Grants:TPS/Mailer diablo/Wikimania/2014/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2014!

Participant

I am Mailer Diablo, and I am mainly based at English Wikipedia. I am also an OTRS admin.

Outcome

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

Add a link to something new that was created as a result of your participation in this event (for example, you might link to a new tool that you and your co-participants worked on at the Hackathon, or to pages created in a workshop you participated in).

I participated in two important discussions/meetups during Wikimania 2014 that resulted in new developments that I find exciting and noteworthy to detail here:

1. https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Pre-Conference:_OTRS_Meetup

   The OTRS meet up brought together all the regular OTRS agents in a roundtable discussion to tackle issues, consider proposals and gain insight on how to make day-to-day experience, training and outcomes of Wikimedia's OTRS system better. Feedback has been gathered that would be brought over to the upcoming OTRS admins meeting, including training material, possible newsletter, best practices and other new creations and initiatives that could streamline processes for OTRS agents. I was also impressed by the LCA tools presentation, which I think some of the methodology could possibly be implemented into OTRS.

2. https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Roundtable:_Admin_tools_development

   Key ideas for implementation are written on an Etherpad during the roundtable discussion, and are now recorded here: https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Roundtable:_Admin_tools_development/Notes

   With this discussion, the WMF staff said they would take up these improvements as well as increasing the priority of some existing bugzillas. Many of these suggested features are intended to save time for functionaries, admins and stewards, thereby increasing productivity. A new mailing list admintools has also been created to facilitate future discussion which I have signed up.

Connections

I was expecting a diverse demographic of Wikimedians at the events, but I was surprised by the scale of it. I quickly realized that editors from English Wikipedia, where I am largely based at, is massively outnumbered by the number of participants from other projects. I got to understand how they collaborate on their home projects as well as their scale and scope, which would help me in my understanding of their probable requirements over at OTRS.

As the first Wikimania, I managed to meet many WMF staff first hand (including Jimbo!), functionaries (e.g. ex-arbs) that I have worked with over the years, as well as local WMF chapters in Asia that particularly impressed me with their level of organization.

Anything else

I have taken a lot of photos in London, and over time I will be uploading them to Wikimedia Commons.