Grants:TPS/عباد ديرانية/Wikimania/2018/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2018!

Participant

عباد ديرانية

ar.wikipedia.org

Outcome

Option 3: New Creation: What was one useful outcome that was created at the event for the Wikimedia movement?

It's hard to be sure all of this would be really 'created' at this point, since there has not been much time after conference to implement it. I'll only include, however, projects that are at least in a stage of serious planning. For me, the most promising (because of past expertise) project I have planned during Wikimania was the second version of Bridges Across Cultures, a cultural exchange-based editing contest where I'll be a lead organizer for the second year in a row. The competition has already been executed last year and will be coming back again, but we have worked during Wikimania on several improvements to its structure, article lists and scoring system.

One more similar outcome is the planned organisation of Wiki Loves Monuments 2018 in the region of the Levant. This has been a bit of a late call, but one important result of Wikimania was bringing up the idea of organizing the contest in the four countries of the Levant as a single competition, hence giving members of the Wikimedia Levant user group a shared collaboration while also saving resources. More projects being discussed now include a proposed GLAM partnership (still not implemented) at Abd Al-Hamid Shuman public library in Amman, Jordan, which we're trying to get in touch with at the moment. Another potential future project for Wikimedia Levant would be something I was very deeply inspired with while at Wikimania in Cape Town: Documenting rural areas by WikiTakes activities. I'm currently asking volunteers to help me out to organize a very similar replica in Jordan, my native country, hoping it'll come real soon.

One last creation, although it belong more to shared experienced (but I was asked to choose only one category of outcomes) is part of a habit that I've started after my first Wikimania in Hong Kong: that is, creating a shared experience page on my native Wikipedia, in Arabic, to document my experience as well as other Arabic-speaking participants' at Wikimania. This kind of documentation is very unique because it's almost the only one that the Arabic community will have access to, since our users very rarely stray over English pages on Meta.

Connections

This was one of my most successful Wikimanias in terms of connections: I have managed to get to meet dozens of new people and many ones whom I knew from past years, some of them just for friendly purposes and others to work together. Meeting with Osmar (Argentina) and Oscar (Venezuela) was particularly important to coordinate our work this year for Bridges Across Cultures. Attending the Wikimedians in Residence meetup and chatting with Alex was also very useful for the GLAM partnership we're working on. Most importantly, WikiArabia meeting (although it doesn't exactly involve 'new' connections) was perhaps the most crucial thing I have done during Wikimania, as it'll hopefully be a start for a Board of Arabic-speaking user groups that'll launch so many future collaborations and projects.

Anything else

• 
  Our amazing pre-conference WikiPenguins trip, coordinated by me, where 18 Wikimedians got to meet face-to-face with real penguins!
• 
  The typical start at Learning Days (with some refreshments).
• 
  Arabic Wikimedians meetup, filled with warm feelings.
• 
  Friends are also connections!