Wikimedia LGBT+/2021
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The Wikimedia LGBT+ is a Wikimedia community affiliate organization. This report outlines key accomplishments and activities organized by the group for 2021.
Global discussion participation
[edit]Members of the organization participated in the following discussions:
- Establishment of the Global Code of Conduct
- See especially in Phase 1 of the drafting at Universal Code of Conduct/Drafting committee, Wikimedia LGBT+ member RachelWex was one of the drafters. From the perspective of our organization, she contributed the majority of content to the initial text, and she regularly consulted with the group on issues.
- Phase 2, the drafting committee for enforcement of the UCoC included another of our members, FULBERT.
- ongoing Wikimedia Strategy discussions and implementations
- active participation in some of resulting implementations like The Capacity Exchange, CEE Hub and others
- Regular stakeholder meetings with WMF Trust and Safety and research
- at least bi-monthly with 3-6 members attending, contributing and providing feedback
Monthly User Group meetings
[edit]Our organization hosts an online video chat every month. This meeting is open to anyone and advertised on the Meta-wiki page for the organization. Notes are here:
Programs and Events
[edit]QW2021 in May was a Wikimedia Foundation-funded "Working Days" online event and workshop over 3 days. Most of the sessions were held simultaneously in English and Spanish, while reports were made in few more languages. The event was focused on improving the capacity and capabilities of the User Group and practical steps to be a recognized stakeholder for the LGBTQ+ community. Wikimedia Austria was a key partner helping to adminster the event and provide financial management.
en:Wikipedia:Wiki Loves Pride is the yearly and year-long English Wikipedia campaign for editing LGBT+ content. As in previous years, Wikimedia LGBT+ supports this campaign by referring English Wikipedia editors to the program. The report for this year is at en:Wikipedia:Wiki Loves Pride/2021, which includes lists of articles edited and also some coordination of media uploads to Wikimedia Commons.
For Wikidata development, our organization refers editors to d:Wikidata:WikiProject LGBT and supports conversations about developing that project. An ongoing LGBT+ issue in Wikidata is when and how to apply demographic labels to Wikidata items for people. Controversial topics include correct use of the properties for gender and sexual orientation.
Various Wikimedia community organizations hosted LGBT+ themed events. While organizations do their own events, in Wikimedia projects people often are members of multiple projects at once, such as their regional Wikimedia chapter and also Wikimedia LGBT+. Examples of LGBT+ events which included the participation of WMLGBT+ membership and promotion using WMLGBT+ communication channels include the following:
Organisational improvement
[edit]An outcome from QW2021 was to establish the Wikimedia LGBT+/Governance team to provide credible oversight of any reported governance issues, financial review, whistleblowing cases, and to provide an independent committee for reporting and assessing potential conflicts of interest. As an example, this gave an independent and stable mechanism for Wikimedia Austria to review financial decisions with WMLGBT+.
WMLGBT+ has been selecting and testing tools and methods of work during the pandemic restrictions:
- we now have a paid version of Zoom service to support members wanting to have meetings or workshops for community needs
- a shared WMLGBT+ Google calendar for coordinating events
- several new Telegram groups have been established this year, acting as virtual meeting spaces to respond to safe space issues, coordinate project work and necessary confidential discussion
user:FULBERT and others published
Participants
[edit]We have two tiers of participants: people who have registered to join a Wikimedia LGBT+ community group, and people who subscribe to or join Wikimedia LGBT+ programs, but who have not joined the organization or any of its subgroups in an explicit way.
Our membership includes the following:
- people who have registered on our Meta-page Wikimedia LGBT+/Participants
- registered participants in the Queering Wikipedia 2021 conference, reported back to the Foundation at QW2021/Report and to the User Group at QW2021/Write-up
- people who join the WMLGBT+ telegram discussion groups, now 130 subscribers
Our participants include the following:
- people who are signed up for the email mailing list
- subscribers to the Twitter account @wikilgbt, 37,000 subscribers
- subscribers to the Telegram channel
Grants, gifts, and financial sponsorships
[edit]Wikimedia Austria was the recipient of Wikimedia Foundation funding to present the Queering Wikipedia 2021 online conference. They did the financial reporting of the event. Wikimedia LGBT+'s memberships were the beneficiaries of this conference, as this event related more closely to our organization even though Wikimedia Austria has a history of supporting LGBT+ events and participation from its own LGBT+ members.
In March 2021 the commercial company NordVPN gave Wikimedia LGBT+ a gift of 10 subscriptions to its VPN service. Fae negotiated this gift. The context was Wikimedia LGBT+ contributors asking for suggestions on how to increase their privacy and security due to danger related to editing in the LGBT+ space. There is no broadly recommended Wikimedia guide for privacy, but this VPN offer seemed useful to explore.
2020 donation of free service for Queering Wikimedia conference by https://Zulip.com/, requested by User:Zblace, was extended to 2021. Wikimedia Foundation does not provide for fine threaded and sustainable chat infrastructure, but this option (also used by WMF Outreachy) is useful to explore for wider adoption.