https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiki_Loves_Open_Data#Organizations_interested is waiting for your input. Any candidates for first organizations to have their own Wiki Loves Open Data pages?

@Qgil working on it -- still waiting confirmation from World Bank that is is okay to add a page with their contact info - that would make it official and they/we might need to check in with comms on proper process.

In T107625#1545228, @Qgil wrote:>

@Wittylama has hinted to a page about Europeana at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiki_Loves_Open_Data#Organizations_interested

I've created a Europeana sub-page now: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiki_Loves_Open_Data/Europeana
I'm not sure if it's what you're after, but it's a start. Please advise if there's anything important missing or what you'd like to see here.

In the "organisations interested" section at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiki_Loves_Open_Data#Organizations_interested I'm confused by what "Wikimedia team mediating" mediating means... That implies that any content partnership has to be directly mediated via a WMF staff team. If that's the case, then that's a pretty sad precedent, as the WMF would then be effectively 'owning' outreach activities rather than helping the community to develop relationships. Imagine if GLAM partnerships had to have a WMF team mediating them - that whole part of our community would never have happened. If the WMF is now planning to start doing content partnerships itself, then that would radically change the motivation for doing outreach among the volunteer community/Chapters.

In T107625#1546516, @Wittylama wrote:

In the "organisations interested" section at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiki_Loves_Open_Data#Organizations_interested I'm confused by what "Wikimedia team mediating" mediating means... That implies that any content partnership has to be directly mediated via a WMF staff team. If that's the case, then that's a pretty sad precedent, as the WMF would then be effectively 'owning' outreach activities rather than helping the community to develop relationships. Imagine if GLAM partnerships had to have a WMF team mediating them - that whole part of our community would never have happened. If the WMF is now planning to start doing content partnerships itself, then that would radically change the motivation for doing outreach among the volunteer community/Chapters.

Agreed. This should not be there as it is.

@Wittylama, @Lydia_Pintscher

"Mediating" changed to "Facilitating". That is what was meant. Thanks for catching that.

I'm still not sure what this means though....

Am I supposed to have a WMF staff team to "facilitate" Europeana's relationship to the community? I thought that's what my role was... Equally, there's lots of GLAMs out there that work directly with a local volunteer.

I think my question basically points to my confusion about what the WMF's "Partnerships" team does. Partnering with mobile-phone companies for the Zero program is one thing, but if the WMF is now moving into the ream of direct content partnerships with external orgs, that's a whole different story. Just like the WMF doesn't negotiate image-donations for Commons, equally it shouldn't be negotiating metadata-donations for Wikidata. It should support "the community" to do that. Alternatively - create a workflow for "the community" to submit our content partnership proposals to the WMF and you do the work that we've done up until now.

In T107625#1546707, @Wittylama wrote:

Just like the WMF doesn't negotiate image-donations for Commons, equally it shouldn't be negotiating metadata-donations for Wikidata. It should support "the community" to do that.

And just to head-off the response that I've seen before from WMF about "the people who are best-placed to do an activity should be the ones doing it"...
The WMF is ALWAYS going to be best-placed to work with an external org if we're starting from a position of no-previous-relationship compared to a random wikimedia volunteer or Chapter. If it wishes, the WMF could invest far more resources (time, money, people) in any project than any other entity in the wikiverse.

One of the main reasons that GLAM became something that the Chapters took-up as their responsibility is because the WMF had specifically said "we're not doing that". If it had said "whoever is best placed to do it" then no volunteer or Chapter would have even bothered - under a "if the WMF is going to do it, why should I?" mentality.

This is aside from the legal issue of the WMF stepping out of its vigorously-defended legal position as "we're just the host of a website, not a publisher".

I'm sorry that this discussion has become quite divorced from the topic of this phabricator task!
But basically, I don't understand what the "partnerships" team at WMF is scoped to do. Do they meet external orgs and build a good rapport, and then introduce them to the local community? Or do they actually do "content partnerships" with them. The former is how we operate in GLAM. the latter is a centralisation/takeover. I'm not talking about things that are definitely within the WMF's responsibility (e.g. caching servers, WP Zero...), I'm talking about "content" and "outreach".

I disagree that WMF would always be best-placed, even where no previous relationship exists. There are advantages of culture and language that local groups and orgs often have over WMF. Additionally, the WMF's capacity to actually negotiate and execute partnerships is very limited, and would ipso facto be reserved for circumstances where there is either very large scale or some unique advantage to WMF being the partner. I agree even "facilitated" is overstating WMF's ideal involvement in most partnerships.

I typed that string, so let me explain, and sorry for the confusion in advance. I just learned that this caused a lot of distress here and in other channels.

"Wikimedia" really means "Wikimedia", and not "Wikimedia Foundation". "Wikimedia team" could be "WMF Strategic Partnerships" as much as "Wikimedia Finland", "Amical Wikimedia", etc.

Thanks to your reaction I see that a) the wording isn't clear but b) it doesn't need to be a team either. An individual wikimedian (volunteer or not) can be also a point of contact. And well, this point of contact is just recommended, not required. I'll edit that section to make all this clear.

Since the beginning of this project we have stated that GLAM was a successful precedent to watch and learn from. Most GLAM projects happen because there is a cultural institution willing to contribute, but also (and specially) because in most cases there are key wikimedians bridging between those organizations and Commons etc. This is the simple idea we want to apply here.

Please check https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiki_Loves_Open_Data#Organizations_interested. Better?

Thanks indeed @Qgil :-) I'm delighted to hear that you're trying to emulate the 'GLAM approach', because we always set ourselves up to build a culture of decentralisation, local contacts, capacity development, every-project-is-different. [Quite the opposite approach to the way the Education program (now Wiki Ed Foundation) set themselves up, which was all about centralisation, formal structure, reporting hierarchy]

I adjusted your wording slightly to wikimediaN - since a wikimedian is a *person* but Wikimedia a concept/movement. This point is clear to me now, and I've adjusted Europeana's listing there as a result.
Do please advise me if there's more detail or clarification you'd like on the Europeana sub-page.

I've take my two broader questions about the role of the WMF partnerships team (which aren't directly relevant to this Phab ticket) over to Meta at the talkpage of WMF Partnerships FAQ. I assume that's the most appropriate place to ask. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WMF_Partnerships_FAQ

In T107625#1549928, @Wittylama wrote:

Do please advise me if there's more detail or clarification you'd like on the Europeana sub-page.

In the context of "Intent and plans of their contribution to Wikimedia", it would be useful to identify obstacles or dependencies that need to be solved in order to improve your contributions. For instance, I think you mentioned somewhere that you miss a SPARQL endpoint for Wikidata data.

This would help identifying which issues are being highlighted by open data orgs and, hopefully, it will help the prioritization of tasks.

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiki_Loves_Open_Data/Europeana and https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiki_Loves_Open_Data/World_Bank set two precedents for the rest of pages to come. Resolving this task.