Wikimedia France/Micro-financement/Wikimania 2019/Demandes/Csisc/Rapport

Context

This first participation to Wikimania 2019 was a continuation to the ongoing works about promoting language support, GLAM support and reference support to the WikiProjects of Wikimedia user groups in French-speaking countries and particularly in African countries including Tunisia. It also served for the introduction of WikiResearch and Wikitech in Tunisia with the special contribution of the University of Sfax. My output and discussions shown during Wikimania 2019 were in part a result of my previous participations to regional conferences of Wikimedia Foundation: WikiArabia 2015, WikiConvention francophone 2016, Wikimedia TN meeting 2017 and WikiIndaba conference 2018.

Sessions

• Presented Wikimania 2019 sessions:
  • Wikidata and Health: Current situation and perspectives (Video, Slides)
  • Library outreach for Wikimedia user groups (Video, Notes, Slides)
  • Wikimedia and Arabic Sociolinguistics (Video, Notes, Slides)
• Visit of Karolinska Institutet:
  • Meeting with Dr. Nadia Davoody: Presenting Medical Wikidata project and discussing the establishment of a research collaboration between Karolinska Institutet and University of Sfax about the amelioration of the quality of Medical Wikidata.
• Discussions with Wikimedians:
  • LZia (WMF), Asaf (WMF), Andra Waagmeester, Saintfevrier, Egon Willighagen (online), Fnielsen, Federico Leva (WMIT), OsamaK, Avicenno, Sami Mlouhi, Emnamizouni, Zeinebtakouti, Yamen, Bobbyshabangu, WJifar (WMF), DNdubane (WMF), Anass Sedrati, Reda Kerbouche, JRabah (WMF), RMaung (WMF), Abderrahman Aït Ali, Rémy Gerbet WMFr, Lionel Scheepmans, Tim-moody, Marcmiquel, Flixtey, Merrilee, Sic19, Epìdosis, Lydia Pintscher (WMDE), ValerieDcosta
  • Other active wikimedians from Sweden, Denmark, France, Italy, United States, Spain, Canada, Germany, Estonia and other countries
• Attended Wikimania 2019 sessions:
  • Free Knowledge and the Global Goals Spotlight Session
  • Research Meetup
  • African Wikimedians Meetup
  • Wikidata pink pony session
  • Opem Data to tackle corruption in the Nordic-Baltic Region
  • Using Internet-in-a-Box for Education
  • EduWiki and Medicine
  • Wikidata in your language (The room was full, I attended from the door)
  • Research lightning talks
  • WISCom-CE Meeting
  • Libraries lightning talks
  • Libraries idea pitches
  • Libraries idea discussions
  • Arab Wikimedians Meetup
  • Languages lightning talk
  • Closing Ceremony

Outcomes

GLAM, Libraries, Languages and Research

• The idea of assigning a member from each continent in WMF Community Engagement team is an excellent idea. This will be useful for the African community to adapt WMF Programs to their needs and solve deficiencies related to the growth of Wikimedia movement in Africa.
• Using private Google Drive repositories to provide offline reference support to the WikiProjects of a user group is a flexible and efficient idea.
• Adding labels and descriptions to Wikidata entities and Adding Wikidata's Lexicographical Data in minority languages is a better idea than creating Wikipedias or other wikis in these languages particularly when a language normalization is missing for them.
• Establishing research collaborations between Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia user groups and chapters and universities through initiatives such as Wikimedia Deutschland/Open Science Fellows Program will be useful to provide methods to automatically enhance the quality and visibility of WMF wikis.
• Thematic user groups such as WikiClassics User Group should be supported as they include specialists and research scholars and can collaborate with official institutions to increase the coverage of their topic of interest.
• Convincing national institutions to convert their open access structured data like statistics into CC0 Licence should be a priority to user groups so that these data can be integrated into Wikidata. Convincing scientists to put their research preprints in repositories will be an excellent way to ameliorate reference support to scientific statements on Wikidata.
• Images of Stockholm University, Stockholm Stadtbibliothek, Karolinska Institutet, Nordic Museum, Gamla Stan, Nobel Museum, Stockholm City Hall as well as several buildings and airports were added to Wikimedia Commons.
• Four people joined Medical Wikidata project.

Medical Wikidata

• Using citation indexes particularly Medline to verify and add reference support to Wikidata statements is possible and easy.
• Building EntitySchemas for Medical classes in ShEx language is important to identify wrong biomedical Wikidata statements and eliminate them.
• Using MeSH keywords of the PubMed entries to identify missing biomedical Wikidata statements is possible. However, it is technically challenging.
• There is a need to add support of missing types of medical items and statements. The most important missing medical items are the stages of medical diseases. We manage to begin to work on adding support of stages of medical diseases to Wikidata by 2020.

Donations from Wikimedia Foundation

• A laptop
• Six books for the University of Sfax

Wikimedian of The Year

• Deserved Honours for Ms. Emna Mizouni. She helped the establishment of Wikimedia TN User Group. In fact, before 2014, we were active on Wikimedia wikis. However, we lacked required skills to grow Wikimedia Movement in Tunisia. Ms. Emna allowed us to build strong relationships with the civil society in Tunisia and to acquire new skills in communication, capacity building and management. This allowed our user group to grow over years and to organize WikiArabia in 2015 and WikiIndaba in 2018.
• Thanks to her involvement in Carthagina associations and her skills acquired through her work in British Council Tunisia (Organization of Cultural events, Contests and Campaign), we succeeded to be involved in GLAM-wiki Movement and ameliorate the coverage of the national heritage of Tunisia in Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata and other wikis.

Expenses

• Visa and Visa application: 92.26 EUR
• Registration: 225 EUR
• Accomodation: 420 EUR
• Flight: 557.33 EUR
• Overall: 1294.6 EUR

External Link

• Wikimania 2019, Images
• Wikimania 2019, Abstracts

Acknowledgements

I thank Wikimedia France for the grant that allowed me to participate to Wikimania conference for the first time. I have also to thank Ms. Leila Zia, Ms. Mina Theofilatou, Mr. Finn Årup Nielsen and Mr. Asaf Bartov for their support.