Grants:TPS/Rodelar/Wikimania/2017/Report
Welcome back from Wikimania 2017!
Participant
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My second Wikimania was quite different from the first one. From the mountains to the city, from a small village in the Alps to one of the great cities of Canada. However, the results and collaborative spirit of the conference were equally positive and inspiring. I was in Montreal from the 9th to the 13th of August, so I attended the preconference days and the conference.
The first of the preconference days I attended the Scan-a-thon and Canadian Women Edit-a-thon at BAnQ-Vieux, hosted by Wikiconference North America in collaboration with Women in Red, where I translated into Spanish the article on the Canadian singer Amanda Alarie. The second day I attended the First Nations Edit-a-thon; it included a roundtable discussion and editing session, where I translated into Spanish the article on the Atikamekw. After that, we enjoyed a guided tour through the BAnQ-Vieux.
During the conference I attended several sessions beside various keynotes, for example: on Friday the Lightning talks session; on Saturday two amazing ones, Wikipedia will soon speak to you, showing a demo of Wikispeech, and Lingua Libre: Massive Open Audio Recording, showing how it works; finally, on Sunday, The Coolest Projects of Wikimedia Chapters, where the one from Wikimedia Spain finished in second position!, and Translating Wikipedia as an educational tool. Also I attended several meetups, like Wiki Loves (on Friday), where we could comment some of the problems that we find when organizing the initiatives Wiki Loves in our countries, and Iberocoop (on Saturday).
Wikimedia Spain was one of the chapters with a booth at the Community Village. I spent a lot of time in it, during the conference and together with other colleagues from WMES, offering information to the people who came to it; for example, Jimmy Wales, with whom we shared a few minutes and took several photos.
Connections
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During the 5 days of conference, I had the opportunity of talking and sharing good moments with a lot of people. In the context of Iberocoop I was with Esteban Zárate and Andrea Kleiman (from Argentina but also members of WMES) and Iván Quintero, from Colombia. I talked with several people from WMF Staff: María Cruz; Melody Kramer, who offered us support in any communication issue; Edward Galvez; Enrique Dans, Spanish we met for the first time; and Juliet Barbara, to whom I asked for help in putting our new communication director -Virginia Díez- in touch with the WMF communication team, for example in relation to the materials of the Wikimedia brand.
In 2014 we organized our first online challenge, Monuments of Spain Challenge. The initiative was a success but there were some problems in sending the prizes; three years later we have solved those problems and we are proceeding to distribute those prizes. Several of them were for three wikipedians who attended Wikimania in Montreal, so we took the occasion to give the prizes to them.
I was talking to several people I knew from previous events: for example Daria Cybulska, from WMUK, with whom I talked about the beginnings of WMES, or Armine Aghayan from WMAM, with whom I talked about a new joint activity of both chapters. The online challenge of last year was a success and we want to repeat the experience next year, so we agreed to talk about the organization. This will include proposing a prize similar to what they have been offering in their latest experiences with other chapters, for example an exchange trip to Armenia.
I met new people, such as Mikheil Chabukashvili from Georgia; Jmvkrecords, a Spanish user whom I knew online but I did not have the pleasure to meet face-to-face so I was very happy; Rich Farmbrough, from UK; Linda Fletcher, from Wikimedia NY; and Jan Dittrich, from WMDE, who went to our booth; he is Designer/Researcher for Wikidata and we were talking with him about the problems we find working with Wikidata, and some suggestions for usability improvement.
- Projects
I had a meeting with Winifred Olliff and we talked, for example, about the midreport of our Simple APG. As well, me and Saskia Ehlers (WMDE) asked her about possibilities of funding for the celebration of the 2019 World Pride in New York. Saskia and I collaborated this year on the organization of a four-day event, during World Pride Madrid, which was a success, and we talked about repeating experience within two years. According to the post-conference talks, there is a favorable opinion, together with Wikimedia NY, to hold this event again.
At the last Wikimedia Conference, in Berlin, my roomate was Douglas Scott from Wikimedia South Africa. There an idea came up, due to the celebration of the next Wikimania in Cape Town: organize an activity together, and we talked about an online challenge on national parks. In Montreal we had an opportunity to speak again and despite the tight schedule of both chapters, we already have a page created and we will try to carry it out in the coming months.
I also shared a moment with Lorenzo Losa from WMIT, talking about the future organization of a meeting of Wikimedia groups from Western Europe in Porto, and about an initiative that was born last year after speaking with WMIT: an writing activity about roman thermae, that finally will be held this autumn.
Anything else
editThese are some of the images I took on Wikimania. I also shared the event through Twitter through the hashtags #Wikimania2017 and #Wikimania.
