Dear fellow Wikimedians,
In January, Abraham Taherivand informed you that he had decided not to
renew his contract with Wikimedia Deutschland. Today, I am excited to
announce that our search for a new Executive Director has been successful:
Christian Humborg will take over office at Wikimedia Deutschland from 1
June.
One of the most important tasks of the Wikimedia Deutschland Executive
Board is the appointment of the Executive Director. My colleagues and I are
very pleased to have found such a fantastic candidate for the vacant
position. Christian impressed us with his bold ideas and visions, his
leadership experience at the head of influential civil society
organisations and his passion for the liberation of knowledge. He clearly
prevailed among the 59 applicants. The search was managed by our
Supervisory Board and Abraham with the support of an external executive
search firm.
Christian knows the Wikimedia Movement and our commitment to free knowledge
well – because he has helped shape both since 2016 as deputy executive
director and head of finance at Wikimedia Deutschland. Before that, he was
the executive director of the anti-corruption organisation Transparency
International Germany, helped establish the non-profit investigative
journalism centre Correctiv and was awarded the Grimme Online Award as a
member of the journalism collective carta.info. He is the right fit for the
future of Wikimedia Deutschland.
At this point, on behalf of our entire Board, I would like to express my
heartfelt thanks to Abraham, who has achieved so much as Executive Director
over the last four years. He has set important strategic impulses that will
be decisive for the future success of Wikimedia in the world. Abraham
joined Wikimedia Deutschland in 2012 and has since strengthened the
organisation in every respect and positioned it very well for this
handover. Thank you for your great commitment!
It is to Abraham’s credit that he discussed his decision with the Board at
an early stage and thus made a well thought-out search process possible.
Together, we are now working on a good transition.
We are looking forward to continuing the success of the last four years
together with Christian, to tackling new projects, to implementing the 2030
strategy – and to liberating a few more pieces of knowledge together every
day.
Kind regards,
Lukas
--
Dr. Lukas Mezger
Vorsitzender des Präsidiums / chair of the Supervisory Board
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 260 – (0151) 268 63 931
http://wikimedia.de
Bleiben Sie auf dem neuesten Stand! Aktuelle Nachrichten und spannende
Geschichten rund um Wikimedia, Wikipedia und Freies Wissen im Newsletter: Zur
Anmeldung <https://www.wikimedia.de/newsletter/>.
Stellen Sie sich eine Welt vor, in der jeder Mensch an der Menge allen
Wissens frei teilhaben kann. Helfen Sie uns dabei!
http://spenden.wikimedia.de
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
Hello there,
We are inviting you to participate in *Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos 2021
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Pages_Wanting_Photos_2021>*, a
global contest scheduled to run from July through August 2021.
Participants will choose among Wikipedia pages without photo images, then
add a suitable file from among the many thousands of photos in the
Wikimedia Commons, especially those uploaded from thematic contests (Wiki
Loves Africa, Wiki Loves Earth, Wiki Loves Folklore, etc.) over the years.
In its first year (2020), 36 Wikimedia communities in 27 countries joined
the campaign. Events relating to the campaign included training organized
by at least 18 Wikimedia communities in 14 countries.
The campaign resulted in the addition of media files (photos, audios and
videos) to more than 90,000 Wikipedia articles in 272 languages.
Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos (WPWP) offers an ideal task for recruiting
and guiding new editors through the steps of adding content to existing
pages. Besides individual participation, the WPWP campaign can be used by
user groups and chapters to organize editing workshops and edit-a-thons.
The organizing team is looking for a contact person to coordinate WPWP
participation at the Wikimedia user group or chapter level (geographically
or thematically) or for a language WP. We’d be glad for you to reply to
this email, or sign up directly at WPWP Participating Communities
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Pages_Wanting_Photos_2021/Partici…>
.
Please feel free to contact Organizing Team
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Pages_Wanting_Photos_2021/Organiz…>
if
you have any query.
Kind regards,
Tulsi
Communication Manager
Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos Campaign
Hello all,
Are you interested in the future of Wikipedia and Wikidata?
Have you heard the buzz around "Abstract Wikipedia" and want to learn more?
Confused about the differences between "Abstract Wikipedia",
"Wikifunctions" and "WikiLambda"?
If the answer to any of these questions is "Yes", then you should read
more. [image: 🙂]
*What?*
My academic course at Tel Aviv University, "From Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, from
Wikipedia to Wikidata", is coming to an end soon and next week we will be
closing the Wikidata module of the course in a special celebration,
hosting Denny
Vrandečić (initiator of Wikidata, and more recently the director of
"Abstract Wikipedia", or rather "Wikifunctions").
To properly celebrate, Denny & I have designed a two-parts "party" for my
students, which includes a pre-recorded interview
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GjNkrvT7Yc&ab_channel=ShaniEvenstein>,
and then *a live Q & A session with Denny during the course hour*.
And the good news is -- *you are all invited!*
*Where?*
*1) Pre-recorded interview* (available here - https://youtu.be/0GjNkrvT7Yc
<https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fyoutu.be%2F0GjNkrvT7Yc%3Ffbcli…>)
-
In the interview we discussed the some of the challenges we have in
Wikipedia and Wikidata, and how they brought about the idea of "Abstract
Wikipedia"; What is the difference between "Abstract Wikipedia",
"Wikifunctions" and "WikiLambda"; What is the current state of the project;
and how it all ties to the current Internet Ecosystem and things like AI
and Machine Learning.
*2) Q & A live session - *
*Next Monday, June 7th, at 15:00 Israel time (12:00 UTC),* I will be
hosting Denny in my course for a 45 mins Q & A session via Zoom.
This part of class will be open and anyone interested in this topic, and
you are welcome to either *join us live*, *send questions* to Denny (after
watching the pre-recorded interview) *or watch later*.
*How?*
If you are interested to join, *please write me an email *(simply reply
privately to this email) *by Sunday June 6th at 20:00 UTC*, and I will send
you the zoom link (this is to avoid Zoombombing).
If you are unable to participate live, but still want to engage, *feel free
to send in questions *(again replying to this email privately).
The session will also be recorded, so if you cannot make it to the live
session, you will be able to watch later on YouTube (I will be sharing the
recording later).
Looking forward to your questions and to seeing you next week,
Shani.
Hi all,
Join the Research Team at the Wikimedia Foundation [1] for their monthly
Office hours on 2021-06-01 at 16:00-17:00 UTC (9am PT/6pm CEST).
To participate, join the video-call via this link [2]. There is no set
agenda - feel free to add your item to the list of topics in the etherpad
[3] (You can do this after you join the meeting, too.), otherwise you are
welcome to also just hang out. More detailed information (e.g. about how to
attend) can be found here [4].
Through these office hours, we aim to make ourselves more available to
answer some of the research related questions that you as Wikimedia
volunteer editors, organizers, affiliates, staff, and researchers face in
your projects and initiatives. Some example cases we hope to be able to
support you in:
-
You have a specific research related question that you suspect you
should be able to answer with the publicly available data and you don’t
know how to find an answer for it, or you just need some more help with it.
For example, how can I compute the ratio of anonymous to registered editors
in my wiki?
-
You run into repetitive or very manual work as part of your Wikimedia
contributions and you wish to find out if there are ways to use machines to
improve your workflows. These types of conversations can sometimes be
harder to find an answer for during an office hour, however, discussing
them can help us understand your challenges better and we may find ways to
work with each other to support you in addressing it in the future.
-
You want to learn what the Research team at the Wikimedia Foundation
does and how we can potentially support you. Specifically for affiliates:
if you are interested in building relationships with the academic
institutions in your country, we would love to talk with you and learn
more. We have a series of programs that aim to expand the network of
Wikimedia researchers globally and we would love to collaborate with those
of you interested more closely in this space.
-
You want to talk with us about one of our existing programs [5].
Hope to see many of you,
Martin on behalf of the WMF Research Team
[1] https://research.wikimedia.org/team.html
[2] https://meet.jit.si/WMF-Research-Office-Hours
[3] https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Research-Analytics-Office-hours
[4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Office_hours
[5] https://research.wikimedia.org/projects.html
--
Martin Gerlach
Research Scientist
Wikimedia Foundation