Report August–October 2008

Wikimedia Hungary Report

Vol. I. Nr. 1

August–October 2008

Prepared by: Tamás Mészöly and Bence Damokos

This is the first report of Wikimedia Hungary (or as we call it Wikimédia Magyarország, or just WMM). During the reporting period we were dealing with the official business of the incorporation. This report focuses on our activities during this time, and more.

Activities

August 2008

The plans and discussions about a Hungarian chapter were brewing for over a year by August (c.f. our short summary on the subject on meta:Wikimédia Magyarország). At a meeting held on 1 August we finally decided on establishing the chapter. This is what happened after the meeting in August:

• We contacted the Chapters Committee with our plans, and than adapted those to the requirement of the WMF.
• Opened a temporary, closed wiki for discussions about founding the chapter (http://sunfire.mokk.bme.hu/wikimedia).
• We gathered information regarding WMF policies and guidelines, the local legal environment, our fiscal needs and capabilities.
• Contacted as many chapters as we could to have a clearer idea of what to expect, and asked for advice. We received valuable input from all the chapters we contacted, and also a welcoming attitude in forming a new organisation in the family of chapters.
• During this month we discussed the operation, activities and goals of the planned chapter, and drafted our bylaws.
• Through the help of our president we secured the domains wiki.media.hu and wikimédia.hu (unfortunately we found that wikimedia.hu is “squatted”).
• We prepared the introduction of the Flagged Revisions extension on the Hungarian Wikipedia. After a period of testing on a copy of Wikipedia, the community has approved and asked for the introduction of this extension on 1 September. A Bugzilla request (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15568) has been filed to this effect, now we are waiting for the developers to implement the decision.

September 2008

• On 3 September we had a meeting and decided on a schedule of the founding. The local tax laws put pressure on us to incorporate before the end of the year, which at the time didn’t seem entirely possible.
• Meanwhile, the admins of the Hungarian Wikipedia have started removing images that cannot be legally used according to Hungarian copyright law. Hungarian law doesn’t recognise the concept of fair use and there are only limited cases when a copyrighted work can be used without permission. Finding proper legal expertise over the years to advise on crucial issues has been extremely difficult, though we can acknowledge the help of the Hungarian Creative Commons community. Many questions remain open that in the future we hope will be answered by legal counsel made available through the facilities of WM Hungary.
• Concurrently we applied and received OTRS access, established a Hungarian information and permissions queue, and adopted a way of handling permissions similar to the one used on Commons.
• We have redoubled our involvement in the translation effort, translating some of the Foundation web pages that would be useful for our chapter’s website as well. Note, that MediaWiki localisation of the Wikipedia UI has been constantly close to 100% for a longer period of time.
• We introduced ourselves on Meta-Wiki (meta:Wikimédia Magyarország and meta:Wikimedia Chapters), and started a community wide discussion in the Hungarian projects about the chapter.
• Concurrently, in the first half of the month we have sent the draft of the bylaws to the Chapters Committee.
• The end of September has been significant in the life of our chapter, we organised the founding meeting on 27 September in Budapest. At the meeting 20 founding members showed up from different parts of Hungary and one member even travelled from Transylvania, Romania just to be a member. Apart from the founding members there were present some spectators that couldn’t join (for being too young, we hope that we can clarify the legal situation and offer some form of involvement for the members of the younger generations as well).
• After a successful founding meeting the elected board and the certifiers of the minutes handed in the necessary paperwork at the Metropolitan Court in Budapest (housed in a very impressive, old building, still bearing signs of once being a court in the Austria-Hungary of the 19^th century).

October 2008

• The Court has ordered some smaller changes in the bylaws and additional papers, and to affect them a repeated founding meeting had to be held with the same members present as before.
• We organised this new meeting, gathered the necessary documents and changed our bylaws. The repeated meeting was held on 19 October where we accepted the necessary changes. The request for incorporation with the new bylaws and the additionally requested documents was handed in at the Metropolitan Court the next day.
• During October we started collecting ideas about our future homepage and a possible strategy regarding buying the necessary domains for the different projects that have a Hungarian name (all except Commons, at this time).

Chapter administration

• We have voted on our Board at both founding meetings we have held, with the same results. The composition of the Board is as follows, their term starting at the moment of legal registration (incorporation):
  • Péter Gervai, President;
  • Tamás Mészöly, Executive Vice-president;
  • Dániel Zrínyi, Financial Vice-president;
  • Bence Damokos, Board member (for international relations);
  • Gábor Hanák, Board member.

Lobbying/Political

• Some of our members were present at the founding of the Hungarian Creative Commons Association (Creative Commons Magyarország Egyesület).
• We conducted successful negotiations with the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and the Media Education and Research Center thereof, they have agreed [possibly outside the current reporting period] to provide us with an official seat at the University.
• Some of our members were invited to a meeting in the Hungarian Department of Health with the representatives of ESKI (Health Strategic Research Institute) about the Hungarian version of the ICD classification (they were concerned about the copyrights and the importance of providing accurate information about this fixed system on a freely editable interface that is Wikipedia).

Media and news

• After our founding meeting we were mentioned in national and regional newspapers, and their online editions:
  • an online newspaper article about us and the Creative Commons community forming an association;
  • regional newspaper, a short mention in one of their columns;
  • article about us founding an association in one of the biggest dailies in Hungary;
  • Hungarian Wikinews article about our founding.

News from the Hungarian Wikimedia projects

• The Hungarian Wikipedia has overtaken the Esperanto edition, regarding number of articles, becoming the 21^st biggest edition (8 August).
• The number of edits on Wikipedia has reached 4 million in total (14 August).
• The Hungarian Wikipedia reached an article milestone of 105,000 articles (11 September).

Coming up

This concludes our report on activities in the period of August–October, you can find out more on our website and Meta pages: http://wiki.media.hu and meta:Wikimédia Magyarország (currently both point to the same page, this will change however). Coming up in the next issue of our report and in the next chapter of our chapter:

• The race between the Board and the Court results in a tie: they approve us on the same date;
• Starting up an open wiki for our chapter, moving the members only wiki to its final hosting place;
• Further media appearances.