Annual Plan for Fiscal Year 2013–14
Our programs
Starting with fiscal year 2014, Wikimedia DC is simplifying its program structure to reflect the three interconnected factors that make the Wikimedia movement a success: content, technology, and community. The aim of Wikimedia DC is to make free content available for the world. The development and promotion of technology gives us the tools needed to distribute free content. Most importantly, building a community makes all of this possible.
CONTENT
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Washington, DC, is home to many institutions of knowledge and knowledgable people. For the past three years, locally based institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution, have expressed an interest in improving Wikipedia's content. To this end, we have had several successful collaborations with institutions of knowledge:
- This past fiscal year, we held five editing workshops with the Smithsonian Institution, resulting in 47 new articles, 105 existing articles improved, and 8 images uploaded. All of the images contributed have been from the Smithsonian's collections, and the articles have been on subject matters of interest to the Smithsonian.
- George Washington University worked with Wikimedia DC to hold three edit-a-thons at their libraries and archives, covering such subjects as global affairs, labor history, and the Foggy Bottom neighborhood. As a result, 31 articles were created or improved, including one article in German! Access to university resources were instrumental in the improvement of these articles.
- Wikimedia DC volunteers have aided the Cato Institute in its efforts to document bills introduced in Congress on Wikipedia. According to Jim Harper, the Director of Information Policy Studies, articles written through this effort have gotten 70,000 hits, promoting knowledge of the legislative process.
Events planned with these organizations, as well as with the National Archives and Records Administration in fiscal year 2011–2012, have been fruitful in developing relationships with these organizations. Yet there is still more work to be done. Wikimedia DC will look to build on these existing relationships by devising longer-term program plans, including a schedule of planned events and metrics for content contributions and volunteer outreach. More effort will also be made in hosting non-editing events such as scan-a-thons, which allow institutions to share their collections with a broader, global audience.
We also look forward to expanding our work to include additional cultural institutions and universities. For example, we look forward to holding additional events with the National Archives, with the help of Dominic McDevitt-Parks as their new full-time Wikipedia specialist. Additionally, we are interested in supporting Andrew Lih in his efforts to integrate Wikipedia into his curriculum at American University. These provide excellent opportunities to share the content of Washington, DC, with the rest of the world.
TECHNOLOGY
As we have made progress with using the resources of DC to improve Wikimedia's content, further efforts needs to be made to enhance the technology that underpins the Wikimedia movement. As the Wikimedia Foundation makes substantial investments in improving its MediaWiki software, we have opportunities to use technology to enhance our outreach efforts.
We will be holding hackathons to improve MediaWiki's functionality and to develop tools that make Wikipedia easier to use. This includes tools that allow cultural institutions to easily upload their collections to Wikimedia Commons en masse. We are also interested in creating tools and apps that allow people to engage with Wikimedia content in new ways, including apps based on Wikidata and image discovery tools that make use of Wikimedia Commons' extensive collection of free media. We anticipate that these tech-centric events will raise awareness of the underlying technology that empowers the Wikimedia projects, and will improve engagement in DC's technology sector.
Technology is also useful to measure the success of our outreach activities. We will make extensive use of analytics, including the new Wiki Metrics tool, to measure the outcomes of our events, including the number of bytes added to Wikipedia and the number of articles contributed. Wiki Metrics will also allow us to measure editor retention rates for workshop participants. We will also work with our institutional partners to develop analytics tools that demonstrate the concrete ways that Wikimedia allows institutions to share their knowledge with the rest of the world.
COMMUNITY
Wikimedia is fundamentally a volunteer movement, and the success of Wikimedia DC in promoting free access to the world's knowledge and the technology that makes this possible depends on a strong community of volunteers and enthusiasts. Last year we started holding regular WikiSalons, informal events where people gather to discuss Wikipedia and work on improving articles. These WikiSalons have been successful in recruiting new participants in our movement and giving them access to resources to help them succeed at contributing to Wikipedia. We look forward to holding additional WikiSalons in the coming year, as well as regular dinner meetups.
Starting this year, we will have new opportunities to host social events at collaborative spaces starting up in DC, including the Digital Commons at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library, as well as a planned space at the downtown National Archives. These technologically equipped spaces will give us more opportunities to train volunteers in contributing to the Wikimedia projects, including through ancillary tasks such as digitizing documents.
As we have succeeded with offline outreach, we are interested in enhancing our online outreach. This outreach includes the use of our website as a resource to teach prospective volunteers the ins and outs of contributing to Wikipedia, as well as building our community through social media. Online outreach will build a broader audience, including remote volunteers who cannot attend in-person events. Unlike current community-building efforts that focus exclusively on virtual organizing, volunteers recruited through our online efforts will have access to our in-person events as a resource to meet fellow Wikipedians. As an example of an opportunity for online outreach, there is currently no coherent introductory guide for editing Wikipedia that we can point interested people to. Further, we have no reason to believe that Wikipedia's community will independently build one in the next year. Developing such a tool would be useful at our events, as well as for remote volunteers.
Planned events
- Ten to twenty edit-a-thons
- Scan-a-thons at NARA and other locations
- Volunteers within cultural institutions
- Hackathons to improve MediaWiki functionality
- Developing new tools to view and use Wikimedia content in a novel way
- Build/maintain analytics tools for NARA and SI
- Innovation Lab at NARA
- WikiSalons hosted at NARA and/or DCPL
Fit to strategy
On September 7, 2013, the Board of Directors of Wikimedia DC approved the following strategic priorities:
- Foster a welcoming and supportive social environment for local and remote Wikimedia volunteers.
- Empower academic, cultural, and government institutions to contribute content and expertise to Wikimedia projects.
- Promote women's participation in all aspects of the Wikimedia movement.
- Cultivate diversity of participation and content on Wikimedia projects.