Grants:TPS/Protonk/Wikimania/2014/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2014!

Participant

Protonk

English Wikipedia

Outcome

I don't want to condense this section into a single outcome. I had several productive encounters with members of the Wikipedia Education community as well as members of the GLAM community. The location of the conference itself was fortuitous in that I was able to talk to a friend of mine who works at the library of the House of Commons on building out access to their materials in the same way that Dominic McDevitt-Parks did for the national archives. I was also able to talk with editors and GLAM community members about expanding editathons in the northeast US beyond the immediate Boston area (e.g. to Providence and New Haven) as well as picking out strategies and themes which might make those editathons better attended than they would otherwise be. Often these interactions can happen over skype or IRC or on wiki, but the beauty of a conference like Wikimania is the ephemeral contact with new people or old friends whom I might not have considered contacting out of the blue. If instead they're standing outside waiting for a session to start it's much easier to start a conversation which brings in new ideas and inputs to the discussion.

If I were pressed to produce a blog post, I'd point to this (warning, NSFW language) on Oliver Keyes's talk regarding mobile edits and systemic bias. I was glad that I could help oliver work on the talk (see here for a later version w/ acknowledgments), which was one helpful outcome of my participation at the hackathon. While I didn't give a talk, it's good to be able to help someone else deliver a better presentation, something which is difficult to do without that face to face contact. At the hackathon I also discovered Yuvi Panda's Quarry, a literate query reporting tool which I plan to contribute to just as soon as I learn enough Python to be dangerous to myself and others. :)

Connections

I connected with a number of people, some of whom I knew would be at Wikimania and others who I had either never met before or didn't know would come. Namely, I started a project with Ocassi (on en:wp) after discussing gamified microcontributions on wikipedia with him and millosh (a member of the serbian wikimedians chapter), both of whom I had met briefly at other wikipedia events. I was also lucky enough to talk with Raph Koster before his talk on Wikipedia as a game, which both enriched my understanding of his talk and propelled my own interest in creating a mechanism to allow new or marginally attached editors to have some of the fun we normally reserve for editors with AWB or Huggle on the english wikipedia. The proposal for gamified microcontributions is on meta and I plan to finish the proposal for the app and service before the end of the month.