User:Victuallers/wikitowns

The WikiTown Stall at the Wikimania Community Village The state of Wikitowns


 * Gideon Digby and Roger Bamkin

The Community Village at Wikimania was bigger than it has ever been. Most of the major chapters had a stall and there were a few extra showing off new software, 3D printing and the Wikitown stall. WMUK had one of the main stalls at the end of the block, but they had also booked a small table for Wikitowns. The main purpose of the stall was to be a focus for the Wikipedians who had used QRpedia in GLAMS or the ten towns who have built Wikitowns.

Coolest Project report
Whilst we were there they had a "coolest wiki project" competition at Wikimania. This is the competition that Monmouthpedia won two years ago in Washington DC. Lots of different projects had been nominated from around the world and the top ten were chosen for the room to clap about. The top project that gathered the loudest clapping was an education course organised for children in Armenia to use Wikipedia. Cool, but not what we wanted to share here.

The interesting reason we’re mentioning this competition is that the audience wanted to know "what was a cool project?". The organiser said that ...Monmouthpedia was the example of cool as it had been successful and it had spawned lots of wannabee projects that had also been successful! Thats buzz. In fact of the top ten cool projects, three of them were QRpedia based and two were Wikitowns. The Wikitowns were Fremantle and Toodyay in Western Australia (vy Gideon Digby) and the third project was Sofia Zoo in Bulgaria (Well done User:Spiritia). Sofia Zoo QRpedia project was in the top four best projects in 2014 and it was well received in Bulgaria.

And the subject is still going. There are plans to run a second wikitown in Tunisia and a second in South Africa and talk of creating one in Mexico. We have ignored many smaller projects and those who are still to identify a firm plan. Well we enjoyed this so we thought we'd share the highlights with you.

Germany and Italy
During this year Bremenpedia has been successfully developed. The main proponents of this project had not attended because they were not fluent in English. However the project needs to be included here. There has been developments also in Italy but no delegates discussed the project work there at Wikimania.

South Africa
Wikimedia South Africa had a nearby stall and they were talking about Joburgpedia and the plaques they have on the houses that belong(ed) to Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela and Gandhi. Impressive. This year they plan to extend the coverages in Johannesburg and build a new project in Cape Town. Both of these are very interesting. They can use Wikipedia Zero Wikipedia Zero delivers free access to Wikipedia to whole areas of the Global South and this adds to the free access available in the Wikitowns in Wales and Sweden where the use is also free. Since the article several new Cape Town School articles have been written.

Odessa2
Another Wikitown is in Odessa. They already have a demo project running with a fair number of plaques, a web site and proposals to create 1000 new plaques. This is ambitious. Monmouth had 1000 codes but only a small percentage were permanent. In order to make this work Odessa need changes to QRpedia operation, however during the conference we were able to show how to simplify the codes that get to be needlessly complex. (This problem is due to urls not supporting cyrillic text very well). Odessa2 has it own web site and a few new articles have recently been contributed in English.

Sayadapedia and Medinapedia
A second town in Tunisia! The Medina section of Tunis will be covered with plaques by the only official chapter in North Africa. A small project has been undertaken in Tunisa (Sayadapedia) but this one is more ambitious and it has a significant partner.

Macedonia
This needs changes to QRpedia code to handle the use of language. The problem is that Macedonians and have there phones set to English but they would like to access Macedonian. This is a siumilar issue to that encountered by the projects using Welsh and Catalan.

Estonia
Tartupedia is another wikitown that was proposed some years ago but it has recently been relaunched. No contact was made at Wikimania but we have made contact since the event.

Sweden
Umea is a European City of Culture this year and the plaques are appearing in one of our most Northern locations for QR codes. Wikimedia Sweden have been taking the lead and they have arranged free Wifi access to QRpedia and Wikipedia.

Australia
As mentioned earlier both current WikiTowns were in the list of coolest projects. The first Wikitown in Fremantle(Freopedia) provided samples of maps used by the tourist information centres that show the location of each plaque. Toodyay(Toodyaypedia) plaques were an aluminium based plaque with UV resistant inks and coated in a UV resistant coating these plates are the size of playing cards and very light increasing the options of where they can be locacated. Wikimedia Australia assisted in manning the table and provided a supply of Tim Tams & Caramellow Koalas for days 2 & 3�

Improving QRpedia - A Billion pages
Good news is that apart from the projects the codes are also being used on 15 million web pages to illustrate Wiki data. This is an an amazing expansion but only a fraction of what is available. One of the problems with QRpedia is that sometimes there is no information in the users language (despite having 20 million or so pages available). Wikidata gives effectively hundreds of millions of pages because we may not have a page for “Prof. A.N.Other” in French but we know when she was born (nee) and when she died (morte). We can do a similar trick in the 200 or so languages that we support. 200 languages times 5 million articles in English gives a billion pages. Given the expansion of Wikidata then a page for everyone on the planet is a credible target.

Quite a lot of discussion about repairs and improvements to QRpedia. The major criticism is the stats which used to give simple results. Users are now invited to “click here” for stats but the link is to WMUK dashboard of some complexity. There are offers from users to program this. Roger spoke to Doug (Rexx) and Emanuelle and it would appear that might be the only offer. The stats have been broken for some time. We need this fixing.