2025:Program/Poster session

Wikimania@20: Inclusivity . Impact . Sustainability .

The Poster session at Wikimania Nairobi will be a prime event held on Friday, 7 August from 17:00 - 18:30 local time. (The exact date, time and location of the poster session will be shared here closer to Wikimania.) Refreshments will be served, and attendees will be encouraged to mingle and discuss ideas with poster authors. It will feature all posters accepted through two processes: the program submissions process and the affiliate process. It is an opportunity for participants to interact with their audience one-on-one, for a longer time, and in greater depth. It will be the primary venue for attendees to showcase their own projects at the conference.

This year's poster session will showcase both individual work as well as affiliate work. Attendees will be able to browse posters on a number of different projects and initiatives, on different topic areas, from different regions of the world.

The official category for submitting this year's posters is: category on Commons. This includes posters accepted through:

the original Eventyay process
a secondary process for affiliate work (limit 2-3 posters)

Deadline: Poster drafts are due Sunday, 13 July, end of day anywhere on earth. They will then be reviewed and reviewers will reach out to authors with any feedback.

Poster author responsibilities

Create your poster and upload it to Commons category Wikimania 2025 posters by end of day 13 July.
Be on the lookout for any feedback from reviewers on-wiki or via email and be prepared to upload a new version of your poster in the event that there are typos, missing attributions for photos, or other issues.
Poster authors do not need to print or hang their posters themselves, the event organizers will take care of that.
Poster authors who are conference attendees in Nairobi are invited to stand with their posters during the session to discuss the topic in person with the attendees.
Poster authors who will be joining remotely should include methods for contact on their poster, such as an email address and/or wiki page, so that attendees can get in touch after the Poster Session with any thoughts or questions.

Poster creation instructions

All posters need to meet the following criteria:

One poster per accepted submission.
Poster can be in more than one language.
Poster size/format: A1 (594 × 841 mm, or 23.4 × 33.1 inches), portrait/tall orientation.
All images are freely licensed with the author credited, the license information, and a url or short url to the file page on Commons or elsewhere. This is the number one thing poster authors forget to do. All images--photos, graphics, etc--must be properly attributed or you will be asked to redo the poster. Remember, we set the standards we expect on reusing our content.
Limit the text used. Include one or more QR codes to link to more detailed information, reports, instructions, or presentation videos (e.g. on Wiki-Meta, Wikimedia Commons, etc.).
Deadline: Sunday, 13 July end of day anywhere on earth.

Lay-out

Once the participant chooses the topic they want for their poster, lay out the story in a way that lets other people know what happened, what were the key results, and what (if any) is their advice to the audience. They can also use the ABCDs of Storytelling as a guide to creating the poster. Find more detailed guidance at Posters that work Learning Pattern, and also by looking at posters shown at previous Wikimedia events:

Suggested templates

There are many programs/templates the participant can use to create a poster. It is suggested that Microsoft PowerPoint, LibreOffice Presentation, and LibreOffice Draw are the easiest to use, and make good-looking posters. Other programs like Inkscape have more features, but they are also more difficult to learn, and tools like Adobe InDesign & Illustrator are expensive. Another option is to use Google Draw.

Whichever program/template the participant chooses, organizers request the participant to set the size of the poster before they start adding words and pictures. This will help the participant make sure that the fonts they are using are the right size, and that the pictures they include have high resolutions for printing.

Here are some links that may help participants create a poster of the correct size:

Visual assets

Poster authors can choose to use Wikimania Nairobi designs, but are also free to stick to any branding they prefer. For those interested in adding elements from Wikimania Nairobi, see the Designs page.

Use of institutional logos

It is common for poster authors to showcase work done in partnership with other organizations. In this case, the poster author may wish you use an institutional logo.

Technically, only institution logos that are freely licensed should be used (rare, outside of Wikimedia), or public domain due to them being either too simple to copyright (basic text and geometric shapes) or expired copyright (by being very old).

Using a Wikimania 2024 poster as an example:
Most of the institution logos on that poster are simple or old enough to not be copyrightable (the Univerzita Karlova seal, for example, is from the 14th century! so public domain). But a few of the logos are complex enough to be copyrightable, like the Prague Zoo.

Regarding Wikimania 2025 posters, these are the main points related to the use of institutional logos:

The logos should be considered free, by either being freely licensed (rare), simple enough to be uncopyrightable (basic text and geometric shapes), or old enough to be public domain.
⁠If a logo is considered uncopyrightable, you don’t technically need attribution on the poster (and any attribution would usually be redundant anyway, since the organization itself is usually who you would attribute).
⁠If a logo is too complex, some institutions will also have a basic wordmark that is just text that could be used instead (and if they don’t, you could consider cropping the "complex" part out of the logo, as one could do with the Prague Zoo — though not ideal since the logo becomes a bit "unofficial" in that case).
⁠In an ideal world, any public domain/uncopyrightable logos used on the posters should also be independently uploaded on Commons (and these can be linked to in the "source" field in the description as good practice).

The team in charge of the poster session can still print and hang posters that use any institutional logo; the poster just may not be able to stay on Wikimedia Commons indefinitely if it doesn’t align with the above main points.

Final step

Once the poster is complete, the participant must export it to PDF format and open it in a PDF reader to ensure that everything displays correctly. Some questions the participant might ask oneself are:

Minimum requirements

Are my pictures blurry?
Have I properly attributed all media I've used?
Is my text aligned?
Is my text big enough to be clearly legible?
Is my text free of typos?
Have I used any materials that are copyrighted and thus need to be removed? As you will be uploading to Commons, please ensure all elements are available under a CC license.

Things to consider

Does my poster have text that explains what it means when the author is not around?
Is my poster overwhelmed with text? Try to include only the highlights so people can easily read it.
Are the pictures relevant?
Is the author(s) contact information clearly displayed?

In it to win it

There will be four awards: Best Design, Best Content, Best Poster, which will be scored by a jury, and People's Choice - scored by the attendees. The posters will be assessed using the following criteria:

Licensing - all materials have clear licensing (Pass/Fail)
Content quality - the relevance, accuracy, and depth of the information presented (0-10).
Clarity & organization - how well the information is organized, the clarity of headings, and the logical flow of ideas and graphics (0-10).
Overall impression - The overall impact and impression of the poster as a whole (0-10).