Vuosikertomus 2017/en

Success story: Wiki Loves Monuments

In 2017 Finnish Wikipedia participated first time to the Wiki Loves Monuments.

WMFI organized the national competition of Wiki Loves Monuments in collaboration with the Finnish National Board of Antiquities (NBA). The competition was successful: 2 300 photos were uploaded into Commons by 93 participants of whom 50 were new, which shows that projects like WLM are a good way to reach and activate non-editors.

Technical implementation of the competition was built on top of Wikidata. Cultural heritage sites of national significance and some ancient monument register sites were matched and imported to Wikidata with statements covering basic information such as area, type, coordinates and national IDs. After that, existing Wikidata items, which were located inside the Wikidata items from the national registers, were linked together using ‘part of’ property to get higher granularity in the data. SPARQL and Listeria were used to create target monuments lists of the Wikidata items that had either an NBA ID OR were part of a Wikidata item that had an NBA ID. Wikidata was also used for adding the default descriptions and Commons categories to the photos. In addition, a separate mobile map based on Wikishootme by Magnus Manske was used. The jury used Montage for photo evaluation.

The collaboration proved to be successful as both parties were able to utilize each other’s contacts, knowledge and skills. WMFI had the chance to use NBA’s databases and connections and NBA published WLM press releases. After the competition, photographs have been utilized in their databases on cultural heritage sites of national significance in Finland and ancient monuments database and they were used. Part of the photographs will be permanently archived by the NBA. An example from the NBA's website - a WLM photo in the top right corner.

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  Listeria list which was used in Finnish WLM 2017 competition for uploading photos.
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  The Helsinki City Theatre at nightfall.
  RKY: 4664
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  Jurmo village in Finnish archipelago.
  RKY: 5188
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  The Helsinki Lutheran Cathedral
  RKY: 4628
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  Pikku-Musta of Suomenlinna sea fortress
  RKY: 1569

Learning Story

In 2017 WMFI became a proper employer – for the first time in two years. The latter half of the year was spent on learning employer’s practices and responsibilities. Excluding few stand-alone projects, everything had been done previously on a volunteer basis.

In May we hired a part-time coordinator to organize WLM, manage our projects and carry out association’s day-to-day activities. However, WLM was a big task, especially for a first-timer in Wikimedia environment, and we also underestimated the technical demands of our plan. We realized that we would not have been able to arrange WLM well enough without somebody working full-time on the data and the technical implementation. So, in the end, we supported the coordinator with one board member as a volunteer doing the required technical and wiki-specific work, and we hired a Wikidata and cultural content expert for the technical implementation.

However, even with the success of WLM, last year clearly unbalanced WMFI’s internal workflow. As a result, our reporting was late, our higher education project was postponed to next year and our 15 years of Finnish Wikipedia exhibition was completed only in March 2018. To improve this, we adopted new project management tools, such as Trello and Slack, and practises, such as guidelines and division of tasks. This has made it possible for board members and staff to be on the same page, and it has allowed us to organize our individual work better.

In addition, we have developed our systems related to financials by putting in place new guidelines and rules. Hiring a treasurer from outside has helped greatly with our management. It has also improved sustainability as we now don’t have to find a new volunteer with these professional skills every year.

Programs

Community

WMFI strengthened its international collaborations: Board members and staff participated in international events, such as CEE Meeting in Warsaw and Diversity Conference in Stockholm, and traveled to Tallinn, Estonia to congratulate WMEE on their 15 years of Wikipedia. During the Estonia trip, we continued our strategy work in brainstorming sessions and networked with our Estonian colleagues. At Wikimedia Hackathon and Wikicite, WMFI representatives gave presentations about Glampipe and the Flagged Revision extension.(link 1 and link 2) Three representatives of WMFI participated in Wikimania, one of which had not participated in a Wikiconference before .

WMFI continued with Public art project in which the task is to collect data and photographs of all Public art works and memorials in Finland into Wikipedia. The largest cities have been covered and the work continues into smaller municipalities. Several experienced Wikipedians have joined the project and since last summer the work has become continuous. We have organized photo safaris in Pori, Tampere, Espoo, and Vaasa. The participants have created a control list to govern the lists: 12 municipalities were estimated as complete or nearly complete; 102 had coverage but were lacking in illustration and location; and 41 were lacking in coverage, illustration and location incomplete. Still, ungraded were 144 municipalities. Integrating into Wikidata is next major issue, and we need more intense collaboration with local museums, heritage associations and organizations that adhere public artworks and memorials.

This turned out to be a successful project, developed over time, and it has attracted many community members. One of the reasons for its success might be that it was planned to be accessible and attainable, and results can be seen in real time.

Wikimedians participated in open culture hackathon Hack4FI – Hack your heritage! where one project was a plan of AR application of recognizing public artworks. A Finna to Commons uploading tool was made in this event.

CEE Meeting and Diversity Conference led to shared knowledge and new initiatives between international Wikimedians; for example, WMFI, WMSE and WMNO are planning together a project about female community leaders. Finnish Wikimedians also presented the Glampipe project at the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin.

WMFI assisted the community of Finnish Wikipedia in their Suomi 100 editing contest, the objective of which was to improve and translate selected 100 articles related to Finland into other language editions of Wikipedia. Due to WMFI’s minor supportive role in the contest as a whole, it is not included in our metrics.

The Wikimedia Suomi association held 17 meetings in 2017. 14 of them were board meetings, two were general meetings and one was a strategy meeting.

Partnerships

During this grant period, WMFI opened collaboration with the National Museum of Finland and the National Board of Antiquities which are the major large museum establishments in Finland. This happened first in conjunction with Wiki Loves Monuments and later with the WikiLeap project. WMFI was represented in Museopäivät (Museum days) by two board members and one community member, who promoted WLM and Wikimedia tasks.

WMFI continued cooperation with established partners and also started collaborations with new partners such as KAVI (National Audiovisual Institute), with whom we organized one editathon. The participants were both from this institution and the staff of YLE Finnish Broadcasting Company. In late 2017 we started collaborating with the Finnish National Archives and it led to our very first Wikiresidency, starting this February.

We organized ten editathons and events with GLAM institutions and libraries. For example, we held an editathon with the National Audiovisual Archive, editing and creating articles relating to Finnish radio and television history. We held three small-scale editathons in a local library in Vantaa. Another workshop we organized was Coding Obstacle Course, which focused on editing WikiBooks in a fun way.

Another conference that WMFI participated in was a conference Open licence, open content, open data: tools for developing digital humanitites in Tartu, Estonia, in which president Heikki Kastemaa and a representative from the Game Museum in Tampere took part and who gave a presentation on the establishing of the Game Museum, which opened on January 2017.

WikiLeap

WMFI’s flagship education project WikiLeap is aimed at co-creating learning materials and textbooks for Finnish schools to be freely used by anyone in elementary education. Our partners in this project are The Finnish Information Processing Association (TIVIA); IT Educators Association (IT-kouluttajat ry) and CSC - IT Centre for Science (Tieteen tietotekniikan keskus Oy).

The project progressed swiftly in 2017. Results include two editing events, out of which one was organized for teachers and the other with the National Museum of Finland. Five presentations on WikiLeap were held in different events. The team also organized three school visits. This cooperation has resulted in increased awareness of WikiBooks as a source for learning materials, and new materials have also been created.

Outreach

In Spring we had pilots in Helsinki ja Jyväskylä Universities for our higher education program. Helsinki University course had an obligatory group assignment to produce a Wikipedia article about Cold War topic; the Jyväskylä university course had and optional assigment to edit Economics articles. Helsinki University course produced ten articles, but Jyväskylä only a couple minor edits. Helsinki used Wikiproject namespace to coordinate the course, Jyväskylä used Programs and Events Dashboard.

Helsinki course provided good feedback from the students and the teacher, as evident in the blog post. More instructional material is needed, but whether to use Wikiproject space or EDU extension to facilitate the courses inside Wikipedia is up to discussion with the community. P&E dashboard looks promising and we look forward to using it again later, as it provides an easy way to exhibit the results.

We also produced a form for Finnish teachers, aiming to gather experiences using Wikipedia in education and interest to it, but the form didn’t succeed in the social media. Few other incidents related to edu assignments (outside these edu pilots) stressed the importance of accessible instruction materials for the teachers and students to use.

Apart from WLM, a big part of our outreach work was conducted through participation in different events, making contacts and holding speeches, thus making Wikimedia and WMFI more known to different stakeholders. For example, the association had a representative participating in the Gothenburg book fair in Sweden. This was important as WMFI has wanted for a long time to build more bridges between Finnish Wikipedia, Swedish-speakers in Finland and WMSE. The representative has become a connection between these groups, and we’re planning to use her contacts and networks in the future as we move forward with our cooperation with Fenno-Swedes.

We also participated in Library Days in Jyväskylä with a booth and presentation for librarians. In “Library network days” in Helsinki Heikki Kastemaa gave a talk on Encyclopedism, Wikipedia and Wikimedia. Libraries and librarians are an important resource we’re working to engage more, and his talk made the Wikimedia movement more known in this event.

Kastemaa also worked as a Wikiresident in Villa Karo in Benin, where he gave talks and hosted editathons in various events and thus raised awareness of the Wikimedia movement and WMFI.

We reached the planned 10 percent growth in our membership.