What do we agree on: China TF recommendations

The list of recommendations by China TF.

1. Promote the Wikimedia movement and involve the public at large
   1. Re-invigorate the community
      1. Before 2006, Wikimedians in many cities of China often held meet-ups. But after the government blocked Wikipedia, these meetings were not organized any more. We need to re-invigorate the community both online and offline.
   2. Increase public relations activities
      1. Hold annual conferences for Chinese Wikimedia in Mainland China
      2. Increase media coverage on Wikipedia via news, interviews, reviews, etc
      3. Wikipedians reach out and give talks in universities and IT/education-related conferences/gatherings
      4. Form partnership with popular websites in China
   3. Improve the SEO result in Google.cn and Baidu.com
2. Lift the obstacles for participation
   1. Help students and teachers in universities to access Wikipedia
      1. Chinese universities and academic institutions use the CERNET (wikipedia:China Education and Research Network) to connect to Internet and have limited data allowance for international traffic. Setting up a mirror inside China for Wikipedia would be a solution but it must deal with the censorship problem.
   2. Improve usability of the user interface, especially on the editing interface
   3. Improve the mobile version of Wikimedia
   4. Be more friendly to newcomers; encourage and help them participating
   5. Maintain and expand the link with the Chinese government for better communication and mutual understanding
3. Improve content quality and expand coverage on local topics
   1. Using the high-quality content from English Wikipedia and other languages is an opportunity.
   2. Expand coverage on topics more relevant to Chinese users, such as Chinese people, Chinese culture, Chinese geographic, etc
      1. Lots of works in public domain may be used to expand the coverage in a systematic way
      2. Project to enhance geographic entries with semantic format support
4. Build online and offline partnerships
   1. Build partnerships with relevant websites and online communities
      1. For example: Songshu Hui(松鼠会, http://songshuhui.net/), OOPS (http://www.myOOPS.org), TEDtoChina (http://www.tedtochina.com/), etc.
   2. Build partnerships offline with groups such as teachers
   3. Supporting facts:
      1. Hudong partners with teachers from primary and secondary schools
      2. Hudong partners with websites of various museums

Hi, folks,

In the recommendation, we said to re-invigorate the community both online and offline. As part of the efforts to execute the recommendation, Chinese Wikipedians in Mainland China had set up a group blog( http://www.bloki.org ) recently. And we planed to host meetups in cities also.

If this helps in any sense, I am going to be in Beijing almost the whole month of May 2010.

This is really tremendous, Mountain! How has the response been so far?

What about a project focused on reviewing the social and other tools that Hudong and Baidu provide (in addition to their outreach efforts mentioned above), and assessing which ones should be tried out on Wikipedia? This would have a major impact on non-chinese Wikis as well.

Sorry for the late reply, Sj. Hudong's activity mainly recorded in the page of Xinzhishe(New Knowledge Groups), including:

• about 30 public speech by invited scientist, professionals or activist;
• about 40 events or gatherings for different purpose
• a special project for teachers to promote the usage of Wiki in education

These activity were taken during the past two years. Also they sponsor many volunteer groups or NGO in China on exchange to promote Hudong by simply using their logo, I know these from my friends.

Hudong's offline activities are impressive, I think we can borrow some experience from them.

Thanks, Mountain. I supplemented the Baidu and Hudong page with this information.