Wikimania 2013 Report/Peter Coombe

Attending Wikimania 2013 was a very valuable experience for me. I would like to thank Wikimedia UK for giving me this opportunity, and for the smooth organisation of our trip.

Chapters village

The UK stand in the Chapters Village was consistently popular, and I met many attendees of all nationalities who were interested in the chapter's work and experiences (as well as the free biscuits!). We handed out numerous copies of the Annual Report, and people seemed very impressed by its professionalism and content. There were a lot of questions about the chapter's past and future activities, and many people expressed their excitement about Wikimania in London next year.

The Village was also a great opportunity to meet volunteers and staff from other chapters, especially those I haven't had much interaction with before, and find out more about what they were doing. Things I remember standing out as particularly interesting were the French chapter's Projet Phoebus, and how the German chapter is driving the development of Wikidata. The latter has certainly reinforced my belief that Wikimedia UK should be doing more to help technical development.

Fundraising

Between being selected for a WMUK scholarship to Wikimania 2013 and attending, I was hired by the Wikimania Foundation's fundraising department. Therefore there was inevitably a certain amount of time at Wikimania dedicated to my new "day job". However aspects of this will hopefully be beneficial to the chapter; for example we had discussions (along with Wikimedia Germany and Wikimedia CH) about how to better inform donors to the Foundation about their local chapters, and whether it will be possible to share donor information.

Wikimania 2014

This was my first time meeting Ed Saperia and James Knight from the Wikimania 2014 organising team, and it was exciting to hear more about what they have planned. We talked about communication, the expectations of the community, and what can be done to help. I have moved to London in the past month, so hope to be getting more involved in the preparations for this.

Sessions

From the outset one of my main interests at the conference was the VisualEditor, since this is probably the Foundation's largest ongoing project and has the potential for a huge impact on Wikipedia and other sites. It had also been a topic of heated debate in the community. Therefore I attended several sessions and workshops related to this. It was enlightening to learn more about how the VisualEditor, and it's backend "Parsoid" works; until Wikimania I was unaware of many of the technical challenges that had been overcome. Despite that I was pleasantly surprised in the "Extending the VisualEditor" talk how easy it is to write plugins for. Although not a developer myself, I was inspired by the session and have been working on some plugins to improve documentation (unfortunately this has become a lower priority now that the VisualEditor is once again disabled by default).

I also helped out with the IdeaLab Brainstorm session organised by Siko Bouterse (WMF's Head of Individual Engagement Grants). The aim of this was to bring together people from acoss the movement to share their ideas, and hopefully find someone who could help put them into action. Another goal was to raise awareness of the various grant programs available: something I had personally benefited from in the past and was therefore in a good position to explain. It was a successful session, with many attendees and many connections made.

Other sessions I particularly appreciated:

Community communications - how do we talk to a hundred thousand people?

Andrew Gray had a lot of insights into how fragmented the community's communications have become, and some possible ways to address that. His talk was followed by much interesting discussion with members of the audience.

From the streets to the wikis, onboarding newbies

This had been an important aspect of my work on help pages, and it was very interesting to hear more about the approaches that Benoît Evellin and Wikimedia France had tried in their project.

Wiki Loves Public Art

Whilst I was well aware of Wiki Loves Monuments, and involved in the early attempts to organise it in the UK, I had previously heard little about this related project. It seems to have been a great success in the countries where it took place.

Random encounters

Perhaps the most valuable part of Wikimania is all the people you have a chance to talk to in real life, often for the first time. Listing them all would be impossible. It was particularly good to meet and get to know Alastair McCapra and Saad Choudri from the Board. I also got to talk more with Martin Poulter about his work with Jisc and academia, something which I was aware was happening but didn't know many of the details.

Adam Cuerden and I had many productive conversations, including about his work in image restoration and my work on help pages. We also talked much about the VisualEditor, and the technical and community issues surrounding it.

I also enjoyed talking to Sumana Harihareswara about her work for the Foundation on supporting the Wikimedia and MediaWiki technical communities, and attempts to address the gender gap.