Grants:TPS/Dsvyas/Wikimania/2015/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2015!

Participant

User:Dsvyas

Gu.wp; Gu.ws

Outcome

This year's Wikimania was a great success, kudos to Mexico team who made it happen. It is true that everyone is awaiting for videos and some are complaining/debuting about not having all the sessions video recorded, but when I look back at what the volunteers and organising committee made possible is much greater than what we are missing. The sessions were very immaculately arranged and having all the sessions running at the same venue was very helpful, unlike Hong Kong where many parallel sessions were running in different buildings. I had done it at least a couple of times when I had interest in 2 sessions which were at the same time, I had a liberty to run between the two, thanks for them being on the same floor or on a floor above/below the other. I cannot forget the moment when we Indic wikimedians were looking for room to hold our Indic meetup as we had planned it already but had no room booked for ourselves. It was Elly and the team who had come to our rescue and at the last moment, we had a room made available to us. There are several other experiences which proved how efficient the organisers were, e.g. when a speaker missed his own session, which was immediately scheduled for a little later time. It was virtue as I could attend that talk.

Personally the conference gave me a chance to meet so many wikimedians and discuss with them about my language wikis. It was a great opportunity to meet other Indic wikimedians and to be present in the Indic meetup, which later turned out to be SAARC wiki (informally names after the SAARC organisation to represent the Indian subcontinental chapters/groups, e.g. Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, etc) meetup. This was the meetup where we discussed and decided to go for a second WikiConference India. I have seen the same point being raised by many other wikimedians that smaller and local conferences should be more preferred over larger conferences like Wikimania.

Connections

I even attended Hackathon, which was very helpful to me. I run my bot on Gujarati Wikipedia and Wikisource, hackathon was of a great help to discuss more about the bots and other scripts. I was lucky enough to meet User:Hoo and Manuel during the wikimania, with both of whom I could discuss the bug that I have filed for Hindu (Gujarati) Calendar parser functions. I could get some lead in developing this and hope to have the functionality very soon, hackathon helped me to learn little template making, which I could use to make temporary lookup template to overcome the lack of functionality. I am sure that my attending wikimania will give my Gujarati community some improvement. If the Hindu calendar is developed in Gujarati, that will be a huge achievement for the community and all the credit for it will certainly be to Wikimania 2015.