Discover Wiki Worlds – the many facets of Wikimedia volunteering

In 2023, 256 projects with 2,111 participations were supported (multiple participations possible). Wikimedia provided 718 individual services, with travel expense reimbursement being by far the most frequently requested support. Since 2017, Wikimedia Deutschland’s Communities and Engagement team has been measuring how volunteers respond to the individual funding instruments using the Funding Barometer. It is a survey tool that continuously measures the overall satisfaction of those who receive the funds and the usefulness of the funding.

The aim is to achieve a score of between 9 and 10 points. The barometer shows the best values for 2023: overall satisfaction in the survey period up to November was 9.62 – based on a reliable sample group of 335 responses. In general, over 90 percent of the funding applications we receive are approved. It is important to us to make the services as accessible as possible. This is why we make it easy to submit applications for funding or cost reimbursements online via the Wikimedia Deutschland funding portal.

When researching their articles, another great help for Wikipedia volunteers is access to specialist literature that can be cited as a reliable source. The Wikipedia Library, set up by the Wikimedia Foundation, has existed for several years for this purpose. Volunteers can find a wide range of offerings from renowned scientific publishers and university presses in 34 languages, including industry giants such as De Gruyter and Elsevier. In 2023, two leading academic publishers, Mohr Siebeck and Nomos, joined as partners.

In addition to publishers who grant the Wikipedia community unlimited access to their content, there are also offers such as those from Zeit Online, which provide a certain amount of free access that volunteers can apply for. In 2023, Wikimedia Deutschland attended the Frankfurt Book Fair and other events to recruit more publishers to participate in the Wikipedia Library.

Although involvement in the Wikimedia projects is digital volunteering, the social component plays a major role. “We see this in the need for work and networking meetings, but also in the local spaces,” says Magdalena Horn-Costolloe from the Volunteer Coordination team. Wikimedia Deutschland provides financial, organizational and year-round advisory support to six of these spaces, where the communities meet in a self-organized way to exchange ideas and write together. The temporary house in Neu-Ulm was added in 2023. In a former combined sports & shopping center, the temporärhaus initiative – a group of digitally savvy people from the MakerSpace movement who are interested in Free Knowledge – shares two floors with the “House of Sustainability” association. A wealth of activities is on the calendar: from Maker Mondays and sewing workshops to the joint editing of data on the German Basketball League in the free database Wikidata (“Wiki loves Basketball”).

Another local space, Kontor Hamburg, was supported for the last time in 2023. From Wikimedia’s point of view, the funding requirements are no longer met, which was reflected on in a joint process with the local community. “Of course, we are happy to continue supporting local volunteers in their activities if they apply for funding,” emphasizes Claude Beier from the Communities and Engagement team.

In 2023, the three major conferences co-organized by Wikimedia Deutschland and supported by the communities were once again valuable for networking, the exchange between volunteers and the recruitment of new volunteers: WikiCon, the annual meeting of the German-speaking communities of Wikimedia projects, AdminCon as a specialist event for active and prospective administrators, and the FemNetz meeting, which is primarily aimed at FLINTA* Wikipedians and community members (women, lesbians, intersex, non-binary, trans and agender people).

WikiCon 2023 took place as a hybrid event in the Wissensturm in Linz, Austria. With 337 participants – 253 of them on site – it was the most popular WikiCon to date. A GLAM digital (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) station was also held in Linz with the German and Austrian UNESCO commissions to discuss aspects of intangible cultural heritage. “A topic that has long been at the top of the volunteers’ wish list,” reports Holger Plickert from the team Culture & Marginalized Knowledge at Wikimedia Deutschland. He describes networking with UNESCO as an important step for further cooperation. In collaboration with the German-speaking commission and the Museum for Sepulchral Culture, the Board of the  Intangible Cultural Heritage Cemetery Culture and the Berlin Monument Authority, another GLAM event was held in September 2023 on the topic of “Wiki Loves Cemetery Culture”.

A total of ten GLAM digital events took place in German-speaking countries in 2023. As Plickert states, “the format has now successfully established itself”. The events not only ensure that more and more cultural institutions are opening up to Free Knowledge and thus enriching Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons with new content – they also create more diversity in Wikimedia projects.

This includes, for example, the station “Wiki Loves Revolution – a virtual exchange on the 1848/49 Revolution”, which took place in December 2023 in cooperation with the Archive of the German Women’s Movement and the Memorial for Freedom Movements in German History. The focus was on the women who contributed to the fight for democracy as journalists and writers or as fighters on the barricades, but up to now have hardly been mentioned in the Wikipedia articles on the 1848/49 revolutions and the Frankfurt National Assembly to date.

Plickert also emphasizes this: At two GLAM digital events in 2023, new collaborations with the museum associations of North Rhine-Westphalia and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania were initiated. “Our long-term goal was to create a more close-knit network of the community and the regional museum associations and to expand our contacts – and we will continue to work on this in 2024.”

Personal interaction and direct contact with other active contributors are essential for integrating new members and new target groups into the Wikipedia community. In 2023, events such as “FLINTAstic” and “Jugend editiert” offered interested parties the opportunity to get involved locally and strengthen the sense of community within the Wikipedia community.

The newly launched FLINTAstic event series was created in cooperation with the America Memorial Library Berlin and was aimed at FLINTA* people. The focus was on topics relating to (queer) feminist art and working on Wikipedia. A total of 45 women took part in the six days of events, and two new collaborations were established. “I am delighted that we were able to bring together people interested in this topic,” says initiator Sandra Becker.