Newsletter/2018-05/long

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Wikimedia Belgium Newsletter - May 2018

Please find the newsletter of May 2018 from Wikimedia Belgium below.

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Upcoming events

Logo Public Domain Day

19 May 2018 - Edit-a-thon about Belgian authors & artists in the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels (invitation | program (page 5)). Exposition till 14 July with graphical work works by Felix Timmermans and Gustave van de Woestyne.

20 May 2018 - Amnesty International Vlaanderen organises an edit-a-thon in Dutch to describe women and/or people from minority groups on Wikipedia and give them in this way a face. (announcement in Dutch)

26 May 2018 - Edit-a-thon public domain day in Muntpunt (invitation | program (page 5))

Date to be announced - As part of the European Year of Cultural Heritage, the Flemish Government organises together with PACKED vzw, FARO and Wikimedia Belgium, a photo contest around cultural heritage in Flanders and Brussels. The precise starting date has not yet been determined, but the contest will start this spring and run until Autumn 2018. The announcement will follow.

Date to be announced - As part of the European Year of Cultural Heritage, Wikimedia Belgium organises also a photo contest around cultural heritage in Wallonia. The precise starting date has not yet been determined, but the contest will start this spring and run until Autumn 2018. The announcement will follow.

Short news

On 8 November 2017 Wikimedia Belgium endorsed the strategic direction of the Wikimedia movement. The process of drafting a strategic direction for what we want to reach by 2030, started in January 2017. In October 2017 the strategic direction was finalised. The common goal as movement is that we become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us. A more detailed description the strategic direction can be found at 2017 Movement strategy.

On 1 January 2018 it was again Public Domain Day. On this day the copyrights of many works expire and enter the Public Domain. For an incomplete overview of authors of which the works enter the public domain the article, see 2018 in public domain. One of the most known Belgian author of which the works enter the public domain in 2018 is the architect Victor Horta. In January also various works that previously have been deleted, but are now in the public domain, have been restored on Wikimedia Commons, for an overview see this page.

On 20 January 2018 Wikimedia Nederland organised a new year's event, during which the WikiOwls have been reached out to the most valued contributions to the Dutch Wikipedia. See for more information in Dutch on Wikipedia:WikiUilen and for the receivers on Wikipedia:WikiUilen/2017.

On 25 May 2018 the new European privacy law "General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)" will be effective worldwide for all EU citizens. The GDPR of Wikimedia Belgium can be found on WMBE GDPR privacy declaration.

In Autumn 2018 structured data will be implemented on the media database Wikimedia Commons which will result in that every file on Wikimedia Commons will get database fields, comparable with the ones on Wikidata. While on Wikidata the items are about specific subjects, the database fields on Wikimedia Commons will be about individual images and files. While there is only one Wikidata item about a specific subject, this subject can have multiple images on Wikimedia Commons. (more information)

Association

At the end of the year it was time to close the books and write reports to close the year. We published a general activity report and financial report about 2017 on Activity report and Financial report.

In October 2017 the board requested a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation for the activities of Wikimedia Belgium in 2018. As part of our budget we requested funding for all the activities we do in 2018, as well as funding for local volunteers to participate in international Wikimedia conferences to gain experiences and ideas, and funding for hiring a part-time staff (0.2 FTE) to take over some administrative and communication tasks to be able to further grow as chapter. We received funding for our activities in 2018, but the conferences part for our volunteers and for the hiring of a part-time staff member were not funded. We can live with the lower amount, but the way how the process went was extremely disappointing.

On 14 April 2018 the annual General Assembly of Wikimedia Belgium took place (minutes). First the General Assembly approved the financial report. In accordance with the legal requirements, the board has submitted the financial report to the Belgian government. After the financial part, the members elected a new board for our association. One board member stepped down (Lfurter) as she became super busy with her professional work; the association would like to sincerely thank Loraine for the work she did when she sat on the board. Two people were candidate for becoming a board member (Lionel Scheepmans and .Anja.) and both were elected by the General Assembly as board member. The rest of the board remains the same.

The board is since April 2018 composed out Geertivp (president), Romaine (treasurer), SPQRobin (secretary), Afernand74 (national liaison), Lionel Scheepmans (Cultural Diversity, Knowledge Equity and educational aspects in Wikimedia projects) and .Anja. (Gender and Diversity aspects in Wikimedia projects).

See for an overview of all reports on Reports and see for a detailed overview of activities of Wikimedia Belgium on the pages Activities.

Education

Iedereen WIKI (Dutch for Everybody WIKI) is a project of the local library of Ternat supported by Wikimedia Belgium. The project's aim is to digitally unlock local knowledge by making digital data accessible for everyone and to stimulate skills. During the project local heritage organisations and other interested people get an introduction and help in editing Wikipedia, also, students edit Wikipedia and upload photos about a local topic.

The project is a pilot project funded by the province of Flemish-Brabant and has two phases: phase one in spring 2018 and phase two in autumn 2018. In the second phase the project is enlarged to neighbouring libraries.

During April three activities were organised:

21 April 2018 - Multimedia walk in which participants take photographs in Ternat
22 April 2018 - Edit-a-thon Iedereen WIKI in library Ternat
26 April 2018 - Wikipedia session with school class in Ternat in which a school class writes a Wikipedia article about the castle of Ternat

Cultural institutions (GLAM)

Wiki Loves Public Space

In July and August 2017 we organised the photo contest Wiki Loves Public Space around modern buildings, public artworks, memorials and monuments. We organised this contest to use the momentum as this was in Belgium the first full summer in what we had Freedom of Panorama. Freedom of Panorama came into force on 15 July 2016 thanks to our efforts and the parliament members who took it up. To celebrate Freedom of Panorama, we organised this photo contest in what we finally could depict Belgium as it is seen every day.

On 20 July we also gave a lecture about Wikipedia and uploading in the public library of Ternat.

Due personal circumstances the award ceremony was delayed to February 2018. The winning photos of the photo contest have been announced at the new year's event 2018 in Brussels.

The winning photos are:

1. The Japanese tower in Laken - Moyaertsd
2. Vrieselhof in Oelegem - Sally V
3. Beautiful streets of Durbuy - Ravindra Hegade
4. Queen Astrid Memorial Brussels - EmDee
5. Boat lift of Strépy-Thieu - .Anja.
6. A night in Bruges - Zzval
7. Citadel of Namur - Ravindra Hegade
8. Botanical garden in Leuven - EmDee
9. Klein Begijnhof of Leuven - Sally V
10. Royal Palace in Brussels - Sally V

GenderGap edit-a-thon

On 8 March, International Women's Day, we organised together with the Permanent Representation of Sweden to the EU in Brussels, and with support from Wikimedia Sweden, the GenderGap edit-a-thon to create and improve biographies on women on Wikipedia. About 14 new articles have been written and at least six have been improved. A good year in a long tradition.

Links:

Project page on the English Wikipedia
Category with photos of the edit-a-thon on Wikimedia Commons

Venue
The Swedish ambassador Åsa Webber speaking
Linnéa Claeson speaking
Editing Wikipedia
Editing Wikipedia

Dictionary argot released for Wiktionary

At the recent Wikimedia conference in the Netherlands in November 2017, the writer and publisher of the "Dictionary Popular French - Dutch", Berry van de Wouw, attended the session on Wiktionary. In a conversation afterwards he came up with the proposal to donate the contents of this dictionary, some 5,000 lemmas and 30 illustrations by Ronald Kronenburg, to Wiktionary. It is a solid collection of contemporary French spoken language (argot) with a large number of example sentences and the meaning in Dutch.

The past few months we have examined how this can best be achieved. The first result is the second edition of the dictionary with a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license being completely published on Wikimedia Commons at File:Woordenboek Populair Frans - Nederlands 2e druk met Creative Commons licentie.pdf. The first test pages have already been added to Wiktionary. The intention is to transfer all lemmas during the course of the year.

After the Foundation Hebrew and Yiddish words in Dutch donated in 2012 its Jewish-Dutch dictionary to Wikimedia, this is the second major donation of lemmas for the Dutch Wiktionary. The Dutch-language Wiktionary included about 640,000 pages at the beginning of 2018.

More information about this project can be found on the project page on Wiktionary.

Other

Mois de la contribution francophone

In March of this year, the 2018 edition of the Mois de la contribution francophone took place, the month of contributions in the French language. Two events were held in Belgium out of the three initially planned, in Louvain-la-Neuve and Walcourt. This was an opportunity to better connect with the volunteers of Wikimedia in Belgium and to introduce new people to Wikipedia, its sister projects and their particularities. If a new edition is organized in Belgium next year, the goal is to welcome even more people.

Call for volunteers

As a growing chapter, we would like to share our passion for the Wikimedia projects and free knowledge by organizing more events across Belgium. But we need you!

If you're a student, a teacher, member of an institution or just interested in the Wikimedia projects, you're welcome.

If you would like to gather people interested in learning how to contribute, or edit the Wikimedia projects including Wikipedia, or to learn about how the projects work, contact us.

We would be happy to assist you to organise such events like a training session, a thematic edit-a-thon, or a lecture about the Wikimedia projects, the Wikimedia issues and Free knowledge; in Dutch, French and/or English.

Feel free to contact us to tell about your ideas!

Contact us at infowikimedia.be