Annual report 2013

Photo from "Wikitræf" in June 2013.

Photo from a "WikiWednesday" in 2013.

General assembly in WMDK back in 2010.

Photo taken during a WikiWednesday.

Flyers fra Wikimedia Danmark.

Bethesda building in central Copenhagen, where a board meeting was held in March.

Annual report 2013 for Wikimedia Denmark (WMDK).

Organization

Wikimedia Denmark (WMDK) is the organization supporting Wikimedia activities in the Denmark, such as promoting Wikipedia. Most of the active members are based in Copenhagen and most activities also takes place there, though a few activities have occured outside the capital area.

In the end of 2013 WMDK had 20 members and around 8'000 Danish Kroner on its bank account. Apart from this amount, WMDK has received a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, which now amounts to 21.641 Danish Kroner. This grant was originally intended to cover the salary for the Wikipedian-in-Residence (WiR) in 2012, but as the hosting institutions choose to fund the WiR the grant was not spent. The budget of WMDK is far less than the budget from WMDK sister chapter in Sweden, Wikimedia Sverige, which in 2013 had a budget on several million Swedish Kroner. Our accounting in 2013 was considerably delayed due to our change in accountant. The new accountant acquired access to the bank account and updated the books.

A board was elected in 2012 at the WMDK general assembly, which served until a new board was elected in september 2013. There has been no major change in the board. Through the year Ole Palnatoke Andersen has been Chairman and continuous to be so. The board usually meets each month, alternating between face-to-face meeting and board meetings held via IRC.

The board usually communicates via email, etherpad, IRC and wiki. Prior to 2013 most wiki-based information used the meta Wikimedia wiki (from meta:Wikimedia Danmark) and an "intern" WMDK wiki. The idea was to use the meta wiki for public information, while the "intern" we could use for internal/privat information. The "intern" wiki crashed with some data lost. Now most information is being moved to dk.wikimedia.org and the newest minutes of the board are available on that wiki. dk.wikimedia.org has been significantly expanded in 2013.

WMDK has setup a strategy with specific goals for the organization. While some goals have not been reached in 2013, e.g., 100 members of WMDK and 12 months of Wikipedian in residence, others have been reached, e.g., WikiWednesdays, Wikitræf and edit-a-thon.

Events

Edit-a-thon June 2013 on the Danish National Archive.

Katrine Lester, Deputy Mayor of Frederiksberg Municipality and Wikipedian.

War telegraph from 1864. Photo taken of old photo during the 1864 edit-a-thon.

WMDK continues to organize WikiWednesdays in the Copenhagen area. The informal meetings usually takes place the first Wednesday in each month. In 2013 we organized 12 such meetings, where the December meeting was the most successful with participation of Jimmy Wales and around 20–30 people, even a few from Sweden. In connection with this WikiWednesday event Wales was interviewed by several journalists and later no less than 5 articles based on the interviews were published.

Other WikiWednesdays have taken place at the company Kontrapunkt, at Copenhagen Fablab, the Frederiksberg Townhall, the National Archive and the National Museum. During the summer months the events are usually outside and often resulting in improvised photo session with photos for Wikimedia Commons.

A full day informal meeting, "Wikitræf", was organized 15 June 2013 in Aarhus with participants from all over the country. It was the first "Wikitræf" since 2010 and had around eight Wikipedians participating.

During 2013 WMDK has organized two edit-a-thons: one in June with focus on the year 1864 and hosted by the National Archive. The event was featured in an article in one of the major national newspapers of Denmark. A few Wikipedians joined in on the same topic and the same day from Wikimedia Sverige's office in Stockholm. A total of 11 new articles were created in Danish, Swedish and Catalan and a further 10 were substantially extended. The other edit-a-thon was organized with the help of city council members of Frederiksberg Municipality and Wikipedians, Nikolaj Bøgh and Katrine Lester, in September before the election to the Danish municipalities. Based on the success of the 1864 edit-a-thon WMDK considers making a second edit-a-thon on the same theme. 1864 was a crucial year for in the history of Denmark and its 150-year will be commemorated in 2014.

In 2013 WMDK has facilitated several educational sessions for new Wikipedia editors, around 5 sessions at the main library of Copenhagen and one at a school.

In connection with the general assembly in September WMDK organized a "Wikiday" where 6 people from outside the Wikipedia community gave talks, e.g., about the GLAMs/Wikipedia interaction, Open government data and OpenStreetMap. Although the talks were enlightening and inspired interesting discussions the event failed to attract any major number of new participants into the WMDK community. WMDK plans to make a similar event in 2014, that hopefully will attract more than the "usual" WMDK core.

Due to lack of manpower there was no Danish participation in Wiki Loves Monuments in 2013.

Collaborations

WMDK maintains collaboration with several other organizations. We have held meetings with new collaborators, e.g., the archive in Silkeborg.

A special collaboration was with 90 student from a high school (gymnasium) in relation to "Brede Værk", — a part of the National Museum. A few new article drafts were made in this project.

Wikimedia projects

Wikipedia

The Danish Wikipedia had at the end of 2013 a bit over 184'000 articles, up from around 173'000 at the begining of the year. These numbers are considerable lower than the Swedish Wikipedia on over 1.6 million articles and also well under the Norwegian bokmål's Wikipedia on over 400'000. The Greenlandic Wikipedia, kl.wikipedia.org, shows very low activity, while the Faroese Wikipedia, fo.wikipedia.org, is more active.

The public discourse in Denmark on Wikipedia started quite dramatically with investigative journalist Lars Fogt putting a Wikipedia story on the front page of one of the two major tabloid newspapers. Based on a scrutiny of the edit history he found that staff members of a prominent Danish politician, Ellen Trane Nørby, had made biased changes in her Wikipedia article. The story was widely circulated in other newspapers and news sites, and the following days more kept coming focusing on biased edits in relation to other Danish politicians. The story even reached Norway. Both the politician Nørby and the journalist Fogt wrote opinion articles ("Kronik", Letter to the editor/opt-ed) in one of the major Danish newspapers attacking each other. WMDK chairman was interviewed on national television. The story is probably the Wikipedia-related news story with most news articles in the Danish media.

In September a sarcastic comment from comedian Sanne Søndergaard criticizing the pink Danish Wikipedia article "Wikipedia for Women" spawned a discussion about women and the Danish Wikipedia. The WMDK chairman participated in the discussion. The text on the page was subsequently edited but the controversial pink color was maintained.

Wikivoyage

Wikivoyage logo.

The Wikivoyage was also announced in Denmark. Two of the major national newspapers, Jyllands-Posten and Politiken, published articles about it in January 2013. A Danish Wikivoyage has been requested. It is presently on the Incubator. WMDK has attempted to generate interest for the project with a Facebook group. Statistics of the number of edits showed reasonable activity in the beginning of 2013. However, later in the year few editors were active. The mediocre activity meant that the Danish Wikivoyage on the Incubator did not reach the state of being an "active test project" in the end of 2013. Several pages have been created, but most pages only display a framework of section titles, with no body text. The Danish Wikivoyage has a long way to travel before it can take off.

See also

• Annual report 2012
• Meta:Wikimedia chapters/Reports
• Årsberetning 2012-2013 for Wikimedia Norge, in Norwegian.