Closer to the Wikimedians, closer to the Wikimedia Projects

annual report 2014 Wikimedia CH - Association for the advancement of free knowledge is a non-profit association aimed to support the free dissemination of about knowledge in , including projects hosted by the .These collaborative projects include the free , the multimedia database , the col- lection of educational texts , the news portal , the wikimedia collection of quotations or the collection of . Created on 14 May 2006, it brings together participants and users of Wikimedia projects.

CH We speak the four official languages of Switzerland (German, French, Italian and Romansch) as well as the Alemannic dialects. Wikimedia CH is recognized as a local Chapter by the Wikimedia Foundation, like 39 others across the world. We are, however, a financially and legally independent entity, obeying different rules and leadership.

Wikimedia CH does not host any of the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation nor does it have any special publishing rights on them.

To support our activities in Switzerland Post Account: 85-766601-5 IBAN : CH26 0900 0000 8576 66015 BIC: POFICHBEXXX

contents introduction 3 programs 4 community support 5 wiki4alps 6 wikipedians in residence 7 wikipedia offline 8 illustrate wikipedia 9 facts and figures 11 introduction

In the past year, the professionalization of Wikimedia CH has allowed our association and its volunteers to keep actively promoting free knowledge in most parts of the country and in a variety of ways.

As you will discover in this brochure, in 2014 we supported a new edition of the Loves Monuments photo contest, this time dedicated to our cultural heritage in the Alps; you will also learn about how two Wikipedians in Residence strengthened our relationship with the National Library, and how continued to disseminate educational content offline, making Wikipedia accessible even without an connection.

The Board has also been particularly active this year, drafting a strategic plan that should take us well beyond the next five years.

Wikimedia CH is of course centered on local activities. However, I’m glad that in 2014 the chapter also suc- cessfully hosted an international event for the first time. Volunteers from various countries, mainly from the developers community, met and worked together at the Zurich Wikimedia . It was there that , the new WMF Executive Director, first came in touch with this larger Wikimedia Community. The next opportunity for Swiss Wikimedians to convene with visitors from other parts of the world is up soon: in 2016, will be coming right to our doorstep, to the Alpine village of Esino Lario, in , and will count on Wikimedia CH as one of its co-organizer. Until then, we look forward to helping Wikipedia and its sister projects grow further, for everyone’s benefit.

Patrick Kenel, President

CC- b y-SA C l é ment B ucc o-L echat 3 programs

In 2014, Wikimedia CH pursued its efforts towards offering a better, more comprehensive and cost-efficient support for Wikimedians based in Switzerland.

With this in mind, the following four strategic axis were defined for the medium term: 1. Support to contributors: whenever volunteers come to us with an idea, a project that they would like to get started, we will try our best to help them - be it by obtaining accreditations to attend public events, providing equipment, funding or anything they see fit and where we can add real value;

2. Support for content : we want Wikipedia’s quality to improve, not just its size. For this, we are willing to lend or support the purchase of books and semi-professional photographic equipment, and we also want to reach out to Galleries, Librarie, Archives and Museums (GLAMs) to convince them to liberate their content;

3. Develop tools: Kiwix, a platform that allows people to read Wikipedia even in the absence of Internet connection, is being developed in Switzerland but is used all over the world, from remote mountain loca- tions to the African countryside to . We want to ensure that it keeps improving, and that millions more can use it for their own educational purposes;

4. outreach: there always is and will be an effort to be made about editing and licensing. We want to reach out to GLAMs but also to any public or private partner interested in sharing their content and, of course, to schools so as to prepare the next generations of Wikipedians. Let’s bring wiki to the non-wiki world! SAILK O CC- b y-SA

4 community support CC- b y-SA C l é ment B ucc o-L echat

Wikimedia CH’s community support programs are meant to help individuals, groups and like-minded ins- titutions improve freely Wikipedia and its sister projects but also to facilitate events and reunions as well as fostering gender diversity in our communities.

In 2014, 10 Wikimedians received a scholarship to attend the worlwide Wikimania conference in , while another four went to Cologne for the German-speaking WikiCon. In Switzerland, we supported the organization of community meetups in Basel, Zurich and Lausanne.

We also were there when contributors (mostly photographs) from across the country needed to get press accreditations for the Glarus Landsgemeinde or to document the Lucens nuclear reactor - both of which have now high-resolution pictures on Wikimedia Commons. The Groupe photo romand was, again, very active and, again, produced quite a few quality images: we provided them with semi-professional equipment and reimbursed part of their costs.

The support for diversity - encouraging women to take a more proactive part in Wikipedia-related activities - saw us organize several editing workshops with our partners FemWiss and Girls Geek Ticino. Other like- minded institutions we collaborated with included the Project, whose aim is to digitize old and rare music records which have now fallen into the public domain: Wikimedia CH paid for the equipment, as well as for part of the actual digitization work performed by people with Asperger syndrom (a form of autism) from the Specialisterne Foundation.

Last but not least, we offered to our members the possibility to attend a photography workshop, a media training as well as course on copyright law and licenses. Talking about these, we are looking forward to the Swiss Federal Archives’ continued collaboration so as to release even more works under a free license. 5 wiki4alps te n CC-by-SA ti n ga r M a r

The photo contest "" dedicated to our cultural heritage in the Alps took place last Autumn.

Facts & figures • A total of 2.681 photos, uploaded by 138 participants (96 of which were new users); • A Swiss participant was in the top 100 of uploaders worldwide (Mauro Cassina with 731 photos); • The website experienced 62.000 unique visitors.

We would like to warmly thank the jury for their great work! EPSIL O N ERIDANI CC- b y-SA ZEDIPEDI CC- b y-SA 6 LEIJU CC- b y-SA wikipedians in residence Gub le r CC-by-SA K a b ellege r / D avid

Certainly one of the highlights of 2014 was the 6 months internship of two "Wikipedians in Residence“ at the Swiss National Library, in Bern. Thanks to the amazingly dedicated team there, Micha Rieser and Emmanuel Engelhart helped the institution re-think the way it thought about content distribution. Presentations were made to the staff, workshops were held, and public editing events were organized, including an « Edit-a-thon » about Word War I in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Archives and Wikimedia CH.

As a result of our Wikipedians in Residence’s participation, the National Library has uploaded several hundred high quality pictures and documents onto Wikimedia Commons. More importantly, the Institution now has the tools and processes necessary to further improve its presence onto the Wikimedia Projects.

7 wikipedia offline

For many years, Wikimedia CH has been supporting the development of Kiwix - a platform that allows people to read Wikipedia without having access to the Internet.

Once again 2014 saw some amazing work : Kiwix was downloaded ~400,000 times in more than 120 countries : available on all Android , it scored 4.4/5 on Play store and 4.8/5 on Sourceforge.

Kiwix is not only providing offline access to Wikipedia, but also to further content and follows the broader mission of "making knowledge available“: In 2014, the number of available content offline has been increased extensively, providing more and more up-to-date content: • TED Talks about Business, Technology, Science, Global Issues, Design & Entertainment; • New Wikimedia projects like Wikisource; • the Gutenberg Library of public domain books; • Vikidia, a simpler version of Wikipedia for children.

Partnerships and distribution In 2014, team Kiwix was able to establish collaborations with many different partners: • with the reader manufacturer Bookeen; • with eSyllabus: 100 tablets pre-loaded with Kiwix & Wikipedia we sent to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and 20 tablets pre-loaded with Kiwix and Wikipedia have been shipped to Burkina Faso; • Ideasbox: Kiwix is used by the IDEASBOX, a portable library, to give access to Wikipedia in 10 refugees camps around the world. • thanks to the Orange Foundation, around 150 schools in were equipped with offline version of and Wikipedia; • In Sayada, , Wikipedia offline is now available to the whole city trough a mesh network; • Project Etekkatho pushes for the deployment of Kiwix in Burma across dozens of schools and universities.

Tech news In order to make Kiwix more affordable, the support of RaspberryPi was finally merged to the Kiwix-Plug master branch; this offers new perspectives because the price to create a Kiwix-Plug - and therewith to make Wikipedia offline available - has dropped to around USD 100 per plug.

• KIWIX iOS App: A proof-of-concept of a Kiwix iOS app was made in 2014, so a first app for iOS might be released in 2015. • Kiwix 0.9 for PC (desktop version for Windows/OSX/) final version was released in December.

8 illustrate wikipedia

"CH Wiki" is a blog maintained by a group of photographers from Western Switzerland who are contributing considerable amounts of high quality images to Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia CH provided them with press accreditations, as well as reimbursement of minor expenses when going through Switzerland. You can follow them at chwiki.wordpress.com

PHOTOS: Clément Bucco-Lechat CC-by-SA

9 Wikimedia CH decided to support User:Sailko, an Italian Wikimedian, to help him buy a new camera and a new lens (partial support of 500CHF). Sailko is an extremely prolific contributor on Commons, with more than 200,000 uploads on Commons and 200,000 more edits on the . Despite his huge number of uploads and his strong interest in taking photos of cultural heritages, Saiko had limited means to purchase the professional equipment he needed to take his photographs to the next level.

The idea of supporting came from Ilario Valdelli, our Community Liaison for the Italian-speaking community. As a result of his intervention, Sailko has already uploaded another 13,000 images onto Commons, all of them labelled « supported by Wikimedia CH »

PHOTOS: SAILKO CC-by-SA

10 facts and figures

membership evolution december 2010: 100 members 2014 december 2011: 121 members december 2012: 240 members 2013 december 2013: 393 members december 2014: 481 members 2012

2011

2010

profit & loss

REVENUES EXPENSES Hackathon: Wikimedia fundraising: 25’365.84 CHF 6’616.92 CHF Operating revenue: Administration: 34’191.53 CHF 107’917.29 CHF Donation to WMCH: Activities: 190’307.14 CHF 145’004.92 CHF Wikimedia fundraising: : 728'888.14 CHF 258'383.10 CHF Staff: 396'650.67 CHF

11 «Wikipedia is something special, It is like a library or a public park, It is like a temple for the mind, It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others. Join us!»

If you want to stay informed about our projects and activities, you can join us on: our website http://www.wikimedia.ch via social media https://www.facebook.com/WikimediaCH https://twitter.com/WikimediaCH

IMPRESSUM Wikimedia CH 8008 Zürich Switzerland www.wikimedia.ch Post Account: 85-766601-5 IBAN : CH26 0900 0000 8576 66015 Credits: Cover picture: «Chateau Chillon Montreux, Alps Castle Lake Léman» by Karim Kanoun Photography – Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 Text by Wikimedia CH Layout and Design: Léonor Tanquerel

All content, if no other mention, are published under Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY-SA 4.0) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0