My Wikitinerary: Day 1 at Wikimania DC
In a few hours, the first day of general activities at Wikimania—the official annual conference of Wikimedia Foundation—begins right here in Washington, DC. It is a global conference, in fact this is the first time Wikimania is being held in the United States since 2006, when it was hosted on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This year, it just happens to be outside my front door. What's more, it is being held on the campus of the George Washington University, precisely where I launched this very blog at a (much smaller) conference in March 2009.
So: it's a big day ahead—big weekend, but I have to focus for now. A review of the official schedule reveals an almost overwhelming number of events. After reading through the various panels and presentations, I think I have a pretty good idea of my day ahead, which I'd like to share here now:
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09:00 – 11:10
The only place to be, indeed the only official event at this time, is the opening ceremony, keynote and plenary. Most of the wider media attention that Wikimania generates will be probably be focused on Wikipedia co-founder and unofficial mascot Jimmy Wales on "The State of the Wiki", but I'll be interested to see the opening keynote by Mary Gardiner, an Australian computer programmer who is also a leader in "increasing participation of women in open technology and culture". Wikipedia editors have long skewed heavily toward men, but in recent years more attention has been focused on how to change that. I am a skeptic—Wikipedia is hardly alone in this fact, particularly among technology tactics—but I am also interested in hearing what she says, on this very high-profile stage for such a topic.
11:40 - 13:00
Here the breakout sessions begin, and it is truly a poverty of riches from a Wikipedian perspective; there is too much to possibly take all in. What follows is an estimation of the panels I am likely to check out:
Title: "This is my voice": the motivations of highly active Wikipedians Speaker: Maryana Pinchuk, Steven Walling Category: WikiCulture and Community Description:One of the most common questions I am asked about Wikipedia, and also one of the hardest to answer with anything but anecdotal evidence, is why Wikipedians do what they do. Pinchuk and Walling have interviewed some of the most active Wikipedia editors to study the motives behind why they participate. Intriguingly, their submission includes the following teaser: "Note: after this talk, we will be making a special piece of conference swag available to any interested Wikipedians which will let them show off their own motivation for editing."
Title: Engaging editors on Wikipedia: A roadmap of new features Speaker: Fabrice Florin Category: Technology and Infrastructure Description: This talk will discuss new features on Wikipedia that make it easier to edit and the impact this will have on attracting new editors and retaining current ones. This follows a 20-minute talk so if I leave right after the Pinchuk / Walling's talk and sneak in quietly I can probably catch most of this. At least, I presume this will work. You can never really tell how a conference will work until one arrives.
14:00 - 15:20
Title: A talk page is a broken message wall: Building a more efficient communication Speaker: Danny Horn, Tomasz Odrobny Category: WikiCulture and Community Description: These days, I spend more time on Wikipedia's discussion pages than I do editing the encyclopedia itself, so I am extremely familiar with how these pages work—and how they don't. This presentation will demonstrate a new talk feature that will make it easier to track conversations you are interested in without receiving watchlist notifications about topics you don't actually care about. Interesting! Although Wikipedia has put much more public attention on a forthcoming WYSIWYG editor, I think this could actually be a bigger deal. If it works, of course. The above talk is followed by another one that I find fascinating for exploring the insider-outsider dynamic around Wikipedia, featuring the presenters from the first breakout session:
Title: Welcome to Wikipedia, now please go away? improving how we communicate with new editors Speaker: Steven Walling, Maryana Pinchuk Category: WikiCulture and Community Description: On Wikipedia, veteran editors run across the same kind of activity by new editors so often that they have developed a deep reserve of templated messages—some friendly, many unfriendly. According to the session's topic page, "On English Wikipedia and many other projects, automated warnings and welcomes currently make up about 80% of first messages to new editors." Wow. I had not thought about it before, but it makes complete sense. I'll be curious to see where the state-of-the-art thinking is on this topic.
15:40 - 17:00
For the final breakout session, there is one long sustained discussion of Wikidata that I am awfully tempted to spend my time at, but there is another talk that I find interesting within this period:
Title: How Wikidata fits into the global web of data; Wikidata implementation and integration; Wikidata as a platform Speaker: Denny Vrandečić; Daniel Kinzler; Jeroen De Dauw Category: Technology and Infrastructure Description: What is Wikidata? Indeed, what is it precisely. It is only the most ambitious new Wikimedia Foundation project to launch in recent years. As the first panel description says: "Wikidata's goal is to move the rich structured data currently encoded in Wikipedia templates into a central repository, which will be available for re-use on all Wikimedia projects, but also to 3rd party services. We will introduce what Wikidata aims to do and how: centralizing language links, centralizing data for the infoboxes, and all of that in the first new Wikimedia project since 2006." Yeah, that's not too ambitious. The first talk appears to be more of an overview and the two following it seem to be more technical. Location: Grand Ballroom Length: Each talk is 25 minutes
Title: Wikimedia relations with government, lobbying and public relations Speaker: James Forrester, Philippe Beaudette Category: Wikis and the Public Sector Description: If Wikidata gets too technical for me, I'll be heading over to this panel. In my professional life public relations is one of my primary activities, often involving Wikipedia—as I have written about before—and so I will be very interested to see where this discussion goes. If there is any presentation where I am likely to participate, this may be it, depending on where the discussion goes. Why not come find out?
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And that is the end of the official activities for the day. More events stretch into the evening, but I won't be at them. Tonight, Roger Waters brings The Wall to the Verizon Center, which I will be seeing with a friend from high school and college in town just for this event. Actually, we'll be seeing this if StubHub and FedEx combine to deliver these tickets during the day today, which they have so far been rather slow about.
I know... this has nothing to do with Wikipedia. But it's highly relevant to my day ahead at Wikimania. Fingers crossed everything works out! Meantime, I will be tweeting the day's activities from my @thewikipedian Twitter account, so please follow! And if all goes well I will post tomorrow's wikitinerary here soon.