: University in Amsterdam has done work on it before
- Partnerships
- Python community in Argentina: working on Wikipedia on DVD
- Print copy
- Available through PediaPress
- A good solution for lack of electricity
Desires
- want ZIM dumps of all mediawiki
- ensure articles are most updated
- incorporate video into offline distribution
- update cycle 1x year
- Add content "time stamp" showing when the download was created
- Documentation! Not available
- Automate the selection process
- Combine lists of "essential" articles for the different Wikipedias to help improve other articles
- add certain meta data to articles for ease of selection
- prepare good presentations/talks about the collection extentions - how teachers/others can develop (Asaf)
Postponed
- Translation issues
- Technical aspects, translatewiki.net, input methods, Unicode
- Effectiveness and best practices in the practice of translation of Wikimedia content
- Outreach events: How to educate communities on purpose of Wikipiedia and what it is
other related information
grants
wikimedia grants program
support non-chapter, organizations, even individuals, on meta, grants:index
Mailing list
- mail:devnations-l
- devnations-l@lists.wikimedia.org
- mail:offline-l
Actions
- Create page to index "lists of basic topics" as promulgated by various groups such as national governmental educational organsiations.