Wikimedia Community User Group Uganda/Events & Projects/Wikimania 2021/Micheal Kaluba/Report

User Detailsː[edit]

Usernameː Micheal Kaluba
Affiliationː Wikipedia Community User group Uganda

Event Name[edit]

Wikimania ̏August 2021

My Experiences[edit]

This was my very first Wikimania and below is a list of my lesions and experiences throughout the event. I started the attendance on the second day of the event as am not a good or into much programming so I didn’t attend “The Hackathon”. In a special way I thank the Wikipedia user group Uganda community for the scholarship, Geoffrey Kateregga , Douglas, Alice Kibombo and Sandra Achenge. These guys made it possible for me to attend Wikimania2021.

Day2-Saturday14 August[edit]

The first day was pretty confusing as I had never used or navigated through the Remo web platform but things went on getting better with help of the community. I had made a free registration on Eventbrite earlier on before the event day so I as well got instructions in my email that guided me tooI first joined Building 1, which was the common point I think for everyone called the community village, help desk and WMF desk. After that I navigated to Building 3 where the topic was “ A variety of approaches to teaching students in Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia, Wikiversity, Wikivoyaga, Wiki cap and beyond)”. Here Andrew and Traversa gave details on wikiversity and projects under the theme for example the University has been organizing teaching activities based on Wikipedia and how they have conducted and results. I then joined building 4 where Samma talked about Mapping the present and future of Wiki philosophy, the challenges and opportunities. He also talked about centralizes and decentralized application with case studies like Tiddy wiki, Federated wiki and distributed wiki and finally that day I joined building 3 where Isaac and Alabi talked about Building a successful Wikimedia community of African students also talked about wiki for medics

Day3- Sunday 15 August[edit]

The third day and my second was a nice one because I had gained some experience to navigate through the Remo site from one building to another and different floors! At around 14:32 EAT, I joined in to the main stage in building 1 for a few minutes then joined in to building 6 for the unconference.

I joined building 3 where the topic was Wikipedia and the weird: covering humorous and unusual topics with respect and fairness. Here Yitzi litt talked about what is weird! Topics like Surreal memes, the secret cabinet of Nepal, Judaism and jokes among others, issues with representing the weird and what can be done about it plus the biases and how we can be less biased when addressing such topics like racism, sex, skin color. He pointed out that we categorize biases depending on our history, interest and culture. He also said we can become less biased if we look for existing holes when addressing such issues.

I then joined in to building 5 where the topic was indicators for Wikipedia projects and here the speakers pointed several important points and concerns like the challenges faced by the different ongoing Wikipedia projects like training materials, un updated information and the quality issues involved plus the access being one of the greatest barrier. They also talked about the different research project in details like the community health Metrix, knowledge gap index. Finally, that day I joined to building 4 where the topic was RedWarn and improving vandalism into the 2020’s. Here the speakers Chlod and Englefiel talked about how they and the team have developed one of the newest and most popular counter vandalism tools on the English Wikipedia. Though I didn’t note much down

Day4- Monday16 August[edit]

I joined at around 10am, and I jumped in building 5 where the topic was Bridging content Gaps through large scaled campaigns. Here the speakers talked about WikiGap 2021 especially Ukraine. Here I learnt how the Wikigap was organized, the number of participants to make it more effective. They said I was a project that took four years with 300 participants and over 3000 articles and 6 offline events and webinars. I also realized that the Wikimedia user group Uganda and that in Ukraine have a lot in common like the challenges of financial resources and less online participation and this is always tackled through building partnerships. Also, to take WikiGap into another angle like inclusion and diversity by looking at other several topics that can follow under gender gaps. One of the ways of maintaining quality over quantity through rewarding authors, disqualifying those that violet Wikipedia quality rules.

I joined for the universal Code of conduct roundup table still in Building 5, here there were several speakers talking about different things in line with the code of conduct on Wikipedia, harassment and misconduct, their cause and how to handle them.

Day5- Tuesday17 August[edit]

This day began as usual and I started by joining in to building 3 where the topic was Integrating Wikidata into Wikimedia projects by Nirali and other speakers. Here we learnt of the different scripts that have been and are under development to do different tasks on Wikimedia for example the one the that filters out information from Wikidata for exportation in other words that export to for Wikidata into to Wikipedia. Then Erica presented about Mbabel a tool that automatically generates Wikipedia stats using information from Wikidata and it was developed by her and her friend Ederpoto and inspired by a Pharos template which was developed in order to increase or improve knowledge dissemination on Wikipedia. It’s a tool that can be used in education and GLAM project and it can support small language communities and it able to identify the gaps to be filled with Wikidata basically. And in all these cases, presenters explained exactly how they developed these templates, whys, what, and the hardships they found during the process. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mbabel Then after Benoit Prieur presented about the French Wikipedia and Wikivoyage where data from OpenStreetMap is used. He also talked about info box and how to get data from Wikidata and he gave an example of Anna Kiesenhofer who is a mathematician and a cyclist where he gave the details on how to add two or even more infoboxs on the same article for the different professions on a single article. Sergey talked about Russian Wikipedia and others; he also talked the info box on Russian wiki.

Then I finally joined building 5 where the topic was The Future of Wikimania and here Phoebe Ayers pointed out that Wikimania2022 will as well be virtual one due the global uncertainties and she pointed out the benefits of an online event.

Connection[edit]

Phoebe Ayers I met her and we interacted several sessions and she is one of the WMF.
Robby Robert Scheueren He's from Luxemburg.
Andrew Lih

Outcomes[edit]

And in my opinion I realized that all these projects face almost the same challenges and other projects work well than others depending on where they were carried out from and how they were carried out.

Writing Credible Articles on Wikipedia and how to add info boxes on articles.

To dig into details and doing a hands on how to use the different tools like Mbabel and others