Annual Report 2022/Story: Launching a Helpdesk for the Movement’s content partnerships
In this story, we focus on how we're launching a Helpdesk as part of the thematic hub we are working to establish. The helpdesk offers practical support for Wikimedia organizations around the world who are collaborating various actors to make knowledge available on the Wikimedia platforms. We also present some examples of our first successful projects.
A central part of the hub that Wikimedia Sverige is building, with a focus on international support for content collaborations, is the so-called Helpdesk. The goal of the Helpdesk is to provide reactive support to Wikimedia organizations and volunteers, when they need different forms of help to move forward in their content collaborations. This may involve uploads to the Wikimedia platforms, but also answering questions about issues such as copyright, templates for presentations, examples of work with certain content types, or the like.
Through conversations, interviews and initial feedback, it has become clear that many have not yet reached the level where they have concrete upload projects to implement, so the Helpdesk needs to be able to respond to people's needs along the entire journey towards a successful content partnership.
During the year, the Helpdesk was launched and received about a dozen support requests. These came from about a dozen countries on four continents, and concerned many different types of projects (and parts of projects). The breadth and volume show that the Helpdesk is needed, and the hub was able to start working on some of the requests.
A central part of the Helpdesk is to select the requests to focus on decide on which order to fulfill them, as our resources are limited. An important principle for Wikimedia Sverige is that this prioritization should not be done by our staff, but rather by experienced volunteers in the global movement. Therefore, an expert committee has been appointed, consisting of eight volunteers from all parts of the world, with different backgrounds and areas of expertise. The committee's task is to provide recommendations and directives for how the Helpdesk should prioritize its resources, and has become an important sounding board for how the Helpdesk should provide support in the best way.
We have started our active upload work with one specific project, an upload of medical material from SMART Servier. The upload of a total of approximately 3,000 images will be completed in early 2023, after which the global community - following directives from the expert committee - will be in various ways engaged to spread the material, and share the lessons learned from the upload. Additionally, the Helpdesk provided minor support in the form of sharing concrete experiences, including effective presentation templates for a GLAM project in Croatia and initial conversations about how to use Wikidata to run Wiki Loves Monuments in Uganda and South Sudan.
The initiative was communicated at several international Wikimedia events, both physical and digital, and via e.g. blog posts and mailing lists. The response was very positive, both externally and in the e-mail inquiries that the Helpdesk received. Going forward, we will need to think more actively about how we reach out to new groups, i.e. those who do not necessarily know that they need support, or that support exists. If we are to achieve actual diversity, we as an organization and a Hub must get better at lowering thresholds and reaching out to more underrepresented communities.
As the next step, we are going to launch working groups in order to streamline and spread the support, as well as to include more parts of the global Wikimedia movement in supporting content partnership projects. The aim of the working groups is also to reach more people with our capacity building work, so that in the long run we remove the bottleneck where only a few actors on a global scale can work with content partnerships on a more advanced level.
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