Campaigns/Future of WikiForHumanRights

On 13 December 2023 and April 2024, the Campaigns team at the Wikimedia Foundation announced (by Diff post and Office Hour) its intention to consult communities regarding the future structure of the WikiForHumanRights campaign. The intention behind this campaign restructuring would help the Wikimedia Foundation better understand what support is needed for communities to grow and lead the campaign going forward.

Since that announcement we have begun informal conversations with communities to understand their needs and priorities for an inclusive restructuring process, including a consultation with the LATAM Working Group on Climate Justice. This update is a follow-up to that announcement and will shed some light on the rationale behind this decision and some next steps for communities actively organizing under the WikiForHumanRights banner.

Over the past few years, the Wikimedia Foundation has been assisting communities to coordinate campaigns under WikiForHumanRights, with a focus on Climate & Sustainability. Initially, this support was intensive and included a global approach where the Foundation directly supported the campaign design, outreach and learning.

Over the past 4 years, we have learned from participating communities that a regional coordination process deepens participation and impact. Based on these observations, in 2023, we supported 9 regional coordinators to facilitate community engagement in their respective regions. Their role included:

• Championing communication across communities, including through multilingual communications support, storytelling through podcasts, video promotions and radio talk shows
• Mobilizing volunteers for participation and building energy for the campaign in different Wikimedia communities
• Providing grantmaking support, including supporting the grant review process
• Regional List Building – Creating Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote and Wikidata local topic lists for the African Region
• Providing capacity building, including on event registration and list-building tool support
• Community activation, including supporting communities to start new collaborations through the campaign.
• Hosting regional meetings and office hours

The communities doing work on this campaign have demonstrated creativity and leadership - showing their capacity to lead the campaign and take it into the next level. During this time, we saw how regional coordinators, affiliates and the movement transformed the WikiForHumanRights campaign. Through their work, participation grew in Francophone Africa, Lusophone and North Africa. Some community-led innovations include the creation of a new Wikimedia community in Libya, a WikiForHumanRights podcast, and in Spanish speaking LATAM, the community has worked together to create a Climate Justice and Wikimedia Projects Working group.

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  WIKI FOR HUMAN RIGHTS 2024 IN RWANDA
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  WikiForHumanRights UAE 3
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  Participants from WikiForHumanRights 2022 Workshop in Ghana
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  #WikiForHumanRights edit-a-thon organized by Wiki Movimento Brasil UG in partnership with Missão Paz
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  WikiForHUmanRights New Mexico Students
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  Wikimedia Community User Group meet up and civil society organizations for the Wiki for Human Rights meet up in Nairobi 2024
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  Newbie participants and WAP members in their WikiforHumanRights uniform
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  Participants conférence de Wiki For Human Rights 2023 9
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  Participants attending the wikiforhumanrights training in South Sudan
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  Wiki For Human Rights 2023 in Uganda Editathon
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  WikiForHumanRights 2021 in Nigeria

Most importantly, we have seen how regional coordinators, affiliates, local organizers and participating communities have grown in their capacity to create, lead and implement this campaign at a global level. As a result of these community-led innovations, the Wikimedia Foundation’s role has gradually shifted to focus on:

• Coordinating partnerships with the UN OHCHR to launch the campaign annually
• Defining the campaign theme and creating the global work list for the campaign
• Providing global communication support including developing a toolkit and branding
• Facilitating cross-regional alignment including developing the global P&E Dashboard and sharing global metrics on the campaign impact
• Providing product/technical support through product ambassadors on new WMF features
• Supporting global communication, such as setting up the campaign Meta page and organizing calls.

As a Foundation we value the growth of our movement. For this reason, we believe it is important to grow the leadership of the movement in the WikiforHumanRights campaign. We are interested in learning what communities need to continue to take this campaign to the next level.

At the same time, the Foundation is committed to providing ongoing support to the work taking place in the campaign through ongoing:

• Facilitation of learning for our movement, including supporting tool adoption and campaign best practice
• Partnership activation and support for regionally coordinated campaigns
• Provision of funding for campaign activities that meet the grant-making criteria
• In FY2024, the Wikimedia Foundation will also pilot an experiment where campaign organizers can access the services of a Library Fellow to help define the topical scope for this area.

We recognize that there may be more areas that we need to support, and there may be some that parts of our movement want to champion. We are committed to learning with communities what these should be and how we should start.

We have designed a consultation process that includes a survey, regional calls, Talk page discussion and learning sessions. Please join us in these activities.