Grants:TPS/Isha/Wikimania/2014/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2014!

Participant

Isha

es.wikipedia

Outcome

Option 1: Shared Experience:

The possibility of attending Wikimania is always exciting because of its social value, which is difficult to put into metrics. It is really refreshing for your commitment to meet fellow Wikimedians from around the world, and friends from the Iberocoosphere in particular. I was also interested, as someone involved in a local Wikimedia organization, to meet new WMF ED Lila Tretikov.

This Wikimania was especially useful for me because it enabled me to get to know better Wikidata, something that many times Wikipedia editors tend to ignore and find difficult to get involved. I found a fantastic way to contribute --I became a huge fan of the Wikidata games and made it into the top 5 contributors on one of them. That means thousands (ca. 4k) of corrections and data additions to Wikidata. But, more broadly, that allowed me to bring back my new knowledge about Wikidata to Wikimedia Argentina, so we can take it into account to incorporate Wikidata into our activities. This was a practical outcome I didn’t plan or expect.

I shared my experience in Wikimania with fellow Wikimedia Argentina members and other Argentine volunteers in our meetings after the conference; most importantly on the WMAR Board meeting of last August, which as all our Board meetings is open and announced to the community. I did also tweet about the conference via de WMAR twitter account during Wikimania (@wikimedia_ar).

Connections

I was one of the organizers of the two Iberocoop working meetings that were carried out during the conference days. This enabled us at Wikimedia Argentina to get input for program design about the different chapters’ and groups’ experiences, challenges and expectations for the meeting that we'll be hosting in Buenos Aires at late-November

I, together with other WMAR board members, had a meeting with WMF’s Floor Koudijs about our educational programs, during which we explored possible ways of coordinating our work and helping other countries and communities in the Latin American region. I met with the Wikimania 2015 organizing team as part of experience sharing and transferring knowledge from our experience as Wikimania 2009 organizers.

Finally, I was able to take part of the WikiReadings initiative. I read the Spanish Wikipedia article about the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, an Argentine humans right group whose aim is to identify the stolen grandsons of those dissappeared during the last military dictatorship. Recently, Abuelas’ president Estela de Carlotto made the headlines worldwide after it was known that she was able to found the grandson she had been searching during the last thirty years. You can see me reading the article here.

Anything else

Here you’ll be able to find a series of photos I took during Wikimania and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

Please forget my delay in reporting. I want to be sincere --I completely forgot about the deadline. As soon as I received a reminder I tried to correct the situation.

I would like to highlight once again the importance that the scholarships program has to enable the participation for people from the Global South, and especially from far away countries like Argentina. For many of us it would be almost impossible to attend on our own means, while there are people that can just take a train and get there. The scholarships program is a great tool to give opportunities for all and I thank the Wikimedia Foundation for ensuring its continuity and improvement every year.