Grants:TPS/Gereon K./Wikimania/2016/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2016!

Participant

Gereon K.

Homewiki: de.wikipedia.org

Outcome

• The Writing week/Cultural Heritage was planned by Taketa. He had assigned me to start the writing week for the German speaking community. At the Wikimania I had the chance to meet Taketa to plan the joint launching of the writing week. After this I started the German project page and wrote an article for the Kurier, i.e. the German Signpost.
• I talked with Valentin Muenscher about teaching Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects and Mapping OER, a project about Open Educational Resources. Outcome: We will be giving a session together at WikiCon 2016.

Connections

• WikiCities was started at the Wikimania, a project to pair Wikimedia communities from sister cities so that they can help each other. I managed to connect the founders with Wikimedians who had already started a project in this vein.
• The Yorbua Wikipedia has mainly been written by a bot. However, the bot did not know that Yoruba requires diacritics. Without them there is hardly any comprehension of the written form. For a relaunch of this language version the aid of bot programmers is required. I met Strainu who told me that he would be willing to help.
• I am planning to attend the WikiIndaba conference 2016 in Ghana. Meeting the organizers Flixtey and Rberechie in Esino Lario I could discuss the planning, solving concerns about the early start day, capacities of venues, costs and content.
• I met Barbara Fischer and had a talk with her about Coding da Vinci, a series of GLAM hackathons. I could share my experience of a GLAM workshop in South Africa: OpenAfrica15.

Anything else

• At Wikimania 2016 I had a critical issue talk and discussion with the title “How to train future Wikimedians in Residence”. It was about what Wikimedians can do to save African cultural heritage and how to school them in Africa. You can see a video of my presentation: wm2016:File:Wikimania 2016 - "How to train future Wikimedians in Residence" by Gereon Kalkuhl.webm.
• I will attend the Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2016 in Armenia. NTymkiv (WMF) had asked to fill out a questionnaire for the conference. During Wikimania I was able to sit together with Cornelius Kibelka to fill out the questionnaire. At the Wikimania I could attend a preparation session for the CEE Meeting and answer questions from participants and the organization team.