User:Pbsouthwood/Wikimania 2018

Wikimania 2018 impressions.

Background:

I have known that Wikimania occurs for several years, without taking much interest. It was somewhere else, run by people I did't know, and cost too much to attend. I don't have that sort of money lying around to spend on something that did not seem like it would be worth attending.

This changed in 2017, a couple of months before the Montreal Wikimania, when I found out that Wikimania 2018 would be held in Cape Town, where I live. I still didn't know what it was all about, but as a Wikimedian I thought it was appropriate to offer to help. Next thing I knew I was appointed to manage the website, on the strength of being fairly familiar with wikicode. I joined Wikimedia ZA soon afterwards.

The website was not difficult to manage, though having to do everything from scratch on Meta, then have it transferred to a new wiki was a huge waste of effort. Probably 50% of the work could be avoided by cloning the previous years Wikimania site and starting there. After copying and pasting from Wikimania 2017 and editing to change the dates and places, and getting it all transferred to the new site, it was more or less taken over by the WMF events team and later the translation team, who knew what they were doing better than I did, so there was not really that much to do. This in itself was not a problem, but to some extent I lost track of what was being done, and just has to assume that the translation crew knew what they were doing.

There were a few unexpected changes. The logo and banner we created were changed without notice. I don't think they were an improvement. So it goes. On the projects it would have been discussed first. If it was discussed outside of WMF I am not aware of it.

Conference:

As I considered it likely that this would be my first and probably only Wikimania, I didn't get involved in the on-site volunteer crew - I wanted the flexibility of movement to see as much as I could, and as I would be commuting daily to the venue from one of the most distant suburbs, did not want to commit to being there at a specific time in the mornings. This allowed me the flexibility to attend as much as I could get to. I went for the full 5-day package, of preconference and conference, which turned out to be a good choice, as the preconference was an excellent opportunity to meet people in real life with whom I had been working on the projects and discussing things on the lists for years. I found them to be a diverse and rather pleasant group.

The down side is mainly that I met and spoke to so many people that it all blurs a bit, and I will probably not remember who said what when I want to find out more about something that was discussed somewhere with someone on those days.

The conference proper was quite intense, and I had to choose between several options that I would have liked to attend for most sessions. I chose to go with the threads of spreading the Wikipedias in Africa and other areas with low internet access, developments on Wikidata, diversification of content, and how to help the smaller language Wikipedias. I may be able to help in local outreach in the future, so thought this would be most useful.