User:Merle von Wittich (WMDE)/Sandkasten

Ilona Buchem // Promoting gender diversity through open innovation
The session focuses on outlining the approach, development steps and preliminary results of the project "Wikipedia Diversity" conducted by Beuth University of Applied Sciences Berlin and Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. The project focuses on enhancing gender diversity in the German Wikipedia and follows the principles of open innovation. Its aim is to engage the Wikipedia community in devising new, creative and effective ways of approaching gender diversity, especially related to such questions as: How can we establish a welcome culture which is inviting to female contributors? How can we communicate in an inclusive way and solve conflicts constructively? How can we develop awareness of gender issues without provoking gender wars?

Ilona Buchem (Germany) is professor for Digital Media and Diversity at Beuth University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. Her courses focus on how digital media change current practices in education and business. In her research she explores how to design and apply digital media to support open learning, collaboration, creativity, diversity and inclusion.

Netha Hussain // Diversifying India through outreach among women
Wikimedia’s gender gap is more pronounced in Indian Wikimedia Community where only 3% of the participants of the editor survey (2011) were female as opposed to 9% globally. The presentation will focus on the context-specific barriers and challenges faced by Indian women in editing Wikipedia and how the Wikimedia community in India has attempted to bridge the gender gap. It will focus on the designs of outreach programs conducted in India for targeting different groups of population, and the cultural aspects that are to be addressed while conducting outreach.

Netha Hussain (India) is a medical student from Kerala, India. She began editing Wikipedia in 2010, contributing to the English- and Malayalam Wikipedia. She has been involved in women topics and coordinated two edit-a-thons in India to increase the representation of women in Wikipedia and the coverage of articles about women in India. She is also an active blogger and has published various blog posts about Wikipedia and women.

Andrés Maggese // Preservation of indigenous languages through Wikipedia
The presentation will focus on Andrés Maggese’s work with children in schools in Argentina. Many children are of Guaraní or Quechua descent and still speak these languages besides Spanish, but most of them did not know about Wikipedia’s existence in their native languages. Over the last few months, Maggese and his partner have introduced them to these language versions of Wikipedia and taught them how to edit. The presentation will show the steps they took, the ensuing results so far and their expectations for the future.

Andrés Maggese (Argentina), Wikipedian since 2012, has been working in schools since last year. He currently works as a teaching assistant, focusing on Wikipedia in the classroom. With his partner, a sysop, he focuses on teaching children how to use and edit Wikipedia in Spanish, Guaraní and Quechua.

John Andersson // Thematic edit-a-thons as a way to reach new groups
The presentation will give an overview about what Wikimedia Sverige has done with regard to edit-a-thons. First, it will give examples followed by a general discussion on what can be learned from these. Wikimedia Sverige had three edit-a-thon events in 2012 and 2013 focusing on different topics. By means of a survey among the participants, they will be evaluated in order to find common denominators. The question is if carefully chosen thematic topics can help to get more women involved and if there is a need to change the format of an edit-a-thon to reach a successful outcome. Thus, the idea of the presentation is to share Wikimedia Sverige’s experiences with edit-a-thons and to get valuable input from others to continue work in this area.

John Andersson (Sweden) is a project manager at Wikimedia Sverige and has worked with the two projects Europeana Awareness and the Open Database of Public Art in Sweden up until the second half of 2013. Since July, he has also also been working with Wikipedia in Education and has been involved in a project directed at immigrants to study Swedish. He has been an active contributor to Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects for about seven years and an administrator for the Swedish Wikipedia for six years.

Nemin Wang // Editor diversity on Chinese Wikipedia
Although Taiwan does not have the same population level as mainland China, 39% of all editors on Chinese Wikipedia come from Taiwan. Only 19% of them come from mainland China and 26% come from Hong Kong. These facts result in a really special editing environment. Neutral point of view has become more important and popular than verifiability and original research. The central question is: How do people with different ideologies improve Wikipedia?

Nemin Wang (China) is an administrator and local community coordinator of Chinese Wikipedia. In the past three years, he has hosted more than 25 offline activities in five cities in China.

Gregory Varnum // LGBT Outreach
The session will focus on online and offline outreach to LGBT communities and wiki users by Wikimedians and Wikipedians. It will include a presentation on conducting effective LGBT outreach, a brief update on existing LGBT outreach by Wikimedia projects, and conclude with a group discussion.

Gregory Varnum's (USA) online work includes founding and serving as the lead administrator of WikiQueer, a Wikipedia style wiki for the LGBT communities; advising Netroots Nation LGBT outreach; volunteering for the Wikimedia movement - including serving on the Affiliations Committee, on the Wikimania Program Committee, as a Hackathon coordinator, MediaWiki developer, and doing offline outreach; and serving as a consultant to political, educational, and direct service organisations doing LGBT advocacy or outreach.

Dumisani Ndubane // Wiki Indaba and the African agenda
The topic of this session will be the merits of Wiki Indaba and how the event is hoped to be the first organized response to the question of community building in Africa. The session will focus on diversities to be encountered in dealing with Wikimedians and organisations from different parts of Africa.

Dumisani Ndubane (South Africa) is the president of Wikimedia ZA and proponent of Wiki Indaba. He has been Wikimedian since 2008 and has experience with small language communities in South Africa. He has managed various projects for WMZA including Wiki Loves Monuments and Joburgpedia.

Katie Chan // Where´s the T in Wikimedia Diversity
When the Wikimedia community talks about diversity issues, a lot of thoughts and bits are given to the low proportion of female editors, global south and attitudes towards lesbian, gay and bisexual editors and article subjects. What is often not addressed are transgender issues, how they affect those of our editors that are concerned by these issues, and whether our approach towards transgender issues and subjects on our projects involve appropriate sensitivities. When transgender related discussions do occur, many of the participants often demonstrate a critical lack of understanding of the issues involved. This presentation will focus on transgender and gender nonconforming topics, Wikimedia projects coverage of it, and discuss possible initiatives to improve Wikimedia movement treatments of this area.

Katie Chan (UK) currently works as a volunteer support organiser for Wikimedia UK. She joined the Wikimedia movement in 2004 contributing to the English Wikipedia, before branching out into other projects in more recent times. Within the Wikimedia movement, she has previously served on the Foundation Election Committee in 2008 and 2013, the Grant Advisory Committee and Wikimania 2013 Scholarship Committee. She is currently an administrator on the English Wikipedia and a volunteer on OTRS.

Jake Orlowitz // Inviting diversity: A playful approach to broadening our community
Like other open-source projects, Wikipedia’s culture can seem complicated, inaccessible, or even intimidating to newcomers. This impression can work against our aim for diversity. We’ve run a series of experiments using welcoming social interaction to see how changing tone can increase diversity in communities like English Wikipedia and Meta-wiki. This session will explore four strategies: invitation, acknowledgement, showcasing people, and playful design, which we have used in projects like Wikipedia’s Teahouse, The Wikipedia Adventure, WikiWomen’s Collaborative, IdeaLab, and Individual Engagement Grants. Does this approach contribute to diversity in meaningful ways? Are there pieces of it that could be used in other projects?

Jake Orlowitz (USA) has been editing English Wikipedia and Meta-Wiki for five years. He focuses on outreach to new editors and all of the ways you can help attract and engage them. He has been an IRC channel operator in the wikipedia-en-help channel for three years, a Wikipedia Teahouse host and organiser since its beginning, a creator of guides for new users, and the designer and builder of a learning game for new editors called The Wikipedia Adventure.

Matthew Flaschen // Engaging new editors by reducing barriers
Engaging new editors by reducing barriers The session focuses on the problem that certain types of editors have an inordinate barrier to entry. This favours a current tiny minority type, and this has resulted in a lack of diversity (i.e. there are more women in the excluded type, the global south is in the excluded type, etc.). And here are the things the Wikimedia Foundation is doing to combat this exclusive behaviour: Visual Editor, Echo, Flow, post-edit feedback, account creation, onboarding/getting started/guided tours, mobile contributions, ULS, etc.

Matthew Flaschen (USA) is a software engineer on the Wikimedia Foundation's Growth Team (formerly the Editor Engagement Experiments team). He has been part of the Wikimedia community since he joined Wikipedia in 2004. At the Foundation, he has been a developer on several projects focused on new editors and also assisted in developing the new user login and signup forms for MediaWiki.

Ilona Buchem and Netha Hussain // Design Diversity
In this workshop, the participants will engage in designing concepts for actions targeted towards fostering diversity in Wikipedia. These actions can be interactive formats, networks, events, learning resources, research and projects of any kind. "Design as enquiry" will be used as a method to inspire innovative solutions. "Design" is meant here a epistemic activity which provides insights into the situation to be changed. Participants will work in small groups and use a variety of materials including pictures, objects, blocks etc. to build and visualise ideas.

Ilona Buchem (Germany) is professor for Digital Media and Diversity at Beuth University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. Her courses focus on how digital media change current practices in education and business. In her research, she explores how to design and apply digital media to support open learning, collaboration, creativity, diversity and inclusion.

Netha Hussain (India) is a medical student from Kerala, India. She began editing Wikipedia in 2010, contributing to the English- and Malayalam Wikipedia. She has been involved in women topics and coordinated two edit-a-thons in India to increase the representation of women in Wikipedia and the coverage of articles about women in India. She is also an active blogger and has published various blog posts about Wikipedia and women.

Alyssa Wright and Siko Bouterse // Creating a toolset for impact
Setting up experiments and demonstrating the impact of diversity (and lack thereof) can help us communicate the importance and make progress towards equitable representation in our community. But fear and inertia can stop us from trying new things. Measuring diversity, from current demographics to initiative outcomes, can be in tension with the ethos of privacy found at the heart opensource. How do we track demographics to improve diversity within a context of privacy we want to preserve? How can we work towards diversity in ways that don’t alienate existing community, and yet still demonstrate the impact of our approaches? The goal of this interactive session is to develop a common toolset for diversity experimentation and measurement which balances community concerns with grounded strategies for implementation.

Siko Bouterse (USA) works for the Wikimedia Foundation as Head of Individual Engagement Grants and started the Wikimedia IdeaLab, where she encourages people to turn ideas into action. She worked on projects like the WikiWomen's Collaborative and the Wikipedia Teahouse.

Alyssa Wright (USA) has worked for the past five years in the open source geospatial industry as Vice President of Civic Programs at Boundless. Prior to her direct involvement in open source, she was a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab and a research affiliate with the MIT Center for Civic Media where she studied technologies as tools for empathy.

Alyssa Wright // Collaborating with other open source communities
Wikipedia’s community is not the only technical one tackling questions of diversity in their ranks. What are other open source communities doing to address issues of representation and participation? This workshop is an opportunity to review research and strategies across communities, including recent work within the OpenStreetMap project. A fundamental assumption is that we cannot move a conversation about technical equity alone, only bounded by the confines of our own communities. This is bigger than any one of us and it is only by working together that we can build the alliances, dialogue, support, techniques, and accountability required for technical equity.

Alyssa Wright (USA) has worked for the past five years in the open source geospatial industry as Vice President of Civic Programs at Boundless. Prior to her direct involvement in open source, she was a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab and a research affiliate with the MIT Center for Civic Media where she studied technologies as tools for empathy.

Ting Chen // The economy of Diversity
Nothing is for free, except Wikipedia. Diversity is also not for free. The discussion aims to answer the following questions: What is the price? To which cost the Wikimedia movement is ready to pay that price? What is the benefit and to which benefit can the Wikimedia movement get out of that price?

Ting Chen (China/Germany) is a long term Wikimedian. He originally started editing the German Wikipedia in 2003 while studying at Braunschweig University of Technology, but soon changed his focus to the Chinese Wikipedia. Ting Chen took part in the first Wikimania, which took place in Frankfurt in 2005 and he instructed the Chinese Wikipedia Community. He also was chair of the Wikimedia Foundation from 2010 to 2012.

Valerie Aurora // Diversity initiatives that worked in other open communities
Other open culture and technology communities have similar diversity problems to Wikimedia communities, and some have made significant progress through specific diversity initiatives. This presentation will outline diversity initiatives from similar world-wide online open "stuff" communities, analyse why they succeeded or failed, and conduct a round-table discussion on whether they might work for Wikimedia communities. These include: internships, travel scholarships, event anti-harassment policies, codes of conduct for online behaviour, unstructured appeals for civility, pledges, petitions, leadership from event organisers, leadership from project leaders, keynotes, editorials, various forms of awareness-raising, and HOWTOs.

Valerie Aurora (USA) has more than ten years of experience as both an open source developer and an advocate for women in open source. In January 2011, Valerie co-founded the Ada Initiative with Mary Gardiner in order to work full-time on increasing the participation of women in open source, Wikipedia, and other areas of open technology and culture. Her volunteer work includes several years as a lead volunteer for LinuxChix, writing for Geek Feminism, and writing HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux.

Silvia Stieneker // Women edit - from a small local initiative to a nationwide network
Wikimedia Germany's programme “Women edit“ seeks to encourage women to actively participate in Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikivoyage. In November 2012, a monthly meet-up for women in Berlin who are interested in editing Wikipedia was initiated. It was soon found that many of the participating women are interested in real-life-contacts with experienced Wikiwomen and other female newbie-editors on a regular basis - it was thus decided to transfer the local idea to other places in Germany. The goal is to establish a nationwide network for women editors, who support each other (online and offline) and tell others that contributing is fun.

Silvia Stieneker (Germany) currently works as a project manager for “Women edit” at Wikimedia Deutschland. Prior to that she worked as a primary school teacher and as a freelance journalist, texter, translator and trainer.

Emily Temple-Wood and Kevin Gorman // Women scientists and philosophers on English Wikipedia
The session will cover efforts to correct systemic bias on the English Wikipedia in two critical biographical areas: scientists and philosophers. Kevin is working with a group of academics to address the lack of coverage of women philosophers on ENWP, a gap generated by the compounding gender imbalances of Wikimedia and philosophy. He will cover the details of this discrepancy and how collaboration between academia and ENWP might mitigate it. WikiProject Women Scientists is an important initiative to increase the abysmal coverage of female scientists on English Wikipedia. Of an estimated 3000+ notable women scientists, only 1500 have articles, and only 5 of those are Featured Articles. This session will cover reasons behind this and efforts to expand the project.

Emily Temple-Wood (USA) is a Wikipedia administrator and the founder of the English Wikipedia's WikiProject Women Scientists. She has spoken about the project at two scientific conferences in 2013 and gave a talk at Wikimania 2013 that covered the project’s history and encouraged audience members to join. WikiProject Women Scientists has been very successful in 2013, producing many pieces of quality content on the English Wikipedia.

Kevin Gorman (USA) is an ENWP contributor and co-moderator of Gendergap-L and is preparing to launch a major project aimed at improving our coverage of notable women philosophers. He recently graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in cultural geography, and has been significantly active in educational outreach to undercovered disciplines.

Gerard Meijssen // Wikidata as a tool to bring initial information
All Wikipedias suffer from a lack of information about the "global south". When this information is known in Wikidata, it is relatively easy to bring this information as a stub to many languages. This is already done on some Wikipedias. In this presentation, Gerard Meijssen will explain what is needed to bring information to a language. He will also indicate possibilities that become possible as Wikidata matures.

Gerard Meijssen (Netherlands) is a longtime Wikimedian and has special interest in language and other cultures. He has been particularly active in Wiktionary, the language committee and, most recently, in Wikidata. He also is a frequent blogger about subjects like language, other cultures and Wikidata.

Tim Moritz Hector // The Teahouse - why and how we internationalize it
The Teahouse project was started by fellows and employees of the Wikimedia Foundation. It provides a suitable, usable and friendly space to Wikipedia newcomers to ask questions and receive ideas about what to do and how to do it in Wikipedia. It especially addresses diverse target groups such as the elderly, people with little technical experience and women. So far, the project is implemented on the English Wikipedia, but it is planned to adapt it for the German language version as well. The session will focus on how the Teahouse can help to fill the gap between online- and offline-support and why it works particularly well for women in order to increase diversity. It will also highlight the challenges of internationalisation and discuss community-based problems in implementing it in different Wikimedia-projects.

Tim Moritz Hector (Germany) is a an editor, mentor and administrator on the German Wikipedia. As a volunteer, he is engaging in projects at Wikimedia Deutschland with a focus on addressing new editors. He conducts courses about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia-projects, was Wikipedian in Residence at the #ZDFcheck (ZDF is a public-service broadcasting television) and supports the German wikiHow as community-facilitato

Sydney Poore // Mentoring: how to mentor women and older people in the Wikimedia movement
The presentation gives an overview about different approaches for mentoring that will encourage a diverse group of volunteers in all types of volunteer jobs in the Wikimedia movement. It includes a focus on encouraging women and older people to fill on and off site volunteer jobs.

Sydney Poore (USA) is a Wikimedia volunteer since 2005 and serves in the Wikimedia Fund Dissemination Committee since 2012. She also served in other committees within the Wikimedia movement such as the Wikimedia Fund Dissemination Advisory Group (2012) the Wikimedia Ombudsmen Commission (2011, 2012, 2013) and the Wikipedia English Arbitration Committee (2007-2009).

Alolita SharmaThe question of culture: changing the diversity equation of open source
The culture of open source presents significant barriers to encouraging contribution from a diverse community. Many open source projects believe that contributions can come from anywhere and everywhere and that they promote the emergence of innovative software from their communities. However maintaining an open collaborative model with a diverse group of contributors from all over the world is hard. Encouraging and spreading the culture of diversity in open source engineering contributions is key to driving innovation. Successful open source projects like MediaWiki/Wikimedia, Firefox/Mozilla have used a variety of strategies to increase participation and diversity. The aim of the presentation and following discussion is to show what works, what does not and how culture, diversity and open source innovation are closely related.

Alolita Sharma (USA) is Director of Engineering for Internationalization and Localization at Wikipedia. She has been working with open source software and has promoted its adoption for almost two decades. Alolita is board member of the Software Freedom Law Center, emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative, and a passionate advocate of Open Source and the Open Web.

Siko Bouterse WMF // Ideas into Action: IdeaLab Diversity working session
Conferences are best when the connections we make and conversations we have are followed up by action! Throughout the conference, we will be gathering a list of projects and ideas for improving diversity that come up over the course of presentations and discussions. The idea of the workshop is to turn some of the best ideas into actionable projects. Participants can begin drafting project plans in IdeaLab on Meta-Wiki, or otherwise dive into organising and getting started with work on projects to improve diversity in Wikimedia communities.

Siko Bouterse (USA) works for the Wikimedia Foundation as Head of Individual Engagement Grants and started the Wikimedia IdeaLab, where she encourages people to turn ideas into action. She worked on projects like the WikiWomen's Collaborative and the Wikipedia Teahouse.