2021 Strategic Plan
Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey (WMTR)
2021-2022 Strategic Plan
About WMTR
Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey (WMTR) is a user group of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), an U.S.-based non-profit organization that operates and manages the Wikimedia projects. WMTR consist of active members of Wikimedia contributors in Turkey, who are interested in organizing and participating in outreach activities on a national level in addition to contributing Wikimedia projects by editing. After getting officially recognized by WMF in 2016, WMTR registered an official legal entity in Turkey in July 2019 under Dijital Bilgi Derneği (Dijital Knowledge Association) name.
The main objective of WMTR is the encouraging people to collect, develop and disseminate scientific, educational, cultural and historical content under a free license, in Turkish and other languages.
In 2021, strategic priorities of WMTR is strenghtening the community, increasing the number and diversity of outreach activities; building partnerships with educational instutions and other external partners.
Mission
The mission of Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey is to support and engage people of Turkey to collect, develop and disseminate knowledge and other educational, cultural and historic content in all languages of Turkey, under a free license or in the public domain.
Vision
Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey shares the vision statement of the Wikimedia Foundation:"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment."
Programs
Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey advances its strategic priorities through its four primary program areas
- Stronger Community
- Effective Outreach & Content Development
- Students Editing Wikimedia Projects
- Synergic Partnerships
Stronger Community
This program focuses on establishing a more networked community. The editor community of Wikimedia projects in Turkey consists of dedicated volunteers distributed across the country. For our user group, it's important to ensure that community members work collaborating with each other and not feel overloaded or working isolated. This requires systematic communications to keep people informed and diversify the channels of interaction. The first objective of this program is providing effective communication with the community on the user group works and activities through different channels.
Members feel more powerful and attached to the group when they see they are developing their competencies by being a part of that group. In addition to increase communication between group members, the program is intended to provide in-group training on topics that the community is interested in developing their capacities.
The local community would be stronger when the members acknowledge themselves as a part of a bigger global community. Regional and international Wikimedia events are very helpful in providing this however, the Turkish community show very low attendance to global Wikimedia events. The program is also aims at increasing awareness and motivation for taking part in global events and initiatives.
Effective Outreach & Content Development
The focus of this program is increasing the awareness and understanding of the people of Turkey about Wikimedia projects as well as increasing their contributions to the projects.
We consider increasing the editor base and developing the content of the projects are processes which always go hand in hand. Because we witness how the proliferation of contributors ensures the projects cover more diverse subjects in higher quality by providing different viewpoints. With this understanding, this program includes a set of outreach activities to reach potential new contributors with different backgrounds to Wikimedia projects mainly Turkish Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. It’s aimed at effectively communicating those activities in the media and make Wikimedia projects seen more in the media in order to create awareness and understanding of the general public about Wikimedia projects.
Students Editing Wikimedia Projects
WMTR carried out the Wikipedia Education Program at Turkish universities in the past years. In next two years, our goal is to continue developing this program and contact the same academicians and new others who are interested in using Wikip(m)edia assignments in their classes. Group is now much more experienced in offering training modules for students editing Wikipedia for assignments and it’s possible to get even better results based on this experience.
Secondly, we’d like to cooperate with secondary schools this year; because we believe it is important that exposure to Wikimedia projects before university in order to prepare themselves to become enlightened consumers and also producers of digital content.
Synergic Partnerships
The focus of this program is building a strong support network around the activities of the user group. Our goal is reaching out to several institutions including local groups which advocate free knowledge, as well as city governments, embassies and cultural centers, in order to get the purposes of Wikimedia projects better understood by such institutions. We’d like to discuss partnership opportunities and suggest those institutions how they could share their knowledge and digital assets with the public and engage with their audiences through wiki projects such as edit-a-thons, contests organized in partnership with wiki communities; as well as learning how we could support their activities related to free knowledge. We’d like to conclude carrying out a thematic wiki-activity with at least one of the institutions visited.
We believe in the importance of civil-society solidarity ties and in order to develop such ties would like to join meetings of other local groups that advocate for open knowledge to understand them and their activities better, as well as making presentations about Wikimedia projects and purposes for their members. We also would like to make presentations and organize workshops at related academic events in order to establish ties with members of academia who strive for open knowledge and support our mission.