Relazione sulle attività 2017/en

Introduction

The association Wikimedia Italia – Associazione per la diffusione della conoscenza libera (hereinafter referred to as Wikimedia Italia or WMI) was founded on 17th June 2005 in Canino (Italy). WMI is a non-party, non-political, non-profit association that actively contributes to the diffusion, the improvement and the development of knowledge and culture throughout the world.

Wikimedia Italia social purpose

Wikimedia Italia members from 2005 to 2017

Wikimedia Italia collaborates with Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit American organisation that manages Wikipedia, the online multilingual free-content encyclopaedia cooperatively written by volunteers. Wikimedia Foundation hosts Wikipedia in all languages and other projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikiversity, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.

Wikimedia Italia works alongside Wikimedia Foundation but does not represent Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia in Italian legally in Italy. Wikimedia Italia is entitled to use Wikimedia brands and logo exclusively for its institutional activities. Similarly, Wikimedia Italia is chapter of OpenStreetMap Foundation but remains independent from it.

In particular, Wikimedia Italia aims to spread out the philosophy that inspires Wikimedia and OpenStreetMap projects; Wikimedia Italia members contribute to one or more Wikimedia projects and share the underneath values of these projects. Being part of this association facilitates the exchange of views and experiences at world level and allows to be directly involved in the development of Wikimedia and its objectives.

Wikimedia Italia members' actions on Wikipedia are carried out in their own personal capacity and the association does not take any responsibility and does not give any guidelines or advice in this respect.

Wikimedia Italia members

Wikimedia Italia members pay an annual membership fee of 25,00 euros. Honorary members have equal rights as ordinary members but do not pay the annual membership, while supporters are all those people and organisations contributing to Wikimedia Italia with important donations in order to sustain the maintenance, the improvement and the further implementation of WMI projects. Wikimedia Italia was founded by 18 members on 17th June 2005. On 31st December 2017, WMI registered 412 members.

Members in 2017 divided by region

• New members (from January to December 2017): 87
• Decayed members: 94
• Average age: 47 years old
• Youngest member: 19 years old
• Oldest member: 92 years old
• Gender:
  • Women: 93 (22,57%)
  • Men: 319 (77,43%)
• Region of residence: regions where the higher number of members reside are Lombardia (109), Lazio (48), Emilia Romagna (40), Veneto (32) and Piemonte (26). The other regions have less than 30 members. 12 members live abroad (see chart).

Coordinators

As in 2016, in 2017 regional and thematic coordinators have been appointed: 31 during the first semester and 27 during the second one. In some cases, some of them were new members, in others cases they were volunteers who had already covered that role. On 5th February 2017, a meeting with the participation of 21 coordinators, 4 staff members and 3 members of the board was organised in Rome.

Staff

Wikimedia Italia recruits some staff members for more intensive activities together with some collaborators for specific external activities. In 2017, a reorganisation of the staff has been started in order to make the workforce structure less hierarchical and more linear.

Activities

Institutions and free culture

Seminar in BNCF in November 2017

In 2017, several collaborations with libraries have been established, numerous courses and events have been successfully organised and the relationships with the main Italian institutions were particularly fruitful.

One of the most outstanding results is the collaboration formalised in June 2017 between AIB and Wikimedia Italia in favour of the public domain. The agreement stipulates the commitment of both sides to work together for the promotion of various initiatives, such as training courses and advocacy activities, encouraging the diffusion of open licences and the free use of digitised works in the Italian libraries.

At the same time, the Italian law legge 124/2017 allows to take pictures of pages of documents or other print volumes with personal equipment (e.g mobile phone), without prior authorization, in libraries and archives. Wikimedia Italia has contributed to accomplish this result thanks to the advocacy activities related to this topic organised in 2017.

Institutions and participation to projects

Libraries

One of the 300 images digitized in 2017 from the Acta Eruditorum, public domain works in the BEIC catalogue

Within this positive context, the association has promoted more than 30 events and training courses in different libraries throughout the year. These initiatives have involved more than 1000 participants, among which more than 150 were new contributors to Wikimedia projects.

This growth has been encouraged by an enhanced presence at the convention named convegno delle Stelline, where the WMI President outlined the benefits of Wikidata and open data in general. The annual convention Sfide e alleanze tra biblioteche e Wikipedia also was very successful. It was held at the Central National Library in Florence (Italy) and more than 270 people participated to this event.

With regards to workshops, the training launched at the beginning of the year with the Biblioteca San Giorgio di Pistoia has generated 33 new articles on Wikipedia, while in the training with Sistema bibliotecario Seriate Laghi more than 20 librarians were involved. The workshops organised at the Biblioteca di Area Linguistica dell'Università Cà Foscari (BALI) have been the most successful ones with the participation of about 40 new contributors each.

One of the main innovations of the year was the establishment of the collaboration with the Department of digitised bibliographic services of the University of Turin (Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures and Modern Cultures) which will employ part of its vast bibliographic archive in Wikimedia projects. Moreover, in the Biblioteca delle Oblate (a library situated in Florence), a weekly assistance service for Wikipedia has been tested for 3 months.