Hi, this is Diego, User:Poco a poco. I will attend in person Wikimania 2023 thank to a scholarship from Wikimedia Germany (WMDE), thank you guys for helping me to be here! Furthermore I am also a member of WMES, WMAT and CPUG.

Accomodation

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I'm staying in the Citadines Rochor Hotel at 2 Serangoon Road, Little India.

Venue

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Map

Maps, location here: 2023:Venue

Program details

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Raw submissions can be found here:

Schedule

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If you are looking for me, some hints were you can find me:

Tuesday, Aug 15th

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Arriving late with a flight from Dubai and landing in Singapore at 9:15 pm. So no big plans for this day, just going to the hotel and hoping to get some sleep.

Wednesday, Aug 16th

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Program
Beginn End Event Location Comments
09:00 10:00 WELCOME TO SINGAPORE ORIENTATION Plenary Hall, Halls 401/402 It was helpful to hear about this general information live within the Wikimania context instead of getting a flyer per email.
10:00 11:00 Portable Museum and low-cost digitization with mobile phones for GLAM collections Plenary Hall, Halls 401/402 It was interesting to understand what our colleaguese are doing in Brazil and also the (euphoric) way they were talking about it. With an invest of just 1500$ they procured a portable set of tools which they can put within a backpack and get decent quality images everywhere they go. Something that probably many other chapters with limited ressources can learn from.
11:00 11:15 MORNING BREAK -
11:15 13:15 Communication skills for collaborative leadership Room 324 This session was different, we talked about missunderstandings and conflicts and how catastrophic they can becomee for the project. The use case about a new editor with a lot of dedication that was willing to start a new project vs an established organisation (chapter) that "didn't support it" and all this derived in poor results for different parallel initiatives, is in fact something which is happening in the movement. We were encouraged to look for solutions to avoid and solve this kind of situations.
13:15 14:15 LUNCH BREAK -
14:15 16:30 Wikimedia Commons Basics Workshop Room 310 I'm an experienced Wikimedia Commons user, and that's why I went there. I was curious how Mike (Mike Dickison, User:Giantflightlessbirds) would introduce unexperienced users into Commons. What kind of information did he considered to be relevant, and which not. What are the main challenges of newbies and the most important use cases. Mike's speech was really interesting even for somebody who mostly had seen everything explained there. I just missed a few words about FOP and encourage newbies more about the fact that we just don't want everything they photograph but rather a selection (the best) out of it. And yes, many people refine categories but that taks would be impossible if the uploaders wouldn't put effort here.
16:30 17:00 ASSEMBLE TO OPENING CEREMONY Plenary Hall, Halls 401/402
17:00 19:00 Wikimania 2023 Formal Opening Ceremony. Wikimedian of the Year 2023 Plenary Hall, Halls 401/402 There was a nice performance a the beginning of the ceremony. The ceremony was though mostly dedicated to the Wikimedian of the Year in different categories and offered also the possibility to bring on stage those winners of the last years who could only been awarded virtually. To me it isn't really clear who is proposed and how the decission making process looks like, but those awarded were definitely dedicating lots of time and effort in the project. I can though think of many other users who also do and are probably low-profile.
19:00 - Dinner at Suntec

Thursday, Aug 17th

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Program
Beginn End Event Location Comments
10:00 11:00 AI advancements and the Wikimedia projects Room 309 A topic that is really interesting to me as I have no clear picture what path the project is taking when it comes to AI. They stressed many times that they are working on AI on a multilanguage approach, as results of AI depends on the language. English providing usually better results to other (also major) languages. The WMF is trying to put the focus on those tasks taking most time of the volunteers, which are usually maintenance tasks. The discussion dealt also often with legal issues as attribution is a tricky topic when AI is involved. AI does not copy a text from an author and offers it but takes that text and many others to provide an answer. It was also shocking to me to here that since AI is playing a bigger role many others are not willing anymore to offer their work for comercial use.
11:00 11:15 MONING BREAK -
11:15 12:15 ChatGPT vs. WikiGPT: Challenges and Opportunities in harnessing generative AI for Wikimedia Projects Plenary Hall, Halls 401/402 In this session we learned again that there is a huge gap between languages like appointed out in the session before.
12:15 12:45 State of machine learning on the Wikimedia projects Plenary Hall, Halls 401/402 I found out that there is a lot of different machines behind the translation tool. One is better in western languages, another in asian languages. Also the likelihood that an article created using the translation tool is deleted is much lower than one article created from scratch. Newbies also get AI proposal for adding wikilinks to other articles. An easy task to start with that helps to retain those editors.
12:45 14:15 LUNCH BREAK -
14:15 14:25 Kulturbotschafterinnen und -Kulturbotschafter, a GLAM-approach in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (DACH) Room 324 Rainer's talk was good to learn what a Kulturbotschafter (cultural embassdor) is and what isn't. There are in fact a bunch of prerequisites, so not something for everybody.
14:25 14:45 Creative uses of Wikimedia Commons for a better understanding of heritage! Room 324 Sound mapping was indeed something know to me. Recording what goes one in a a building does indeed provide additional information about the building.
14:45 15:15 “noGLAMor” Room 324 To be honest, I didn't take much from this talk. I miss an introduction and I cannot recommend either to have a hybrid session with the atendees in a room and the speaker online.
15:15 15:30 FIRST AFTERNOON BREAK -
15:30 16:30 Building capacity: designing a train the trainer programme for your affiliate or community group Room 324 Sarah Thomas shared her experiences in WMUK about the training of trainers. She presented a method to achieve better results for any event depending on the public, the trainees skills and so on.
16:30 16:45 SECOND AFTERNOON BREAK -
16:45 17:00 WIKIMANIA 2023 GROUP PHOTO Plenary Hall, Halls 401/402
17:00 19:00 POSTER SESSION AT THE EXPO SPACE Plenary Hall, Halls 401/402

Friday, Aug 18th

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Program
Beginn End Event Location Comments
09:00 10:00 MEETUPS -
10:00 10:10 Detailed dimensions of History JarrahTree GLAM, Heritage and Culture Room 326
10:10 10:30 The whole GLAM package: a workflow for turning the richness of GLAM knowledge and collections into great wiki contribution Room 326 The NZ colleagues gave us a brief overview of what they do in the NZ national museum. It was good to learn that they benefit from the GLAM work done by others and encourage others to do the same. Their advice was to stay focused, keep the whole picture and stress the planning phase.
10:30 11:00 Community Archives in Singapore My Community Room 326 Increadible what a small group of people can arrange in a NGO organisation. Similarly to WP it is a proof how a strong purpose can boost participation and dedication to achieve high targets. These guys even went door-by-door to collect material and foster participation. I also learned for the first time about Wikibase Cloud, an initiave of WMDE that this guys are using and are happy about.
11:00 11:15 MORNING BREAK -
11:15 11:35 Why tackling climate change needs open science and culture Room 326 Key message: scientific work is based on scientific work done before, so that's why it's important
11:35 12:05 Wikitongues: Preserving Language Diversity and Empowering Communities through Language Documentation Room 326 Unexpected to find a user group with such a wide range of work field. I'm curious to see their toolkit to revitalize any language. Sad fsct: one language is lost every 2 weeks (out of 7000).
12:05 12:35 West African Media Literacy Project Room 326
12:35 12:45 Commons Photographers User Group : Programs & Initiatives Room 326
12:45 14:15 LUNCH BREAK & MEETUPS -
14:15 14:45 Scaling Wikidata Query Service - unlimited access to all the world’s knowledge for everyone is hard Room 326 700k edits per day on Wikidata, 5000 queries/minute and a growing data are big challenges (time outs, backups,...). Blazegraph the platform where the queries are run, has become out of maintance. They are no hoping that also other projects/companies run in a similar problem and a solution pops up.
14:45 15:15 Attributing the sum of all human knowledge: WikiCite discussion Room 326
15:15 15:30 FIRST AFTERNOON BREAK -
15:30 15:50 The Case for NC Commons Room 310 I learned that there is indeed a site supported by the WMF (but not yet an official sister project) that hosts over 1 million media with NC or ND licenses: https://nccommons.org/ It isn't clear why orgnisation and companies opt for a NC license as this does not prevent a second private company to use it. The NC terms is ambiguous.
15:50 16:10 How to free copyrighted media for Wikimedia Room 310 I was rather expecting arguments to talk with institutions or ompanoes to convince them to release content with a free license but it was rather a HowTo in the upload wizard of Commons. At least there was one slides with thoughts and ideas, but I couldn't take much out of it.
16:10 16:30 Add your country to the Wikidata Govdirectory Room 310 First contact with a wikiproject within Wikidata. In this case for completing and improviding gov data in Wikidata for e.g. nice inboxes in country Wikipedia articles.
16:30 17:00 SECOND AFTERNOON BREAK -
17:00 18:00 Multiple 5 minute sessions in Spanish and English Plenary Hall, Halls 401/402
18:00 - Photowalk Depart from Suntec, meet on concourse level 3, at the Wiki Loves Living Heritage, Singapore photographs

Saturday, Aug 19th

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Program
Beginn End Event Location Comments
10:00 11:00 The participation at future Wikimania Plenary Hall, Halls 401/402 Why Wikimania? Networking, meeting people in person, getting a higher commitment into the movement for those attending. We also need a good mixture of experienced people and not so experienced people (newbies)
11:00 11:15 MORNING BREAK -
11:15 11:35 Wiki Loves Earth International - 10 years of experience Room 311 This session provided a lot of data about what WLE is, what countries are participating and so on. There was not much new to me but still good ho hear.
11:35 11:55 Wiki Loves in numbers Room 311 Lodevijk Good to see that we are digging into the stats to understand why e.g. some countries are having a higher retention rate so the question is why, understanding that would be great for other countries or the movement.
12:05 12:25 Ideas for Wiki Loves Monuments: local contests, partnerships and usability Room 311 I learned that in Italy they don't organize WLM at national level but at regional level in so called local contests (12 different contests). In this way they involve local authorities, photography clubs and partners and also target different culture, which varies from one region to the next one. In this way they could booster participation in the region. It makes sense and they have proven it. In the second part of the talk they showed the app that has been launched officially in 2021.
12:25 12:45 Wiki Loves Monuments organizers: Q&A Room 311
12:45 14:15 LUNCH BREAK -
14:15 14:55 Wiki Loves SDC – making cultural heritage photos more accessible together Room 310 Alicia showed a bunch of tools in order to add structured data to media on Commons so that machines can understand what is depicted on an image and so provide results for searches.
14:55 15:15 Wiki Loves Folklore - Five years of global campaign Room 310 We had some very general information about the contest, the required licenses,... nothing new here, that I didn't know.
15:15 15:30 FIRST AFTERNOON BREAK -
15:30 15:40 Wiki Loves Campaigns: When, Why and How? Room 310 Again a very general view of WL something. I at least learned that there is a bunch of other contests I wasn't aware of.
15:40 16:00 How to use a thematic campaign to boost your affiliate's reach: the case of Wiki Loves Música Portuguesa Room 310
16:00 16:30 GLAM Wiki Conference 2023: Help us build a roadmap for GLAM Wiki! Room 310 It didn't take place
16:30 16:45 ASSEMBLE TO CLOSING CEREMONY Plenary Hall, Halls 401/402
16:45 19:00 WIKIMANIA 2023 CLOSING CEREMONY, HANDOVER TO WIKIMANIA 2024 Plenary Hall, Halls 401/402
19:00 - Dinner and closing party Gardens by the Bay

Sunday, Aug 20th

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Wikimania 2023 is over :( I'm leaving from Singapur at 10:40 am