Jan Ainali

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Category: Wikimedia

WikidataCon 2021 – community awards

Posted on by Jan Ainali

Last weekend, it was time for the WikidataCon 2021. It was three days full of sessions with both short and long sessions and small and large ideas. As always, one of the most interesting sessions is the community awards because this is a time for celebrating the work of each other. And this year it was a bit special for me, because I was part of some of the winners. I’ll talk about them below, the link under the images takes you directly to the YouTube video when the award was revealed.

Using & Querying data

Presentation of the award with motivation

This is the latest project, that Albin Larsson and I started, and that I’ve written about before. Since then, in the short five months it has existed, many more people have joined and helped and also deserves the recognition. It feels particularly good to now win a prize for this, as I have been thinking about it for many years.

Community building (global scale)

Presentation of the award with motivation

On March 29, 2020, Albin Larsson and I got together with this small idea of just editing Wikidata for an hour, but to live stream it. Our plans were not big at the time, but we had fun, so we kept going. After a while we also started to get regulars hanging out with us, so that made it easier to continue. The stream is very casual, and our goal is mostly to show what we have learned and at the same time learn from each other. As I know that community building is very important this made me really happy.

Special sustainability categories

For the first time some special awards were given with a focus on the Sustainable Development Goals. As one of the co-founders of Wikimedians for Sustainable Development, these categories alone felt like a win. And to add to that joy, I was part of some awarded categories.

Sustainable institutions

Presentation of the award with motivation

In the project with the Swedish Riksdag documents, it’s truly a team effort. Users Popperipopp and Belteshassar have been doing most of the edits, whereas I have helped with the data modeling and research, and several other users have also helped out.

Sustainable environment

Presentation of the award with motivation

Finally, I am also happy that WikiProject Biodiversity was awarded in the category Sustainable environment. As I haven’t really been editing much at all in this project, here most of the glory should be given to the other project members. But I am still happy that I have been able to help out with live streaming.

Final thoughts

I am a bit blown away with all this recognition. I am honored and humbled by it. Best of all, even though this has taken many hours, it has mostly been a great deal of fun for me! Editing Wikidata is for me a feeling of being able to contribute knowledge to the world in a way that truly scales and easily can be used by others. There are so many places with knowledge gaps to fill that it’s possible to be entirely lust driven and never run out of stuff to do. I encourage you to go explore the corners of Wikidata of your interests and see if making connections gives you the same joy it does for me.

Image credits

All images by Artur Torres, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Click the image to get to the file information page.

Code for all lightning talk

Posted on by Jan Ainali

Today at the Code for all 2021 Summit, I had the honor to present a lightning talk about the Govdirectory together with Albin Larsson. You can watch the talk below.

The link to the presentation that has the links to all examples and resources: https://bit.ly/wikidatacivictech.

Interviewed in The World According to Wikipedia

Posted on by Jan Ainali

A week ago, I was interviewed for the podcast The World According to Wikipedia about Wikidata. We talked about what Wikidata is, why it has grown so fast, and what role it might play in the future. And of course I had to mention Wikimedians for Sustainable Development and Govdirectory.

Listen to the episode here: https://headstuffpodcasts.com/episode/s02e09-stanning-wikidata

Thanks to Rebecca O’Neill for a lovely chat!

Building a Govdirectory

Posted on by Jan Ainali

Which Swedish municipalities have YouTube accounts?

Sometime in 2016 I got the idea of building a website that would display all the social media channels for all Swedish public agencies. The idea popped in my mind as I was learning the flexibility and power of Wikidata. But my confidence in the more advanced tooling to edit it was low, so I put this in the backlog to revisit later since it felt like a huge task.

Unlocking the idea

Five years, almost 50 live streams of editing Wikidata, a won contest, and about 70 Wikidata meetups later, when the announcement of the Unlock accelerator by Wikimedia Deutschland flew into my Twitter feed, not only did I feel more confident, I also had a potential collaborator. So I pitched the idea to Albin Larsson, my co-host of the live streams, but this time on a global scale, not only for Sweden. The idea at this stage was bold and simple:

a global directory of all government agencies and their online presences

We now also knew that by using Wikidata, we could show even more information than only social media. The accelerator program is unusual in that it doesn’t aim to create a startup and make a profit, instead it aims to enable a social impact on the world. The theme this year, (Re)building trust in the digital age, felt really fitting. We worked on an application and short thereafter we were accepted and in a sprint. The first sprint was really great, with the help of our coach Fabian Gampp we took our somewhat technical idea into a purpose driven project by forming a vision and a mission that extended way beyond the technology. Even though we had some ideas of what this could be used for when writing the application, it was still somewhat fleeting in our minds. Our ambitions became these:

Vision

Our vision is a world where people are empowered to engage with their government to ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels.

Mission

We will enable a community powered directory where the online presence of every public organization is easily findable, queryable and trustworthy.

Early days

We are still in the midst of the accelerator program, and just published the midterm report. If you want to give us feedback on our early version at govdirectory.org it would be valuable to us. If you would like to help us even further, check our contributing file on GitHub for improvements on the website and our project page on Wikidata for improving the data displayed in it.

My Wikimania 2021 contributions

Posted on by Jan Ainali

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.

Video of Wikimedians for Sustainable Development User Group: Looking at Sustainability Through Wikimedia Lenses

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.

Video of Wikimedia and Sustainability – Selecting topics for impact

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.

Logotyp för Wikimedia Accessibility

Posted on by Jan Ainali

För några veckor sedan kom någon med en idé för en logotyp för de som håller på med tillgänglighet på Wikimedia. Idén byggde på FN:s tillgänglighetssymbol och jag tyckte att idén var bra och var värd mer kärlek. Så jag ritade om själva symbolen och färglade med officiella färgerna och använde rätt typsnitt. Och vips så var en ny logotyp född. Och den verkar gillas och användas även om det inte finns en officiell användargrupp än. Måhända får texten sättas om när/om det blir en användargrupp.

Jan Ainali, based on an idea by Psychoslave, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Jan Ainali, based on an idea by Psychoslave, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons, CC0
Wikimedia Commons, CC0

Vinner Wikidata sprint

Posted on by Jan Ainali

För en månad sedan var jag tillsammans med Albin Larsson, Andrew Lih och Nicolas Vigneron med i University of New Brunswicks Data Sprint, som var en “gren” i deras Data Challenge. Vi kallade laget Qutedata, en hommage till Q-numren på Wikidata och Wikimedia Cuteness Association.

Datasprintet bestod av två delar, en frågedel och en berättardel. I frågedelen ställdes 21 frågor som skulle besvaras med en Wikidata query. Själva svaret var egentligen ointressant, det intressanta var hur frågan var skriven och det som lämnades in var en länk till frågan. Berättardelen skulle ha en serie sammahängande frågor, där vi fokuserade på folk i New Brunswick (presentation). Vardera del stod för 50% av resultatet.

Det hela gick tydligen bra för vårt lag vann!

Igår kom äntligen pressreleasen som meddelade vinnarna. Priset som kallades NBIF Innovative Data Award bestod av 1 250 kanadensiska dollar som vi skänker direkt till Wikimedia Canada. Förhoppningsvis kan detta leda till fler bra samarbeten för dem, kanske med universitetet till och med.

Climate lexeme week

Posted on by Jan Ainali

As part of the 30 lexic-o-days 2021, April 5-11 I am hosting a Climate lexeme week. During this thematic week the focus is to improve the lexemes derived from the Glossary of climate change. This is not a competition where points are given, instead this is a collaborative week when we help each other to improve these lexemes as much as we can.

In this 17-minute video, I explain the idea and what it is all about.

Launch of the Climate lexeme week.

Join in and learn about lexemes!

Logo based on File:Translation – A till Å-colours.svg by André Costa (WMSE), File:Global Warming icon – Noun Project 4963.svg by Luis Prado and File:Simpleicons Business calendar-weekly.svg by SimpleIcon (all modified), CC BY 4.0.

Wikifunctions logo contest

Posted on by Jan Ainali

Some time back I had some inspiration for the Wikifunctions logo contest.

https://twitter.com/Jan_Ainali/status/1358911498169516036

I was (and am) quite happy with the design itself. But a logo is much more than just something that looks good. It also needs to be unique.

And thanks to many people looking at this submission, some similar logos that I was unaware of were found. This is normal in the process of designing logos, the difference here is that they are reviewed in the open instead of before being published the first time. I am also already happy with the positive feedback that I have got. So while I still like the idea I got in my sudden nightly inspiration, I realize that there is some uphill momentum now.

Sidenote: I trust that the legal team of the Wikimedia Foundation will do a proper legal review of my proposal if it were to win the votes so that no further legal issues are raised later. If the community like the basic idea, it should be possible to make a few adjustments to clear any such issues.

Besides my proposal, there are many more nice candidates. Please go vote!

Rulltrappor på södra station

Posted on by Jan Ainali

I väntan på pendeltåg efter inspelning av ett avsnitt av Wikipediapodden för ett och ett halvt år sedan spelade jag in en kort snutt video av rulltrapporna med min mobiltelefon. Den laddades så klart upp till Wikimedia Commons, och min tanke var främst att beskriva rulltrappor i allmänhet.

För ungefär ett år sedan nominerade jag den till Featured media, men den tycktes då vara för enkel. Så nu i vintras dök en annan användare (Jahobr) upp och tog en kort bit av videon och gjorde om till en oändligt loopande gif. Helt genialt, resultatet är nästan hypnotiskt.

Escalator looped animation.gif, video av mig, redigerad till gif av Jahobr, licens: CC BY-SA 4.0.

Jag nominerade denna version och förra veckan utsågs den till Featured media, den högsta kvalitetsutmärkelsen på Wikimedia Commons, och mitt första bidrag till en sådan. Idag är den dessutom på första sidan av hela sajten, som Media of the Day.