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This is a manual for Wikimedia chapters. It is divided into several parts corresponding to the tasks in a chapter. Please contribute to this manual, by inserting answers, but also questions. What are the experiences of your chapter, what would you like to know from other chapters? International Wikimedians you can reach via Meta Wiki.

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This is a manual for Wikimedia chapters. It is divided into several parts corresponding to the tasks in a chapter. Please contribute to this manual, by inserting answers, but also questions. What are the experiences of your chapter, what would you like to know from other chapters?

Organisation and human resources[edit]

Charter, bylaws etc.[edit]

Question: What are the typical goals you find in the charter (bylaws, the basic legal document) of a chapter?

Strategy[edit]

Several chapters have adopted a strategy for the following years. The strategy document is the link between your charter and its goals on the one hand and your annual plans on the other.

Board organization[edit]

Every chapter has a board, which is usually elected by the general assembly (the convention of the members). The number of board members (also called trustees or directors in some countries) varies in the movement from 5 to 10.

Should the board members have specific tasks? It seems that in most boards they have. For example, one is responsible for international affairs, another one for cultural projects. For a board member, it is difficult to be familiar with all subjects.

Staff[edit]

• Transition: from a volunteers organization to a mix of volunteers and paid people.

There are various chapters now that employ a professional staff. A good first step is to contact these chapters and benefit from their experience.

• What are typical tasks for chapter staff?

Chapter staff are hired to bring the activities of volunteers to a higher level and to reduce the workload of board members.

Typical tasks are:

- Internal communication between, board, members and volunteers.

- External communication, such as newsletters, the site, social media, but also handling incoming questions from the public of the press.

- Day-to-day administration, invoices, payments, receivables, in close cooperation with the chapters' treasurer.

- Membership administration.

- Prepare strategic plans, annual plans, project plans, in close cooperation with the Chapters' board.

- Reporting, monthly, quarterly and / or annual reports, for the board, for the general council of the Chapter and for WMF.

- Fundraising activities

- Support activities such as collaboration with national institutions, the organization of the annual assembly or convention, a hackaton, other meetings. The role of the staff is mostly a supportive one in these cases, as for many activities the volunteers remain in the lead.

- For further info, don't hesitate to leave a message Grijz (talk) 20:01, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

Meta Manual Differential

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Office[edit]

An office is the hired place that a chapter can use permanently

• as the work space for staff
• for meetings (of volunteers, of board members)
• as a storage place for promotional materials, the paper archive etc.

Question: Can't the staff work from home?

I suppose that a part of the staff of chapters with a number of employees (cf. WM DE) could work from home. However, one of the primary function of the initial staff is to hold the office. --Millosh (talk) 08:21, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Finances[edit]

Basics[edit]

Annual plan and budget[edit]

Sources of money[edit]

Member contributions[edit]

There are basically two concepts of membership. According to the first one, the association wants to have a lot of members in order to show how many people support the ideas of the association. This is a concept very suitable to associations which concentrate on 'advocacy', which pursue e.g. a political or social goal and are engaged in lobbying. The membership fee or contribution should be as low as possible.

According to the other concept, the association wishes to support people, maybe especially its own members. An association that is willing to spend much for its members might also want to ask a high fee from them. For example, an automobile association such as the ADAC is mainly a service organization, with services that cost a lot of money. Consequently, a member has to pay a high fee. (It is actually a kind of ensurance company, for the case that your car breaks down.)

How about a Wikimedia chapter? A Wikimedian might think, naturally, that the chapter should ask a very low fee:

• We want a lot of members, to impress others, also hoping to gather active volunteers from them,
• Wikipedia is for everyone, and also the chapter's membership should be affordable for everyone.
• The main source of income are the Wikipedia donations anyway.

But the Wikimedian should also consider:

• Registering members costs work (if done by a paid employee, even money). Do you really want to invest that kind of work for people who find the association not even worth a fee?
• Having 50 active members is more important than having 1000 members who hardly support the association.
• A chapter should have diverse sources of income. Membership fees are 'specified donations' the chapter can dispose of independently.
• In general, the expenses purely for members (especially members conventions) should be covered by the membership fees.

To sum it up: the membership fee should be not too high, excluding poor people such as students or the unemployed. It should also be not too low, generating too few income and giving the impression that the membership is not much worth.

Some chapters offer a reduced fee for people with financial handicaps (young people, students, the disabled, senior citizens etc.). This is also common in other associations all over the world. But this means that your membership administration becomes a little bit more complicated.

Wikimedia Nederland, for example, offers its members to pay the full fee (24 EUR) or less with a minimum of 12 EUR. The member does not have to explain why it pays less than 24 EUR.

1. As Wikimedia chapters are not fun clubs for rich, there is no reason to keep the membership fee high, because more money would be get if membership fee is lower; i.e., it's more likely that you'd get more than 100 members willing to give ~10 EUR/year than 10 members willing to give ~100 EUR/year.

   The other financial issue is related to the areas where giving any sensible amount of money is an issue. For example, up to late 2000s, it was the issue in Serbia to give ~10 EUR/month. In such cases, chapter boards should have a way to free particular members from giving membership fees.

2. Although amount of given money can correlate with the subjective worth of membership, that's just one of the secondary reasons for the involvement in organization. There are much more important reasons why someone would value membership in one organization, like how good the program of the organization is.

‘Unspecified donations’ (Wikipedia donations)[edit]

The largest sum of money in the Wikimedia movement are donations 'via Wikipedia', collected in the annual fundraiser organized by the WMF (and in rare cases by chapters). This money is called 'unspecified donaties' because the giver (the Wikipedia reader donating) did not specify to which Wikimedia entity it should go. It is the task of the FDC (a WMF committee) to ask for requests and to decide which request will receive how much money. A request can only come from an 'eligible entity' in the Wikimedia movement. At the moment, those are the WMF itself and a number of chapters responding to some conditions.

If your chapter wishes to receive a part of this 'unspecified' money, you can turn in a FDC request if it is eligible. Otherwise, your chapter can request a grant from the WMF (up to 50,000 USD).

External funds[edit]

External communications[edit]

Outreach[edit]

Press[edit]

Internal communications[edit]

See also: en:Etiquette_(technology)

Wikipedians are used to use wikis and communicate a lot via many communication channels. Alas, it seems that many Wikimedians find it difficult to receive exactly the information they need, in a way that does not consume too much of their time. For example, if you are subscribed to several Wikimedia mailing lists, you may receive much more e-mails everyday than you can filter or even read.

How can Wikimedians achieve better communications in the movement? They should ask themselves which information has to be sent to which person or which group, and in which way. Sometimes the best e-mail is the one never sent.

In your chapter, you may have already a chaos of communication channels: a chapter's mailing list, a chapter's wiki, one or several Facebook accounts, a website etc. Also, you have to deal with international communication channels, such as Meta Wiki or the mailing list Wikimedia-l. Maybe you find it useful to make a list of all the communication channels, in order to have an overview. Then, you might consider which channels is suited best for which target group and what kind of information. For example, WMNL has a page Communicatiekanalen on its wiki for exactly that purpose.

Have the courage to shut down a communication channel which you don't need! A superfluous channel costs you time, or it confuses your target groups. Why open a Facebook page if you use it for less than two posts per year?

The target or relational groups for a Wikimedia chapter typically are:

• The members, and only them. Make sure that you have one channel that is used only for very important information to the members, for information absolutely every member must receive (such as an invitation to the General Assembly, or a change of the fee). Take for example a collection of the members' e-mail addresses they give you when they became a member; this is a one direction way, the board or a collaborator sends an e-mail centrally to the members. You should be very sparingly with this channel, because a member easily considers an e-mail spam if it does not interest him.
• The members and interested partners or other people. This can be a newsletter sent by e-mail. (Maybe you want to send the newsletter only to paying members. But consider that the content is possibly free licensed anyway, and that writing the newsletter costs you some work. You might want to make that work for as many people as possible.)
• Active members and other people (e.g. Wikipedians who are no member), who want to be informed more frequently, and discuss. For this purpose a mailing list is usually suitable.
• Active members and collaborators may have benefit from a wiki for the chapter. Here you can store and discuss specific information necessary for running the chapter. Typically, if want people to edit a certain page on your wiki, you send an e-mail to the chapter's mailing list and link to that page with a specific question or ask for help.
• Partners (outside the movement) and the general public should find the necessary information about your chapter on a good looking website. For the first time, you can use your wiki for this purpose, but don't forget that the target group of that wiki is a very different one. The website should be really suitable for people who have never heard of the Wikimedia movement. (It is okay to have on your website one general page in English, but not more. Your site will not be the most used place for international communication with the rest of the movement.)
• International Wikimedians you can reach via Meta Wiki or international mailing lists. If you don't want that all board members are bombarded with the many mails on Wikimedia-l, one of you can be the 'guard' who watches what happens on Wikimedia-l, and informs the board colleagues if necessary. Keep in mind that this system of a 'guard' can only work if the guard is really dedicated, and if everybody knows what kind of information should be shared with all board members.

Volunteers and community[edit]

Definitions[edit]

Talking about 'volunteers' or 'the community' can be tricky because some terms are used in several ways. Especially 'user' can lead to confusion: some people call 'users' only the registered Wikipedia editors, others use the word for our readers. Also, the 'community' of a Wikipedia language version is not necessarily the 'community' (or membership) of your chapter.

You might use the following definitions:

• Community: the people editing Wikipedia on a regular basis; usually you consider the Wikipedia language version most important for your own country
• Readers: people reading Wikipedia, including those who reuse the content
• Members: everyone who paid the membership fee of your chapter
• Volunteers: your active members
• Donor: someone who gave money; you should distinguish between 'Wikipedia donors' and those who directly give to your chapter (maybe 'chapter donors'?)

Conventions[edit]

Micro grants[edit]

A micro grant here means that the chapter gives money to volunteers for a small activity. Think of little money for a meetup. The procedure is usually very lean and simple.

Who in the chapter should decide on the allocation of money? What should be the maximum amount of money per activity? What kind of activities can and should be supported?

Projects and partners[edit]

International affairs[edit]

Participation international conventions[edit]

As a chapter, you are supposed to be represented at the major Wikimedia conventions. Visiting a convention means that you can tell about your chapter and its activities, and that you can learn from others. The main goal of a convention is to talk to many people and to get an impression about a possible collaboration with them.

The two largest and most important annual Wikimedia conventions are

• Wikimania, usually in summer, and the
• Wikimedia Conference, in April. The Wikimedia Conference started in 2008 as a chapters meeting, and still the chapters play the major role in it. Every chapter is expected to visit and to give a short presentation about the previous 12 months in the chapter.

Other international conventions are dedicated to a specific subject, such as GLAM.

Whom should you send to a convention? It should be a person really dedicated to the movement, and capable to interact with others in an international (English speaking) environment. Often, but not necessarily, these people are board members or the WCA Council Member appointed by the chapter.

Wikimedia Chapters Association[edit]

The Wikimedia Chapters Association is the umbrella organization of the Wikimedia chapters. Every chapter (recognized by the WMF) can and should become a member. The WCA coordinates chapter activities and supports chapters which need help in their evolution. This Chapters Manual is an initiative of the WCA.

See also[edit]

Is this manual for you? Yes, if you are a contributor to a small Wikipedia, or want to start a new language edition. It may also have useful ideas for contributors to other Wikimedia projects, and for big Wikipedias as well.

Getting started[edit]

Should I start a new project?[edit]

There has been much discussion about the relevant criteria for assessing whether a new Wikipedia edition (or Wikisource, Wikinews etc.) should be created. Read the official (yet not undisputed) rules at the language proposal policy.

In addition to the rules, think about whether you can gather enough people to make your project work. You should have at least 20 people who:

• are thoroughly fluent in the language, at least 'level 3' ('advanced' or 'fluent');
• can and are willing to invest a lot of time; and
• at least some of whom will be able manage the technical aspects of the new project.

Realistically, you must expect to lose the participation of some or even many of the 20 initial volunteers soon or in the first years after the project is started. Thus, you must ask yourself: is it likely that the language community is large and active enough to provide you with new Wikipedians? Are there language institutions or associations that are interested in supporting the project? How developed is the language in consideration, and are there modern dictionaries and grammar guides? Does the language have unified spelling?

There are many examples of Micro-Wikipedias that are more or less defunct, their Wikipedians hardly active, and a number of them have been closed or 'frozen', such as Klingon, Moldovan and Herero.

If your language already has a Wikipedia edition, you should concentrate on it and not start a new project like Wikisource or Wikinews too early.

How do I start?[edit]

If you think that you have the people and perspectives and the rules will allow your language edition, you must start in the Incubator. The Help:Manual there tells you what to do to convince the language committee to approve a new language edition. After that, create a logo for your language edition: Logo#Localisation.

Rules are important[edit]

It would be too much to translate all help pages from English Wikipedia or write your own, but there is a starter kit for help pages should suffice for the first years: Basic Wikipedia and help pages. Alas it is still not complete.

Meta Manual Differential

Having rules and having thought about your mission – from the beginning on – is very important. A large and rich linguistic community like the English can afford to have edit wars, quarrels about relevance etc., English Wikipedia still works. But with your very limited number of contributors you must be careful not to waste time on useless discussions.

Cantonese Wikipedia has taken over, by default, the rules of the English Wikipedia, in order to have stability.^[1]

Language or linguistic problems[edit]

Some languages are less unified than others. For example, English is called a pluricentric language because it is spoken in many different countries, also as a native and official language. In a Wikipedia article, it may happen that an American Wikipedian wants to write center, a British centre. What to do?

English Wikipedia gives four principles to follow:^[2]

• Consistency within articles
• Strong national ties to a topic (write about the Queen of England in B.E.)
• Retaining the existing variety
• Opportunities for commonality (try to use a word common to all varieties)

Many Wikipedias have similar problems, and similar rules. This means that the person who creates an article decides the variety, unless a topic asks for a certain variety. For example, in Dutch Low Saxon Wikipedia the article about the region 'Achterhoek' should be written in Achterhoek dialect.

Dutch language follows the recommendations of Taalunie, German has its Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung. Some Wikipedians, whose language knows several varieties, would like to have a linguistic norm, too. This is a very local issue, for which no fixed rules can be set. It mostly depends on the kind of acceptance you can expect for such a proposed norm, so it's pretty often a matter of marketing. When several local varieties are at stakes, you can sometimes have political strings attached. When such is the case, you can hardly expect a wikipedia to solve problems that your linguistic community at large has not been able to solve. Wikipedias are written by people, who have political ideas and are influenced by the environment they live in. If your environment is politically troubled, so will be your wikipedia project.

Some such situations will simply be beyond any chance of satisfactory solution. Whatever decision you'll make you will pay a high price for it, in terms of internal relations. But this should be no news for you, if you are unlucky enough to be born in such places. When in such a trouble you are probably better off by counting the number of potential users a given norm will give you. Anyway, you should always remember that from a purely educational point of view full anarchy is the opposite of what can help people become literate in a language (see next paragraph). We all learn by repeated example, if all examples are different in nature it becomes very hard for people to make any use of them.

Whatever the regional language you are using, chances are that most of the native speakers will not be immediately able to read the script. Bear this in mind when writing. Use a very simple language with short sentences. It may help if all your pages contain a pointer to a manual for the illiterate and references to widely available printed material (grammars, dictionaries, etc). Most people being native in a regional language are literate in another, so this other language(s) can be used to teach them basic reading in specialized pages. It can also help to have a basic set of simple pages they can use for practice. In case you are using a multi-standard script you should really be careful to be consistent and to catalogue things so that users of a given script/local variant can easily navigate through material they can use.

Remember that we all write wikipedias to deliver information, not just for the sake of writing it. Whatever you choose with standards, make sure you do not get more complication that your community can reasonably manage to deliver information to final readers. If you fail to do so all you get is a small club of adepts, not an encyclopedia.

Content questions[edit]

You do not have to write everything by yourself, you can translate (a lot from) good articles in other Wikipedias, maybe modifying them according to your own culture and the interests of your readers. By the way, if you have a choice, it might be easier to translate from whichever language version has shorter/less verbose articles on the topic you're interested in: this might be the Simple English Wikipedia instead of the English Wikipedia, or the French Wikipedia for a German topic and the German Wikipedia for a French topic.

Does size matter?[edit]

For an alternative to bot-generated articles, consider enabling the mediawiki extension Article Placeholders in your Wikipedia.

It has been and still is common to give attention to number-of-articles milestones: 'Wikipedia X has reached 10,000 articles, Wikipedia Y is ranked 19 out of all Wikipedias', etc. This race for articles has caused tragic dynamics: Some Wikipedians believe that creating a lot of articles is the most important thing in the world, with little regard for the quality or relevance of the articles. For example, some Wikipedias have created articles about telephone area codes; stubs about towns and villages in foreign countries; one-sentence-articles; articles with pure data base value; articles in the wrong language (simply copying the English article) and so on (of course, bot created articles about your own cities can be useful, and also pages on years and numbers can make sense.).

Those pseudo articles only serve to pad article counts over a short time period but have little inherent value. People (inside and outside Wikimedia) will find out what these 'impressive numbers' are really worth. A huge number of (pseudo) articles leaves a Wikipedia edition vulnerable to vandalism, and costs too much valuable time that would be better spent creating worthy articles of which you can be proud. Since the discussion about Volapük Wikipedia, many language editions tend to be more negative about those pseudo articles, see some discussion on the topic with background.

The number of articles doesn't matter for entering the Top Ten Wikipedias.

On the other hand, each and every journalist will ask you how many articles you have, pretty much in the way people would judge you by the amount of money in your wallet. Press coverage will often compare Wikipedias only by this number. At least some of the members of your community will not care at all about anything and simply push to 'grow bigger', because they will feel it as a competition.

Be sustainable[edit]

All Wikipedias have stubs, and no matter whether you use bots or enter them one by one manually, stubs is what you will mostly get, in the beginning. If you can write a title, somebody else will add the content. True, but only up to a point.

There are two categories of contributors: the vertical and the horizontal writer. Vertical writers make very few in depth articles. Their work is delivered as finished, they prepare an essay and publish it. Others will start to map the planet, by making very short entries of all countries of the world, so that 'at least we can link to them'. Both are needed, even if the horizontal writers may sometimes be perceived as 'human bots' who create only stupid stubs. Reality is that without them you'd never have a basic systematic informational surface on which vertical writers can place their essays, link them to other material and make a wiki not just a collection of articles, but a real hypertext. Up to this point, 'size matters'.

But size is something you have to manage. Let alone vandalism (which is really not that relevant for most small wikis, if they have at least 2-3 users active every day), the problem you face is called systematization. You need to

• catalogue material in terms of categories,
• place links to (and from, which is the worst) other existing articles,
• put images in it,
• create and manage standards in formatting, etc.
• check that articles titles are proper (which is sometimes far from being easy, if your language has many standards and/or misses widely used native names for many things/places/people)
• keep the articles up to date

When you do not have much human resources this work will not be done and your result is going to be a mess. Now when you publish a mess you cannot expect readers to find it interesting and come back to it.

When you make an article you create an “administrative debt”, just as when you mortgage a house. That article will require care for many years to come, and it will be you paying the debt with your own time. If you make sensible plans on time expenditure you'll find that your community will kind of naturally start to discuss about article maintenance. Be sustainable, choose those stubs your potential readers are most likely to improve and make only as many of them as you can manage to maintain.

How to get more readers, more relevance[edit]

Statistically, for major languages, the topics that are prominent in the news are also the topics that are most widely read in Wikipedia. This means that when you read your daily newspaper and then ensure that there is background information to the news in a Wikipedia edition, that endeavor will have a bigger impact then just creating another worthwhile article. When an earthquake hits Greece, you can write about earthquakes and Greece. There will be an earthquake in another part of the world, something will happen in Greece that hits the news. You are weaving a web of relevant articles in this way.

When you write background information to the news, make sure that you use a local paper, preferably in your language, for the subject selection. A local paper has a nice mix of both local and global subjects. When you look for illustration material, commons has an abundance of material, but do consider that a picture of something that can be found locally gives added local relevance.

Small wikipedias start from a little number of users, and you have to balance between the interests of this small community (which is all the productivity you have on starting the project) and the interests of the community at large, somewhere out there. Some content is more likely to get you exposition in the news (no matter in which language they are written). And all the exposition you can get is pure gold. Even when they make fun of you, they actually help you by spreading the news that you do exist. So it does not really matter how nice is the press coverage you get, as long as you get it.

Concentrate on your strengths[edit]

Given that Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, the ultimate aim is to include all human knowledge. There is a need for articles about astronomy, about geography, about arts, about history, etc. Of course, do also provide to your readers articles about subjects many people are interested in, for example, history: Roman Empire, Mongolian Empire, Middle Ages, First World War, Second World War, Rwandan Genocide... The List of articles every Wikipedia should have can provide some guidance; Mix'n'match has more lists, is easier to keep tidy and has real time statistics for all wikis. Another method is to write articles that were requested and were not found ('failed searches').

The easiest tool to use may be Not in the other language, which sorts missing articles by number of interwikis. Each user can select a familiar and culturally close source language and start translating interesting topics from the top of the list, although there is some noise.

In short, there are three fields for you to work on:

• A general overview of science and humanities, for example an article about astronomy, an article about the most famous astronomer, Isaac Newton (but not many astronomer articles).
• Subjects people see on the news, like International Criminal Court, China, nuclear power, Bill Gates, diabetes.
• Subjects related to your language, culture or linguistic community (you can be exhaustive here).

You may concentrate on articles about your own region, your own language and literature, your own culture, crafts typical for your region, etc. On these subjects your Wikipedia can become really great and even useful to your readers, while it probably cannot compete with the English Wikipedia about American motorcycles or chemical elements. On the other hand, a single determined good writer may make much better articles than English Wikipedia has, even on such subjects. So before pressing your community towards a standard direction just because so it's written here, take the time to analyze what your community is writing. Real work counts more than principles and guidelines, and all editions are unique.

Getting support[edit]

Create or join an organization[edit]

Wikimedians can create 'chapters' – national organizations that cooperate with the Wikimedia Foundation. Examples include Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikimedia Argentina and Wikimedia Russia. If you speak a minority language in a country that already has a chapter, you may want to contact it. It may support you if you have reasonable plans - especially if a lot of Wikipedians of your language have joined it.

'Chapters' operate on country-wide range. If your Wikipedia's language is minority in your country or it is spread over some countries you may think to establish an independent 'user group' which, similarly to chapters, can cooperate with Wikimedia Foundation. The main advantage of user group for small language is very simple founding process.

Good organization may help. Some things can be done very good with the wiki principle of open collaboration (like writing an encyclopedia), others work better in a traditional way. Chapters and wikis are made of people, so evaluate the quality of human relations before making any step in any direction.

Ideas from other Wikipedias[edit]

There are Wikipedias since 2001. Learn about them and from them, observe what is happening on big and mature Wikipedias, but also on other small Wikipedias. Alas, there is not much interchange between them, and there has not been much research about them and their specific problems.

• Check at the Village Pumps (Cafés, Questions / Help for Newbies, Talking Place) of other Wikipedias what problems they are dealing with.
• Tell on Meta Wiki what is (roughly) going on in your Wikipedia (Tell us about your Wikipedia).
• Contribute to the articles about Wikipedia language editions at English Wikipedia (see below that page).

Sometimes it is difficult to communicate with other Wikipedias. Make sure that

• there is an 'embassy' easy to find, maybe via a link 'English' at your main page.
• you have a redirect that brings people who type 'village pump' to your village pump (whatever it is called in your language version).
• create interlanguage links for these kinds of pages, especially to other small wikipedias that your relates to.

Language institutions and associations[edit]

You are not the only one who is interested in your language. Is there an Academy that observes the usage of the language, publishes a dictionary etc.? Are there associations of people interested in your region, culture, language? Maybe teachers would like to see a working Wikipedia in your language?

Be realistic about what to expect from a language institution. They will not do the work you are supposed to do. They will not massively become new Wikipedians. Ask them to:

• have a look at your language edition and tell you what they think about it;
• let you tell on their meetings and in their periodicals about Wikipedia and especially about your language edition.

Look for arguments about the manner in which other Wikipedias supports their cause: Wikipedia, for example, is an instrument to popularize the results of scientific research. This is something those institutions are really interested in. If they find Wikipedia interesting, you may ask more:

• Money to produce flyers and teaching aids.
• Maybe they let you use their rooms for Wikipedia meetings and trainings.

Besides, they know a lot about your language and can help you to become more proficient: speaking a language and being able to write an encyclopaedia in it is not the same. They probably have a library and offer language courses.

Do not be disappointed if your first contacts do not have the results you wished. Carry on and try again, maybe when your project has grown a little; of course, it will be difficult to make a good impression if your language edition is full of pseudo articles.

Talk to different people: often one person of an institution is anti-Wikipedia, another is pro-Wikipedia.

Public relations[edit]

Media contacts[edit]

It's not the task of journalists to inform about your Wikipedia, they will only report about you if there is something interesting for their readers. Ask yourself what could be interesting: the creation of a Wikipedia in your language, maybe also reaching 10,000 articles, the election of a new administrator certainly not. Make comparisons people understand.

Before talking to the media, be sure that you know well about Wikipedia and your language edition, that you would be able to answer to some common questions (how many people contribute, are there any readers you know about, what are your main aims for the future etc.). Be proud about your Wikipedia language edition, but not arrogant.

Get your vocabulary straight[edit]

For people who do not know much about Wikipedia (new editors, journalists and their readers, politicians etc.) it is very confusing to hear different expressions for the same thing. Make sure that you have worked on your 'Wikimedia vocabulary'. Two examples:

• Wikimedia Deutschland once translated 'local chapter' with 'lokaler Verein', although lokal in German relates only to towns and villages. By the way, it is questionable whether 'local chapter' itself has been a good choice for describing the independent national Wikimedia organisations.

• How do you call a person who edits in Wikipedia but is not logged in, so that instead of an user name his computer's IP shows? Anonymous user, anon, IP user, IP, unregistered user, unregistered editor? Maybe the last one is the most clear. Then use it, and only it, when talking or writing about this kind of persons.

Show your content[edit]

When you meet other people who are busy with your language, a printout of a (good) article can show immediately the use of your Wikipedia. Maybe there is a blackboard to put it. Or you have friends who are interested in certain subjects, and you can send them articles by e-mail. Sometimes the periodical of a language association would publish a Wikipedia article.

Choose the article carefully. It must be of high quality, and the subject must be suitable for the readers. A teachers' association will be more delighted with an article like 'History of writing' than 'Robert Horne (wrestler)'. By the way, teachers always think: Can I use this at school, is this something for my pupils? This means that it is important that also young people can easily understand the article.

Technically, it is most easy to provide and print the article as a PDF. A PDF based on a website can be made very simply with Mozilla Firefox 3 (and higher). It looks better than the 'printable version'.

Sometimes it is possible and makes sense to present a whole article, sometimes you can present only one sheet. Then you may present the beginning of the article and write at the end of the page: 'The rest of this article you can read at Wikipedia, search for [name of the article].' And then you give some information about your chapter, how people can contact you, how to donate etc., whatever seems to be suitable given the context where you use the sheet.

Produce flyers and distribute them[edit]

See examples: Leaflets

In the beginning, a flyer in your language will be enough. Look what flyers already exist in other languages and learn from them. Often you cannot simply translate a flyer into your language, you must modify it. Try to 'localize' your flyer, tell about your language edition and why it is so important for your language.

Writing a flyer (or other PR materials) you should always keep in mind what do you want to achieve. First, you want people to learn about Wikipedia, to have a look of their own, to become (regular) readers. Second, you would like them to contribute, to write; do not underestimate how difficult it is for many people to actually contribute. Third, they also can support you simply by donating to your chapter.

Stick to these three aims, write something that makes people read, write, donate. Do not try to put as much information as possible into your flyer, concentrate on the important things.

Use Wikipedia and Wikimedia logos; to get permission contact your chapter or Wikimedia Foundation. In the beginning, it is OK if your flyer is only black and white; this makes it easier to print and copy it. This will also keep the costs down. Ask your chapter, ask people who sympathize with you for money, collect money among your Wikipedians.

Producing a flyer is one thing, also consider how to distribute. Are there meetings in or about your language? It is too expensive to send copies by mail to the popular masses in your region, but you should send a copy to important language institutions and associations. Do not produce flyers if you have no idea how to distribute them.

Wikipedia manual[edit]

Many people find it difficult to contribute, partially because they need to learn an encyclopedic style to write, partially (and especially) due to the technical aspects of contributing. Help pages are important, but consider also providing an extra manual people can buy or download and print. An experienced computer user works easily with several windows open, for example a help page on the left side of the screen and an editor window on the right side. But inexperienced users prefer a printed manual they can put aside the computer, or read on the couch before turning the computer on.

A Wikipedia manual must be more than a bundle of the ordinary Wikipedia pages and help pages. It must be a well structured new kind of text, divided into chapters in a way that makes sense. Do not jump from one subject to another, try to make one chapter follow naturally the other.

There is one major error seen in many manuals: They give the reader too much information. Be modest, your aim is to make the reader a driver who securely finds his or her way home, not a Formula One driver. For example, your reader should know about the four or five most important Wikipedia codes (like [[ ]] for creating a link), but constructing tables is something for later. The more stuff you put into your manual, the less your reader will learn (or even notice) the important basic things.

Another frequent error in Wikipedia manuals is starting too early with editing. A new Wikipedian must first know about the essence of the project, about general rules (what is Wikipedia - and what is it not), about how to fit in. Letting people make edits immediately is confusing for them and frustrating, when they see that their edits are reverted quickly.

You may use pictures, but not too much. Whenever you can describe something by words, do not use a screenshot. For example, simply tell that the link 'Log in / create account' can be found at the right side of the top of every Wikipedia page (unless the user has already logged in). But you should show some beautiful pictures from Wikimedia Commons to make your manual look nicer and inviting.

A suggestion for your table of content:

1. Introduction [what this manual is about, to whom it helps with what]
2. The Wikipedia phenomenon
   1. Encyclopedias, Internet and Free Knowledge
   2. History of Wikipedia
   3. Wikimedia Foundation
   4. Wikimedia projects
   5. Wikipedia in our language
3. How to use Wikipedia
   1. General rules of Wikipedia
   2. Main Page
   3. What is an article
   4. Content of an article
   5. Good and Featured Articles
   6. How to search
   7. Quality
4. How to contribute to Wikipedia
   1. Why people contribute
   2. Kinds of users [readers, unregistered users, registered users, administrators etc.]
   3. How to register, and why
   4. How to discuss and contact people
   5. Edit an article [at the example of correcting a simple typing error ]
   6. Edit conflicts and edit wars
   7. Wikipedia code
   8. How to create a new article
5. How to use pictures
   1. Pictures in Wikipedia articles and code
   2. Search for pictures in Wikimedia Commons
   3. Upload pictures to Wikimedia Commons
6. What to do now [register, contact the local chapter, donate etc.]
7. Glossary
8. Credits

Meta Alarm System Manual

References[edit]

1. ↑Cantonese Wikipedia, last seen 2008-12-18.
2. ↑Manual of Style.

Meta Manual Dg Shipping

See also[edit]

• Multilingual Wikipedia, an overview
• Cross-wiki taskforce to help communities getting up to speed with work needed locally to optimize editing with the visual editor
• Small wiki toolkits, learn and share technical skills to support, maintain, and grow your community

External links[edit]

Meta Manual R

• Securing a place for a language in cyberspace, a Unesco document

• Handbuch der Vielsprachigen Wikipedia, user page of Ziko van Dijk (de)