Grants:TPS/عباد ديرانية/Wikimania/2014/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2014!

Participant

Abbad Diraneyya

Arabic Wikipedia

Outcome

Option 1: Shared Experience: What is one way you shared something from your experience with your community (either locally or globally), after the event?

I have wrote a blog post about my personal experience in Wikimania, with a good lot of details regarding the lectures I attended and what I've learned from them. I've also wrote a small report on Arabic Wikipedia to tell the community what happened at Wikimania, focusing on the Arabic Wikipedians meetups and the results we gained from them (the current report is still under development right now, its final state should be similar to what I made last year.

Option 2: Learning Pattern: What is one useful learning pattern you can share with the Wikimedia movement?

I don't really have anything actual to link yet, but I must say that attending Wikimania had opened my mind in many different ways. Now I want to know more, to discover more, and to share more. I figured out that I know so little about the technical wiki world, I am now working on learning more through exploring mediawiki, translatewiki and other brilliant projects I barely know.

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

As a sort of natural Wikipedian passion, I've created and expanded several articles about London city, even though they are not some of the largest, they include; V&A Museum, Natural History Museum and South Kensington, which were mostly developed from old articles in a very bad state. Currently, I am planning on a project to develop the Arabic article on London city to a featured one.

Another inspiring thing for me was attending the OpeenStreetMap sessions, which encouraged me to start participating in the project for the first time ever. I also want to work on expanding and developing the OSM wiki in Arabic.

Connections

• One of the best things that happened to me at Wikimania was meeting my roommate, Benoit! We'd became great friends. He's much more experienced than me with the organizational wikiprojects; like GLAM, WLM, and these stuff. He shared a lot of his experiences with me, and he seeks now to help me with organizing some similar projects in my country.
• Another great opportunity was getting to know Addis, who's the main coordinator of the Chinese Wikipedia Library version. Since I am currently a coordinator of the Arabic Wikipedia Library, it was very interesting to have a conversation with him about the challenges and success each of us is having. Even though it turned out they are doing way better than us, I think that was still very useful for our future experiences.
• In total, I think I ran into around 35 to 45 people in a fair conversations. I closely know less than 10 of them.

Anything else

I'd some disappointments; I wished to do more. I wanted to get to know a lot of special people whom I didn't get the chance to meet. I tried to make as much connections as I could from this brilliant community, but I don't think I made very much. Even though, I am still extremely happy I'd this unique opportunity, now I want to attend Wikimania every year, I can't even believe I've ever missed it! I want to do more and to learn more. I want to discover the wiki world better, and to explore all its aspects, especially the technical ones, which I almost know nothing about. I hope in the next few months, I will become a better Wikipedian than I've ever been! :)