Wikimedia news/numero 22/en

W i K i M e D i A N e W s no. 22 - December 3rd, 2008

Official monthly bulletin from Wikimedia Italia Association.

Editorial
This number of Wikimedia News, just before Christmas, is being published in a characteristic period for our association and all of WMF; we are in the middle of fundraising (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate/it). I believe that everybody, and especially our members, know that it's necessary to support, also financially, both Wikimedia Italia and Wikimedia Foundation. Together with the usual reports for activities and events, so, the Board wants to urge all readers to take part, both physically and financially, in the needs of the the association.

Senpai

What happened last month
Cristina Moretto made a short introduction, then Simone talked about history and logic of the licenses. His talk was quite interesting, and the public from a lot of questions. I talked more or less for 20 minutes about wiki philosophy and the various projects. The other speakers were Simone Cortesi (OSM) and Christian Biasco (about his work).
 * November 2, Pavia: we attended Sapere libera tutti!, a day dedicated to the new ways for creating a collective culture. The report from EdoM:
 * I don't know what kind of promotion the event had, but at least in the morning there were just we speakers among the members of WMI. I don't know if in the afternoon some other people came.


 * November 28-30, Faenza: we attended Meeting delle Etichette Indipendenti. The report from Senpai:
 * This year, Meeting delle Etichette Indipendenti was below par. Maybe there were less visitors, but it's certain that they were much less willing to support our projects. Takins were much lower than last year: many visitors looked at our stand, said "Oh, Wikipedia", and then went away. I had the impression that the casual user takes our projects for grant. Maybe we should try and explain that the fact that Wikipedia and the other WMF project are free (as in beer) does not mean that we don't need money to run them.
 * Maybe we could think at some effective slogan to let people know that the lack of donations will lead to the closing of the projects.
 * Leaving aside the financial issues, we took advantage from MEI. We managed to get in touch with some music companies interested in copyleft; in the near future we will be therefore able to insert a lot of new content, especially for classical music, but also for some rock and electronic music, in the pages of our project Musica.

Future events

 * March WMI Meeting: The meeting which should let us change our Charter and eventually become a Non Profit association might not be held. After the proposal of a few location for the meeting, no official bid has been made yet: we need to have a final bid by the end of December, or the meeting shall not be held.


 * Wikimangia: Since March and April 2009 will be full of events (WMI Meeting, Chapter Meeting, Easter), Senpai thought that it would be nice to anticipate the usual "eat-and-drink-alot" gathering in February. The program will consist in a day of skiing (Saturday), while laziers will appreciate the typical pubs near the ski tracks, and quaff hot chocolate or alcoholic beverages. As usual, we need quickly to know how many people think to attend the event, so please gave us some feedback!

News from Italian WMF projects

 * Wikibooks: New logo was approved. We need just the last details.
 * Wikinotizie: Reached 6,500 articles.
 * Wikipedia: Fundraiser started. Here there are the statistics about efficacy of the various requests to donate.
 * Wikiquote: A proposal was made to promote all sysop to bureaucrat, like in es.wiki. Two new pages featured: Matrix and Fight Club. Catechismo della Chiesa cattolica was voice #8,000.
 * Wikisource: Still discussions about copyright: text of posters, leaflets, flysheets, may be defined public domain like public speeches?
 * Wikiversità: Danielg quit from sysop.
 * Wikizionario: Approved a rule which will lead to deletion of thousands of lemmata automatically imported from en.wikt in 2005 and 2007.

News from association

 * Wikimedia Italia, together with Wikimedia Nederland, sent a statement about the Green Paper on copyright which European Union prepared (the link refers to the statement by Wikimedia Italia).
 * For the holiday season, our Association promotes "Regala Wikimedia" (Wikimedia as present). Through our online shop, at this page, people may buy a gift token that can be spent in Xmas gadgets by WMI; we suggest to every member to pamper her/himself with a wikigift! By the way, we added new pins and some stickers; we are also purchasing a new model of t-shirt and a new sweatshirt.
 * Wikimedia Hungary, one of the latest Wikimedia Chapters, partially modeled its homepage after ours.

News from Biblioteca

 * Mizardellorsa has nearly completed the upload of the latest book by Simone Aliprandi about copyleft. Whoever wants to lend a hand will find our guidelines here.

News from Musica

 * At MEI we approached some recording label interested in copyleft. During the next days we will fatten our site.

Editorial staff: To contact the staff, write at: redazione@wikimedia.it or directly to the editor:
 * Luca Sileni;
 * Frieda Brioschi;
 * Marco Chemello;
 * Nemo (section "News from our projects")
 * Aubrey (section "News from Biblioteca")
 * DracoRoboter and Elitre (section "News from W@H")
 * Luca Sileni - wikisenpai@gmail.com
 * Frieda Brioschi - ubifrieda@gmail.com

'''Notice. This newsletter is exclusively intended for information about Wikimedia Italia, both to the members and to the general public; as per Art. 1, Comma 2, Legge 7 marzo 2001 no. 62, it is not an editorial product'''