CEE/Newsletter/Newsroom/Wikimedians speaking Turkic languages met at Istanbul
- By: Basak
Over 90 wikimedians from the CEE region met at Turkic Wikimedia Conference 2023 held in Istanbul between 20-23 October. The event was organized by Wikimedians of Turkic Languages User Group and brought together wikimedians using those languages and dialects: Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tuvan, Turkish, Turkmen, and Tatar languages.
Turkic Wikimedians Conference was the second event organized by the user group in Istanbul after the Wikidata Trainings For Turkic Wikimedians event held in 2022. Unlike the 2022 event, this year’s event, rather than focusing on one Wikimedia project, covered presentations and workshops on Wikimedia projects in general. Still, there was a celebration for Wikidata Birthday coming on 29th October by a birthday cake (because Wikimedians never miss an opportunity to eat cake).
The program included 30 speakers from 9 countries presenting in one of three languages simultaneously translated to each others: Turkish, English, Russian. Some of the sessions involved talks around Wikipedia where participants discussed how to edit psychology articles better at Wikipedia, how to tackle falsehood at Wikipedia, how editing Wikipedia would be easier for the blind. Some sessions were about the ai; where participants learned basic ai literacy concepts, expressed their concerns and hopes related to ai in relation with Wikimedia projects or introduced with the Mozilla Common Voice project, which aims to democratize voice-AI. There were hands on sessions on Wikisource, Wikidata and Wikidata Lexeme projects; about cleaning messy data with OpenRefine tool and about creating a gazetteer by gathering geospatial and cultural data from OpenStreetMap (OSM), Wikipedia, SPARQL queries (Wikidata), and the Overpass API.
One unforgettable moment was when after Dick Osseman (User:Dosseman), a 74 years old Dutch photographer, made a talk about his experiences on photographing and documenting Türkiye in last 30 years, participants made a queue to thank him and taking a photo together because almost everyone contributing to Wikimedia projects on Türkiye related topics were benefited from his photo archive.
In the closing ceremony, the organizing team in Türkiye handed the user group flag to Azerbaijani delegates for holding the meeting in Baku in 2025.
