Grants:TPS/Urjanhai/Wikimania/2014/Report

Participant

• Username: Urjanhai

• Home wiki: fi.wikipedia.org

Outcome

• a blog post or a link to some other way you shared back with others who could not attend the same event:

My decision was to report about the event to the user community of Finnish language Wikipedia using the community portal for news concerning Wikipedia: https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Kahvihuone_(uutiset).

First I created there an entry with the basic information and the essential links on Wikimania 2014 including links to the official pages of conference and blog entries on the conference written by the Finnish participants: Wikipedia:Kahvihuone (uutiset#Wikimanian 2014 satoa 1: Konferenssin sivut ja suomalaisten some-postaukset. This link link list has then been expanded also by others. In the conference, there were participants from Finland who were there as representatives of Wikimedia Finland as well as people from Finland who were there as representatives of some other organisatiion or by their own initiave. Some of these paricipants from Finland I also happened to meet in the event, some blog posts were discovered and added only afterwards.

Secondly I decided to post in the same portal my own insights from the conference as several comprehensive entries to the same community portal to give an overview of the event to Finnish language Wikipedia community. My priority here was especially the Finnish language Wikimedia editor community, because the other participants from Finland would write blog posts that would be aimed also to the wider public in general. I found this important, because all the members of Finnish language editor comminity necessarily do not follow other social media like Facebook or blogs (as a private person,I myself created a Facebook account only quite recently, due to some work projects, and noticed soon the potential usefulness of it, but before that I had been editing the Finnish language Wikipedia for several years). (I speak here about the Finnis language wikipedia editor community, but actually it could as well be the wikimedia editor community of Finland as well, because the Wikimedia projects' editor comunity includes the swedish and saami speaking wikimedians as well, some of whom I have met either personally or virtually, and of course also the expatriates from other countries in Finland who write in other language wikipedias, whose work I also have learned to appreciate.)

My first post in the comunity portal was here: Wikipedia:Kahvihuone (uutiset#Wikimanian 2014 satoa 2: Ensimmäiset poiminnat kahvihuoneeseen. In that I gave my first impressions soon after the confrence and picked out some points from the final speech of Jimmy Wales and some notes about the community support projects of the bigger Wikimedia chapters and the bigger Wikipedias. There would have been also more, I could have written about this. And finally, I gave a short overview what Wikimania was all about, and what were the several "threads" of the conference, hoping to be back soon.

Then, however, the time ran fast, and I did not have time enough to write the following post until today. The posting Wikipedia:Kahvihuone (uutiset)#Wikimanian 2014 satoa 3: Poimintoja ensimmäiseltä konferenssipäivältä about the contents of the first conference day. This was meant to be the first part of my real onribution to fulfill my reporting duty to my home wiki community at least for some parts by the timeline that was given. After this I will probaly tell something also about the last two days of the conference in the same place.

Besides of the posting in community portal I also have made occasional references to some Wikimania 2014 representations as parts of some other editing discussions. Of some of these topics I hope I will still be able to write also longer postings in the community portal or somwhere else.

(If you wished the grantees to submit only one link, I could of course gather the three links to subpage of my user page and link that subpage. But this is at least the direct content that I shared with my home Wiki community.)

Connections

Conferences are great places to make new connections, but because I was by my background mostly a wikipedian who had edited only one small language wikipedia and only been active in the finnish Wikimedia chapter for less than one year, I really did not know many people before, and also came to know quite few, allthogh I talked with quite many.

One meeting was about the Wiki loves earth project, that I had found very interesting and very important already long before the conference, and I gave my contact information to the organisers of the meeting. Already before Wikimania 2014 I had been discussing about the possible launching of the project also in the Finnish Wikimedia community, and some users of the Finnish language Wikipedia had been, like myself, in principle interested in it, but, however, no one, including myself, seemed to have time to do anything for it, however a good idea and worth all support it would be.

- For example, no one had had and still has not had time to to find out whether or not the natural monuments, conservation areas etc. in Finland have any official number codes, that then could be used in the projects (probably they have, at least this my guess). - Something that, however, could be found out easily, because at least some geographic information of the natural reserves of Finland and other such data are readily available as open data at the internet, being opened recently (a year or two ago or something like that) by the Finnish environmental administration, and the data can be downloaded from the data service of the Finnish environmental administration for free.

- For me, as a GIS specialist who has worked much also with environmental data, finding out this from the data and asking more from those who know bettter would be easy and also interesting, but having left for London from the middle of another project that has nothing to do with the Wikimedia movement and also returning back in the middle of it, I still have had no time to do anything for this. - But however, and in addition, I do have in mind a couple both governmental and non governmental organisations that potentially could be interested in the idea somehow.

- And actually, only now I am realising, how crucial either the professional staff and different kinds of community support mechanisms are for launhing wikimedia projects; but just now I do not myself have time to even write any aplication anywhere (and the hired staff of wikimedia Finland also seems to have a vast variety of previously booked projects to run and realise already); but what I could do would be to talk to some people that perhaps could be interested and on the other hand to look trough (and if needed to ask someone) about the IDs of nature reserve etc. data that is available. - But as I am not a staff member of any organisation that could be involved, but only a volunteer with limited time resources, I cannot promise anything at least just now. - And this, of course, is a general problem too, when one chapter in one land tries to promote one project, and is busy with it, and anorher chapter in an other land tries to promote a differnt project and is busy with it, and so on. - But at least this is a project that I find important and interesting and potentially also a great fun for many users also in Finnish language wikipedia, if only someone would have the capasity to launch it.

Anything else

I did not take much photos, because I am not an experienced photographer especially indoors. Of those photos that I took, I however noticed that I could well have taken more. Those that I took probably, however, will not be of much interest and I will not publish them here, because there for sure are great amounts of general overview photos from the conference already in the commons. A learning pattern here could be, that general overview photos of a conference can be well taken even by an unskilled photographer whenever there happens to be enough natural light, and of spesific conference events like sessions and representations this is possible with the same condition. And if for example some representation happens to be interesting and there happens to be enough natural light, it will be easy to take a nice photo that is useful if you, for example, would like to write something about the spesific presentation and would need an illustration to your text. But of course, if you are not a skilled photographer, it will perhaps be nicer and more polite towards everybody to leave the photographing fore those who are more skilled.