Punjabi Wikimedians/Reports/Wikimania 2018
The page aims to document learnings of all the participants from Punjabi community who attended Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town, South Africa.
Wikimania 2018 was an inspiring experience and I attended several sessions and met many Wikimedians with whom our community will be collaborating in the near future. Some of the highlights of the sessions that I admired the most are:
- Coolest African Projects - Be inspired
In this session, we were showcased the stunning projects African community has been working on since the past few years for promoting Gender and culture content that is scarcely represented in Wikipedia projects and how they work with national and global institutions to achieve their goals. (video)
- Ubuntu for who? Equity by Free Knowledge?
This was very informative session that I felt was one of the best sessions resonating with the theme of Wikimania 2018 - “Bridging knowledge gaps—the ubuntu way forward”. The origin of it is from the southern African philosophy, to focus on Wikimedia’s gaps in content and contributors and what we can do to take this initiative further with our contribution. Open Education, Open Science and Free Knowledge are often presented uncritically as representing notions of ubuntu: democratization and equity. The aim was to identify and deconstruct existing power structures and popular narratives and different ways of fighting for equity and against marginalization in education and knowledge sharing with Open and digital as tools and how to transfer these concepts and ideas to the practice of free knowledge sharing in projects such as Wikipedia.
- Keynote session by Katherine Maher who engaged discussions with the leaders of various African communities about their challenges and how they overcame them!
- Other Important Events
Apart from that, I presented a lightening talk on Bridging the gender gap on Punjabi Wikipedia and gave a session with Jack Rabbah about Working towards Growing Local Language Content on Wikipedia (GLOW), in which I talked about how Project Tiger came to be and what were the learning experiences as an organizer from the winning community. I was also on the panel of Introducing Wikipedia to New Readers session, where I shared my experiences of the project of awareness campaign of Punjabi Wikipedia and pre-launched the "Punjabi Wikipedia Tales - A trip to Lahore" animation movie.