Grants:TPS/BlaueBlüte/Wikimania/2017/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2017!

Participant

edit
 
User:BlaueBlüte (right) walking to the Culture Crawl at Montreal’s McGill University on the first day of WikiConference North America 2017

User:BlaueBlüte

“home wikis”:

Outcome

edit

Learning Pattern (Option 2): What is one useful learning pattern you can share with the Wikimedia movement?

Learning patterns/Imagery for event promotion

Other

Connections

edit

various and sundry—following up individually and personally

Anything else

edit
English-only signage at Wikimania 2017

This was my first Wikimania. While announced as a bilingual (English and French) conference, the whole event struck me as exceedingly anglophone.

It would seem to me that this could cause/exacerbate the following issues:

  • Obfuscation of the scope of the whole movement
  • Lack of representation of large parts of the movement
  • Undue implicit focus on English-language projects
  • Impediment to reporting/involvement of local communities—How do participants take discussions back into their communities if those don’t converse in (one of) the conference language(s)?

Possible redresses:

  • Require/encourage that contributions be bilingual: for example, in the presenter’s first/home-community language and (one of) the conference language(s)
    This might help
    • make contributions more accessible to presenters’ home communities as well (not just the conference)
    • structure discussion of contributions in a way more helpful to the presenter’s home community, facilitating the conveyance of feedback from the conference to the presenter’s community,
    • convey the cultural context from with the contribution stems
    • demonstrate the scope of the movement
  • Work with the community local to the conference venue to make signage/website/printed matter/… multilingual
    This might help
    • the local community to feel more included
    • impress upon attendees the decidedly multilingual/pluricultural/global scope of the movement

(For the sake of fairness I should of course acknowledge that ironically, this very report is in English only as well.)