Wikimania Stockholm 2019
It is indeed a privilege to attend Wikimania, the largest gathering of Wikimedians! I attended my third Wikimania a couple of weeks ago at Stockholm University in Sweden. Before I landed there, my mind was thoroughly blown, having discovered how amazing the city is. On a ~10 hour flight to Stockholm from Oakland, I spent some time reading the cached Wikipedia article on Stockholm. I learned that the city had received the most innovative, greenest, global, livable, honest city of the year awards in recent years.
The theme for this year’s Wikimania was “Stronger together: Wikimedia, Free Knowledge, and the Sustainable Development Goals.” Broadly, this theme help brings to one’s attention, the role Wikimedia movement already plays or the one it can play in the future towards each of the seventeen sustainable development goals. Not only it encouraged the hallway conversations to be around the sustainability theme, but also reminded participants to limit their carbon footprint in preparation for this year’s Wikimania. Here is my story — I borrowed a tablet for following through my presentation notes instead of printing them out.
I loved attending this year’s Wikimania as it kept me busier than previous Wikimanias :) I felt that I actively participated in quite a lot of activities that were part of the Main Conference and Hackathon and especially collaborated with both; my team at the Wikimedia Foundation and community members in planning activities before and during Wikimania.
At this year’s Wikimania Hackathon, I helped coordinate the mentoring program and one of the focus areas, Small Wiki Toolkits. Mentoring program (first started in 2017) helps connect newcomers, new to Wikimedia technical spaces and the Hackathon with mentors willing to help teach a skill or bring contributors to their project. Tonina and I helped orient newcomers with getting started resources, navigating the Hackathon and led the project and mentor matching ceremony. Here are all the posters created and presented by mentors during this session.
I ran two hands-on workshops as part of the Small Wiki Toolkits focus area, the goal of which was to equip contributors with skills needed to support small wikis. The first workshop around Wikimedia APIs that I led with Lucas Werkmeistr engaged participants in using the MediaWiki Action API to do fun things with the data from Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. Here is the workshop toolkit. The second workshop around User Scripts and Gadgets engaged participants in developing simple user scripts and getting them familiar with steps to turn it into a Gadget. Here is the workshop toolkit.
It was fun to watch participants having ‘aha’ moments when a script they played around with, generated an output! One of the participants from Luxembourgish Wikipedia (a wiki that I did not know existed!) mentioned that their community lacks technical contributors. We worked together post-workshop in resolving an issue they were facing while running a user script (and identified an unknown MediaWiki bug that was causing it :-/ ). One Punjabi community member shared that they didn’t even know that it was possible to easily promote a user script to a Gadget. With my colleagues since, I’ve been internally discussing, possible content improvements for these workshop toolkits, and some next steps that will be published on Meta-Wiki soon.
Eventually, the Main Conference commenced, and first things first. Andre and I set up the Community Booth for Small Wiki Toolkits focus area (this was to continue the discussions related to the Hackathon focus area). We hung posters, schedule, and a banner that the focus area crew had created with much love and carried with them in their bus/train/plane ride. We had to be at the venue super early for the set-up, earlier than my morning kick-off routine, especially when the night before we were all partying and chit-chatting till late. And this made the set-up planning quite adventurous :D
I love hearing inspirational keynotes; awesome people say awesome stuff that inspires me to do good work!
“Our dream is to dramatically increase the number of people in the world who directly participate in solving global challenges.. from the bottom-up, in their local communities..” — Michael Peter Edson, Co-founder, Museum for the United Nations
Participants curated this year’s conference tracks. I helped review the proposals received in the Technology, outreach and innovation space and mostly attended the sessions that fell in this track. In the “Building technical capacity in small wikis” session, I learned from community members of Fon and Breton wikis, about their current technical challenges and ideas for improving small wikis. Notes from this session are here.
Coolest Tool Award Ceremony was indeed not only my favorite, but a lot of attendees’ favorite session. This session awarded tools that are coolest and makes it easier for community members to contribute to Wikimedia projects. After the winners were made public, developers were found celebrating all over on IRC and Telegram!
This year’s Wikimania ended with a closing ceremony where elderly couples performed a Swedish folk dance that I loved so much (I called my grandparents right after it finished, as it so reminded me of them).
With fun conversations that ran all day long until late-night, I got an opportunity to have cross-cultural exchanges and learn about the incredible movement projects. As part of this year’s Wikimania’s social events, I visited the Nordic Museum, and Stockholm City Hall with wonderful community members, friends, and colleagues. All this makes being part of this largest gathering so special, a fun and frolic train ride that should never halt!
