Friday, August 10, 2018

Wikimania 2018: Learnings and Experience


Hello world! After my most successful Wikimania ever, I finally managed to get some time to share my learnings and experience at Wikimania 2018. As usual, I will *try not to* keep the content boring but keep it crisp and informative. So, let's start!

Bridging knowledge gaps: The Ubuntu Way forward

The theme of Wikimania 2018 was, "Bridging knowledge gaps—the ubuntu way forward". Here "ubuntu" doesn't refer to Operating System Ubuntu, but is much broader than that. Ubuntu, as per South African philosophy says, means, "I am because you are." This in itself is quite deep and much of what we can gather from this statement means, "the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity." Since volunteer community-driven projects like Wikipedia follow this vision as well, in my opinion, no better theme than this can exist.

My learnings before pre-conference days

Before the pre-conference, I managed to free some time from hacking and completing my session presentation. Me along with Amir E. Aharoni, Andreasmperu and Olga Viota went to see the penguins at Boulder's Beach. We went via train till Simon's Town and then we walked till Boulder's Beach. On our way, Amir taught us (especially me), my native language, "Hindi". I was surprised that he knew about my language more than me. I never tried to go into the technicalities of Hindi, but he made sure that I know them by the end of our trip. Andreasmperu contributes to Wikidata and Spanish Wikipedia. She enlightened us with Peru, her home country and told us about Peru Wikipedia community and the challenges that the community are facing. Olga, who is from Bolivia, contributes to Spanish Wikipedia. She shared her experiences as well.

Another very informative thing I learnt is about Basque language community. I always thought about the complexity of words in Hindi Wikipedia and whenever I tried to persuade my friends to contribute to Hindi Wikipedia, they became dazzled after a while due to its complexity in sentences. They mentioned it to me, "as if a Hindi scholar wrote this". I discussed the same with Amir and he told me how Basque community has already come up with their own solution to which they named, "Txikipedia" (thanks to Amir again for reminding of it). It is a simplified version of the Basque Language in order to attract high school kids to edit Wikipedia. This initiative is quite brilliant!

My learnings and experience during the pre-conference days

Pre-conference was very much important for me. I had a scheduled Lightning talk and I was also leading a session on volunteer recruitment and engagement with Reem Al-Kashif and Walaa Abdel Manaem. I attended Wikipedia & Education meetup. Nik Skaull explained about South African Education System. He mentioned the diversity in South African Economy and how badly it impacts the education system.

Children belonging to Chronic Poor -> Get Poor High School Education -> Do not go to College

Me, Mina and 2 other Wikipedians sat together after Wikimedia & Education meetup and after a long discussion on Non-Wikipedia Wikimedia Projects, we came up with a list of ideas. They can be accessed here.

I shared a lightning talk on "Using Blogs as a tool to attract people from other open communities". You can access the slides here. In this lightning talk, I shared my experiences in writing blog, what to write, how to share, whom to share etc. The talk went good and people appreciated it. Yay! Listening to other talks on various topics like Gender Gap, Education Programs, Photography etc. gave me a lot of inspiration.

I lead a session on "Non-Wiki Activities: A motivation to edit Wikipedia" in which I shared unique ways to motivate students to edit Wikipedia. This went far more better than my expectations. I won't go deep into details but you can access the slides here and if you ran into some question, please feel free to drop it on my talk page here.

Author: Reem Al-Kashif (She is the best). Shared under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license

My learnings and experience during the main conference

This year, I finally started my journey with Wikidata which I wanted to do from a long time. For this, I attended a 2 hour session by Asaf Bartov and finally learnt how I can contribute to Wikidata. I learnt the basics and then after the session tried implementing complex SPARQL queries on my own. Oh, I just found a new love. It's Wikidata <3.

I also attended a session on "Using artificial intelligence to keep Wikipedia open" by Aaron Halfaker. The session demonstrated how AI is being used at different elements of Wikipedia. Being a AI enthusiast myself, I was very keen in knowing the Machine Learning models being implemented so, I managed to take a photograph of it.

The keynote session by Joy Buolamwini on "The Dangers of Supremely White Data and The Coded Gaze" was one of the best keynotes I have ever been into. She showed the dark side of AI and how billion dollar companies' "production-ready" AI can't even detect the gender of non-white people. I would say, this was one of the best sessions at Wikimania.

I attended a workshop on Scholia tool and the tool showed a very good practical application of Wikidata. I volunteered for the event with Daniel.

The last workshop I attended was on Pattypan. I was successful to make a Pull Request while the session was going on.

Meeting a lot of people at Community Village, Breakfasts, Breaks, Lunch, Excursions etc. was just awesome. This Wikimania, I met 100+ new people with whom I hope to communicate and collaborate.

P.S: I hiked up the Table Mountain, yay! ^_^

Okay, that was it. I finally complete this blog. I know most of you won't bother reading it (except my Wiki friends), so here are the key takeaways:

Learnings

  • Basque Language Wikipedia and Txikipedia
  • A lot of innovation in Wikipedia Education Program
  • Gained better insights on issues like Gender Gap, Community Health, Volunteer engagement etc.
  • Wikidata and SPARQL!!!
  • Grants proposal
  • Tools like Scholia, Pattypan
  • AI powered Wikipedia
  • AI and it's dark side
  • Experiences from world-class editors, coders, leaders, innovators (they all are Wikipedians)!

Told ya, it will be small.