Wikimedian of the hour ....

Well, it is not about being the best, the biggest, the whatever ... it is about contributing actively to the fundraiser ... a test-feature that shows a photo of the Wikimedian of the hour is running on two wikipedias for now - the Piemontese and Neapolitan Wikipedias. Besides that we decided that it made sense to have the donation page in our languages as well. Piemontese is already there ... Neapolitan still needs translation and then proof reading.

Now let's come to the point: the sense of this exercise is to get more people look at the donation page during the fundraiser period. We all know that a picture or graphic attracts our eyes more than just a written line. The Wikimedia Foundation will need more and more funds since it is continuously growing exponentially. This means we need and want to reach user groups that before were not reached and there are plenty of them. Of course we cannot do everything "right now" since the time left to the next fundraiser is short, but at least we should start to do something. Showing pictures of the community creates a different feeling of "being part of real people". It welcomes people in a different way.

These "Wkimedian of the hour" pictures can be used anywhere - also in the village pumps for example. Well, I would like to see you ... yes, you who are reading ... among us as well. You are a Wikimedian, so you should be there. Of course, those who want to remain anonymous can send me their picture and I will simply upload it without information about who it is. Pictures I receive by e-mail for publication on commons and flickr are released under cc-by-sa 3.0 and GFDL license.

If you don't know how to get that picture of yourself, well you can do a collage or just a screenshot like the one included in this blog.

The picture cycle gets updated regularly substituting the actual pictures with a bot, that is when some new pictures are added.

If you are on one of the projects that would already like to have the Wikimedian of the hour online, please let me know. I can pass you the file for the upload or eventually upload it with my bot.

I believe that for small projects (not only Wikipedia, but also Wiktionaries, Wikisource etc.) it will not only have fundraising effect, but will eventually also attract more people looking and hopefully contributing to these projects.

You can reach me by e-mail at scretella (at) wikimedia (dot) org

So I hope to see your picture online soon or have it in my mailbox. :-)