Report January 2011
This is an update on Wikimédia Magyarország's activities covering January 2011.
Fundraising
Wikimedia Hungary has finished its most successful fundraiser ever. We have raised HUF 5,7 million (~$28 600 at today's exchange rates) from around 1300 donors, which is a four-fold increase from last year.
For the fundraiser we have used the standard WMF landing pages, but also introduced a special banner and appeal from our former Vice President. (Interestingly, the appeal performed worse than the Jimbo appeal on the Hungarian Wikipedia, but better on the English Wikipedia.) In order to have better statistics and to provide some more contextual data on our operations to the donors, we have moved the landing pages mid-fundraiser to our own servers.
One of the lessons we gathered was that donors had a high abandon rate with Paypal, possibly due to it not being in Hungarian. As the direct bank transfer method of donations were quite popular, we will be investing in the development of CiviCRM to allow us to connect it with our bank's online banking solution, offering donors this choice of donation method.
Later in the year, in February and especially in May we will be working on convincing potential donors to choose Wikimedia Hungary as the recipient of one percent of their income tax.
Wikipedia 10
We held two events to celebrate the English Wikipedia's tenth birthday: a conference and a wiki meetup. In July, we plan to hold a celebration of the Hungarian Wikipedia's 8th birthday.
Conference
We held a conference in the Hungarian National Széchényi Library's Asssembly Hall to about 150 guests from the public.
The conference was opened by Szilveszter E. Vizi, the former president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where he called Wikipedia the "Common memory of mankind." His opening was followed by a special video message from Jimmy Wales.
Frank Schulenburg spoke about the roots of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation's Public Policy Initiative. (Videos available through Wikimedia Hungary's new YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/WikimediaHU).
Frank's keynote was followed by three presentations on the history of Wikipedia, about the French encyclopedists and about networks on the Internet and in Wikipedia.
Finally, there was a panel discussion about Wikipedia use in education and in general, involving university professors and the Director of the Library.
(The conference was funded through a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation.)
Wiki meetup
The conference was followed by a wikimeetup with about 40 particpants. We distributed some Wiki 10 and general Wikipedia T-shirts and celebrated with a cake.
Wikimedia Hungary publications
The conference was the first time we publicly distributed our two publications that were produced at the end of last November: the Hungarian edition of the Welcome to Wikipedia brochure and our 2008-2010 Report.
The brochures were based on the Wikimedia Bookshelf designs adapted to our needs and printed through a grant of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Chapter Development Pilot Project
On 16 January our Board members met with Anna Royon-Wiegelt to discuss a Chapter Development Pilot Project. The meeting was quite useful in going over the history, timeline, successes and challenges of the chapter.
We are currently considering participation in the project.
Media attention
The anniversary and the conference has garnered considerable media attention. The national news agency and all the major internet news portals[1][2] published reports about the conference.
We've given interviews to three newspapers[3][4][5] and four radio stations.[6]
An other issue that has resulted in some original reporting in the Hungarian online media was a copyright violation case where one user has uploaded 5000+ articles from copyrighted encyclopedias over 5 years and where it took considerable amount of time for a small group of editors to go through all of his edits and to compare them to the numerous sources that the user had used to find the copyright violations (the user had used a number of Public Domain sources, purging all of his edits would not have been the ideal solution).
The media mentions[7][8][9] were based mostly on the report written up by one of the most active editor in the clean up effort and were generally positive about the fact that the offending pages have been filtered out. The issue got a few mentions in passing in the coverage of the anniversary as well, but overall the episode hasn't tarnished Wikipedia's reputation in Hungary.
Ongoing projects
Toolserver
We have purchased a server in December 2010 to provide various tools to the editing and researcher community, to allow us to test MediaWiki extensions and software updates and to keep backups of the database dumps. The server was in transit during the month of January. Delivery and set up is planned for February.
Photo competion
We are planning a photo competition with a major Hungarian photo upload site to collect high quality, freely licensed images. The competition is planned to run from April through May.