Annual Report 2023/Story: The Helpdesk Is Increasingly Supporting More Projects
This story focuses on the ways in which the work of the Helpdesk has intensified during 2023, enabling the Hub initiative to carry out more projects as well as to enable more Wikimedians to conduct uploading projects. There has been a significant focus on material related to the Wiki Loves competitions, as advocated by the expert committee.
During 2023 the work with developing a Helpdesk for those working with content partnerships and in need of support has intensified. The Helpdesk is an initiative within the framework of our Content Partnerships Hub. After dedicating a significant amount of time to make the Helpdesk function known during 2022 and the beginning of 2023, partly through various blog posts and digital communication efforts, and partly through participation in various Wikimedia events, the Helpdesk received several inquiries during 2023. In total, the number of inquiries now exceeds 20, spanning from South America to Oceania, from Africa to Europe, and we have been able to fulfill a large number of them.
The Wiki Loves campaigns is one area where several volunteers and Wikimedia organisations have requested concrete support, namely the photography competitions Wiki Loves Earth (WLE), focusing on natural heritage, and Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM), focusing on cultural heritage. Among other things, several Wikimedia organisations have requested assistance in basing the Wiki Loves competitions on information from Wikidata rather than manual lists from Wikipedia. We have, for instance, in close collaboration with the international team of Wiki Loves Earth helped around a dozen Wikimedia organisations in Europe, South America, and Africa to make natural heritage data accessible via Wikidata, with the aim of subsequently basing WLE on this data. Regarding WLM we have provided similar support to Uganda, and together with Wikimedia Ukraine we have begun the process of transferring their 95 000 monuments to Wikidata.
The work on WLE and WLM has largely been based on the expert committee considering the project to be highly prioritised. The starting point has been that the committee would rather see the Helpdesk prioritize self-help, or in other words, capacity building, than pure uploading projects. This was also the case with Smart Servier, where the expert committee had a very positive attitude towards the project but wanted the requester of the support to be actively involved in the project, in order to eventually learn to undertake similar efforts themselves. In this way, the expert committee has also driven the Helpdesk to focus largely on capacity building, even if this has led to slightly fewer projects being carried out.
Moving forward, a challenge is to ensure that knowledge about the Helpdesk reaches further, so that more Wikimedia organisations and volunteers understand the support they can receive, and to involve more people in the work of the Helpdesk, enabling more projects to be implemented. One way to achieve this is by developing working parties that can contribute with direct efforts and competence in various forms of content uploading projects.
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