Wikimedia

Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, which is the biggest repository of information in the world.

The Wikimedia Foundation supports the creation and uploading of free cultural content, mostly through Wikipedia.

They strive to bring about a world in which every single human being can freely consume and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. The foundation works to develop and globally disseminate educational content.

Wikimedia Projects

But the foundation is not just about Wikipedia, it also supports other wiki-based projects.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia commons, published under CC licence

• Wiktionary: A project to create a multilingual free content dictionary in every language.
• Wikiquote: A repository of quotations taken from famous people, books, speeches or films.
• Wikibooks: A collection of free e-book resources.
• Wikisource: A multilingual project to archive a collection of free and open content texts.
• Wikispecies: An open, wiki-based project to provide a central, more extensive species database for taxonomy.
• Wikinews: A project to report news on a wide variety of subjects.
• Wikiversity: A project dedicated to learning materials and learning communities, as well as research.
• Wikivoyage: A project to create the world’s largest free, complete and up-to-date world-wide travel guide.
• Wikimedia Commons: A project to provide a central repository for free photographs, diagrams, maps, videos, animations, music, sounds, spoken texts, and other free media.
• Wikidata: A project to create a free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike.
• MediaWiki: An open source community to maintain several software projects.

Wikimedia Australia

Wikimedia Australia Inc. (WMAu)  is the Australian chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation. As a non-profit organisation, it is comprised of people who come together to empower a global volunteer community that collects and develops the world’s knowledge and to make it available to everyone for free, for any purpose.

WMAu seeks to ensure that information is always freely accessible for everyone.

Kerry Raymond is the Vice-President of Wikimedia Australia and an active Wikipedian. She explains the goals of Wikimedia and reveals what her role as Vice-President of the Australian chapter involves.

On Wikimedia’s primary focus

…a lot of what we do is concerned more with outreach, for example, training – where we teach people how to edit Wikipedia and we also work with GLAM which is the abbreviation meaning galleries, libraries, archives, and museums – to help them, where their activities can integrate with Wikipedia… So they are probably the main two things I do wearing my Wikimedia Australia hat.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, published under CC licence

It is done face-to-face because if you think about it, the people who have confidence to just reach out and press that edit button on Wikipedia generally figure it out. It is the people who lack the confidence to do that – they tend to be people who have an interest in a particular topic or subject matter but they are not the most computer skilled and they need that extra hands-on kind of help.

On time spent helping Wikimedia Australia

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, published under CC licence

Look, it varies enormously. Clearly if I am doing an edit training course then obviously I spend all day actually at it and I would have spent most of the day before going through, refreshing the slides, looking for examples that are local to the area that I am doing the course in or interests of the group I might be speaking to. It can be quite intensive, sometimes I have to travel to different states for meetings, sometimes you get those really frustrating days where you have a meeting with a library first thing in the morning then another one on the other side of town late in the afternoon, so you lose the middle of the day sitting between them.

Wikimedia Australia, where a lot of what we do is concerned more with outreach… to help them, where their activities can integrate with Wikipedia or those other Wikimedia projects.

On becoming Vice President

Wikimedia an incorporated association, it is entirely run by volunteers and to stand for election for the committee means you have to be willing to commit a fair amount of time. I was just on the point of retiring at that time and I thought maybe this is something that I will have more time to do now that I am retired. So, I became Vice President simply because somebody in the community had to resign due to personal circumstances and they needed someone to be Vice President and I was it. I was really reluctant actually.