Grants:TPS/WereSpielChequers/Wikimania/2015/Report

This is the Wikimania 2015 report from WereSpielChequers an editor on wikimedia commons, English language Wikipedia and occasionally elsewhere

Outcome

Option 1: Shared Experience: What is one way you shared something from your experience with your community (either locally or globally), after the event?

After talking to various WMF people about Visual Editor I learned that one of the "Won't Fix" bugs that had I had reported in early 2013 had now been resolved, and that V/E now works on old PCs. I've since tested this and after a largely satisfactory result I have emailed a couple of mailing lists I'm on saying that we can now consider V/E as an option for outreach editathons, this was reported in the Signpost.

I attended the August 2015 London meetup and was able to answer various questions as to how Mexico had gone and what we had heard of next year. Most of the people present had at least attended London 2014 so knew something about wikimanias and there was a lot of interest in how Mexico had gone.

Option 2: Learning Pattern: What is one useful learning pattern you can share with the Wikimedia movement?

If the editors in your city edit in multiple languages then don't be afraid to put up watchlist notices in multiple languages to promote your events. I have shown Emna from the Tunisian chapter how to promote Tunisian events to editors in Tunisia on the English Wikipedia by posting a request a little like this

I learned from Benjamin Mako Hill that he'd studied Wikia Wikis that had stopped IP editors from editing and we now have proof of the longstanding theory that doing so stunts community growth.

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

I met a fellow admin on the English wikipedia who I had heard of but not met on or offline, we got talking about potential candidates for adminship and an RFA will probably be forthcoming. It would be premature and unfair to link to the candidacy, but as the probable candidate wasn't at Wikimania this struck me as a good example of a wider effect.

I attended the Community Liaisons Round Table and lobbied for some sort of community involvement in choosing/prioritising IT developments for Mediawiki. Now drafted at Grants:IdeaLab/Community prioritised IT developments

I discussed with a couple of researchers the possibility of appointing a batch of new autopatrollers and testing different messages to see what the effect of that would be on editor retention.

Connections

I met lots of people at wikimania, some I'd encountered before, or have obvious connections with because we run across each other online, others like Exec8 are from very different parts of the Wikipedia movement and it was good to compare notes but it may be a while before I think of something where we can work together.

I had a couple of discussions with developers about the future of search and particularly moving from text based search to also being to able to search for "things that look like this" and have since sent Dan Garry a facebook message about an academic contact I made who has worked in this field.

I had a long chat with a developer about edit conflicts, we didn't agree on their importance or frequency, but at least I learned something of the developers mindset about them. At present we don't even know whether they are a major or minor cause of newbies being driven from the project.

Normally at Wikimania I try to spend time with people I'm not going to meet in London, but at this Wikimania I had a useful catch up with Chris Keating.

I spoke to Beat Estermann about his Open GLAM survey (I attended his presentation and he was very generous with his time afterwards)

Andrew Lih signed my copy of his book "The Wikipedia Revolution" and I took part in an abortive recording of Wikipedia Weekly till we were moved on by a security guard.

Anything else

I uploaded a few pictures here My favourites include:

A Museum forecourt
An Aztec bird
Chinese ivory
I climbed this