User:Ainali/2024

This is my Wikimania experience, planned and lived. Feel free to add notes if we talked or had an interaction. Bolded sessions are the ones I am part of organizing, sessions in italic are sessions I watched/participated in, all other listed ones I am planning to participate in/watch.

I made two talk submissions that were declined:

Conflations, "duplicates" and split candidates - Open data / Round table
An overview of sustainability related initiatives across the projects - Research / Lecture

With Wikipediapodden we did two episodes about Wikimania, one before, and one after to summarize it (both in Swedish):

Tuesday

Common(s) cause - In the last minute, I was asked to facilitate one of the breakout sessions, the one on open climate. The notes from that session are here: 2024:Program/Common(s) cause/Open Climate breakout session.

Wednesday

10:00 Data Products as tools for Collaboration - A very high overview of what the Wikimedia Foundation is doing. It is not clear to me how I can use any of the tools to increase collaboration, even though I heard about most of the tools before.
10.30 Chatted with User:Daniel Mietchen about next steps for Wikimedians for Sustainable Development. Besides talking about the work with affiliate health and strategy that's already planned, we didn't come up with anything new.
11:00 WikiProject International Botanical Congress 2024 (eventyay) - I was reminded of this great resource: https://www.learnwikidata.net/
11:30 Future of MediaWiki: A sustainable platform to support a collaborative user base and billions of page views - a bit too developer focused for me to grasp it.
12:15 Hackathon opening session - presented my work on an an alternative Wikidata search, maybe I will find some time to hack on it too. (Addendum: I didn't.)
16:00 Open as a Prerequisite for Solving the Climate Crisis (eventyay) - the session I was on the panel of. Crowded room! Some good questions. Got good reception of the idea that the Data namespace on Commons also should have structured data enabled. One of the questions also highlighted the need both to link Wikidata to time series data on Commons and the need to be able to query it when we can. Also, the Wikimedians for Sustainable Development should really help in any way we can on the Open Goes Cop initiative.
17:00 Opening ceremony and Wikimedian of the year - was scheduled for two hours, but went on for almost 2,5. Way too long. This needs to be cut down to one hour. There was so much repetition. So many people on stage, I figure in total about 20 minutes was just waiting for people to get off and others to get up. (The stage was also huge, so just walking to the middle from the edge took 10 seconds.) It was also a bit cold in the room compared to the other ones.

Thursday

10:00 The Big Funnel: Africa Growth Pilot phase two (eventyay) - pointed out that there are no videos about the core policies of Wikipedia. I think I should do some for the Swedish Wikipedia (I am thinking that both the five pillars and notability will be useful). Currently, there are about 2,000 active editors in sub-Saharan Africa. WMF has the gal to increase that to 5,000 by 2030. Very ambitious! In the hallway discussion afterwards, we were talking about AI a bit, and I realized it would be interesting to have an AI take a look at all discussions at the Swedish village pump and compare the things where consensus were found with the existing policy and point out were there are gaps in the written policy, ie. where the result of the discussion was never documented.
11:00 - participated in a discussion about the future of the affiliations summit. It was very interesting. This continued in the afternoon too. If remote participation is cut, then perhaps the mapping of who does what can be made separately because we need all that input.
15:30 Lightning talks showcase 1 (eventyay)
- "The never ending World War: Fake and Hate in Articles Concerning Poland" Rudolf H. Boettcher - an odd lightning talk that outed vandals rather than using onwiki processes. A call for help somehow, but still unusual.
- "A developer's guide through the data jungle - getting you to Wikidata's data" Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) - presentation of d:Wikidata:For developers
- "Monsters, legends and mythical creatures: A Wikidata Folk(lore) Tale" Sara Thomas - perhaps the best presentation delivery of the entire Wikimania. Almost like a theater play.
- "Leveraging academic engagement: Insights from the UK's Residency for Climate" Tatjana Baleta - w:en:Wikipedia:100 Days 100 Edits campaign, w:en:User:TatjanaClimate
17:00 Commons Video Meetup - one interesting thing is that the Video link on the main page on Commons gets you to c:Category:Video. Even getting to c:Commons:Video would be better, but even that one could be made much more friendly. Especially, actually embedding examples so the types of videos that we want would be helpful. And the most important tools could be featured, whereas the more detailed instructions could be moved to subpages. A question in the end also made me remember the Media Requests API (and even though it is more precise than page views, it still doesn't track media plays)
18:00 Chat with the Wikidata Development Team - Got the idea to make a tool that looks up all pages that are using data from an item and all their pageviews in order to sort of get an idea of the usefulness of an item.

Friday

Started the morning with User:Sadads a very interesting discussion about WikiProjects. I showed my mainpage analysis tool, and he showed the work being done with community defined translation tasks in phabricator:T371515. I think this should be stored with d:P:P5008 so that the data can also be used for other things. I also got reminded about how RelatedChanges could be used for Govdirectory. Perhaps it could even be embedded on the project pages for countries where we have useful watchlist. After trying it again, I think I realized it shows too much on Wikidata which defeats the purpose. Will investigate more, this may be a bug I've encountered.
10:00 Wikimedia & GenAI: A 360 movement panel one year later (eventyay) - only saw the first half where people presented themselves. (will need to watch the rest later.) Glad to hear that both Jimmy and Maryana highlighted open source as a prerequisite for using it in production, but surprised about the phrase that is good when used on real users, as if the experiments are not on them.
10:30 Let’s Connect Learning Clinic: Managing difficult conversations as Wikimedia leaders in remote communications - not what I expected, but learned the basics of Non-Violent Communication. Well-run session.
During lunch, answered a survey and scored a pair of Wikipedia socks
12:15 Wikimaps User Group meetup and OpenStreetMap birthday party - frustratingly few were frustrated with maps needing to be clicked before they get interactive. Later it seems like my question wasn't clear enough, because some who read the notes then agreed.
13:30 Crowdsourcing Wikimedia positions on AI and the impact on the platforms (eventyay) - left early as I didn't feel I could contribute to the post-it session constructively
Had a chat with User:TuukkaH about search and Wikidata. Perhaps it is possible to make it more efficient by using a Wikidata query that uses the MediaWiki API and thereby only doing one (big) request.
Had a chat with User:Samwalton9 (WMF), showing him the Swedish w:sv:Wikpedia:Senaste ändringar/EventStreams that I (and others) use for patrolling.
Had a chat with User:IFried (WMF), showing her the mainpage analysis tool and then talked about WikiProjects and events in general. Getting events shown across Wikis will be a huge win.
15:30 Lightning talks showcase 2 (eventyay)
- ~~Missed the first talk, want to see that later.~~ Good overview of the organizer lab. Makes me even more eager to go to WikiLearn and indulge in the courses.
- "Menstrual justice and Wikimedia" Lucy Moore (Lajmmoore) - Nice call to action.
- "Quality of Male and Female Medical Content on English-Language Wikipedia: A Quantitative Content Analysis" Nuša Farič - I was positively surprised that it was not a bias towards male content!
- "‘A Wiki Minute’ videos: A Wikimedia 101 series and how you can use them" Lucas Pasqual - videos in c:Category:A Wiki Minute (English, 16:9), got inspired to add new Swedish talk overs on at least some of them.
17:00 Wikidata WikiProject Biodiversity & iNaturalist meetup - Idea of making a Listeria page that lists new species so that it is easier for people to fill the new gaps. One problem is that there is also a gap of getting them into Wikidata. Next year, we should both do a walk besides the blitz, and have an upload / editing session.
17.45 Poster session:
- File:Climate policy in Wikidata.pdf - this one sparked most interesting discussions. One Japanese user was inspired to look at their laws.
- File:Govdirectory-add-your-country-poster.pdf - managed to poke both Danish and Philippine users to go find good sources for state agencies.

Saturday

10:00 WikiOutdoor Training - very different from what I thought it would be. Instead of being general about outdoor activities, it was about one very specific type of expedition with drones and how to do training for that. I suggested that they also do the upload as a collaborative social event to avoid people putting it off and get large backlogs.
10:30 Future of Wikimania - great that there will be a continuous effort to make the remote participation in focus.
11:15 Equitable hybrid approaches for all Wikimedia events - Very nice advice from Mike, not much more to say than just doing them. (Except for the leniency towards proprietary software.) Made me inspired to volunteer for helping out with the remote parts for 2025.
12:15 Sustainable Development meetup - this did not turn out how I expected. Perhaps we need a climate anxiety café as well where people can vent.
13:30 The Future of the Wikipedian in Residence Position - well presented, but felt a bit American to me. However, most parts was good inspiration and advice.
14:15 WMF Future Audiences experiments: Exploring the future of free knowledge - gave me the idea that an onwiki chat assistant should only give answers like "I think the answer is here" with a link to the place where the LLM thinks is where the information is (if it can't point anywhere, it would say "I don't think the answer is on Wikipedia yet, this is best I could find and point to a general article on the topic.
15:00 Record podcast about free software in the movement. We were a bit stressed due to misunderstanding on when to start and then a guard didn't like where we recorded, so we'll have to see if it is useful.
15:30 Changemaker's Toolkit - demonstrator of introductory materials for advocacy - the course might be something useful for my work (also, there might be other courses on WikiLearn I should do to get the certificate)
16:15 Impact Visualizer: a new tool to explore how a collection of articles develops over time - this tool was so cool! I will try experementing with it soon. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to support Swedish - reported
17:00 Closing ceremony + closing party - left early as there was no place to eat safely.

After Wikimania

Watched at home

What tools you can use to fill Structure Data on Commons files - Fast paced inspirational presentation! Some gaps in the audio, but mostly comprehensible. I will try which of these tools are easily used on a mobile as I am still searching for something that is not feeling like a chore, but as fun and easy as desktop feels.
Wikidata Query Service - the way forward for getting the most out of Wikimedia's knowledge graph - Interesting talk and cool to see Govdirectory mentioned!
Charts, the successor of Graphs: A secure and extensible tool for data visualization - this is so promising! The plan is to have the charts themselves be defined and translatable on Commons, and that one just include them in any project. This will be huge for wikis who lack contributors with good graphing skills. And also great that it will be deployed as soon as later this year! A question about the referencing in the end also speaks to adding structured data for the data namespace on Commons.
Community Configuration: Shaping On-Wiki Functionality Together - opens up for interesting opportunities. Besides the obvious values tuning, it also opens up to other localizations. I wrote an idea about local celebration logos.
Revision quality algorithms: a subjective view - this was inspirational. I would love to see a similar bot on Swedish Wikipedia. Even if we wouldn't reach as high automation, getting rid of the most blatant vandalism within a minute 24/7 would be both good for reputation and discouraging for vandals.
A brand new citation option – What does this mean for citation templates? - this cannot arrive fast enough! Really good and will make referencing much easier!
State of WikiFunctions - good overview. The timeline looks promising, I sure hope it holds.
Wikipedia and public television - a match made in heaven? - Made me wonder if the map at 22:05 could be made through #Wikidata. And it sort of can, but one has to click the dots to see the logo (and it seems to be a lot of missing data): https://w.wiki/BCSJ It was also interesting the project is trying to identify parts of the content related to climate change from the Thomson Reuters Foundation's YouTube channel context_news that whole, or in parts, could be suitable for the wikis, this could be something for Wikimedians for Sustainable Development to help out with.
Wikimedia and Public AI: a tale of two cultural technologies - gave me more questions than answers about the topic.
10 Research Findings and How You Can Use Them in Your Work
Hearing the Unheard: Bridging the Multimedia Gap with Audio on Wikipedia - good that more people are talking about audio. Weird that neither the speaker nor one asking a question knew about m:Wikispeech.

Still to watch

Learn from each other with linked data – We're developing a Wikibase instance for the Wikimedia movement's activities
Introducing the Citation Watchlist

Tips & Tricks for Programs & Events Dashboard

How can we do content campaigns better?