Wikimedia news/numero 27/en

W i K i M e D i A N e W s no. 27 - December 09, 2009

Official monthly bulletin from Wikimedia Italia Association.

Editorial

We did it! After nine months, we went to the end of the roadmap: our association is officially an APS (Associazione di Promozione Sociale, Social Promotion Association), since the newborn (and disorganized...) Province of Monza and Brianza failed to make opposition in the due time. During the last days our President frantically complied with all the requests from the Italian bureaucrats so that no obstacle could be found. Many thanks to her and Nemo, who spent months for achieving this result.

What does it mean? First, now donations to Wikimedia Italia are tax-deductible. Here (in Italian) it is explained how to donate in a tax-approved way.

Moreover, we were able to join Wikimedia Foundation 2009/10 Fundraising, having signed the Chapter Fundraising Agreement. If you donate to Wikimedia Italia you'll get the fiscal deduction and you'll help both Wikimedia Italia and Wikipedia with all its sister projects.

This is the time to study what we can do in 2010 to promote efficaciously the free culture. We created a commission whose purpose is to contact public and private institutions to obtain freed stuff. We look at what WM-DE managed to do in the Deutsche Fotothek project: after all, Italians museums are scattered all over the nation, and this heritage could be shared if texts and images were donated.

Libraries too are widespread: every one of them contains encyclopedic material, and librarians usually know local authors. Tuscany will give an opportunity to meet the librarians in the beginning of 2010: we have been contacted to organize a training day on Wikipedia.

We already have two open projects, Biblioteca and Musica, which may be boosted by the collaboration with libraries, music schools and music academies. But if we want that these projects become true we need people who offer their time.

In 2010 we hope for more participation from our members; we will also try to offer some stages and scholarships and to contribute financially to selected co-operation projects.

Our association is entering its fifth year. We want to cash our experience and show ourselves as a grown-up association: the second edition of the Festival of Digital Freedoms - that we will host again - will help us to get in touch with other associations sharing our ideals of free culture. Who knows what we may find!

During last year, relationship between WMI and Wikimedia Foundation staff was tense. This enforces our idea that it is wise to invest in local chapters, volunteers and their energy. If you keep sustaining - financially, too - WMF projects, everyone of us can add his card to complete the deck.

Speaking of cards... don't forget to renew your Wikimedia Italia card for 2010!

Xaura

What happened during last months

• September 19th, Rome: the Assembly of Wikimedia Italia discussed the legal problems related to the association, the activities in the last year and the perspectives for the future, and renewed the social offices. In the Board, three members out of five are new; moreover, the first Ombudsman College, introduced last March in the new bylaws, has been elected.
• October 5th-7th, Pisa: Internet Governance Forum Italia 2009, Frieda took part to the second tematic session: social networks: what is public, what is private. In her (quick) speech, she tried to explain how Wikipedia works, gave some figures, introduced WMF and WMI projects, talked about the responsibilities (for the projects and for the contents), told a litlle about what's going on in Italy and what are the problems that WMI and the project communities are facing. The record of the speech is available here.
• October 16th, Padua: at the Altinate/San Gaetano Cultural Centre, the international conference From Diderot to Wikipedia: an Epistemological Revolution? took place. The conference aimed to compare the different actors that are dealing with ecyclopedias, both public and private, both open-content and traditional publishers, in Italy and abroad. The morning session had had the important speeches of prof. Girgenti, who analyzed the evolution of the concept of the encyclopedia in the centuries, especially during the Renaissance, and of prof. Peratoner, who analyzed the roots of the encyclopedism through the philosophy, pointing out the one-to-many relationship that characterized the phylosophy up to now and hopefully will find a conciliation in the Internet world. Wikimedians as well took part: Xaura opened the morning session and .mau. explained how some phenomena observed on Wikipedia can be described by mathematical models; Ilario - for the Swiss chapter - introduced the Swiss scenario of a unique national chapter involved in several different linguistic projects. The afternoon saw the presentation of an initiative of the Italian Ministry for the Education, University and Research; then the editorial director the the Treccani Encyclopedia, Massimo Bray, showed the relationship and the conflicts between the two different worlds of Wikipedia and Treccani and, at last, the director of RAI Nuovi Media, Gaffuri, introduced an important collaboration between RAI and YouTube for publishing RAI archive materials.
• October 23rd, Milan: at the State University, within the international week for the Open Access, a meeting has been held: Wiki and Open Access: collaboration, sharing, knowledge. CristianCantoro, Aubrey e Nemo took part for us. A successful meeting, not only for the obvious "evangelization" about the wiki projects, but also as a starting point for a potentially rich future collaboration. A partnership with the Open Access movement looks very promising: given the common background (free knowledge, usage of free licences, open attitude and collaboration) the two movements can fruitfully collaborate in events for promoting the free knowledge and the Creative Commons licences. WMI members' speeches are available (in Italian) here.
• November 13th, Vatican City: Delphine Ménard (Wikimedia France) and Sannita took part at the meeting Who makes communication today? Between Social Networks, Search Agents, Social News and Social encyclopaedia, within the plenary assembly of the Presidents of the Media Commissions of the Bishops' Conferences of Europe (12th-15th November).
• November 26th, Rome: Sirabder took part at mEDITA 2.0 - publishing in web times meeting with a speech about Wiki, the freely editable culture and the media. The attenders talked about the on-line publishing, its relationship the the traditional publishing, its pros and cons, the problem that still have to be addressed. All the guests came from different experiences, but all linked to the "2.0 culture". The meeting lasted 4 hours, with an interested and actively participating audience. Among the interesting contacts, we list the organizers - the i creAttivi association - and the Circolo Letterario Wunderkammer. Further meetings in Salerno and in Urbino (Ninja Marketing) might follow soon.

What will happen next months

• December 20th, Rome: "Creativity, Cooperation, Condivision II" at the Città dell’Altra Economia, within the "Altradomenica" meetings.

News from our groups

Wikimedia Roma

Following a proposal from the last meeting, we created a group based in Rome, now joined by several members. The group started the WikiTrips project: trips and walks both within Rome and in the outskirts, visiting a museum, a village, a monument, a park for collecting material to be published in the Wikimedia projects.
For the moment, two trips have been organized and duly advertised on the meetings page on Wikipedia: one in Sant'Oreste, a village not very far from Rome, whose article was lacking a lot of information, and one in ancient Ostia, where we mainly took photos. A WikiTrip is simply getting together and going to a place where, other than enjoying the beauty and chatting among us, we can collect useful material. There's not a strict commitment: trips have to be and to remain a pleasure, not an obligation.
We'd like to achieve a bigger participation, we still have to promote the trips in a better way, on other Wikimedia projects as well, and to involve other editors in the choice of the destinations.
In a future, we could have the goal to involve external people also, interested in collaborating and learning how to take part in Wikimedia projects, to be introduced to them not only through the trip, but also through a subsequent meeting for publishing together the collected materials.

GLAM

WMI is creating a special group for dealing with the relationship with memory institutions such as libraries, archives, museums and galleries (GLAM, you know?), in order to liberate content through the Wikimedia projects (especially Commons, Wikisource and Biblioteca).
The group aims to follow the footsteps of other chapters' similar groups, like the Australian GLAM.
The first event in agenda is a meeting with a group of Tuscan libraries for organizing a familiarization day with the Wikimedia projects,

News from our projects

News from Biblioteca

Following the discussions after the meeting in Vatican City about the web and the new media, an experimental translation project has begun: the translation of the 1st chapter of St.Marc's Gospel on Biblioteca.

News from Musica

The work about Francesco Paolo Frontini keeps going on with the publication of the Marinaresca and other works of the Sicilian composer.

News from wiki@home

DracoRoboter passes Wiki@Home through to Christian Cantoro's hands, who hit a long-awaited goal: to interview P.G. Odifreddi. Other interviews are being processed and will be published shortly.

News from WMF projects

• Wikipedia hit the milestone of 100 administrators, with 5 new ones appointed during the last month. The search field has been moved at the top of the sidebar, following the example of the English Wikipedia and Wiktionary (2008) and Italian Wikiquote (August). A modification coherent with the Vector skin by the MediaWiki usability project, where the search box is more visible than before.
• Wikiquote hit the milestone of 10 000 registered users. Featured articles now show Maria and Dr. House - Medical Division.
• Wikisource: here too the search box has been moved at the top.
• Wikizionario: the function "dictionaryLookupHover" has been activated, Wikipedia and Wikibooks users now can use the tool for reading the Wiktionary definition for a word in a pop-up box by double-clicking on it. The function, developed by en:Wikinews, is spreading in all other Wiktionary and Wikinews editions.

Monthly strip

Singloids by Persichetti Bros. Follow Wikimedia Italia on Twitter and identi.ca (the free equivalent)!

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Editorial staff:

• Frieda Brioschi;
• Marco Chemello;
• Nemo (section "News from our projects")
• Aubrey (section "News from Biblioteca")
• Christian Cantoro (sections "News from W@H" and "GLAM")
• .mau. and Paginazero (English version)

To contact the staff, write at: redazione@wikimedia.it or directly to the editor:

• Frieda Brioschi - ubifriedagmail.com

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Notice. This newsletter is exclusively intended for information about Wikimedia Italia, both to the members and to the general public; as per Art. 1, Comma 2, Legge 7 marzo 2001 no. 62, it is not an editorial product