Grants:TPS/Papuass/Wikimania/2016/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2016!

Participant

Papuass

Latvian Wikipedia and sister projects, Wikidata, Wikimedians of Latvia User Group

Gallery

• 
  Meeting new and old acquintances in airport
• 
  EU Advocacy session on 22 June
• 
  Learning days on 22 June
• 
  Checking the program for a day on 23 June
• 
  School of Rock(ing) EU Copyright
• 
  CEE meetup on 24 June
• 
  100wikidays meetup on 24 June
• 
  Participating in Wikidojo session on 25 June
• 
  Hiking with Estonian volunteers on 24 June

Attended sessions

Generally I tried to make most of provided sessions. In most cases there was an interesting session available from one of the parallel tracks. In other cases I tried to catch up with discussions in my own community.

Pre-conference 22 June 2016

I attended Hackathon opening session and later joined some of learning related sessions about learning Lua programming and SPARQL queries. This also provided opportunity to ask some questions directly to Wikidata team.

Pre-conference Thursday 23 June 2016

I started day by attending WMCON Follow-Up Day session about EU Advocacy, which was de-briefing of recent activities. I spent the other half of day at School of Rock(ing) EU Copyright workshop where we used hands-on approach with real life scenarios tackling Freedom of Panorama (mostly) issues in various European countries. A small portion of time was spent to generate ideas on how to get Freedom of panorama on agenda in Latvia.

Friday 24 June 2016

After opening session and following introductory sessions I went to technical sessions "Detecting Copyright Concerns in Near Real Time" by James Heilman, followed by "Lessons learned building machine learning models for Wikidata" by Amir Sarabadani which were both interesting sessions for me as a technically involved volunteer, but most likely out relatively small language project would not gain much by putting effort in to set them up for our needs.

One of best sessions in Wikimania is a traditional one: The coolest projects of Wikimedia Chapters, it has both entertainment value and it inspires you to try out new things. After that I stayed for The Archives Challenge summary presentation and "How to train future Wikimedians in Residence" which provided practical tips even if these are not the things we are currently working on in our user group.

After the main program there was a Central and Eastern European Meetup, during which we discussed a number of topics, like Wikimedia CEE Spring 2016 and 2017 contest, next Wikimedia CEE Meeting in Armenia, Wiki Loves Earth/Monuments 2016 participation and other issues concerning cooperation of region.

At the end of the day I attended #100wikidays gathering organized by Spiritia.

Saturday 25 June 2016

Most important sessions of day were "Designing the future I: A roadmap for Wikidata" discussion and two gender gap related presentations, especially by "Content Gender Gap, an International Movement" by Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, which was quite inspiring. In the afternoon I attended another Wikidata related presentaion "Wikidata in Wikipedia" by Michael Peel which I will try to transfer to concrete outcome, by bringing more Wikidata integration to our infoboxes. After the break were multiple technical presentations about bringing more interactive visual content to Wikipedia.

In the evening I attended Wikidojo session, participating and taking pictures.

Sunday 26 June 2016

After ED Q&A session I rushed to "Understanding Editor Behavior on Wikipedia" by Jeph Alapat, which seemed to be interesting take on statistics about users. I am interested in comparing our community with similar size communities. After that it was useful to hear debrief from AffCom as our user group plans to become a chapter in near future. Later on the day were two important topics for me: Wiki Loves Monuments future (I am a local organizer) and one more session on Wikidata from development team.

Then it was time to close the conference and participate in final social activities.

Outcome

After returning from Wikimania I organized a meetup for local Wikipedians. Part of the meeting was dedicated to reporting about experiences and ideas gained in Wikimania and trying to engage people to attend future Wikimanias or regional conferences. 10 people attended it (a new high for the community). During the meeting notes were taken and later posted online.

Connections

Having shared accommodation with two Estonian (neighbouring country) wikimedians, I built stronger relationship with them. Ivo Kruusamägi shared his own projects like WikiComment while I demonstrated my tool I use to extract information from webpages in structured way. During hackathlon learning session I made a demo integrating ArticlePlaceholder extension with existing module, demo can be seen in this article.

I also talked with Jeph paul and his graphs, including generating them for Baltic Wikipedias which are very comparable in size and outer factors.

Anything else

I took a lot of photos during Wikimania Wikidojo session, documenting all active participants. I took photos atother events, but I have not yed uploaded them to commons.

During many sessions I took shared notes in linked Etherpads. As I found out writing the report, lots of sessions have video recordings added to their pages. I will make my duty to recommend them to my community.