Projekt:Podcast/Avsnitt 266
Avsnitt 266
Inspelningsdatum: 20 april 2024
Publiceringsdatum: 5 maj 2024
Lyssna:
Extern länk: https://wikipediapodden.se/camelia-boban-wikidonne-wikimedia-summit-2024-266/
Programanteckningar
Programledare är Jan Ainali.
Special episode
This is the sixth episode in a series of short interviews recorded at the Wikimedia Summit 2024 in Berlin. Here we meet Camelia Boban from WikiDonne.
Transcript
This is the sixth episode in a series of interviews from the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin 2024. In the first episode we heard about the Wikimedia Summit itself, and in the second episode about the Movement Charter. And in the coming episodes we will hear the perspectives from some of the affiliates attending the summit.
Hello and welcome to Wikipediapodden. This is a special episode recorded at the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin 20th of April 2024. I'm your host Jan Ainali and I'm here with Camelia Boban from WikiDonne. Hello Camelia, how are you doing?
I'm doing well, thank you.
So can you tell me a little bit about the user group WikiDonne and what you do, what is your purpose?
So we started with a project in Italian Wikipedia to write about women biographies, and this was in August 2016, then in November we became an affiliate, and in 2020 also a legal entity in our country, which is Italy, we are based in Rome, Italy, so we essentially work on gender gap, gender gap, not only gender gap, but also diversity as a whole, so disability, minorities, such and such, and we are not working only on Wikipedia, we are working on a lot of other projects. One of the most used projects on the last time is Wikibooks because we use this kind of project to have our educational program. We are working on writing profiles for women, not notable because Wikibooks do not have this criteria of notability, so it's something that avoids the deletion of articles in Wikipedia, so our partners are more smoothly to use this kind of project. It can be used as a tool for education, so it's a wonderful opportunity to do everything. We finished this program on Monday, 30 students from two high schools wrote 31 articles about women, and we put anything well on the page, everything formatting, so they can download this PDF and show to everybody they have, for example, a presentation to the school in theaters, so it's a great opportunity for them to not, because it's not the case of writing an article about a woman, it's the case of having the tools to understand how to do a research, how to put a note, how to see what is reliable and what not, so this sense of criticism that means creating citizens, so this form is very, very important for us.
And how did you personally become involved in the user group?
I'm the founder and the chair, and yes, I started this in 2016, and yes, we have a lot of ideas and we do not have maybe the whole people to do everything, because we also see a lot of things that others can do, so we are doing sometimes international campaigns, so we bring the other campaigns inside our activities. We also created our own campaigns, Wiki Loves Sports, for example, on the next July, we have this International editathon for the Games, Olympic Games in France, so Wikimedia France will be one of our partners in this editathon, so sometimes people come only for a barnstar, so it's enough to give a barnstar, if you have money, yes, you can give also prizes, but for Wikimedia it's enough for a barnstar.
And you're here at the Wikimedia Summit now as a representative for WikiDonne and your user group, what are your expectations from this Wikimedia Summit, like in the perspective of the user group?
I'm expecting, first of all, to understand better how everything will continue, because we started the strategy in 2016 or 2017, if I'm not wrong, so we spend time to do this, and we have a lot of things to talk about, so I'm curious to understand how, I'm very interested in hubs, for example, because I proposed a diversity hub, and we have a lot of different opinions, so this activity in some way stopped because we don't find the shape to do everything, so a lot of different opinions, we don't have consensus on what to do, but it's something that I would like to have inside the community to talk about diversity as a whole, because what I saw during all the discussion, we have the same issues in every community, in every language, we have the same issues of harassment, we have the same issues of community health, and this is one of the most important things that we need to fix.
And we're on the second day of three, do you already have some sort of highlights from the talks, or something that you're going to bring home, and oh this was a good idea, or how has the meeting been so far for you?
So I have something that I heard a lot of times, so I talked with people that said yeah we have a lot of problems, so yeah we need to fix this, but at the end the final word was hope, so everybody in this community, in this meeting, is hoping to do something good, and another thing, the second thing, it's also my opinion, we are here to change the world, so we are here to change our little piece of world, which means open knowledge, open knowledge is bringing open governance, openness bringing every time something good, so yes, some way we are innovators, I don't know, but for sure yes, we have this feeling, this power, this hope, this idea, philosophy, it's our philosophy.
And finally, what are some things that your user group are planning to do in the future? You already mentioned the Wiki Loves Sports, is there something more, or how can people help out with that before even it starts perhaps?
Yeah, people can help to organize international things, because it's a lot of work to manage and to create the project, then to have translations, so the next project is Wiki Loves Sport during the Olympic Games, we have our usual interwiki women collaborating with covers usually Wikimania, and I say hello to Andrea Arminet, and we also have Wiki Loves Fashion, people from maybe Netherlands, if I'm not wrong, it's engaging in these editathons, so yes, we don't have this big big engagement, but someone interested in our in our editathons, we always find someone.
Great, thank you Camelia for taking the time to join in the podcast.
Thank you to you, one last thing, I'm very very happy, because here I have the opportunity to give a prize that a new user Faizal take from one of our editathons two years ago, and we didn't meet never to give this prize to this gadget, a hoodie, a Wikipedia hoodie, so finally this time I had the opportunity to give to another user, another user, yes, which is part of this Ghana user group, and I'm happy, I'm so happy to finally close this chapter, so yeah.
That's a lovely story, not only to close this chapter, but also this episode, thank you.
Thank you so much.
In the coming episodes, we will continue to hear the perspectives from the different affiliates attending the Wikimedia Summit. In the next one, we'll meet Lane Rasberry from Wikimedia Medicine.