Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Last Sunday, I was elected into the executive board for Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation. If you don’t know what the Wikimedia Foundation is, it’s the organization behind Wikipedia and a range of other similar projects. The Wikimedia Foundation and its chapters are all non-profit organizations relying primarily on volunteer efforts to accomplish their goals.
I’ve run because there were a few things that I thought I could contribute to the chapter. One of the things I wanted to concentrate on was to improve the communication between the foundation and the German language projects. The foundation’s image within the German projects, especially Wikisource and Wikipedia, isn’t very, well, good, to be polite. The name of the organization is most often mentioned in the context of licensing and copyright issue and rarely very fondly. Similarly, election turnout for the board is abysmal and there have been only very few candidates with ties to the German projects. Yet they are the second largest community after the English projects and the decisions of the board directly affect core issues the community has to deal with. So I’m hoping that I can help bridge the gap between the foundation and the projects so in the future people will both know what the foundation is for and does as well as what significance their involvement with foundation issues would have.
I also want to explore the idea of having a regional Wikimania conference in Europe. It’s great that we have such an international approach to Wikimania and hosting sites are chosen from different parts of the world each year. Unfortunately, this also means that a lot of people have to travel very far to attend. At the same time, events like the recent general assembly of the German chapter or the annual Wikipedia Workshop in Cologne show that there is strong demand for Wikimedians to get together, discuss important issues, share their experiences and collaborate on small projects. One possible solution to that would be a regional Wikimania conference. I hope that in the next months we can spend some time figuring out if there is sufficient interest in having such a conference and in helping out with making it happen.
My final project is related to a suggestion made by Kurt Jansson, the chair of the German chapter. One of the chapter’s goals is to support the different Wikimedia projects depending on their own needs and the abilities of the chapter have. Specifically the chapter could collect ideas for enhancement to the software that runs the projects, then sponsor development of those features by hiring a developer and managing the process from specification through implementation to testing and deployment. It’s an approach that was started with a feature known as “stable versions”, a tool to mark articles as proofread which will ensure that readers won’t by chance find a vandalized version of the page. I already have some ideas as to what could be accomplished here but it’s really up to the community to come up with useful ideas for new software features.
