Annual report 2018

Wikimedia Northern Europe (WikiNEM) meeting 2018 in Stockholm, where Wikimedia Denmark participated.

STORM20 makerspace in central Copenhagen where Wikimedia Denmark has held events.

Annual report 2018.

Events

WikiWednesday

WikiWednesday, a monthly gettogether, continued to be active in the Copenhagen area for the first part of 2018. The biggest WikiWednesday was 4 January 2018 when we collaborated with STORM20, one of Copenhagen city council's cultural makerspaces, for Public Domain Day. We held several WikiWednesdays at STORM20 during the colder months. During the summer, WikiWednesday in the Aarhus area stopped when the organizer retired. No one has yet taken over the lead for that project. WikiWednesday stopped toward the end of 2018 in the Copenhagen area due to lack of participation beyond the board members. We agreed to put the event on standby and rethink how we can make WikiWednesday a useful activity that attracts more participation. As an alternative, we decided to put our energy into Wiki Labs Kultur instead, which is thriving nicely.

Wiki Labs Kultur

There have been monthly meetings with Wiki Labs Kultur throughout the year for general knowledge sharing around Wikipedia and culture. Four regular members of Wiki Labs Kultur, including two wikipedians, Villy Fink Isaksen and Finn Årup Nielsen, were invited to give a workshop on Wikipedia in connection with the international Sharing is Caring conference, where Wiki Labs Kultur's anchor, curator and senior advisor at the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen, Merete Sanderhoff is also very actively involved. Sharing is Caring is a yearly conference that was held in Aarhus, Denmark in 2018. Wiki Labs Kultur has good attendance at their events every month, and it supplemented by an active Facebook group.

As an aside, a fine collection of art was added to Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia Denmark cannot take any credit for this, but perhaps through meeting in Wiki Labs Kultur, Wikipedian Villy Fink Isaksen and again Merete Sanderhoff were able to convince the right people to give access to a photographer and let the photographer take high-quality photos of the artist L.A. Ring's paintings from the O. P. Christensen collection in the Danish Prime Minister's office. The photos are now on Wikimedia Commons. The project was described on the website of the Prime Minister.

In 2018, we began serious discussions about mass-upload of digital media files that can be extremely useful for cultural institutions who want to share their data.

Open Data Day

Merete Sanderhoff receiving the Open Data Award 2018 together with members of Wikimedia Denmark.

Open Knowledge Denmark held an Open Data Day at Copenhagen's IT University. Wikimedia Danmark's chairperson, Finn Årup Nielsen, gave a talk on SPARQL, Wikidata, and Wikidata-derived services, including Scholia. Merete Sanderhoff, won a new award from the Open Knowledge Danmark association: "Åben Data Prisen" (Open Data Prize). As a part of the nomination, the association wrote that she was nominated for her considerable efforts around opening up and digitalising cultural heritage, OpenGLAM, creative reuse, and user involvement, which includes helping to arrange Wiki Labs Kultur. Wikimedia Denmark felt that the award was fully deserved. Merete is key in getting the Copenhagen cultural institutions to collaborate with Wikipedia. Wikimedia Denmark has gained a very good relationship to, for example, the National Gallery, the Danish Film Institute, The Hirschsprung Collection, and Aarhus University's library in Emdrup, Denmark.

Talk Town edit-a-thon

Another notable event in 2018 was Talk Town Edit-a-thon 5 May 2018, that was well-attended. It was organized by that activist group DO:TOPIA and Amnesty International as part of the feministic debat festival Talk Town taking place in central Copenhagen in Huset i Magstrædet. For the event, we attempted to use some of the online tools provided by the Wikimedia community and that we became aware of during the Wikimedia Conference. However, we experienced the old-fashioned paper and post-it worked more conveniently.

Wikidag

We held our annual Wikidag at 15 September 2018 at STORM20. We had four interesting speakers lined up for the day.

• Magnus Pharao Hansen. Magnus is a postdoc at Copenhagen University who works in the areas of language and anthropology. He has written articles including Writing Irataba: On Representing Native Americans on Wikipedia. Magnus spoke on the topic Når ekspertise er nødvendig: Wikipedias repræsentation af oprindelige folk (When expertise is necessary: Wikipedia's representation of indigenous people).
• Bertel Teilfeldt Hansen, postdoc at Copenhagen University [1]. He has written several scientific articles, including one on the free-riding problem. Bertel spoke about his latest studies related to Wikipedia.
• Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen, associate professor at University of Southern Denmark. He has contributed to several encyclopedias. He has also had students do editing in Wikipedia. He has spoken out about problems with Wikipedia, for example, in a Danish article about errors that stick around in Wikipedia articles (SDU-lektor: Fejl bliver hængende i artikler på wikipedia.dk [2]).
• Søren Johannessen, one of Denmark's most active map-crowdsourcer with a lot of experience with OpenStreetMap with about 1.7 million map changes. In the OpenStreetMap community, they currently have a discussion about the further use of this information, for example, for redirection.

There was around 15 participants for the event which was held in Danish.

Wiki Loves Monuments

"Christiansborg from the Marble Bridge". Winner photo of the Danish Wiki Loves Monuments.

For several years Wikimedia Denmark wanted to participate in the Wiki Loves Monuments. In 2018, board member Karen Mardahl organized the Danish part of the event setting up wiki pages as entry. A list with Danish monuments was made available and two professional photographers and a Wikipedian made up the jury. One of the photographers was a World Press Photo winner. Three photos were selected as the winners of the Danish competition. These photos were sent on to the international Wiki Loves Monuments competition. There, the winner of the Danish competition, Christiansborg from the Marble Bridge, became a finalist and was ranked 13th overall.

HACK4DK

Gender distribution of Danish film directors through time. One of the results of the participation of the members of WMDK in HACK4DK.

HACK4DK is an annual hackathon held in Copenhagen by Danish cultural institutions where programmers, designers and others join up with employees from the cultural institutions to make interesting applications and projects with cultural data. In 2018, WMDK did not participate as an organization, but several WMDK members joined the event. An application by Finn Årup Nielsen used data from the Danish Film Institute as represented in Wikidata, — data that has been added to Wikidata from the Danish Film Institute database in connection with the Wiki Labs Kultur events by another board member, Steen Thomassen. With the visualization facility in the Wikidata Query service, graphs were produced in relation to the "diversity initiative" of the film industry, e.g., a graph showing the gender distribution of Danish film directors through times since the first Danish Wikidata-recorded film in 1902.

Organization

Accounting for 2017–2018.

Wikimedia Denmark (WMDK) is the organization supporting Wikimedia activities in Denmark, such as promoting Wikipedia. Most of the active members are based in Copenhagen and most activities also take place there.

The board of Wikimedia Denmark consists of 5 members and meets monthly or every second month, either at a physical meeting or via Skype. We have started using the cloud service Trello to keep track of projects.

Wikimedia Denmark has a small but healthy economy. The income is generated from annual membership fees. In 2018, the expenses related to Wikidag and the WikiNEM meeting in Stockholm.

Wikimedia Conference

Wikimedia Denmark participants interaction during the Wikimedia Conference 2018.

Wikimedia Denmark participated in the Wikimedia Conference 2018 in Berlin with two members, Finn Årup Nielsen and Karen Mardahl. Karen joined the orientation for newcomers. We participated in sessions about the Grant Metric service and other web applications, that could potentially be used during edit-a-thons. Other topics we heard of were, e.g., Wiki Loves Monuments 2018, ART+FEMINISM, Wiki Loves Earth, Wikidata and Structured data on Commons.

The conference also revolved around the Wikimedia Strategy. Finn had previously joined discussion on the strategy. At the time of the Wikimedia Conference, the strategy has condensated into the two phrases knowledge as a service og knowledge equity and WMDK endorsed this strategy. However, we were aware that while we can support the concepts, the words and their translation to Danish may create problems, both for the word "equity" and the phrase "knowledge as a service".

WikiNEM

Finn Årup Nielsen, lightning talk WikiNEM, Stockholm

Poster for Wikimedia Denmark presented at the WikiNEM meeting in Stockholm 2018.

Wikimedia Northern Europe (WikiNEM) is an umbrella organization for Nordic and Baltic Wikimedia chapters and user groups. During the Wikimedia Conference 2018, WMDK members meet with other WikiNEM members.

Wikimedia Sweden organized a weekend meeting in October 2018 in Stockholm where four member of the WMDK participated. We presented information about our activities particularly our edit-a-thon, our work in connection with the EU Copyright Directive and the Wiki Labs Kultur initiative. We got to know the other WikiNEM wikimedians better and became aware of the projects they were working on.

As an organization we hope that WikiNEM can help us with growing our membership base and that we can learn from the other chapters, particularly the large Norwegian and Swedish chapters. The event in Stockholm was well-organized and a positive experience.

Fix Copyright

In 2018, Wikimedia Danmark followed the European Parliament's discussions around the copyright directive, particularly articles 11 and 13. The changes in the laws concerning intellectual property concern, for example, freedom of panorama. Board member Matthias Smed Larsen was in contact with other wikipedians and wikimedians discussing this matter. He wrote a (Danish) op-ed article to this effect that was published in a Danish national newspaper on 4 July 2018 just before the vote in the European Parliament. There continued to be a lot of activity about this law during the remainder of 2018, and Wikimedia Denmark continued to monitor events.

Communication

WMDK has various social media accounts, email lists and other venues. The Danish Wikipedia as Wikipediajournalen a monthly newsletter on the wiki. During 2018, WMDK board members have published short articles in the Wikipediajournalen, e.g., about 3D models on Wikimedia commons, the Open Data Prize 2018, and Wikimedia Hackathon.

The @wikimediadk Twitter account was made in July 2009 and has 1,869 follower as of October 2019. Our WMDK blog at https://blog.wikimedia.dk/ has not been updated since 2015.

Apart from the op-ed of board member Matthias Smed Larsen on the EU copyright directive, WMDK-affiliated Wikipedian Villy Fink Isaksen appeared in the press. This was in connection with an announcement of an initiative for a Danish resource that would join the major Danish reference work Den Store Danske and the work Gads Trap Danmark.

See also

• Annual report 2017
• Annual report 2019