Wikimania 2013 Report/Andrew Gray

I attended Wikimania 2013 on a partial scholarship funded by Wikimedia UK. This covered the cost of flights from the UK to Hong Kong (around £750); other expenses were covered out of pocket. I had previously attended the 2010 (Gdansk) and 2011 (Haifa) conferences at my own expense. I had not attended the 2012 (Washington) Wikimania, which came while I was working as Wikipedian in Residence at the British Library, but did organise and attend the April 2013 GLAM-Wiki conference in London.

This was the first Wikimania at which I had presented rather than simply attended. I originally submitted a proposal for a paper discussing the researcher engagement work done by the AHRC/British Library project [link], and later submitted a second proposal for a paper discussing the issues of disseminating information among the community in the English Wikpedia and in the Wikimedia movement more generally. Both were eventually accepted (to my surprise). I was also recruited later for a panel discussing the various Wikipedia/Wikidata authority control projects, making a total of three sessions during the conference.

Overall, I was very impressed by the organisation and the calibre of the talks, especially from the perspective of having put together a smaller conference a few months earlier. A number of small issues were problematic, but did not affect my general impression.

Notes on sessions attended

As often happens at large conferences, the plenary sessions were less interesting than many of the secondary talks. This was the first Wikimania where I'd been able to attend the pre-conference days. In particular, the pre-conference session on multimedia developments was a valuable discussion, both for community members and for the design staff.

Friday's Wikimedia Chapter Projects talk was particularly interesting - it's very easy to lose track of programs in other countries, and I was very pleased to be able to reuse some of these as examples in a conference presentation to European national libraries the following month.

However, the most valuable part was Saturday's morning session on Flow and messaging/discussions, which helped clarify a lot of ambiguity about the future plans for Flow, and an excellent talk in the afternoon looking at how Notifications had been put together, and touching on some related WMF editor engagement projects. Both of these are very promising technical projects, and communicating them to the wider community will be critical to making them work well. I am more positive about Flow than I have been about many previous technical projects - the broad thrust of the design is excellent and will be a great help to the smooth running of the projects.

In both the multimedia and Flow talks, it was clear that a substantial number of audience members were markedly more positive and supportive of the projects after the discussion. (Anecdotally, the same happened with the Visual Editor discussions, which I did not attend.) There is a lot of concern and misunderstandings about the scope, intent, and design of these programs, which is understandable, but can often become a very strong force frustrating productive discussion. Sessions like this are very good at addressing those concerns head on and avoiding misunderstanding, but fifty-person seminars in Hong Kong don't scale very well!

This could potentially be a good project for local chapters, finding some way to support community discussions about upcoming major developments in a local off-wiki environment, and mediate that feedback to the development group. How to make this work effectively could be challenging, but (for example) a short talk offered before a community meetup might get interest. There is some experimentation at WMF with videochat roundtables, and again finding ways to support these or to help them scale to larger numbers could be an effective role for chapters.

Notes on sessions presented

Authority Control panel

wm2013:Submissions/Authority_Addicts:_The_New_Frontier_of_Authority_Control_on_Wikidata

I gave a short presentation as part of the introduction to this panel, discussing possible future uses for authority control data and related identifiers in the Wikipedia/Wikidata environment. The panel discussion afterwards was wide-ranging, touching on a number of sister projects

Wikipedia in the Library

wm2013:Submissions/Wikipedia_in_the_Library:_tools_for_researchers (with slides)

This talk immediately followed the authority control panel, and was a short recap of the British Library/AHRC Wikipedian in Residence project followed by an attempt to discuss some of the case studies and lessons learned, particularly as it applied to research projects trying to engage with Wikipedia. It also outlined a newly produced set of guidance documents (see w:WP:AHRC) which aims to introduce researchers to possible models of collaboration, and identify the ways in which they could best work with Wikimedia projects.

This guidance was well-recieved, and I am currently investigating the possibility of producing printed booklet versions with WMUK. Academic research projects are a group we have not reached out to in the past - our focus has been on cultural institutions at one end, and undergraduate or graduate students at the other - but they make up a significant element of the academic community, and often have an explicit goal of public engagement/dissemination which fits very well with our core objectives. There is the potential for a lot of future collaborations here.

Community communications

wm2013:Submissions/Community_communications:_how_do_we_talk_to_a_hundred_thousand_people? (with slides)

This was the most challenging of the papers. What initially had been intended as an overview of different communication methods kept ballooning in complexity, and many of the original issues I had intended to discuss were changed by the development of Flow between the time I proposed the paper and the time I delivered it. In the end, I recapitulated the existing situation (fragmented communications, but done in good faith and generally improving); suggested a rough hierachy of priority and reach of messages and messaging tools; and proposed some future development paths to increase the effectiveness of our messaging without placing a heavier cognitive load on users.

Preparing for this paper involved a number of discussions with community members and WMF staff both before and during Wikimania, which pointed up a number of interesting issues - for example, the odd gap by which there is no simple channel for the WMF/chapters to advertise jobs to the community, despite community background being an benefit for many posts.

I have found it difficult to clear the time to work on it over the past few months, but I am hoping to build on the outcomes of some of these discussions to start reworking some of the English Wikipedia's mass-communication tools (watchlist & geonotices) to build on recent work on Commons.