My Fellow Wikimedians,
I am delighted to announce that the Wikimedia East, South East Asia and the
Pacific also known as* ESEAP* will be having an in-person conference in
Sydney, Australia on November 18-20.
The goals for the conference are:
- *Strategic discussions:* ESEAP Hub governance, process of moving from
an informal group to more formal structure aligned with the Hubs/Minimum
Criteria for Pilots
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hubs/Minimum_Criteria_for_Pilots>
- *Partnership, Tools & Skills*: Outreach and community collaboration
support networks; building a network of skill sets so that communities in
the region can provide extra outreach support and collaboration across the
region; and
- *Leadership development* through building networks that encourage* new
and wider diversity *of participants to enable future growth
For more information, please visit https://w.wiki/5RVH or at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ESEAP_Conference_2022.
Scholarship application is ongoing. You may go to
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ESEAP_Conference_2022/Attend to know
more. Deadline for scholarship application is on* 24 July* (Sunday) at
12:00 UTC.
We also call for volunteers to the following committees:
- Scholarship committee
- Program submissions review committee
- Communications committee
- Onsite & technical volunteers
For inquiries, please reach us at eseap.conf[image: @]wikimedia.org.au.
Thank you!
--
Kind Regards,
Butch Bustria
in behalf of ESEAP
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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During the strategic meeting of the Affiliations Committee (AffCom) in
Paris on June 24-26, members discussed how AffCom may be able to support
the movement in relation to the upcoming Hubs pilot process. We reviewed
two issues – whether it was within AffCom’s remit to contribute to the
Hub pilot process and if so, what our involvement might look like.
AffCom has, since its inception in 2004, worked directly with all
Affiliates across the movement, i.e.: User Groups, Chapters, and
Thematic Organizations. Our role, as it has evolved, is to support these
different entities as they come into being and then as they grow, ensure
that they integrate best practices and with a view to long-term
sustainability. This has provided AffCom with both a broad overview, as
well as a deep understanding, of the various challenges faced by
affiliates across a range of circumstances that include socio-cultural
issues and affiliate-based conflicts. Hubs are intended to function as
formal movement bodies constituted by existing groups and/or affiliates,
able to use Wikimedia trademarks to present their association. They
will need to be independent, legally constituted Affiliates, recognised
by the Board of Trustees. This introduces a significant and exciting new
Affiliate model to our movement and AffCom would welcome the opportunity
to bring our institutional knowledge and experience to assist in their
development.
Recognising the principles of subsidiarity, the committee would like to
offer its support as an advisory body for the Hubs piloting process,
working with the community to develop a process that will lead,
ultimately, to their approval by the WMF Board of Trustees.
Wojciech Pędzich
on behalf of AffCom
Good Morning!
I have to say there is much to learn from this...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgbwm/chinese-woman-fake-russian-history-w…
...but also maybe something to imagine and develop?
(beyond VICE's imagination of bored Chinese housewife photo)
If Wikimedia was a well resourced ecosystem,
that is human centric, focused on diversity, care and innovation...
...maybe a new genre of fiction writing using wikis
could be a recovery path for skilled, embedded and
bored Chinese housewife? (not just blocking her)
Best Z.
Hi all,
The next Research Showcase, featuring the recipients of this year's
Wikimedia Foundation Research Awards of the Year, will be live-streamed
Wednesday, July 20, at 9:30 AM PST/16:30 UTC. Find your local time here
<https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1658334607>.
YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMvXOQU5fX4
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMvXOQU5fX4>
You are welcome to ask questions via YouTube chat or on IRC at
#wikimedia-research.
This month's presentations:
Wikipedia-based Image Text Dataset for Multimodal Multilingual Machine
LearningBy *Krishna Srinivasan (Google)*The milestone improvements brought
about by deep representation learning and pre-training techniques have led
to large performance gains across downstream NLP, IR and Vision tasks.
Multimodal modeling techniques aim to leverage large high-quality
visio-linguistic datasets for learning complementary information across
image and text modalities. In this talk, I introduce the Wikipedia-based
Image Text (WIT) Dataset to better facilitate multimodal, multilingual
learning. WIT is composed of a curated set of 37.5 million entity rich
image-text examples with 11.5 million unique images across 108 Wikipedia
languages.
WIT’s unique advantages include: WIT is the largest multimodal dataset by
the number of image-text examples by 3x (at the time of writing). WIT is
massively multilingual (first of its kind) with coverage over 100+
languages. WIT represents a more diverse set of concepts and real world
entities relative to what previous datasets cover.
WIT Dataset is available for download and use via a Creative Commons
license here: https://github.com/google-research-datasets/wit
I conclude the talk with future directions to expand and extend the WIT
dataset. Link to paperː https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.01913.pdf
Assessing the Quality of Sources in Wikidata Across LanguagesBy *Gabriel
Amaral (King's College London)*Wikidata is one of the most important
sources of structured data on the web, built by a worldwide community of
volunteers. As a secondary source, its contents must be backed by credible
references; this is particularly important as Wikidata explicitly
encourages editors to add claims for which there is no broad consensus, as
long as they are corroborated by references. Nevertheless, despite this
essential link between content and references, Wikidata’s ability to
systematically assess and assure the quality of its references remains
limited. To this end, we carry out a mixed-methods study to determine the
relevance, ease of access, and authoritativeness of Wikidata references, at
scale and in different languages, using online crowdsourcing, descriptive
statistics, and machine learning. The findings help us ascertain the
quality of references in Wikidata, and identify common challenges in
defining and capturing the quality of user-generated multilingual
structured data on the web. Link to paperː
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3484828
You can also watch our past research showcases here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase
Emily, on behalf of the Research team
--
Emily Lescak (she / her)
Senior Research Community Officer
The Wikimedia Foundation
Hello everyone,
On behalf of the Community Affairs Committee, I am happy to invite you to
our next Conversation with the Trustees on 14 July at 18:00 UTC
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Community_Affairs_Comm…>
(find your local time <https://zonestamp.toolforge.org/1657821621>). You
are all welcome to talk with the Wikimedia Foundation Board of
Trustees directly
about our work guiding the Wikimedia Foundation.
The call will be held on Zoom with a live YouTube stream
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYg9sJ4Ml3M>. Because we want these calls
to be interactive, we encourage you to join us directly on Zoom. Request
the Zoom link by emailing askcac(a)wikimedia.org.
We will be providing live interpretation into Spanish and Portuguese. If
you would like to request another language, email askcac(a)wikimedia.org.
We will add the agenda to the event Meta page and send it here in the
coming weeks. For now, please save the date and register for the Zoom room.
Hope you see you all there,
Shani.
Shani Evenstein Sigalov
<https://wikimediafoundation.org/profile/shani-evenstein-sigalov/>
Vice Chair, Board of Trustees
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
Hi all,
Save the date! The Global Advocacy and Public Policy team will be hosting
our monthly conversation hours on *July 28*.
You can find your local time, add to the agenda, and details on how to join
the Zoom call on our MetaWiki page
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_policy/Events>. This month we will
share some of our work on the human rights impact assessment.
We have also extended one of the calls to incorporate the canceled session
on disinformation. As always, the rest of the agenda is up to you! These
forums are an opportunity for us to answer questions about our work or
about your initiatives, and to connect, share, and learn from each other.
Looking forward to it, Ziski on behalf of the Global Advocacy team
Franziska Putz (she/her)
Movement Advocacy Manager, Global Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation
Fputz(a)wikimedia.org
*UCT timezone
Hello everyone!
Mark your calendars for the Wikimania Hackathon! The Wikimania 2022
Hackathon is a free, online event open to the general public to work
together on technical projects, learn new skills, and meet other technical
contributors. You can find more information about this on the Wikimania page
<https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2022:Hackathon>, which will continue
to grow over the next few weeks. For more details, read below.
*Schedule: *
The Hackathon will take place virtually in three time blocks:
16- 22 UTC August 12
12-17 UTC August 13
A final showcase on August 14.
*Format:*
At the beginning of the event, anyone can present a technical project they
plan to work on at the Pre-Event Showcase. This session will provide a
space for people to find teams, brainstorm new ideas, and make plans for
what to hack during the Hackathon.
Throughout the following hours, there will be social sessions and training
sessions run by the community, but the majority of the time will be spent
hacking together. Attendees can also attend other Wikimania activities.
At the end of the event, there will be a final showcase to present advances
or new technical projects built during the Hackathon to all of Wikimania.
*Accessibility:*If you have any accessibility or translation requests,
please contact hlepp(a)wikimedia.org.
Looking forward to spending time hacking together!
Cheers,
Haley and the WMF Developer Advocacy Team
Dear fellow Wikimedians,
We are very excited to inform you that within the third edition of the
Wikimedia Accelerator UNLOCK, which has been running by Wikimedia
Deutschland (WMDE) and Wikimedia Serbia (WMRS) in collaboration with Impact
Hub Belgrade, we will support seven innovative, bold, engaging and diverse
projects – with a total of 24 participants from Albania, Germany,
Montenegro and Serbia. The projects show and have convinced us throughout
the selection process with new perspectives for free knowledge – and
addressing knowledge equity – in different regional as well as thematic
contexts.
In the next four months we will support the teams with coaching, a variety
of workshops with experts, regular exchanges and funding. We look forward
to working with these following teams who will validate and test their
ideas and turn their concepts into functional prototypes:
-
activist.org – an open source platform that breaks down barriers to
becoming politically active and thereby connects people and organizations
from different social and activist movements. [
https://www.wikimedia.de/unlock/unlock-projects/activist-org/]
-
Game of political participation – encouraging young people in the
Western Balkans to familiarize themselves with political decision making
and political systems through elements of gamification. [
https://www.wikimedia.de/unlock/unlock-projects/game-of-political-participa…
]
-
f[ai]r – establishing an ethics certification for digital applications
through a holistic examination of the AI system in the social context,
addressing aspects of bias, discrimination, diversity and inclusion. [
https://www.wikimedia.de/unlock/unlock-projects/fair/]
-
Inclusio – providing user-generated audio descriptions of visual content
to the blind and visually impaired. Ideally the solution could be connected
and tested on structured data in Wikimedia Commons. [
https://www.wikimedia.de/unlock/unlock-projects/inclusio/]
-
macht.sprache. – fostering politically sensitive translation through an
open source platform that allows for crowdsourcing and discussing
politically sensitive terms and their translations, and through a tool to
help translate with sensitivity. [
https://www.wikimedia.de/unlock/unlock-projects/macht-sprache/]
-
MOCI SPACE – a digital space to connect activists, grassroots
initiatives and civil society actors in the Western Balkans and that allows
for co-creating, publishing and sharing knowledge by making use of the
Matrix protocol for federated communication. [
https://www.wikimedia.de/unlock/unlock-projects/moci-space/]
-
P2P Wiki for indigenous wisdom and biodiversity – an open source tool to
collect and safeguard indigenous knowledge, and to raise awareness about
biodiversity with a P2P offline-first methodology. [
https://www.wikimedia.de/unlock/unlock-projects/p2p/]
Feel free to click through the projects for further details.
In addition, we shared our learnings and insights from the selection
process and the kickoff of the program in the following diff blog. [
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/07/12/unlock-2022-new-ideas-addressing-know…
]
Best regards,
Kannika (WMDE) and Ivana (WMRS)
--
Kannika Thaimai Program Lead | Programmleitung
Wikimedia Accelerator UNLOCK | Wikimedia Deutschland
She/Her | Sie/Ihr
UNLOCK website <https://www.wikimedia.de/unlock/> | LinkedIn
<https://www.linkedin.com/company/unlock-acc> | Twitter
<https://twitter.com/UNLOCK_Acc>
Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. +49 30 577 11 62 0
Wikimedia Deutschland – Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.
V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts
Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig
anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin,
Steuernummer 27/029/42207.