Annual report 2016

Annual report 2016.

Banner of Wikimedia Denmark in front of the Allinge Library during the Folkemødet (The People's Meeting) in 2016.

Børsen.

Events

Folkemødet 2016

Wikimedia Denmark participated in Folkemødet 2016. Folkemødet (The people's meeting) is an annual political event on the Danish island of Bornholm drawing Danish political parties, a large number of lobby organisations and tens of thousands of people interested in politics. There is a large number of events in the form of speeches, discussions, entertainment, etc. and Wikimedia Danmark provided one of them with a workshop held at the local library, where we gave an introduction to Wikipedia and had a discussion with the participants which numbered 5 to 10 people.

Anders Samuelsen, party leader and Danish foreign minister. Photo taken during Wikimedia Denmark's participation in Folkemødet 2016.

A Wikimedia Denmark member obtained press accreditation for Folkemødet, and took photographs of notable people and organizations during the meeting. Some of photographs have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. As of April 2017 the Folkemødet 2016 commons category contains 51 items. One of these photograph has been used several times outside Wikimedia projects: A photograph of the Danish foreign minister Anders Samuelsen has been used two times in one of the prime Danish satirical news sites.

Two people from WMDK board members participated in Folkemødet. One participated in the capacity of member of another organization, the other provided his own funds, so WMDK had no expenses for this event.

Børsen

Børsen is a notable, several hundreds years old building in central Copenhagen. It is now occupied by the Confederation of Danish Enterprise and the interior is generally not open to the public. Together with this organization, Wikimedia Denmark organized a photoshot 14 May 2016 of this extraordinary building. A particular large famous painting, Fra Københavns Børs, a group portrait by P.S. Krøyer is placed centrally in the building. A considerable time was spend on photographing this 4 meter wide painting. The photo is now uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, where it has been labeled a quality image. A photo taken from the roof of the building by a WMDK member, Villy Fink Isaksen, made it as featured picture on Wikimedia Commons. The photo with Fra Københavns Børs was also declared a featured picture. Apart from these photos several other photos were taken. The Wikidag på Børsen category on Wikimedia Commons contains 33 media files at the time of writing.

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  Fra Københavns Børs, a large famous painting inside the Børsen building, and the primary target of the photoshoot.
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  Photo taken from the same spot.
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  Villy Fink Isaksen's featured picture taken from the roof of Børsen.
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  Leather water buckets from Børsen.

WikiWednesday

WMDK continues to organize WikiWednesdays in the Copenhagen area. The informal meetings usually take place the first Wednesday in each month. During the summer months the events are usually outside. They are typically announced on Facebook and on the Danish Wikipedia by our chairman. In 2016 we had 12 WikiWednesdays.

In 2016, Aarhus also had a series of WikiWednesdays meeting. These meetings were held at the Statsbiblioteket (the national library).

Wiki Labs Kunst

Wiki Labs Kunst event at the National Gallery of Denmark as part of Kulturnatten (The Night of Culture in Copenhagen).

Wiki Labs Kunst has continued in 2016. These monthly events gather Wikipedians and curators as well as other people interested in art in the Copenhagen area to work on art in Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata for two hours on Fridays between 15:00 and 17:00 as brief edit-a-thons. The meetings were initiated in 2015 by Merete Sanderhoff, curator at the National Gallery of Denmark (Statens Museum for Kunst) and there has been increased interest in the events. The events are mostly organized through a lively Facebook group. At the time of writing it had grown to 261 members. Apart from the National Gallery of Denmark there are several other Copenhagen institutions participating. The Hirschsprung Collection was been along from the beginning. We now also have, for instance, the Danish Art Workshop and the Danish Film Institute.

Kulturnatten is a Copenhagen-wide cultural event where a number of institutions opens up a Friday night in October. One of the Wiki Labs Kunst meetings was planned to occur on the Kulturnatten at the National Gallery of Denmark. Tables and rollups were put in the hallway and loads of candy served. Apart from editing on Wikipedia, the event gave a lot of opportunities to talk with a good number of people that came by the wikispot.

Wikidag 2016

In connection with our general assembly in September, we have since 2013 organized a Wikidag (English Wikiday) with invited talks. In 2016, we had talks from Bertel Teilfeldt Hansen, postdoc from the University of Copenhagen. He talked about his research project Offline War in the Online Arena. We also had talks from Rebecca Lewin, Head of Communications at Danish Art Workshop, and Henriette Roued-Cunliffe, Associate Professor at University of Copenhagen.

The Ruben Collection

Wikimedia Denmark Chairman Ole Palnatoke Andersen presenting Wikipedia in connection with Ruben Collection edit-a-thon.

Example sound file from the Ruben Collection.

While most events have taken place in Copenhagen, we have slowly built up some activity in Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark. On 26 October 2016, we had an edit-a-thon based around the unique Ruben Collection, — a collection of old 19th century phonograph-based sound recordings made by Gottfried Ruben. Work at the edit-a-thon and associated activity has now meant that much of the information about the Ruben Collection is available on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. The library that possesses the phonographs, Statsbiblioteket, has donated rerecordings, and the Wikimedia Commons category commons: Category:Ruben collection has 126 digital sound files from the Ruben Collection. There is also a lengthy article on the Danish Wikipedia about the collection. Wikimedia Denmark Chairman and a local Wikipedian participated in event in Aarhus that in total may have had around 20 participants.

Europeana 280

Wikimedia Denmark participated in the campaign organized by Liam Wyatt. This was a virtual exhibition and a challenge, Europeana Art history challenge, among European countries and languages to extend Wikimedia's information on art available in European public galleries. Wiki Labs Kunst anchor Merete Sanderhoff had selected the Danish contribution to the campaign. These Danish paintings got extensive metadata on Wikidata and were widely described by a range of Wikipedias.

The extensive information about Danish artworks may have been the reason why Denmark was heading the challenge for a considerable time during the competition in terms of the number of articles written about the artworks of a country. At the end of the challenge, Denmark came in second.

Other events

Members of Wikimedia Denmark participated as individuals in a few other events.

In 2015, Danish library service company DBC set up a competition for the best cultural app based on library data. A Wikimedia Denmark member participated in the competition and won the second prize in January 2016 with an app that used data from Wikidata and displayed it on a map.

In May 2016, members participated in an evening "dataspurt" at a cafe organized by Open Knowledge Danmark centered around the then just released Panama papers. A small part of the Panama papers data was represented on Wikidata and Wikimedia Denmark members created database queries to Wikidata. One particular blog post reporting on this activity gained considerable attention and was referenced in both The Independent and on a blog under Le Monde. Unfortunately, the limitations of the bubble chart of the blog post was not understood, and many readers seems to have seriously misinterpreted the plot. The Wikimedia Danmark member creating the plot wrote a lengthy reflection on the viral post.

HACK4DK is an annual event in the autumn organized by Danish cultural institutions. It is a hackathon with data provided by the institution. Wikimedia Denmark members participated in 2016 and some data and media from Wikimedia projects were used in the HACK4DK projects. For instance, one virtual reality model recreated a room of a 19th century Danish artist with Wikimedia Commons images.

Organization

Wikimedia Danmarks regnskab for 2015-2016.

Wikimedia Denmark (WMDK) is the organization supporting Wikimedia activities in Denmark, such as promoting Wikipedia. Most of the active members are based in Copenhagen and most activities also take place there, though a few activities have occurred outside the capital area.

The number of members of WMDK has been around 20, — 22 at the time of the general assembly. The budget of WMDK is comparatively small.

The board was elected in 2015 at the WMDK general assembly, which served until a new board was elected in September 2016. We have seen little change among the members of the board. Throughout the years Ole Palnatoke Andersen has been chairman. However, at the end of 2016 he withdrew from his position and Steen Thomassen to over as interim chairman.

The board usually meets each month, alternating between face-to-face meeting and board meetings held via IRC and Skype with minutes written on Etherpad and moved to the dk.wikimedia.org wiki once finished. There are five board members and one alternate. The alternate usually participates in the meetings.

WMDK has setup a strategy with specific goals for the organization. While some goals are still far from being reached in 2016, e.g., 100 members of WMDK and 12 months of Wikipedian in residence, others have been reached, e.g., with respect to WikiWednesdays.

In the news

Wikimedia Denmark and members of Wikimedia Denmark have appeared in media throughout 2016. Wikimedia Denmark Chairman Ole Palnatoke Andersen was interviewed to DR, the Danish national broadcasting cooperation, in January 2016 on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of Wikipedia. A member, Villy Fink Isaksen, was twice interviewed in national radio. Another member was portraited in Forskerforum, a magasin for researchers.

See also

• Annual report 2015
• Meta:Wikimedia chapters/Reports
• Meta:Reports