Following the example of User:Ainali, this is my Wikimania experience. Please add notes if we discussed something or if I have misremembered or misrepresented a session. I've tagged things I need to follow up back in NZ with ▶.
I attended Wikimania 2024 as one of four New Zealand scholarships; mine was awarded only a few weeks out, so there was no possibility of proposing a talk or poster. However the programme was extremely—almost excessively—full as it was.
Met User:Clovermoss at breakfast and was very impressed—and that was before she was awarded Wikipedian of the Year.
GLAM Global Meetup: An all-day affair in a windowless room in the Silesian Museum. Gruelling. Numerous Post-It notes but not entirely clear to what end! Redeemed by an "Idea Auction" at the very end where we could pitch projects and people could bid to help; gained three helpers for the GLAM Wiki Cookbook project. Also agreed to help extend the current European GLAM Wiki online meetups to a different Asia/Australasia compatible time zone.
Met Alice from WMAU for the first time: apply for Australia meetup on 23 November in Adelaide
Met Isla from Open Education Global (one of the Wikimedia Consultants): OEGlobal conference 13–15 November in Brisbane
Hidden Figures: creating a Course Based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE): Very thorough introduction by User:Ambrosia10, marred by some 5-second tape delay issues on the PA.
PMG on structured data editing: no electricity for the first 10 minutes, so talked us through what we could see on our laptops. Once can use Cat-a-lot to select images and run ACDC on them.
Siobhan and Tamsin on the International Botanical Congress. Very thorough workflow, as expected! Great use of poster, handout, guerilla organisation when not on the main programme. The bookmarks they handed out cost $NZ1 each (design plus printing).
Iolanda Pensa WMIT on certifying trainers. Sounded good, but the training materials featured weren't editable/open. See learnwikidata.net, Vanderbilt's short videos. Teaching Wikipedia in the Classroom resource.
Met Jake Orlowitz in person, discussed AI
Met Albin Larsson (still interested in glaciers), who is rewriting Pattypan as a webapp that can handle SDC – keep in touch and offer to help
Gorana Gomaric on the future of GLAM Wiki. An overview. Some of the institutions she deals with have no email or website. AR vs MR (mixed reality) – but AR can't juts be glasses that display Wikipedia!. See Europeana 280 project. How much trust is there in Wikipedia, and how much could we damage it with AI?
MISSED Museums, Media, Data, Genger to have an improptu foyer meeting with Sandra Fauconnier and Michelle van Lanschot to plan making the Global GLAM meeting monthly, alternating with NZ-compatible time zones; every second month in 0800 UTC. Page on Meta, 1 hr planning meeting ahead of time, platform to be decided. I will help with local coordination.
Opening ceremony: 2.5 hours long, brass band, great live Polish cooking. User:Cloverness was announced Wikipedian of the Year! Good chat with Selena about AI over-extension, Polish tourism, and salt mines.
Bring knitting projects to do during keynote speeches!
Open Science keynote panel: One great WMPL board member said lots of inflammatory things about academic publishing.
WikiEdu only supports the USA and Canada so take their survey results with a grain of salt. Cloverness though Wikiclubs might be better thab courses for learning.
Human Rights presentation (went on a little long): Produce a resource hub for digital safety, modules on Learn.wiki (check it out). Learned that some language wikis (German, French, Italian) allow second user accounts – but wasn't sure if this was disclosed or undisclosed. And VPNs can't be used.
Check out Wikimedia and Libraries User Group. Wikimedia + Libraries conference is happening Jan 2025 in Mexico City (double-occupancy rooms and low scholarship funding though)
Teachers' View of Wikipedia in Education: "No gender bias" in survey (but aren't college professors mostly men?) Social sciences and Humanities, mostly university, USA. 90% expanding Wikipedia, not working with media, and only half the teachers had previously edited. Used the sandbox, visual editor – demands extra time to learn editing and to grade. Video tutorials highly requested!
Demonstration of View It!, which works in Wikipedia AND Wikidata, and has good copy/paste features. Will be helpful when adding images to Wikidata.
Demo of new citation tool, an alternative to {sfn} and {rp} for "different details": page numbers, time stamps. BUT it turns out to just be nested sub references of the form:
Smith (2000) blah blah,
p400
pp 402–405
<ref extends="Smith">p400</ref>, with an Extends tab in the Visual Editor. But what happened to "things, not strings"?
Keynote: AI in Wikimedia: Supposedly a panel discussion, but no real discussion between the panelists, and no strong AI critic among them. Tunisian: using AI to create video, podcasts, content. Andrew Lih: RAG (retrieval augmented generation) tools point to actual sources, not made-up ones. Mariana Pinchek (WMF Future Audiences): Compared parsing/navigating existing text with generation – humans needed to determine factuality (but will they, I wondered?). AI could triage and find "peacock language". But: it's not open source, it's biased, and varaiable language support. Jimmy Wales: can support human work with augmented search; we can filter out bad information, but most of society cannot. An Open CC guy: strong sentiment for limiting openness to preserve human rights. Shani Sigilow: We need generative AI literacy!
There were many questions. Question askers were lined up the aisle to take turns at the microphone, but not time was left to actually answer any questions. Mine was: There's been no mention here of the significant decline in public trust when "AI" is added; the enormous environmental costs; the political capture; Big Tech hype about the "AI apocalypse" and the financial bubble; the exact inbuilt biases the Movement has spent years trying to counter; the pollution of the information commons; and the worry shift of many in the Movement from a principled stand with respect to trusted sources, copyright, and openness, to abandoning all this because of "nifty tools".
Euan at Edinburgh: Great example of a university Wikipedian in Residence; argued that universities can't afford NOT to have one. (review slides)
Book outline send to Kamila, Gorana, and Lucy who volunteered to help during the GLAM day.
Crowdsourcing AI: A huge problem with the brainstorming format has been the feebleness of Polish Post-Its, which readily detach from the wall and form drifts like fallen leaves. John Cummings gave a good summary of the "Habsburg AI problem" from excessive inbreeding.
Wikiportraits: a mostly-USA team (including Andrew Lih) photographing events like Sundance , book festivals. Lots of practical tips, just what a talk should be. ▶ Invite one to join the monthly NZ meetup. They use Andrew's WikiList tool for Google Sheets, which includes an ORES score, and Vera's Orator tool (in Toolforge) to see who's missing portraits.
Let's Connect: Basic training connection platform (but wasn't working, so we used a paper-based substitute for the group activity). It seems to provide good scaffolding for organising training sessions. ▶ Get the forms for learner and sharer to use as a basis. ▶ User:PatriHorrillo (Patricia, WM Spain) and User:Mmaua1 (Michael, Kenya) both wanted to learn Wikisource.
INaturalist and Wikimedia meetup: Siobhan launched into a slideshow packed with links – but there was no way to share it, as the post-session meetups did not have an Etherpad. We agreed iNat2Wiki and iNaturalist2Commons both need work.
At the lobby desk there were many (I was told 2000) three-track RAT tests available, with a 1-year expiry (so I grabbed a few).
James Gaunt presented on his Introduction to Wikipedia course offered in WikiLearn – but he wasn't there in person, and the course has not yet run. The course ran to 26,000 words over 69 pages. His advice was to do screen testing first, Frustratingly, the Commons upload screen had already changed, and Wikipedia now has Dark Mode. His uploads were 10 minute videos split up for YouTube BUT these then had advertising added, or uploaded to Commons as WebM BUT had to be tediously converted with HandBrake.
Good breakfast chat with Tamsin about getting OpenRefine to add Wikidata qualifiers, and a possible University of Otago Wikipedian in Residence.
There is a new, much-improved version of Zotero: a good tool to evangelise
Good general chat about AI. We need slogans on stickers: "Knowledge is Human" was Liam Wyatt's coinage. Artisanal knowledge, slow knowledge. Perhaps even staging an intervention or protest with placards. Launch a NoAI.wiki pressure group.
Tool sustainability meetup: the impending graph split in Wikidata to make federated queries for journal articles (a scurrilous rumour said this was being pushed by people who'll soon be working for Elsevier). Which tools could we send volunteers to to make the biggest impact? Andrew's GLAM CSI. Discovered that PetScan used to be CatScan. We need higher standards! Agnostic users don't care where tools live. ToolHub is not sufficient, it's just a database. Selena clearly stated the WMF cannot and will not take over community tools and support them, and it wants use cases for building something new, not just a list of tools.
Final Ceremony: Tamsin popped up on the Cool Tools video (with subtitles). The Wikimedia Orchestra was a lovely idea, and even included a ukulele.
The afterparty was in the cavernous Symphony Orchestra building: cacophonous talking and tiny hors d'ouvres. I bailed and joined the Australians outside, and discussed a possible Pacific Editors project over burgers.
I said goodbye to all on the Sunday and took the 3pm shuttle to Krakow Airport. After much waiting into the evening, the flight had still not left 2 hours after departure, and ended up being cancelled (apparently some safety equipment had been broken, "possibly by the cleaners"). They booked us into the Ibis Styles in Krakow, convenient to nowhere. After waiting at the terminal for an hour for the free shuttle, I took a taxi to the hotel and got to bed at 4 am Monday morning. After four hours sleep, I caught a bus to the airport and was rebooked to Dubai, landing at 11 pm in 33ºC heat and staying overnight again. At least the Dubai Mercure had excellent breakfast: chickpea curry, foule, and rice. Then the long flight to New Zealand, landing on Wednesday afternoon local time, a day later than I'd planned. And this is why attendees from NZ need to allow for three days to get to and from Wikimania!
Museums, Media, Data & Gender: How to Make Images of Women More Visible on Wikimedia? (An impromptu GLAM Wiki Global planning meeting ended up overlapping with this.)
A web2Cit project proposal (see Tamsin's User page for the problems with it)
Reconnect with the kind folks who volunteered to read my book outline
Inspired by James, make short videos of Critter of the Week tasks
Propose a merger of the two iNaturalist tools and create a new, well-designed and -documented one in collaboration with iNaturalist
Meet regularly online with Tamsin to discuss a raft of future projects
The New Zealand delegation was almost entirely masked throughout: one of us had just contracted COVID at a previous conference, and Poland was going through a COVID wave. Although masks (only surgical) and RAT tests were freely available, there were no COVID precautions in practice: many rooms were poorly ventilated and had dangerous levels of CO₂ as tracked on an AraNet 4 monitor (▶ which should be standard issue for all conference rooms), windows did not open, all tea breaks were in a crowded space with no outside access, and although the weather was superb no sessions were scheduled outside. A big change from the 2022 Berlin Summit I attended. On the flight home there were already 8 positive COVID tests in the conference Telegram chat.
