Grants:TPS/BlaueBlüte/Wikimania/2017/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2017!

Participant

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

“home wikis”:

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

Other

various and sundry—following up individually and personally

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.)