2021 talk:Organizers

Question

Is this page okay for me to use to ask a question? If so, my question is very basic; what do i need to do to register, and to also present some ideas? I appreciate any help. thanks! --Sm8900 (talk) 13:32, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

I absolutely don't know. --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 09:56, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

@Sm8900: For registration, please see 2021:Registration. Submissions for the program have been closed, but there will be an unconference where you may be able to present some ideas. Effeietsanders (talk) 23:58, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

2021 program empty but ticket available

I see the official Wikimania 2021 program is empty. So it seems we have tickets (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wikimania-2021-tickets-161884957265) but no conference. Is this.. a feature?

I find it difficult to promote this conference to friends if there is nothing to explore. --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 09:50, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

@Valerio Bozzolan: I don't see tickets anywhere though (2021:Registration says "coming soon")? Leaderboard (talk) 10:01, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

@Leaderboard: I've put it above now :) --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 10:02, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

@Valerio Bozzolan: We thought it would be helpful to not wait with registration until the program is completed. We're working on it. The program will eventually be announced on 2021:Program. Effeietsanders (talk) 00:00, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

Suggestions about migrating from Eventbrite

I would like to urge the organizers not to adopt Evenbrite (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wikimania-2021-tickets-161884957265). Instead of Eventbrite I suggest an easy-peasy list of signatures on a wiki to express interest, or meta:LimeSurvey, or something else respecting users' freedoms (like "Pretix" or "Attendize" or "Eventyay" I think - found right now using my favorite search engine querying "Eventbrite open source").

Eventbrite causes nice browsers ringing like a fire alam because of these proprietary third-party dependencies in Eventbrite:

• google-analytics.com
• facebook.com
• facebook.net
• fbcdn.net
• google.com
• googletagmanager.com
• gstatic.com
• cloudfront.net
• fastly.net
• datadoghq-browser-agent.com
• amazonaws.com
• (some more)

Nerd tip: to discover these issues, just install LibreJS or uBlock Origin in Mozilla Firefox or Chromium.

The world is watching us and Eventbrite would partially ruin some of our efforts. Think about this:

Wikipedia respects our privacy and our digital rights by default, even for people who don't care about any of these things.

This can be reproduced of course :) --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 09:51, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

Also, note that in in this talk page the kind User:Hogü-456 did the same similar feedback a week before this link to Eventbrite came out. --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 10:13, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

Any other solution would have been better than a commercial events portal...--Ferdi2005 (talk) 11:27, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

Please find another solution. I think it is not good to use such a external website like eventbrite. I agree with the idea that the registration is possible through entering a signature to a list. If you dont want to make the link to the event site public then you can send the people who registered an wikimail or aks them to send an email to a address to send them the link if they dont have added an email to their user account. Otherwise there are also people who can help by creating a form and so I think as the Wikimedia projects are Community projects please read feedback. It is not good that know one of the organizers anwered after I wrote my thoughts about registration and the tool used for it.--Hogü-456 (talk) 21:49, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

@Hogü-456: Wikimania organizers have been using Eventbrite for quite some years now (normally the registration also includes a financial transaction). For consistent workflows, this was easiest to implement. This is a great suggestion to bring up with organizers for next year and perhaps volunteer to implement whatever solution you're proposing, but at this point (or a few weeks ago, for that matter), it's too last minute to change this kind of platform decisions. Effeietsanders (talk) 00:03, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

@Effeietsanders: I understand Eventbrite.com was adopted in the past to simplify economic transactions but Wikimania 2021 will be gratis (AFAIK). That's why I propose to immediately close Eventbrite registration and adopt a signature list on a wiki instead, or/and any other above proposed solution. We cannot propose to register on Eventbrite.com; send our data to Google Facebook and Amazon or any other w:Big Tech; execute proprietary JavaScript on our devices; link nickname←→real name; ...; in order to join Wikimania 2021 online. That's a bug. If we need to design a Wikimedian online conference, we cannot design it against the Free software and open source movements or against WMF technological statement without any strong reason. I would like to help the organizers in any way and with all my energies to fix this and avoid any possible similar bug and stay pro-active with users like User:Hogü-456 who just deserve freedom and privacy as default, here, now. --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 22:28, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

I don't understand why we need to register at all this year. But if we do, I would have preferred a platform like Eventyay that is open source. Ainali (talk) 10:45, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

Yup. With that ↑ Wikimania 2021 has 4+ valid libre solutions. I am available to triage the most useful solution to cover this use case, because otherwise I will not be able to participate if there is only Eventbrite :( --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 14:04, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

How to help?

I can't explain to people how to help in this online conference. Yup, most of us have filled out three nice questionnaires, received many "thanks for filling in", kind words from kind people (thank you Elfego!) but I do not understand if these people have already been involved or how to at least passively watch their discussions.

In Italy we lock future popes in a room (with some food I hope) and wait for a while until a decision is taken without any outside influence. Please don't make Wikimania that way :^) --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 09:51, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

Wikimania 2021 isnt that way, they arent feeding us and there will be no purple smoke when consensus is reached. Seriously, we have reached out for volunteers to help with the submission reviews and there will be more tasks where volunteers will be needed to support the event that COT will reach out to those who answered the three questions. Gnangarra (talk) 03:27, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

As written in the chat [1] I would suggest the COT to write their directions somewhere (on the wiki?) more often and before they were irrevocably final. Also, I suggest to avoid attitudes like "we have everything under control; we will involve others when we will know what skills are missing; we will ask for help when we will need help; dear participant read here our decisions; sorry do not help on this: it's a final decision, too late; ecc." as this is not the desirable approach :) --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 14:39, 16 July 2021 (UTC)

Event platform and accessibility

Hello. What online platform is the event being hosted on? I am asking as I have some specific accessibility requirements that I would like to discuss with the organisers before registering to attend the event. I would prefer not to disclose some aspects of these requirements in public (and would expect the organisers to respect that privacy request). Having said that, I see that over on the 2021:Submissions/Help desk page, there is mention of audio translations and subtitles. See in particular the replies here and here by User:Gnangarra, about audio translations and subtitles (saying that the WMF are funding audio translations but asking event participants to create their own subtitles for their presentations).

Some background might help: over the past year I have learnt a lot about how some online live (and pre-recorded) events are very accessible for those who need subtitles (known as 'closed captions' in the USA and Canada, I think), and some are shockingly bad. Can something be said please about how accessible Wikimania will be in that regard, and what funding can/has been allocated to that?

FWIW, the 'gold standard' for live events (which tend to be impossible to follow online for those with accessibility requirements needing accurate subtitles) is stenography (person typing out the words as they are spoken) which can be very expensive, but the cheaper option of automated captions for online events tend to produce hilarious and depressingly bad results. If the speaker speaks clearly you think, 'oh that is really good', but in practice as soon as obscure jargon is used, the audio quality drops, a strong accent arrives, or something else, the automated captions start to produce gibberish (which is incredibly distracting when trying to listen to what is being said). The same applies to captioning for pre-recorded events. It is actually still very expensive to produce accurate captions for pre-recorded material, and time-consuming as well. While the original producers of the material are sometimes best placed to produce the captions, the WMF should really be funding professional level stenography and accurate audio transcription for the whole event (ideally recording at least the audio so corrections can be made afterwards).

Please don't get sucked into the myth that machines can do this to the level of accuracy needed for proper accessibility (they can be trained, and are improving, but are not there yet). An analogy can be made with accessibility for blind people for written text, or for translation from one language to another. You would not accept an error rate of 5-10% there (e.g. 1 in 10 words on a page missing or wrong), you would expect close to 100% accuracy. The same should apply to audio transcriptions. The difference between watching an accurately captioned event (easy to follow) and one that has even a small error rate (incredibly distracting) is difficult to appreciate until you have experienced it yourself.

If this is already covered in the help documentation, please point me there (I was unable to find anything in the FAQ or elsewhere). Thanks. Carcharoth (talk) 07:53, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

@Carcharoth: we two of the event track will have active live translations between, English, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Arabic, and Mandarin, presentations have been selected to maximize this resource. The additional spaces will be without translation, we ask that presentations in those spaces be translated with English captions when prerecorded. If you have further questions about personal support needs please fell free to email me directly or to email the VRT(former OTRS) wikimania-scholarships at wikimedia dot org, Gnangarra (talk) 03:21, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

Mark for translation

Hello I have changed the About Wikimania page after at this page it was mentioned that the regstration has not yet opened. After the registration is open now I have changed that but I dont know if I have done it correct after the pages were translated into other languages. Can please someone check my edit and mark the page for translation or talk to a person who can do that. --Hogü-456 (talk) 18:53, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

Thank you Gnangarra (talk) 03:28, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

getting the URL for attending an unconference session

I'm helping someone to set up an unconference session. Some of the unconference sessions (organised by WMF staff) include the link to use to participate in the session. How does one obtain this link? I asked on the Unconference Talk page but nobody is answering questions there. Thanks Kerry Raymond (talk) 22:09, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

Remo start/end dates

Currently the Remo page (https://live.remo.co/e/wikimania-2021/register) displays the start date as August 14th, 12:00pm - CEST and the end date as August 14th, 08:30pm - CEST. This seems wrong, as everywhere else it is noted as ending August 17th, and the end date is before the start date, which is unusual Asartea (talk) 13:25, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

2022?

Hi to all. Who is responsible for the rudimentary 2022 Wikimania documentation. What is the timetable for decisions, etc. I have had the namespace created and it awaits those basics. Thanks.  — billinghurst sDrewth 00:50, 11 November 2021 (UTC)