Annual report 2017

Annual report 2017.

Danish Wikipedia 15 years at ENIGMA.

Skagen edit-a-thon.

Events

WikiWednesday

Mette Bock, Danish Minister of Culture. Photo taken during the WikiWednesday 4 May 2017 in Copenhagen.

In the Copenhagen area, we have organized WikiWednesdays as recurring monthly events. They usually take place outside during the summer months and inside during the winter months. Popular places for the meetups have been the cafe Din nye Ven and the new Copenhagen Municipality makerspace STORM20. We announce the events via a page on the Danish Wikipedia as well as on Facebook. The meetings have typically no specific theme and through the years they have unfortunately rarely attracted new participants outside the core of Wikimedia Denmark.

In 2016, Wikipedians established WikiWednesdays in Aarhus. They continued in 2017 with 9 WikiWednesdays held at the Statsbiblioteket (now Royal Library in Aarhus).

Wiki Labs Kultur

Wiki Labs Kultur (Wiki Labs Culture) is a monthly event that has taken place since 2015 in the Copenhagen area. Wikipedians meet with curators, librarians and others from Danish cultural institutions. The name was changed from Wiki Labs Kunst (Wiki Labs Art) to Wiki Labs Kultur in 2017 as the scope has broadened. With Merete Sanderhoff from Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK, National Gallery of Denmark) as key organizer, the events take place at Copenhagen cultural institutions such as SMK, Danish Art Workshops (Statens Værksteder for Kunst) and the Hirschsprung Collection (art gallery). The meetings are usually scheduled on Fridays 15:00 to 17:00 and announced via a group on Facebook.

In connection with these meetings, Statens Værksteder for Kunst has been fairly active on the Danish Wikipedia. Centered around the portal Bagom Kunst og Design: metoder og materialer (Behind art and design: Methods and materials), they have written or considerably extended Danish Wikipedia articles on techniques used by artists. Their project is funded by several Danish foundations.

Kulturnatten (Night of Culture) is an annual event in Copenhagen where institutions open up for the public and as in 2016, Wikimedia Denmark joined up with a cultural institution for the 2017 event. It was organized as a lengthy Wiki Labs Culture editathon at the The Danish Film Institute in central Copenhagen. We were around 10 people from Wikimedia Denmark and other Wiki Labs Culture members.

In 2017, Merete Sanderhoff published an academic paper in Journal of Museum Education about the open GLAM movement. The paper, titled The Canon, the Web, and the Long Tail, has a section on her experience with Wikipedia and the Wiki Labs Kultur events. She noted the results of a survey among Wiki Labs participants, who "stated that their interest in art historical topics, and their willingness to write about such topics, had increased significantly because of the opportunity to engage in dialogue and collaborate with museum experts."

Titusbuen i Rom, photo of Constantin Hansen's painting released by SMK and among the most "viewed" SMK images on Wikimedia sites.

Merete Sanderhoff has also pointed to one of the success stories of the openness of SMK. Several of the images of public domain paintings released by the national gallery have been used in the North American miniseries Alias Grace for decorating the interior of the houses where the action takes place. During one of the sessions of Wiki Labs Kultur, the Alias Grace (miniseries) article of the English Wikipedia was expanded with the specific images and a description. According to the GLAMorgan tool, these images are now among the most "viewed" SMK images across the Wikimedia sites, and mostly due to the views gained from the Alias Grace (miniseries) English Wikipedia article. For instance, GLAMorgan reports 195,464 "views" for the articles with Titusbuen i Rom in December 2017.

A related Wikipedia-art event, Skagen Edit-a-thon, was held in Skagen, the northern-most town in Denmark the 18 May 2017. 6 people participated and made edits or created new articles about art and Skagen.

Sharing is Caring workshop

Sharing is Caring - Wikipedia-workshop

Sharing is Caring is an annual international conference on sharing for cultural heritage institution. Starting out as a seminar in 2011 it has been anchored by Merete Sanderhoff through the years and based in Copenhagen.

This year the event was held in Aarhus, the 2017 cultural city of Europe, spanning three days in November. One of the days was allocated to workshops. Two members from Wikimedia Denmark (Villy Fink Isaksen and Finn Årup Nielsen) and two people from the Wiki Labs Culture community (Majken Astrup, Aarhus University Library in Emdrup and Karen Williams, The Royal Library) managed workshop sessions which were scheduled in two time slots. A total of around 20 participants created a lively event with lots of discussion.

The Wikipedia workshop was titled How to boost your collection visibility and impact on Wikipedia and covered topics such as "Why share knowledge and collections on Wikipedia?", "Pros and cons using Wikipedia", "How to get started", Wikipedia editing, Wikimedia Commons, license and copyright, Components of Wikipedia article and Tools for measuring impact. These topics was presented from a Google Slides. The first session became quite interactive with a considerable amount of discussion and we did not get time to let the workshop participants edit. The second session created time for some Wikipedia editing.

Around one month before the workshop, Villy Fink Isaksen had gotten a letter to the editor published in one of the major Danish newspapers. Under the title Den skjulte kulturarv (The hidden cultural heritage), he noted that many works out of copyright are located at sites, only accessible for people affiliated with the site, e.g., town halls. Isaksen argued that such works should be photographed and shared online.

Danish Wikipedia 15 years

The 1st February 2017 Wikimedia Denmark celebrated the 15 year anniversary of the Danish Wikipedia. The event took place at the new museum ENIGMA in Østerbro and around 10 people joined. A local radio station, P4 København, made an interview with one of the participants. In connection with the anniversary, a Wikimedia Denmark member was also interviewed to national television and a national newspaper wrote about Danish Wikipedia on the occasion.

Wikidag

Wikidag is our yearly event where we invite experts from outside Wikimedia Danmark to give a talk. In 2017, we had scheduled 3 speakers. However, the event became somewhat amputated as two speakers had to cancel.

Organization

Minutes from the general assembly 2017 generalforsamling (in Danish).

Wikimedia Denmark's financial statement for 2016-2017.

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 board of Wikimedia Denmark consists of 5 members and meets monthly or every second month, either at a physical meeting or via Skype. We have started using the cloud service Trello to keep track of projects. Just before the end of 2016 our Chapter chairman through many years, Ole Palnatoke Andersen, stepped down and Steen Thomassen took over as interim chairman. At the general assembly, a new chairman, Finn Årup Nielsen, was elected.

Two board members (Finn Årup Nielsen and Simon Studinski) participated in Wikimedia Conference 2017 in Berlin. Finn Årup Nielsen participated in the discussion about the Wikimedia movement strategy with the vision for Wikimedia in 2030. Simon Studinski participated in the many other events about organizational aspects. The trip was funded by the Wikimedia Foundation. Prior to the event, Finn had asked for inputs on the Danish Wikipedia regarding the strategy. Some joined the discussion and there were a suggestion was for a resource library. The discussion led to the creation of the Wikipedia:Ressourcebibliotek page on the Danish Wikipedia. Interestingly another user expressed the opinion that we (Danish Wikipedia) should be proud of having created a Danish Wikipedia with close to 225.000 articles without any public or private funds.

Several years ago, Wikimedia Denmark, obtained a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, to fund a Wikimedian-in-residence. Because the Wikimedian-in-residence ended up being paid by the host institution, the Wikimedia Foundation funds were not used and the foundation requested the funds back. Finally in 2017, the funds were transferred back to the foundation. The amount was a considerable part of the holdings of WMDK. Nevertheless, WMDK maintains a healthy economy.

See also

• Annual report 2016
• Annual report 2018