Grants:TPS/Arash.pt/Wikimania/2018/Report

Participant

Arash.pt

fa.wikipedia.org

Outcome

The most important benefit of the conference was getting to know other Wiki's contributors, talk and discuss about their concerns, problems and achievements.

We all know there are many issues and difficulties in Wikipedia that some of them like Gender Gap are the same in all Wikipedia’s with sort of similar quantity, but in most cases, priorities are different. For German Wikipedia the new copyright law has a high priority, or for Bengali Wikipedia is about difference between the words in India and Bangladesh, and in my country Iran some troubles like censorship and security concerns have higher priorities.

The fascinating thing that I realized was, in some of the cases we'd found the problems to be smaller or less important in other Wikis and each Wiki had a different way or solution of dealing with them. Of course in same of Wikis that particular difficulty has been solved and we could use their experience as well.

The process of presenting was absorbing and helpful, besides interesting several research were done on general problems on the Encyclopedia. I’ve found the "which parts of an article are actually being read?", as the best presentation and that made me think about more research after returning to my country, and even I spoke to several university professor for similar research area.

Before Wikimania, I’ve had the experience of holding over 20 different wikipedia conferences, Now after talking with other Wikipedians about their success in their program and how they organized meeting and their activities related to education program, inspired me to change the process of planning and coordinating our next conferences.

In Learning Days, the “lightning talk“ section and presentation of Sumit, الاء, Anirudh Bhati and Snezana Strkovke were so thought-provoking, in term of their activities and achievements. Also I had a lot of discussions with Sumit Surai and other Indian friends in related to the small wikis, community, similar problems within Wiki in our countries, future plans and different issues that now I am trying to convey these experiences here to Persian Wikipedia.

Furthermore, Talking with different people on the sidelines, while learning about various cultures and languages, was for better communication and planning assistance for future strategies. In the nighttime gathering, we had many related discussion with Asen Stefanov, Veronika Kraemer, Christopher Schwarzkopf, Mina Theofilato, Snezana Strkovska, Mohsen Salek, Olga Vasileva, Robert Myers and Birgit Mueller; our last talk lasted about four hours and it was about “What is Knowledge Equity? What does it mean to you?” and the result was written by Asen. Plus that I had good conversation with Kaarel Vaidla, Fabian, Maria, Kevin Peyravi and other friends on Strategy bar. Additionally I can mention to among other friends who talking to them was a variety of interesting and helpful like Reem Al-Kashif, Leila Zia, Krishna, Rupika, Romaine, Gabriel Thullen, May and Anthere.

Generally, this Wikimania was great and welcoming with many excellent presentations. I am hopeful the future meeting will be presented with better content and speeches. It is better to focus more on the results of the researches and discuss about them instead of just success stories.

I will report my activities and prepare the results of my conferences and the impact of the my wikimania experience in the various programs that I suppose to do, for the next year and I hope that this positive process of research and events will continue, and have an effect on user engagement and our education program, as well as increasing the quality of articles in the Wikipedia.

After Conference

One of the things that we discussed with other participants in the Wikimania was the issue of the presence of different group people. We talked about it that it would be great inviting photographers, journalists and technical guys in specialized programs to participate them in various subjects of encyclopedia. After returning from the conference, We run the idea, and in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture (bureau of media studies and planing), we organized the Wikipedia and Journalism event.

In November 2018, we will also have another event for university students on introducing Wikipedia and the reasons for contributing in the encyclopedia. This conference will be held at the University of Tehran one of the most famous and important university in Iran. I decided to get help from the experience of the other friends I met in Wikimania and I invited Sumit Surai from Bengali wiki and Fabian von Bubnoff from German wiki to speak at this conference.