Community convenings

What a convening is and why they're being held

The top priority for the Wikimedia Foundation is the recruitment and retention of editors to Wikipedia. There are many initiatives planned or underway to address that priority, such as numerous tech projects and the Wikipedia Education Program.

However, some of the most important issues that can ensure we have healthy editing communities on the projects cannot be dealt with by the Wikimedia Foundation, only by community members. In order to help Wikipedians mobilize their community around issues that are important to them, the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Department is organizing a series a small, focused meetups it is calling "convenings".

How a convening is different than a regular meetup, conference, or hackathon

Instead of a huge conference like Wikimania or a social meetup, a convening is called so editors can make concrete plans and share information on a specific topic important to community members.

Each convening will bring together a group of editors who care deeply about reform on a single topic, regardless of whether they happen to come from the same Wikipedia or geographic area. Some might be invite-only, while others might be recorded or streamed to the web. Either way, it will be a meeting for people who really want to get their hands dirty making things better for Wikipedia communities.

How to participate

Community Department staff have a few ideas listed below, but far more important are your ideas about what is important if we are going to make Wikipedia an open community that can build a great encyclopedia.

Please be bold! You can propose a convening idea/location. If there's enough interest, the Foundation wants to help you make it make happen.

Planned or proposed convenings

Please feel free to add your own ideas!

Portuguese Wikipedia

A series of small meetups to talk about the editing experience on Portuguese Wikipedia, starting in Brazil.

pt:Wikipédia:Esplanada/geral/Wikipédia Encontros, Brasil (24jan2012)

Spanish Wikipedia

A series of small meetups to talk about the editing experience on Spanish Wikipedia (as compared to other large Wikipedias).

Potential ES meetup locations

Mexico
Argentina
Spain

Policy simplification

Proliferation of complex rule sets presents a huge barrier to entry for open participation in Wikipedia or any other Wikimedia project.

Bot herders

Bots have an enormously powerful social impact on other editors, and while we have hackathons, very few times have bot herders gotten together to talk about the social impact of their code.

How do we learn from growing Wikipedias?

There is no toolkit or guide for starting a Wikipedia and sustaining a community, people tend to just make it up and copy what seems relevant to them. Bringing together interested editors from the fastest growing Wikipedias and the largest Wikipedias (which tend to not be the same) in order to develop a series of core lessons about what has and hasn't worked to attract helpful editors could be a boon to all Wikipedias.