Wiki loves Universities

The Wiki loves Universities project has several targets:

First, it is a question of distribution of free knowledge in and from Switzerland. Numerous of scientific collections realized by eminent swiss biologists are not preserved and promote as they deserve. It falls into the scope of our association to help in resolvng this issues.

In term of content, these collections represent uniques sources of free illustration for hundreds of wikipedia articles and Wikispecies entry.

The wiki loves Universities will be composed of different digitalization project, but also partnerships for scientific congress ogranisation of scientific event for general audience.

These projects will be good occasions for building bridge with academic world. A project in preparation will concern the digitalization of an herbarium with a part of initiation to Wikipedia, Commons and Wikispecies to the scientist and the student of the university.

Sponsoring of the SOL2012 congress

Wikimedia CH, is now an official partner of the Congress SOL2012, the Solanaceae Conference (http://www.sol2012.ch/ ).

This is the annual conference bringing together the leading scientists in the field of Solanaceae, a large family of plants

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanaceae )

At first sight, this may be a surprising partnership for a Wikimedia-related entity, but our goal was to collaborate with a major scientific congress.

Solanaceae include among others potatoes, tobacco, tomatoes, eggplants and peppers, and it is therefore a major family in terms of nutrition and food industry, and the researchers present at the congress come from all over the world and are generally influential people in the academic world.

The participation of Wikimedia CH will take the form of the development of a USB key distributed to all attendees, containing the conference abstract book, as well as the ZIM offline reader Kiwix, and the ZIM files of a selection of articles related to the subject of the conference, in English, French and German.

Wikimedia CH is willing to support any initiative on Wikipedias for the improvement of key articles on in English, French and German (if possible, the quality is already so high!), for example WMCH could provide prizes for winners of editing contest, or access to research article not in open access or also help for the acquisition of book of reference in the scope of the articles. Do not hesitate to contact me if you have other ideas and need help to implement them.

In return for our support, the abstracts should be published on line or in an open access journal, so that Wikipedians can use them as references in Wikipedia articles. We will also hold an information booth during the convention to reach the participants and participate in an official workshop about dissemination of scientific information from labs to public

People willing to join the "Wikimedia team" during the congress are encouraged to contact me, in the language they prefer! :-)