Dear everyone,
As presented at last year's WikidataCon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_VxTlBNkyk, Wikimedia Deutschland has set out to find new ways for collaboration around Wikidata software development to enhance the diversity of our movement, increase Wikibase’s scalability and robustness and breathe life into our movement principles of knowledge equity. With a grant from Arcadia https://www.arcadiafund.org.uk/, a charitable fund administered by Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, we will be able to implement such a collaboration in the next two years.
Today, we are happy to share an exciting update on the progress of this project with all of you. After spending the last few months with conversations with the movement groups who were interested in joining such a partnership, we have now reached a point where we can spread the news about the future partners and projects that will shape this Wikidata software collaboration.
Wikimedia Indonesia, the Igbo Wikimedians User Group and Wikimedia Deutschland will be joining forces to advance the technical capacities of the movement around Wikidata development and with this, make the software and tools more usable by cultures underrepresented in technology, people of the Global South and speakers of minority languages.
Wikimedia Indonesia, a non-profit organization based in Jakarta, Indonesia and established in 2008, is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development & dissemination of knowledge in Indonesian and other languages spoken in Indonesia. Since then, Wikimedia Indonesia has supported the development of 14 Wikipedias in the languages spoken in Indonesia, 12 regional Wikimedian communities spread across the country, and two Wikimedia project-based communities.
For this project, in collaboration with Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikimedia Indonesia wants to build up a software team of their own in the course of the next 2 years. The tools will hopefully help under-resourced language communities contributing to the flourishing of their languages online through lexicographical data, and also involving the local language communities in contributing to lexemes in Wikidata.
Igbo Wikimedians is a group of Wikimedians that are committed to working on various wiki projects related to Igbo language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igbo_language and culture. The user group is organizing projects around community building in the Igbo community, content improvement for Wikipedia and its sister project and has established its own Wikidata hub in 2021.
The Igbo Wikimedia User Group and their program of the Wiki Mentor Africa https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiki_Mentor_Africa is aiming at building up technical capacity in African Wikimedia communities by mentoring African developers for Wikidata Tool Development. Wikimedia Deutschland will support the user group in the implementation of their project and mentoring program.
Wikimedia Deutschland has been founded in 2004 as a member’s association and is located in Berlin, Germany. Wikimedia Deutschland support communities like the Wikipedia community, develop software for Wikimedia projects and the ecosystem of Free Knowledge, and wants to improve the political and legal framework for Wikipedia and for Free Knowledge in general.
Specifically, Wikimedia Deutschland has been working on the development of Wikidata since 2012. Since then, an active and vibrant community of volunteer editors and programmers, re-users, data donors, affiliates and more has formed around Wikidata.
Wikimedia Deutschland will be responsible for the administrative setup of those collaborations and the communication with Arcadia. We are also happy to share our experiences and knowledge about establishing software teams, software development in the Wikidata/Wikibase environment, the Wikidata community and providing support for emerging tech communities.
If you want to find out more about the partnership, you can read up on this on our project page on Meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Software_Collaboration_for_Wikidata, where we will keep updating the community on the progress of this collaboration. If you have any comments, suggestions or questions please use the talk page there to get in contact with us.
We are all excited to see those collaborations coming to life!
With kind regards,
Igbo Wikimedians User Group
Wikimedia Indonesia
Wikimedia Deutschland