CIS-A2K/Report/Wikimania 2018/Shyamal

Welcome back from Wikimania 2018!

Participant

User:Shyamal

en

Outcome

Option 3: New Creation: What was one useful outcome that was created at the event for the Wikimedia movement?

Add a link to something new that was created as a result of your participation in this event (for example, you might link to a new tool that you and your co-participants worked on at the Hackathon, or to pages created in a workshop you participated in).

One of the key values of attending Wikimania was to meet the people behind some of the technical aspects of the software.

• I was able to follow up with User:Amire80 on the localization of Wikimedia Commons - particularly Hindi - the drop down box of licenses now has some choices unlike the situation in mid 2017 - the license strings are however not localized and much of the page is still inaccessible to a pure Hindi reader. A situation I encountered some years ago and which showed that the Indic-community consists largely of English and computer literates who do not seem to put themselves in the shoes of non-English speakers. The situation is also found in several other Indian languages on Commons other than a couple of South Indian languages.
• Was able to propose and follow up on the possibility of smoothing GeoJSON polygons in the new Kartographer extension for more pleasant distribution maps with only a few points. User:01tonythomas was able to identify the code that could be changed to make this possible. There are more enhancements needed to make this more practical including the need for land/sea masks to make intersections with distribution maps. See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T194455 - I further discussed this possibility of using GeoJSON polygons and points for improving the situation with categorization of flora and fauna items on wikidata/Wikipedia - where one of the issues is with the addition of arbitrary categories such as {Fauna of|Flora of}{Arbitrary geographic region name} - including nested regions and so on. A more systematic way would be to set GeoJSON polygons describing bounding distribution ranges (including such meta data as summer and winter range for some taxa) and using these for showing the distribution maps within the taxobox and also allowing for meaningful geographic searching using data on Wikidata - using point in polygon - polygon overlap - bounding boxes and other ways of searching - possibility with an external tool. User:Daniel Mietchen evinced interest as did User:Pigsonthewing.
• Took part in a very useful discussion was also held on taxonomy in Wikidata and the issues surrounding some problematic ontologies currently in place.
• Outside of the conference - I took many pictures of plants from the Cape Floristic Region which are now on Commons (examples include the first image additions to the article en:Babiana ringens). I also visited a well-known ornithologist at the University of Cape Town and had a conversation on Wikipedia coverage of birds from South Africa. (Images added to en:Percy FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, created en:Joseph William Mathews , enhanced en:Orange-breasted sunbird, en:Hadada ibis and so on) The coverage of most African taxa is poor, often made by tourists rather than residents and have their own peculiar biases. I was also able to compile some reference information from a specialist library in Cape Town for improvement of some articles of interest.

Connections

I met a large number of people including several old acquaintances - many of the key connections are already mentioned above.

Anything else

This was interesting in that I was rejected on the main scholarship list and apparently the rejected list was sent to CIS-A2K for choosing any participants to be supported. In the past CIS and the Indian chapter had used their own discretion to decide scholarship recipients.

The organization and follow up on ticketing, registration and other logistics left much to be desired. It seems like it would be more efficient for such funds to be directly used by WMF to support additional scholarships rather than to delegate these to regional affiliates unless the regional affiliates have raised the funds on their own in which case they should probably have the discretion to choose local recipients on their own.