Relazione sulle attività 2018/en

This is an English translation of Relazione sulle attività 2018 ,
it may be not updated or may be different from the original

The following report was presented by the board of Wikimedia Italia and approved by the members of the association during the general assembly in april 2019.

Introduction

The association Wikimedia Italia – Associazione per la diffusione della conoscenza libera (hereinafter referred to as Wikimedia Italia or WMIT) was founded on 17th June 2005 in Canino (Italy). WMI is a non-party, non-political, non-profit association that actively contributes to the diffusion, the improvement and the development of knowledge and culture throughout the world.

Wikimedia Italia and its social purpose

Wikimedia Italia is the national chapter recognized by Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit American organisation that provides the essential infrastructure for Wikipedia, the online multilingual free-content encyclopaedia cooperatively written by volunteers. In particular, Wikimedia Foundation hosts in its servers Wikipedia in all its languages and many other projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.

Wikimedia Italia works alongside Wikimedia Foundation but does not legally represent Wikimedia Foundation nor Wikipedia in Italy. Wikimedia Italia is entitled to use Wikimedia brands and logo exclusively for its institutional activities. Similarly, since 2016, Wikimedia Italia acts as national chapter for the OpenStreetMap Foundation but remains independent from it.

Wikimedia Italia aims to spread out the philosophy that inspires all the Wikimedia projects and OpenStreetMap; the members of the association contribute to the projects or share their underlying values. Being part of this association facilitates to share ideas and experiences with people from all over the world and allows to be directly involved in the development of the Wikimedia movement and its objectives.

The activities carried out on Wikipedia by the members of Wikimedia Italia are purely personal; the association has no responsibility and does not give guidelines or advices on this.

Wikimedia Italia members

The annual membership fee to join Wikimedia Italia is 25 €, it never changed since 2005.

Wikimedia Italia was founded by 18 members on 17th June 2005. On 31st December 2018, WMI counted 415 members.

Wikimedia Italia members by region in 2018

• New members (from January to December 2018): 74
• Decayed members: 70
• Average age: 47 years old
• Youngest member: 20 years old
• Oldest member: 92 years old
• Gender:
  • Women: 94 (22,65%)
  • Men: 320 (77,11%)
• Region of residence: the italian regions with the highest number of members are Lombardia (98), Lazio (49), Emilia Romagna (40), Veneto (35), Piemonte (32) and Tuscany (29). The other regions have less than 25 members each. 11 members live abroad (see chart).

Coordinators

As in 2016 and 2017 some members - 22 for the year 2018 - were elected as regional and thematic coordinator. On 10th March 2018, one general meeting of the coordinators was held at BASE Milano, were the WMI offices are based: 15 coordinators, 3 staff members and 3 board members were present at the meeting.

Staff

Wikimedia Italia staff at itWikiCon 2018 in Como. By Laurentius, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Italia has a small staff that supports and works with the members of the association and some collaborators for specific external activities.

During 2018 the following people worked for the association: Francesca Lissoni (administration and fundraising, on maternity leave for part of the year), Laura Leopardi (fundraising, replacement for Francesca Lissoni during maternity leave), Francesca Ussani (communications), Giorgia Masiello (office manager, internship), Giovanna Ranci (project manager education), Marta Arosio (project manager GLAM, on maternity leave for part of the year), Daniele Saibene (project manager GLAM, replacement for Marta Arosio during maternity leave), Alessandro Palmas (project manager OpenStreetMap).

Activities

Relations with cultural institutions

Libraries

One of the 300 images of Acta Eduritorum digitalized in 2017. These documents are part of BEIC catalogue and are in public domain

In 2018, WMIT promoted several activities: 9 training courses, 10 seminars and 4 editathons, engaging more than 1000 participants (150 were new editors).

As in past years, WMIT took part in Convegno delle Stelline. Eusebia Parrotto, one of WMIT active members, was one of the speakers in the main session "Comunicare musei, archivi e biblioteche nell'era dei social. Opportunità e strategie di valorizzazione del patrimonio culturale" ("Communicating museums, archives and libraries in the era of social media. Opportunities and strategies to promote the cultural heritage").

The annual conference Sfide e alleanze tra biblioteche e Wikipedia ("Challenges and alliances between libraries and Wikipedia") at the public library Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze was well attended, with around 50 participants. Worth mentioning are also the workshop for PhD students and librarians at Agricultural Department of Università Federico II di Napoli and the training (in remote) for the Montiferru librarians in Sardegna.

In 2018, WMIT renewed the agreement with Università di Torino (digital bibliographic information service of Foreign Languages and Literature and Modern culture Department). The university offered a three months scholarship to promote the literary-humanistic heritage of the Library, using open data platforms, with a special focus on Wikidata and Wikisource.

Museums and archives

WMIT organized many editathons during the year. One of the most successful was the editathon at the Archaelogical Park of Paestum, with 13 participants and 8 Wikipedia articles edited.

In the framework of the project "Reach Out", WMIT and the Polo museale of Campania realized some activities with a group of twenty high school students: lessons on Wikipedia and one editathon, aiming to write and edit articles and to upload new photos on Wikimedia Commons of Palazzo Reale.

In occasion of the upcoming 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci (May, 2nd 1519), WMIT signed a convention with Museo Galileo e Leonardo to realize the Progetto Leonardo. The museum will release materials in CC BY-SA, aiming to improve the contents about Leonardo da Vinci and his scientific works on Wikimedia projects, with the collaboration of researchers, experts and the general public.

Together with ICOM, WMIT took part in the round table on opportunities and goals of images' free licenses in the context of the day of web strategy in museums.

Others

In May WMIT signed an agreement with Sibelius Society aiming to sustain initiatives which promote free dissemination of information, with special attention for music, theatre, art and nordic culture.

In December WMIT signed another agreement with Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Transeuropa / Centro per la Cooperazione Internazionale of Trento, aiming to realize together some activities in 2019, such as school-work experience, one editathon and one workshop in the class of journalism promoted by Storytelling Lab.

In the framework of Art+Feminism project, the user group WikiDonne promoted 6 editathons in different cities, which involved 90 participants who created 35 new articles on Wikipedia in Italian.

Indicators

	Events	Participants	Events by volunteers	New articles
Libraries	23	708	16	-
Museums and archives	11	250	-	159

Education Programme

On the year 2018 over 800 students and teachers from more than 25 different secondary schools participated in our courses, for more than 500 hours of education on how to contribute to Wikimedia projects and OpenStreetMap. 500 more students and teachers participated to 36 conferences held in 14 italian regions, both organized inside schools or within special events addressed to teachers and digital educators. Also, 16 different italian Universities in 2018 hosted courses and seminars on Wikimedia projects, involving students, researchers and professors.

Partnership with the Italian Ministry of Education

On January 18th 2018 Wikimedia Italia signed a three-year memorandum of understanding with the Italian Ministry of Education (MIUR), as part of the Digital School National Plan.

The MoU came after of a long interlocution with the Ministry carried out by some members of the association and allowed WMI to the release on the official platform of the Ministry eight schoolkits for teachers on how to integrate Wikimedia projects - in particular Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikiversità, Wikisource - in their education activity.

During the year the association also participated in the rich calendar of events called "Futura" organized by MIUR: 15 members of the association held 21 workshops in 11 regions (Puglia, Calabria, Campania, Lazio, Umbria, Toscana, Marche, Liguria, Piemonte, Lombardia, Veneto) that involved more than 150 participants, both school teachers and administrators.

Wikimedia Italia also started an accreditation process with the Ministry of Education for three courses focused on Wikipedia, Wikimedia projects for cultural heritage and OpenStreetMap: at the end of the process the courses will be formally approved by the Ministry and proposed to teachers through the ministerial platform S.O.F.I.A..

Activities with secondary schools

2018 was characterized by the activation of different "alternanza scuola/lavoro" (young apprenticeship programmes) projects that involved our members in teaching to the students how to contribute to Wikimedia projects and OpenStreetMap. More than 50 students from Liceo Classico "Quinto Orazio Flacco" in Potenza enhanced the documentary heritage of their school library through by creating more than 30 Wikipedia articles dedicated to classical culture and Basilicata. Also in Potenza, the students of the Liceo Scientifico Galileo Galilei worked on the project "The wisdom of the ancients" while in Turin one classroom at IIS Avogadro dedicated his activity to OpenStreetMap, dealing with urban and extra-urban mapping operations. Other "alternanza scuola/lavoro" were held in Florence at Biblioteca delle Oblate and Fano.

WMI also promoted as usual different workshops in the schools to teach how to contribute to Wikimedia projects: one of the most important in 2018 was held in Cornate d'Adda (MB) and involved ten different classrooms of one high school and five wikipedian experts. Also Liceo Medi in Battipaglia (SA) continued its collaboration with WMI, involving the National Archive of Salerno in a journey to rediscover the origins of the city of Battipaglia thanks to its rich library of references. Noteworthy too is the mapping activity conducted by the comprehensive institute "A. Fogazzaro" in Noventa Vicentina (VI) and a fruitful collaboration of the Alessandro Manzoni Institute of Trento together with the Municipal Library.

Thanks to the fundraising campaign carried out in 2017 to support the education program, the association was able to organize two training days in Abruzzo in collaboration with two important institutions of the territory: the European Documentation Center (CDE) of the University of Teramo and the Civic Museums Centre of Giulianova. Also, together with the Italian Association for Free Software and the University of Bologna, Wikimedia Italia organized the conference Didattica aperta to encourage teachers and parents in spreading the principles of open knowledge.

In 2018 WMI also started to evaluate the appreciation of its courses by the schools through a questionnaire addressed to teachers. The results are collected in this report.

Activities with Universities

In 2018 WMI collaborated with more than 15 Universities: from Politecnico di Milano to the University of Bari, passing through Padua, Bologna, Forlì, Florence, Macerata, Rome, Naples, Salerno and Teramo.

Some of the projects were already started in the years before, such as the one with the University of Salerno, University of Padua and Politecnico di Milano that promoted again the course "Science, technology, society and Wikipedia" addressed to Ph.D. The course involved our members Marco Chemello and Niccolò Caranti and the english wikimedian Andy Mabbett as trainers.

Among the new projects, it's worth to cite the one carried out with IULM in collaboration with Mondadori Foundation, that led to improve several Wikipedia articles also using historical images released with open license by the Foundation.

OpenStreetMap

2018 was a very important year for OpenStreetMap, full of events and collaborations with the main stakeholders that can contribute and use the free wiki world map. The most important moment of the year was definitely State of the Map: the annual gathering of the international OpenStreetMap community that for the first time was held in Milan, Italy. Although the interest on the project is growing a lot, it is still difficult to involve the community on common objectives and it will be necessary to work on this aspect in the coming years.

State of the Map 2018

Group photo at State of the Map 2018 Milan. By Francesco Giunta, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The international gathering of the OpenStreetMap community, organized by the OSM Foundation and Wikimedia Italia in collaboration with Politecnico di Milano, took place from 28 to 30 July 2018. The three-day event, that received instituional support by the Municiplity of Milan, was hosted at the Politecnico di Milano headquarters in Piazza Leonardo Da Vinci. SOTM 2018 was the most participated edition ever: over 420 people from 54 countries took part in the event, including 25 volunteers and more than 20 scholars who were able to attend the conference thanks to the grant programme activated by OSM Foundation.

The event was appreciated by the community and received good attention from the media, also thanks to the launch press conference - hosted at the Urban Center in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan - where the Municipality representatives announced the release of over 60,000 street numbers as open data on his geoportal.

OpenStreetMap and companies

During 2018 the collaborations between the OpenStreetMap community and the companies were tightened and ended up in many public events aimed at establishing a dialogue between OSM users and companies. These initiatives include the mapping party organized on October 19 in Turin together with 5T and ITHACA and the meeting promoted on July 7 by AMAT Milano.

OpenStreetMap and the Civil Protection

Thanks to V-IOLA project (Volunteer International On Line Asset), funded by the EU, Wikimedia Italia in 2018 started to collaborate with the italian Civil Protection department (DPC) and other important partners such as CIMA Foundation (center of competence of the DPC) and the Italian, Romanian and Montenegrin Red Crosses. The project is aimed at finding better ways to involve online volunteers in mapping activities in areas affected by emergencies, focusing in particular on the Balkan territory.

Wiki Loves Monuments

The WLM 2018 winner in Italy: a portrait of Terme Tettuccio in Montecatini. By Francesco Marraccini, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The seventh edition of Wiki Loves Monuments in Italy was characterized by a great participation of photographers, a large number of photographs collected and an important change in the acquisition of the authorizations to portrait italian monuments, that for the first time were managed through Wikidata. Despite WMI promoted a strong advocacy activity towards Italian and European institutions with the aim to change the regulatory framework, Italy still has no freedom of panorama and is still bound by legislative obligations that prevent the publication of photographs of cultural heritage with open license in absence of a proper authorization.

Cataloguing our cultural heritage through Wikidata

Completing a process started in 2017, this year for the first time WMI catalogued all the Italian monuments authorized for WLM through Wikidata. In collaboration with the Turin based start-up Synapta, a list of 27,000 monuments defined by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage (MiBAC) as "Cultural places of interest" were imported on Wikidata. After the importation, the items were analyzed and harmonized with those already present in the free database, both through automatic algorithms and with the involvement of the Wikidata community. Subsequently, each authorized monument was assigned a unique identification code (WLM ID), accompanied by other useful information such as the name of the monument, the type of monument, the geolocation and the date of the beginning and expiry of the authorization. This activity made it possible to enrich Wikidata with over 20,000 new items and add details to more than 7,000 items that were already registered on the free database.

The results

The 2018 edition of Wiki Loves Monuments in Italy reached astonishing results. The photographs collected were over 29,000 (40% more than in 2017 edition): a number that allowed Italy to reach the second place in the international ranking, following Russia that ranked first with a gap of only 3,500 images.

The monumental trees were awarded by the Jury. In this shot, the cypresses of the Val D'Orcia. By Carlo Cattaneo photographs, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Italy also ranked third overall for the number of participants, surpassed only by the United States and India: more than 1,000 people in our country have uploaded at least one shot on Wikimedia Commons. Among the many, three users stand out above all: Sailko, Mongolo1984 e Saverio.G placed respectively second, third and tenth worldwide for the number of photograps they shared on Wikimedia Commons.

The seventh edition of the competition in Italy also registered a boom of authorizations: more than 11,000 monuments including for the first time monumental trees.

Partners, awards and local contests

Several "long term" partners of Wiki Loves Monuments confirmed their support also for the 2018 edition of the competition, such as FIAF, ICOM Italia, BASE Milano, Fondation Grand Paradis and the Italian Touring Club. Also Euronics Italia continued to support the competition as a sponsor, offering a 400 euros voucher as prize for the winner of the national competition.The partners of the competition in Italy also offered four special awards.

Thanks to the support of WMI members and active volunteers, the association also promoted seven regional contests, three of which were held for the first time in 2018.

Freedom of panorama

Wiki Loves Monuments in Italy is more difficult to organize than in other countries because of the absence of freedom of panorama but also due to restrictions imposed by the italian law on cultural heritage. To clarify the regulatory context, in 2018 WMI has asked a legal opinion on this matter by an italian law firm expert in the field in order to better advocate the institutional representatives such as the italian Ministry of cultural heritage. WMI also tried to engage with italian MEPs to highlight the importance of freedom of panorama and let them extend it to all European countries as part of the Copyright Directive.

Support for volunteers

In 2018, for the third year in a row, WMI activated its microgrant programme, allocating € 10,000 overall for financing projects proposed by its members. Every project could be financed for a maximum amount of € 500. The projects submitted in 2018 were evaluated by a dedicated commission that has an annual mandate and is composed of five members appointed by the board. The commission received 16 requests and approved all of them.

Group picture at itWikiCon 2018. By Niccolò Caranti, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The "peer-to-peer" tutoring activity was also revamped in May 2018, featuring six online and offline meeting during the year:

• May 21st: Semantic Web and Wikidata, with Alessio Melandri
• June 5: Semantic Web and SPARQL query, with Alessio Melandri
• September 28th: ​​Montage, with Alessandro Marchetti
• October 17: Linked Open Data for Cultural Organizations), with Francesca Ussani and Marta Arosio
• October 24: Linked Open Data for Cultural Organizations (replica), with Francesca Ussani and Marta Arosio
• December 10th: European copyright reform, with Lorenzo Losa

Also the two annual assemblies were a meeting and discussion occasion for WMI members and volunteers, that were also involved in collateral events such as a mapping party and an Art + Feminism editathon in Padua, for the spring assembly. The autumn assembly was hosted in Como as part of the itWikiCon, the annual gathering of the active users on Wikimedia projects in Italian. This allowed the participants to dedicate an entire weekend to Wikimedia projects and get to know many members of the community. itWikiCon was supported by Wikimedia Italia, that covered for 20 scholarships and for other expenses related to the event, together Wikimedia CH and Wikimedia Foundation. More than 100 people attended the event.

International participation

Edoardo Bighin talks about Wikisource at a Wikimania.

The association encouraged the participation of volunteers in the international initiatives promoted by the Wikimedia movement: from 20 to 22 April two members of WMI board and staff participated in the annual Wikimedia Conference in Berlin. In November Luca Martinelli represented the association at GLAM Conference 2018 in Tel Aviv.

For the eighth consecutive year, Wikimedia Italia also promoted the scholarship programme "Alessio Guidetti" for Wikimania 2018, that took place in Cape Town. Thanks to the programme, five italian Wikimedia users were able to participate in the event. Also Lorenzo Losa, WMI President, was present to represent the association at the event.

Commmunications

Internal communications

Thanks to a constant monitoring of the OTRS platform, WMI staff was able to promptly manage the membership applications and all the other requests received via e-mail. To better involve WMI members in the communications activity, the association asked them to write contents or give interviews for our blog: 17 articles out of 135 published on WMI blog during the year 2018 are interviews or directly involve the members (about 13%).

External communications

A national TV troupe interviewing Maurizio Napolitano, OSM user and WMI board member. BY Mbranco2, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In 2018 the list of subscribers to WMI newsletter grew by 9%, the followers on Facebook and Twitter by 8% and the visitors on the website by 13.5%. It is however difficult to increase the involvement of the public: despite some very high peaks of interest, the opening rate of the newsletters has decreased or remained stable, as have the reactions and comments to contents on social media.

As far as the press is concerned, the "traditional" peak of visibility connected to Wiki Loves Monuments - that this year generated more than 100 press clippings and great feedback on social networks - was this year accompanied by two other events that ensured the association a strong interest: the blackout promoted by the italian Wikipedia community in July, when the EU Parliament had to vote on the EU copyright directive, and State of the Map 2018, the annual gathering of the international community of OpenStreetMap, that this year was hosted in Milan.

The Wikipedia blackout generated more than 200 press clippings, of which more than 15 contain a mention to Wikimedia Italia or an interview with our spokesperson Maurizio Codogno; moreover, it produced a very high traffic on Wikimedia Italia website and on social media channels.

Philip Di Salvo (Wired) interviews Lukas Mezger (Wikimedia DE) at itWikiCon Como 2018. Photo by Niccolò Caranti, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

As for State of the Map 2018, the main result in terms of communication is the coverage by the press: all the main national newspapers (Corriere, Repubblica, La Stampa, Il Giorno and ANSA) talked about the event Furthermore, the event was mentioned by SKY TG24 newsletter and TGR Lombardia, that realised an extensive reportage with interviews to OSM volunteers, our project manager Alessandro Palmas and Maurizio Napolitano, WMI's board member.

The itWikiCon 2018 Como also received attention from the local press and media, but also from magazines such as Wired, that issued an article on the event with an interview on the EU copyright reform to Lukas Mezger (Wikimedia Deutschland), invited as an international guest together with Susanna Mkrtchyan of Wikimedia Armenia.

Fundraising

The main objective of 2018 was to keep the ‘status quo’, with regards to activities and actions. Due to some staff changes, in 2018 the whole fundraising area had a minor setback.

The total income of membership fees and donations was of 46.462,72 €, +68,46% compared to 2017. This increase is related to the Christmas campaign, which ran between the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018.

Members

In 2018, the income from membership fees was stable (+2,37%). 312 members renewed their subscription. Each member received a membership card and a letter.

Donors

In 2018 WMIT had two campaigns: one was the continuation of Christmas campaign 2017 with subject "Wiki Loves Monuments", that reached 22.128 people by email (open rate 22%); the other was a small campaign at the end of July with subject "Openstreetmap", that reached 26.933 people by email (open rate 22%).

Thanks to these two actions, WMIT had 1.007 donations for a total income of 39.040,64 €.

We had two spontaneous donations of 1.000,00 € each (big donors) and five donations from middle donors (total donation equal or over 500€) for a total income of 4.651,00 €.

"Thank you" email were sent in response to 56,23% of all donations. This low rate is due to the fact that many donors one-off didn't share their email address.

In April WMIT sent an infographic to donors of 2017 to share the achievements and results reached by the association thanks to their support. The email was sent to 434 contacts, with an open rate of 38%.

Cinque per mille campaign

Like every year, from March to July WMIT launched the "Cinque per mille" campaign, the main source of revenue for WMIT.

All the contacts of WMI were invited via email, newsletter and social networks to donate their "Cinque per mille" to WMI. Also, given It's a tax deduction donation, we contacted accountants and CAF to promote the initiative.

The Wikimedia movement and the WMF also supported this campaign by publishing the central notice on all the Wikimedia projects for 4 weeks (2 + 2) and by publishing the site notice on the Wikipedia in Italian. WMF sent an email to its Italian donors too.

On May, 31st, the magazine "Internazionale" supported the campaign by publishing the banner of the campaign (free of charge).

Indicators

	Income 2017	Income 2018	Income changes	Num. 2017	Num. 2018	Number changes
Membership fees	7.250,00 €	7.422,08 €	+172,08 € (+2,37%)	412	415	3 (0,73%)
Donations	20.330,26 €	39.040,64 €	+18.710,38 € (+92,03%)	846	1804	958 (113,24%)
Total	27.580,26 €	46.462,72 €	+18.882,46 € (+68,46%)	1258	2219	961 (76,39%)