Submissions/How to Build a Regional Cooperation: A Story from CEE Region

After careful consideration, the Programme Committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2015 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this July.

Submission no.: 2023

Title of the submission

How to Build a Regional Cooperation: A Story from CEE Region

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop)

Presentation

Author of the submission

Ліонкінг

E-mail address

Special:Emailuser/Ліонкінг

Username

Ліонкінг

Country of origin

Ukraine

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)

Wikimedia Ukraine

Personal homepage or blog

N/A

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

The idea of this presentation is to share a working example of trans-border regional cooperation, namely the examle of Wikimedia Central and Eastern Europe, a regional community spreading over 20 countries and consisting of chapters, user groups, organized and unorganized local Wikipedia communities.

This presentation will inquire into two types of collaboration present in the region: 1) annual meetings and 2) collaborative article creation.

1) The idea of annual regional meetings was elaborated on Wikimania 2011 in Haifa and the first meeting took place in Belgrade, Serbia in 2012, followed by 2013 edition in Modra, Slovakia and 2014 edition in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Some of the reasons and benefits of such regional meetings are following:

a lot in common:
- shared cultural heritage from previous eras (and in many cases also from present co-operation)
- similar legal environment (many EU members or striving to be EU members)
- common copyright problems related to socialist/communist era (e. g. orphan images from dissolved organizations)
- NGO sphere underdeveloped, little willingness for donations
- many languages used only in a single country
easy & relatively cheap to travel between many of these countries
great opportunity to exchange experiences, learn best practices, create a meta community that spans country borders but has tighter connections than the global Wikimedia community
could be used for chapters to learn from each another & to coach new/planned chapters
could be used to combine national narratives into NPOV on various historical and political topics

2) The regional cooperation has been from the beginning also closely connected to actual content creation, with the examples of collaboration weeks/months between Wikipedias in the region (e.g. Ukrainian, Armenian and Estonian Wikipedias). The second part of the presentation will introduce a simple model of such collaboration initiatives (collaboration between two Wikipedias, e.g Ukrainian and Estonian), but will also inquire into a more complex form of a cross-wiki collaboration, namely Wikimedia CEE Spring 2015.

The idea of Wikimedia CEE Spring is to join local forces of free knowledge to accumulate and distribute information about history, culture, traditions and people in every corner of the region to support mutual acknowledgment and understanding and to increase the quantity and quality of free knowledge available about the CEE region globally. Local Wikipedias are limited with possibility to create articles about their states. Trans-border cooperation can solve this problem, providing new topics for creation and helping to open new cultures for different contributors from the region.The communities from every country in the region are welcome to participate.

The model for both types of collaborative article creation initiatives is the same: 1) the first phase aims at creating lists of articles for every country, which will be used as guidelines for editing. Every participating community has to create lists of articles on different topics for their country that will be distributed to the other participants and will serve as inspiration for possible participants; 2) the second phase will cover the cross-wiki editing itself.

The timeframe for organising Wikimedia CEE Spring was set for the spring of 2015, i.e. from March to June 2015. That said, the project will end before Wikimania 2015 and it will be possible to report fresh results and newly learned lessons from this exciting project in the fruitful atmosphere of Wikimania.

As regional collaboration is an important field of development in the Wikimedia movement in general and community building in particular, Wikimedians form the Central and Eastern Europe region would be more than happy to share their experiences from a working collaboration on a global level at Wikimania 2015 in New Mexico City.

Track

WikiCulture & Community

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long)

30 minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

Yes

Slides or further information (optional)

Special requests

N/A

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--Claudia.Garad (talk) 13:26, 24 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
--Antanana (talk) 00:30, 25 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
--SusikMkr (talk) 07:58, 25 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Asaf (WMF) (talk) 23:00, 25 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Polimerek (talk) 22:53, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
AKoval (WMF) (talk) 18:46, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
--Wertuose (talk) 06:53, 1 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Ocaasi (talk) 18:09, 3 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
--Atropine (talk) 23:24, 7 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
--Papuass (talk) 12:10, 9 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
NickK (talk) 22:56, 9 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Trans Goat (talk) 10:12, 11 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Лорд Бъмбъри (talk) 13:59, 30 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Spiritia (talk) 19:17, 7 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
ShreCk (talk) 18:54, 27 April 2015 (UTC).[reply]