What kind of board members for Wikimedia Foundation?

Survey slip

Next year the national organizations of Wikimedia are going to select two new Foundation board members. Due to the nature of the selection it is difficult to make the members of a chapter part of the procedure.

In the Netherlands we did at our general assembly yesterday the follwing. We asked the members what qualifications or traits they find important on a 1-5 scale.  Here the results of the paper slip survey (thanks to Hay Kranen for the ‘math’):

Hardly anybody found it important that the candidate supported by our chapter is Dutch or comes from a poor country. There was a little more sympathy for supporting explicitly a woman.

Very important the members found that a candidate can makes things happen, that he is a goalgetter (most important) and is a socially binding factor. Nearly all gave the last question – is it important that the candidate is very familiar with Wikipedia/Wikimedia – a 4 or 5.

Of course, there can be no automatism. The WMNL board will see which candidates apply, are nice to work with and have a realistic chance. But it was important to me giving the members a little bit of say and having a little guidance for hard decisions.

Wikimedia Nederland changes and stays the same

Utrecht cathedral tower (Michele Ahin, CC-BY-SA)

On Saturday, October 22nd, the Dutch national organization of Wikimedia gathered in Utrecht for a general assembly. The attendance was low, but what to expect with the ever growing number of meetings in the Netherlands? Together with the WikiSaturdays and Stamtafels, there is a wiki-meetup nearly every or every second week (see our website).

The assembly was the third this year. We discussed and approved the budget for 2012, elected Cyriel as a new board member (thanks to Austin Hair, he left for private reasons), and aboved all talked about the events of the past months. Maybe the most important point was the change in the hiring policy: Wikimedia Nederland is now searching a director who can help build up the future professional organization.

Lodewijk Gelauff at 2006 Boston Wikimania

Vadim Zaytsev presented the preparations for our big annual meeting, the Wikimedia Conferentie Nederland on November 5th. Lodewijk Gelauff explained the success and impact of Wiki Loves Monuments, the pan European Photo Contest.

Eventually, the president had a little surprise for Lodewijk and the other members. Lodwijk is one of the two subscribers of the original statutes of Wikimedia Nederland, from March 27th 2006. Subsequently he has been for five years on the board in various positions. When he left the board this year in april, we didn’t really stood still at the fact that five years are a long time especially in a young man’s life. A small photo album with pictorial memories and friends’ quotes may represent the thankfulness of the Dutch Wikimedia community.

Unexpected reencounter

Wikipedia class in Antwerp, 2007. From the scene in question only my left ear is visible. (Picture: Yves Nevelsteen, CC-BY-SA)

In early summer 2007 I travelled to Flanders. The Esperanto club of Antwerp had its 100 years anniversary, and I was invited for a lecture on the history of that language. The weekend included a morning with Wikipedia class.  Interested persons were mentored, except by me, also by Yves Nevelsteen and Chuck Smith, the founder of Wikipedia in Esperanto (Vikipedio).

It was not so much a class like a lesson, we also lacked the teaching aids for that, but we guided the people personally. I was occupied among others with an elderly Flemish lady, who attended with her new laptop and told me about her father.

The father I had met in the early 1990s, a couple of years before his dead. A true citizen of the world, founder of a school in Belgian Congo, a very respected and friendly member of the Esperanto community. With his pursuit of knowledge he would have been enthusiast about Wikipedia, she said. Friends wanted her to write an article on him, but she was in doubt that it was really a good idea to write about relatives.

The morning opened my eyes for the difficulties most people have with contributing to Wikipedia. So the focus of my guidance was less editing but actively using Wikipedia. At the end I wanted the mentees to recapitulate what they have learned. I asked the Flemish lady to search in Vikipedio the name of her father. Even if there is no article on him, maybe one of his works is mentioned elsewhere.

She did, and via a redirect we came to an article on her father, indeed. (I shouldn’t have been wondering, but I may have intuitively thought that she already had searched.) It was an even rather extensive article, with photograph and web link.

Telling this story I love to ask my listeners what the lady did in this moment spontaneously. Men suppose that she immediately edited the article. Or saved it on the hard disk. Or made a bookmark in the browser. Only women conject, as unanimously as aptly, that she burst into tears.

This reaction of a Wikipedia reader may be not representative. But it always reminds me of the fact that we have responsibility for our texts and never know, who is reading them with what eyes.

[Appeared in: Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.: Alles über Wikipedia und die Menschen hinter der größten Enzyklopädie der Welt. Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg 2011, pp. 125-127. The original title of the text above is referring to 'Unverhofftes Wiedersehen', a calendar story by Johann Peter Hebel.]