User:Khalid Mahmood/Wikimania 2015

Hello Wikipedians and Friends, Last Month from 14th of July in the evening to the morning of 20th of July 2015 I was in Mexico City, Mexico. I was there to attend 9th Wikimania2015 Conference. It was matter for pride for me and our W.Punjabi Wikipedia to attend it. I was the first person from our Wikipedia to attend it. I was also the first Pakistani to attend the conference. My attendance was scholarship based. It was very useful for myself and for our projects. I made links and resources that could be helpful for our projects in future. I collected many souvenirs from different stalls for our those wikipedians who worked for our wikipedia but they were not invited. It is due their work too that I was there and I will send them these souvenirs for good memory. I will send a report too all our important wikipedians what I experienced in the conference and I would urge them that they should also participate in the future conferences in order to be familiarised with other wikipedians and what we can learn from them and ultimately what these conferences can benefit to our projects. For us it is very important as our language - although it is the majority language of Pakistan - facing serious discrimination at home, it is not taught at schools and it has limited scope for progress, in this situation Wikimedia projects are the life giving medicines to our language. These projects are saving our language, making it modern and offering knowledge freely on internet. This conference would prove a boost for our projects.

The atmosphere of the conference was warm, friendly and energetic. Participants from every continent were there, eager to meet each other. Hilton Hotel Reforma was the most comfortable venue. I will never forget the considerate behaviour of their people and the variety of food they offered.

Mexico Wikimedia Chapter the host of the conference worked well to make the conference successful. Their volunteers were superlatively helpful and kind. Although I walked on the front road of our hotel and visited some architectural jewels myself, it took us to many worth seeing places, the most important was Anthropology Museum. Well I can never forget the Mexican music and dance presented in the inauguration ceremony of the conference.

Hackathon was a very important place for me. Here I met personally many legends of our Wikimedia community I knew only through their names on different pages of Wikipedia and other projects. Here I met many helpful hands for many projects. Many technical problems that we could not solve ourselves, here were many people who gave their time and solved many issues and here too I made connections for the problems of future, I can get help back at home.

I have met lot of people in Hackathon, in conference halls, in eating halls, on different Wikipedias stores and other places. It is painful not to mention all, here I will mention some of them: although almost every one I met left a lasting print on my mind. And they should be. All were working on volunteer base, spreading knowledge freely, giving time, knowledge, energy and resources without in return. I will call them real saints.


 * Jimmy Wales - It was memorable to meet the co-founder of Wikimedia Projects: Jimmy Wales. I thanked him for providing a place and environment where our language can flourish and modernised, although it is facing discrimination at its own home.


 * Satdeep Gill - Meeting with Satdeep Gill, a wikipedian from Gurmukhi-Punjabi Wikipedia was a pure joy. He has a dream to bring nearer our two wikipedias. We talked on the issue and thought what could be possible. I hope meeting with him will be useful for the future of our wikipedias.


 * Braveheart - I met Braveheart at Hackathon although very busy but he solved some of my issues. A nice person indeed.


 * Dineshkumar Ponnuswamy - with his winsome smile and energetic behaviour won me. He solved one of our wiktionary problem too.


 * Niharika Kohli - promised to cooperate with our wikipedia if we have any problem.


 * Amir E. Aharoni - This is the man who was ready to offer help anybody. He introduced us new, easy and useful methods for editing. Through visual editing he taught me how to edit in a better way. He wrote some of my problems and solved some before reaching my home. He directed how we could soon normalise our wikiquote, sleeping for a long time in incubator.