Grants:TPS/safi-iren/Wikimania/2019/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2019!

Participant[edit]

safi-iren

hy.wikipedia.org

Outcome[edit]

This year it was my second Wikimania and the second time when I succeeded to get a full-scholarship to attend it. For sure, it was a great honor for me to be one of the 100 luckiest who got the scholarship and was able to take a part in such a great event. For me Wikimania is an event of the year in my life where I can meet with my old friends, make new friends, spend great time with all of the brilliant minds and learn more and more new things, as well as it is a good opportunity to share my experience and to show all the work what I have been doing all these years. Every time when I am back from Wikimania I am always full of energy and new ideas, more motivated to do new wikiprojects in my hometown. A great thank you to all of them who is enggaged in Wikimania organization and every year give us a feeling of being in fairytale where everything can happen and everything is possible. Thank you, All !!!

Shared Experience: Since it was my second year at Wikimania I felt more confident and more comfortable to talk about my job in Wikimedia Armenia and about all wikiprojects coordinated by me.

In August 15, the second day of Learning Days, I was given an opportunity to have a lighning panel about WikiClubs in Armenia and as a co-founder and coordinator of Stepanakert Wikiclub I was talking about. It was my pleasure to see so many people who were interested in my project and I was enjoying answering the questions asked by all of them. We only had 5-10 minutes to present and answer the questions, but my presentation was lasting at least 15-20 minutes so this was also a good indicator of that I was talking about something what was interesting and useful to all of the participants.

The next panel with my participation was in August 17, "Wiktionary & Wikisource in EduWiki Initiatives: Challenges and Opportunities" and I was talking about the role of WikiSource in Education. And again as we are working with WikiSource at Stepanakert WikiClub I was sharing my experience how it can help to make school students more educated and even improve their markes at school.

August 18, "Building Locally Relevant Knowledge with Wikisource" was coordinated by Satdeep. The idea of this discussion was to capture the diversity of work around Wikisource in the Wikimedia movement, from Wikiclubs in Armenia, to Digitization in India and minority languages in Western Europe. And how Wikisource is playing an important role in growing our communities. It was interesting to listen to other panelists about their experience and to make connections between our work and our wikicommunities.

Due to all above mentioned panels and discussions I learned lots of new interesting information and knowledge and also shared my experience which I hope will be helpful to other Wikipedians and Wikimedians and next year we will have more common issues to discuss and work on them during Wikimania'20.

Connections[edit]

As I have already mentioned since it was my second Wikimania I already have known most of the participants and it was double pleasure to see all of them again and talk about everything what has happened during last year. Beside, I met some new, bright people whom I used to know via Facebook and we even managed to have some calls before Wikimania'19 and finally I met them in person in Stockholm. One of them is Manavrpeet from India, Camelia Boban and Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight. I hope in near future we will have a nice collaboration together. Also I met with guys from Wikitongues - Daniel, Kristen and Cameron. It was interesting to know about their work and as a result we have recorded a video where I am speaking in my mother tongue - Artsakh dialect^[1]. One of the most memorable parts of Wikimania'19 was to see Jimmy Wales again (the first was in Cape Town, last year). I was so excited to see him again and to hear that he remember me from the last year. We talked a lot about Stepanakert Wikiclub and all wikipedians editing and living in Artsakh. It's a good motivation for all my wikipedians when they know they are a small part of something great.

There are many people whom I would like to mention here, but I am affraid that the list will be to long, so I will just say that I am really happy to have all of them in my life or just by my side and hope that in future our friendship and collaboration will bring to something great in WikiMovement.