Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-08-12/Wikimanía report



For the first installment, see part 1, the plenaries

For those who generally only edit on the English Wikipedia project, it is quite an experience to hobnob with attendees from nearly forty countries, over six continents (alas, no WikiProject Penguins from Antartica), and representing about four dozen languages and their respective Wikipedias. There were also those who primarily work on other Wikimedia projects and other WMF websites, such as Wikimedia Commons, Wikimedia Meta-Wiki, Wikidata, Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikivoyage, MediaWiki, and Phabricator. There was non-Wikimedia open source/open data representation there as well, such as Mozilla México in the Community Village and a mapping party for OpenStreetMap.

Meetups
Inter- and intra- were the applicable geographical prefixes, as meetups were intra-continental: WikiAfrica, Wikimedia Asia, Central and Eastern Europe Wikimedians, and the Canada and United States affiliates, intra-language/inter-continental: WikiArabia, WikiFranca, Iberocoop, and Turkic Speaking Wikimedians, intra-country: Wikimedia Deutschland (Germany) and the Mexican Wikipedians, and the inter-language, intra-country, and internationally diasporic Indic Meetup. Thematic meetups included the Wikipedia Education Program, LGBT and allied Wikimedians, OTRS volunteers, Wikidata editors, Wikipedia Librarians, the WikiProject Med Foundation, a Wikiwomen's Lunch, and a joint Wiktionary-Wikidata Meetup. There was even a meetup for a Wiki Wedding.

Meeting the WMF employees and board members
Unless you hang out in San Francisco, you will seldom have a chance to meet Wikimedia Foundation employees. Wikimania is an excellent venue for meeting dozens of them. A prime spot for this was the WMF booth. The Wikimedia Design Research team also staffed a table in the Community Village as well where they conducted surveys and interviews about how editors contribute to wiki projects on mobile devices. Attendees could engage with reorganized Community Engagement team leaders in a mediated Q&A panel discussion, or go to a Wikimedia Engineering Management Q&A, a WMF Legal presentation on defending users and content, or a Q&A with the WMF Board. There was also ample opportunity to meet individual staff and learn from them. It was intriguing to learn that the WMF uses Apache Cassandra as a back-end database to deliver content used by VisualEditor to retrieve page HTML for editing or that the search tool now provides intitle: and incategory: parameters.

Programme sessions
The substance of Wikimania is in the sessions presented by editors and staff for the rest of us. The Programme included tracks on Education, GLAM, Community, Tech, and Legal issues. Of the plethora of sessions, below are just a few that stood out among those attended by.
 * "The coolest projects of Wikimedia Chapters": This session presented a number of inspiring projects, including Wikicamps for Western Armenian editors (see also one of the reports), a project in which primary students in Herzliya, Israel contributed information to Wikipedia about their city and local history (see previous Signpost coverage), and the "Sum of all paintings" (see below).
 * The "Sum of all paintings", in which Maarten Dammers (Multichill) presented the WikiProject for entering the metadata for paintings into Wikidata.
 * "My life as an autistic Wikipedian" by Guillaume Paumier, also the subject of his Signpost op-ed two weeks ago.
 * Content Translation, already used in over 10,000 articles, had a hands-on translathon and discussion.

For more info
Despite the dearth of official videos of Wikimanía 2015 sessions, as reported by the Signpost, some individuals took the initiative to record session and other videos. These can be found at Wikimania 2015 presentation videos on Commons, Wikimania 2015 videos on Internet Archive, and miscellaneous "Wikimania 2015" videos on YouTube.
 * Videos
 * Slide decks
 * Category:Wikimania 2015 presentations
 * "Wikimania 2015" on SlideShare
 * Elsewhere on the web
 * Ziko's Mexican_diary
 * Iberty's blog on Wikimania, 12.07.15 - 19.07.15
 * Iberty's blog on Wikimania, 12.07.15 - 19.07.15