Last Friday to Tuesday Wikimania 2021 took place and after being totally cancelled last year it was now virtual. I was a bit worried that the experience would not be anything that a real one, but I was positively surprised. Sure, it’s not the same feeling that got me to return to every one since I first tried it, but among virtual four day conferences, it was pretty good.
Despite the heavily critiqued use of proprietary software, where Linux users got a big red warning that their system was unsupported when they joined the conference or “changed buildings” in it, the platforms still provided a surprisingly nice user experience. It would be great if the Wikimedia Foundation would invest in putting the available open source solutions together to mimic that. The pieces exist, Wikimedia Foundation presumably have the resources to do it, but is there a will?
Unlike the last Wikimania in Stockholm, I had no official role in the organization of the conference in general, but instead helped provide some content, which I’ll list below in chronological order.
Getting started on Govdirectory
In the Hackathon, Albin Larsson and I presented our Govdirectory project. There were more people attending than expected and many good questions, although most of them with a viewpoint of the data rather than the tool.
Govdirectory user research
We also did some user research, where we tried to find out how we best can support the Wikidata community who are interested in curating data in our topic. It was enlightening to get the views from more power users of Wikidata.
Community Village – Wikimedians for Sustainable Development
The user group Wikimedians for Sustainable Development had a table in the community village. There we showed some basic information about us and listed related sessions. In the platform it was also a point where we in the group regularly connected, and we also got a few curious visitors to chat with.
Wikimedians for Sustainable Development social meetup
For the first time, we in the user group came together in a pure social meeting. In all our previous meetings since we formed, we have had an agenda. It was nice to just have a chat.
Wikimedians for Sustainable Development User Group: Looking at Sustainability Through Wikimedia Lenses
This was a session with short glimpses of what the people in the user group do on the wikis. I presented the Climate Lexeme Week I organized in the spring.
Shortcutting the Identify topics for impact recommendation by reusing free content
This was a lightning talk by me where I argue that we should use the Sustainable Development Goals as the marker for what topics have impact on the world instead of trying to come up with our own idea of it.
The talk on Wikimedia Commons has subtitles in English in Swedish.
Wikimedia and Sustainability – Selecting topics for impact
This was a workshop organized by Daniel Mietchen and me. Despite the platform making it hard to communicate with the audience, we managed to get quite good engagement and many good ideas. You may need to skip a lot in the video since we’re working in silence in some parts.
Documenting
I also continuously planned and documented my attendance in detail on my user page, and I encourage anyone to do the same for all their Wikimedia conferences.
