The week before last I was in Katowice in Poland for the annual conference Wikimania. Overall, it was well-organized, but as in any big conference, there are always things to improve. Unfortunately, there always seem to be some things that have been done better in the past that are regressing (for example, not using multilingual menus). I wonder how we can not only capture the learnings from every year, but also successfully transfer them over to the next.

Overview

As usual, I used the learning pattern Documenting your event experience, continuously documenting what I was doing, watching and participating in, along with notes of thoughts that I got. In total, I partook in 24 sessions and as organizer/speaker of another 3 myself during the conference. I have later watched another 6 sessions and have 7 still on my backlog, so the conference will stay in my mind for quite some time. I will delve deeper into the different aspects of my Wikimania experience below.

Podcast

This year I tried to get people together, but it was difficult to get hold of people as they were so busy with all the sessions. I did record one session, but it has not been edited yet. Per Wikipediapodden tradition, we did record one episode leading up to Wikimania and one episode summarizing it. These two are, alas, only available in Swedish.

My sessions

Open as a Prerequisite for Solving the Climate Crisis

I participated in this panel as part of my work in the Open Climate Data project for Creative Commons that I do in Open By Default now. The session was overflowing with people, apparently a huge interest. Many of the questions were specifically about the intersection with Wikidata, and I think there are some things Wikimedia needs to do to really enable this. First, create a connection from the Wikidata Query Service to the Data namespace on Wikimedia Commons. Second, enabling Structured data in the Data namespace on Wikimedia Commons so that provenance and attribution can be solved.

Add your country to the Wikidata Govdirectory

While I had a workshop session with this title last year, this year it was a poster session. I think at least a few people got inspired to take a closer look at their countries when back home, and I got some good sources immediately when standing there.

Climate policy in Wikidata

This poster really sparked many interesting conversations. It was inspiring that so many attendees were so knowledgeable about Wikidata and also found it important.

Wikimedians for Sustainable Development

While the user group Wikimedians for Sustainable Development didn’t have any particular sessions by themselves, many members were organizing sessions and even more people in the community had sessions related to the sustainable development goals. They were so many that I just to get an overview for myself, I created a subpage where I roughly categorized them by SDG goal and type of session.

What’s next?

As usual, a Wikimania leaves you with loads of inspiration and ideas. So what will I try to do next?

• As mentioned before, follow the discussions about Data on Commons and provide feedback where I can. I already started with some input on Phabricator.
• Help design a more welcoming Video landing page on Wikimedia Commons.
• Investigate if there is a bug with Related Changes on Wikidata.
• I emailed the organizer of next year’s Wikimania that I would like to volunteer on making it a good hybrid conference.
• Start a discussion on Swedish Wikipedia to turn on some of the new event tools.
• Continue watching the talks on my backlog.