Wikimania 2013 Report/Adam Cuerden

This was my first Wikimania, and really helped to reengage me with Wikipedia. I had been feeling a little disconnected - online communication can only go so far, but being able to be there in person, meet the developers, get excited about what they were doing, and - for the first time ever - talk with someone else who shares my passion for restoration - my main Wikipedia focus; Approximately 3 to 5% of all Featured Pictures on English Wikipedia were restored by me; and I'm currently at about 1.5% of all English Wikipedia Featured Pictures being restorations I have done in the last year. (See User:Adam Cuerden. I must say that coming to Hong Kong highly encouraged me to put that bit more effort in, and this has shown I can do a lot more next year, despite the occasional hiatus due to illness and hardware issues.

I think the biggest surprise was being able to hear from the developers themselves what they were planning. I was an opponent of VisualEditor before Wikimania, but, being able to hear the developers talk about it, and understanding the details of the technical achievements made not only made it clear that VisualEditor's strengths were larger than I thought, but that the seemingly-inexplicable bugs and issues were completely explicable: If that was how it was being done (and given that made a lot of sense as a way to do it), then the bugs and slightly clunky interface were not an indication of problems - they were the natural result of software that had an incredibly good backend (with a few minor issues) that just needed to work on the user interface part some more.

Chapters Village

I really liked the Chapters Village. It was a friendly, well-organised place to meet up with many interesting Wikipedians. I enjoyed helping out with the tea party, and talking to Wikipedians throughout the world.

Wikimania 2014?

Oh, definitely.