● First, search to find if local editors or contributors have hosted meetups via the Meetup listing page.[1] Organizers or participants of meetups can often also host events with local partners.
● Reach out through social media channels and/or other networks asking for someone who has Wikimedia experience. Though having someone locally available is often a good start, you may not find someone local who is also interested in supporting outreach or programmatic activities -- increasingly library communities have at least one or two library professionals in their own network, who have run Wikipedia editathons or Wikipedia education assignments. Sometimes best support will come from aligned professionals.
● Reaching out to the closest affiliate in your language context and ask them to help you find a more local Wikimedian. They will likely use several tactics for searching out community members:
○ Local Wikimedia chapters often have a directory of trained or experienced volunteers who are capable of effectively training new editors -- even in nearby regions outside their scope.
○ The part of the Wikimedia community that does outreach is relatively well connected, as a social network, so they may know someone in your region through an unconventional method.
○ Using categories and user templates to find active users who either self identify as being from a particular region, or participate in editing topics relevant to your context.[2]
○ If you are organizing an event or gathering, you can solicit a Geonotice, which places a banner on the Watchlist of people who sign in within your geographic area without exposing their location to the message sender.[3]
In most parts of the world, these requests will find someone who can connect you to contributors in your local context. If you don’t find these networks responsive, there are an increasing number of Facebook groups and mailing lists that can connect you with the larger network working at the intersection of cultural heritage (GLAM - Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) and the
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- ↑ Find meetup listings for English-focused projects at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup
- ↑ Though this information is very public, most of it is going to be out of date, since it has accrued over the last 16 years of the community. To find Wikimedians who identify in your geography, check out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedians_by_location . To find Wikimedians active in a geographically focused editing Project, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Geographical_WikiProjects . Also, you may be able to find editors by looking at the history of articles relevant to your local context.
- ↑ The Instructions for Geonotices can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Geonotice
