Grants:Conference/Algeria Wikimedians User Group/WikiArabia 2021 Remote Conference/Report/in-depth report

The official logo: WikiArabia Algeria Logo 2021. The logo font was created from a rough sketch drawn by the Algerian calligraphy artist Izz Al-Din Shaaban. The right corner denotes Maqam al-Shahid, in City of Algiers. The denominator is followed by the Arabic alphabet Waw (letter) which is the first letter of the word wiki that is completed after it. At the top left, the word "Arabia" is written in the Arabic alphabet. The color of the emblem is inspired by the color the Phoenicians used often.

Introduction

 
temporary logo before the start of registrations for the conference

WikiArabia 2021 Algeria is the fifth edition of the conference Wiki Arabia, organized from 15 to 17 October 2021 by Wikimedia Algeria user group, the conference was remote and for the first time in the Arab world under the title openness إنفتاح.

context

Immediately after the announcement of the organization of the Algerian version by the Wikimedia Algeria user group at the closing ceremony in Marrakech in October 2019, the core team began its first steps to organize the conference by starting to announce the date and location of the Algeria 2020 version, it was decided to hold it in Algiers, Algeria, in October 2020 but quickly cancelled due to coronavirus pandemic and the global lockdown, causing the team to postpone the organization to spring 2021 in April. But the health conditions remained the same, so in February 2021, the team had to bitterly announce the postponement of the conference and come back for community input.

We consulted the community on the postponement of the conference, which was to be organized, as indicated in the archive of February 2021, and opened the discussions to deepen the consultation until March and announced the opening of the participation for August 2020 after receiving the results of the survey and the adhesion of the sponsors to the conference.

Survey Analysis

A remote survey about the organization of wikiarabia was collected during the month of March, early April 2021 was distributed in social media and distributed to the 500 most active users of the Arabic Wikipedia and in the banner ads, where we received

126 answer in Arabic, 5 in English, 2 in French After sorting, we kept 131 answer, here are the results of the analysis as follows: I

Participant data demographics

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Most of them are editors from Arab countries or posted in countries around the world. The segment between 18 and 35 years old is the dominating category in the survey, then decreases with the presence of a section that did not want to disclose the age, more than 80 percent of those who participated in the survey are males and a little less than 17 percent are females,

The survey participants, the majority of whom have not participated in any of the WikiArabia conferences, and more than 72% do not belong to any affiliated group,

The members of the affiliated groups participated. We mention that they belong to the Levant Group with a percentage of more than 13%, followed by Egypt with 3.8%, then Algeria and Tunisia with 2.3%.

Conference aspirations

Asking this question allowed to clarify the view: How do you want to give priority to the following tasks by participating in the conference?

There is little willingness to engage in discussions or participate in discussions Strategy 2030 for the movement where willingness is 43 percent, the lowest percentage for highest importance and largest for minimum importance.

With a great desire expressed by the respondents in the survey is to develop technical skills and meet new people in the Arab and international community.

  • (14/34/51) (Development of editorial skills) Participation in distance learning workshops on editing in the Arabic Wikipedia
  • (10/27/62) (Technical Skills Development) Learn and develop new technical knowledge about Arabic Wikipedia projects
  • (13/38/47) (General Discussions) Participation in meetings, discussions, symposia on Arabic Wikipedia
  • (13/30/56) (Social Expansion) Weaving new relationships and partnerships with groups from the Arab community
  • (10/30/56) (Activity Expansion) Discover new projects in which you participate or to launch them in your direction
  • (16/35/48) (internal knowledge development) Learn about the global Wikimedia movement in general and its various projects
  • (18/38/43) (Future aspirations of the movement) Learn about the strategy of the Wikimedian movement 2030
  • (6/32/60) (social media) Getting to know new people from the Arab and international community
  • (10/38/53) ( Online tourism ) Getting to know the Algerian culture

Conference progress requests

  • Internet speed: The majority of participants do not have Internet problems, while 20% of them suffer from streaming speed problems
  • Best timeline: The participants expressed their support for the month of April with the majority
  • About the duration of the conference: Between 2 and three days
  • About the available translation: The Arab community expressed its need for translation regarding the interventions submitted in English
  • About the desire to participate in the conference: The majority who participated in the questionnaire were eager to attend the conference

Announcing the conference

The analysis carried out by the organizing committee of the responses issued by the community produced the following:

Conference Title

conference launch video

Openness: The openness of the Arab Wikimedia community to contributors, active communities inside and outside wiki projects, and new Wikimedia users, especially to international and Arabic content.

The conference problem: How can the Arab Wikimedia community, and in particular the Arab Wikipedia community, push forward a more dynamic openness?

At the height of the era of globalization, and its effects on cultures and minorities in the world, the Arab region and the Arab Wikimedians community in particular, needs to raise the pace of openness to everything that is global knowledge content, in order to deliver this information in Arabic through the Arabic Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Encyclopedic work on Wikipedia with openness, will create quick ways for us to spread knowledge and contents in Arabic to all knowledge of the world in a timely manner without delay.

We need in Arabic Wikipedia and its sister projects to provide good knowledge content and increase the number of contributors to it. In order to be the first source of reliable Arab information in an Arabic language and look that allows the reader to access information in a timely manner. By motivating new contributors to edit, there will be an enrichment of the content in the Arabic Wikipedia and its sister projects with more new articles, and by working to raise the quality of this Arabic content, the Arabic Wikipedia and its sister projects will turn into a high-quality and reliable source and its articles will be translated into other languages.

The challenge lies in the ability of the Arab Wikimedia community and its supportive user groups in the Arab world to attract and train new contributors.

In the long run, we need to find ways to get new contributors to add content to Wikipedia on a regular basis.

User groups have a great ability to launch activities directed to new users and involve them in voluntary work to enrich Arabic content, and to reach users in unrepresented countries, the creation of new user groups must be supported, by increasing cooperation between Arab user groups.

I suggest four main points that need interventions during the conference:

  • How can we achieve this openness?
  • How do we increase the quantity and quality of content in the Arabic Wikipedia and its sister projects?
  • What are the strategies that should be adopted to publish outstanding content in the Arabic Wikipedia and its sister projects?
  • How do we maintain the pace of enriching good and new content in the Arabic Wikipedia and its sister projects?

Preparations for the conference

About Human Support Organizing Team

 
Evolution of the organizational structure of WikiArabia - read explanation

A core team was formed immediately after the announcement of the organization in Marrakech in October 2019, but the pandemic curbed the work and the actual re-launch began during February 2021 in weekly meetings.

The team consists of:

Leadership and Organization Committee: The committee meets weekly and consists of three individuals, all of whom are volunteers, whose mission is to facilitate and direct matters for other committees.

The Programming Committee: is responsible for programming the conference’s interventions, from start to finish, and it consists of one employee and volunteers

The Logistics Committee: is responsible for providing all the positive things to the organizers and participants and the good work of all teams, and it consists of one employee and volunteers

The Communication Committee: is responsible for communicating with the participants and the community through the various available channels, and it consists of one employee and volunteers

 
Organizing team during the conference

Clarification: Regarding the organizational structure on the image: it lists all the committees and teams that were formed throughout the conference, We explain the important developments in the organization At the beginning of the conference, the organizing committee was formed and then we formed a design team whose task was only to design the conference to be dissolved after submitting its report. When we received the grant, the financial officer was appointed and he is a volunteer. Immediately after getting the sponsors, one of our sponsors appointed a technical team whose task is to ensure the installation of applications for the development and programming of the platform. When the title of the conference was announced and the design task was completed, we evolved into three main committees under the direction of the organizing committee, and a few weeks before the start of the conference, we established an animation team under the direction of the logistics committee. It is made up of animators and translators who, during the conference, activate the interventions and translate them into Arabic, all motivated by simple compensation to say less.

About the financial and logistical grant donors

The first support was undoubtedly the community that supported the idea, the role of the Wikimedia Foundation came, which provided the financial aspect in a budget that was considered one of the lowest budget during 2021

Sponsors :Wikimedia Foundation, Elosys, Jannat Al Arif, International Day of Peaceful Coexistence, Feye Agency, Tansikiates Bahjaouia and WikiDZ.

About platform technology support and software

We acquired a conference domain and installed a special platform on it based on Odoo which is a free, open source and secure Business management tools package thanks to the support of Elosys an Algerian StarUp. It took care of all technical and technological matters, the meeting platform relied on an open software called BigBlueButton, the company's engineers were able to control in a short circumstance all technical problems and include it in an excellent way linked with a direct flow to YouTube in three consecutive direct channels.

Technological equipment

The EloSys StartUP provided us with full technological support during the three days. Starup hosted us at its headquarters and allowed us to use its headquarters and computers to manage and release the entire conference.

We only had to ask for an increase in the budget to acquire cameras, headphones and lighting, which will be borrowed after the conference by opening a special page in the Algeria group for those who need equipment.

About Social Media Channels

The communication team prepared a solid plan, starting from the communication scheme, the logo, the videos, the musical interludes, the management of social media channels, and where it focused on Facebook, Telegram and Twitter, the communication was following the plan with scrutiny and the team took care of it according to the directives of the steering committee.

Conference launch

 
Dr. Kamal Salai during the activation of the conference's interventions

With the launch of the conference, the WikiArabia Algeria program was published on the conference page in the meta, more than 120 participants registered on the platform and more than that in the rest of the sites. Quick interventions, round tables, interventions, discussions, readings. The interventions were global from all continents in both Arabic and English, and we provided Arabic translation for all the interventions, and vice versa. We provided full support to those involved, as we created a special pageFor Frequently Asked Questions, We created a visual file (video) explaining how to use the platform, and we communicated with the registrants and intervenors before, during and after the conference, and we opened training workshops for registrants three (3) weeks before the start of the conference to test the platform.

What was difficult was launching the training workshops, which we had to cancel, and we focused on accepting the maximum number of interventions, and it was successful in opening and giving the floor to new, unknown intervenors from countries we do not know about known activity, such as Oman, Qatar and Sudan. Regarding the amendment in other language projects and how one of its amendments was deleted, we participated with an interventionist expressing his rejection of the issue of openness and its difficulty.

We divided the conference activities into three hallsOuarsenis Mountains، HallDjurdjura Mountains، and Hall Hoggar Mountains They are the names of mountain ranges known in Algeria.

We tried to compensate, as much as possible, for the situation of organizing remotely, and we included Algerian musical spots between the interventions with pictures of Algeria, and this is what was stated in the community's requests to allow visiting Algeria, even from a distance.

 

The competition was aimed at motivating participation, so that the number of participants did not fall under twenty in both main halls. We chose the weekends of the conference with a timing after twelve, which allows residents of the Mashreq to participate and residents of the Americas to participate as well, and it lasts 6 hours a day throughout the conference.

Topics that attracted the attention and curiosity of the attendees or were published live on the YouTube channel dedicated for that purpose, for the first time, a channel dedicated solely to all Arab wiki conferences since its launch in 2014, a synthesis of all the interventions in one channel.

In addition, ten (10) symbolic gifts were allocated daily as language lessons on the well-known Babbel platform, during the entire duration of the conference, distinguished guests who participated in the conference and registered attendance for the first time For the Executive Director of the Foundation.

We encountered a technical problem during the first hours of the conference, as we unfortunately lost the recording of the second hall scuffing.

Conference Outcomes

We created a special channel in YouTube and published its video of the conference for those who wish to follow it on the Arabic Wiki channel dedicated to the conference, the content consisting of 60 videos from various fields and excellent and new topics, most of which are in the channel on YouTube and some of them are at the bottom of the report, almost One of the major outcomes of the conference. With this we distributed a questionnaire at the end of the conference,

Announcing the group or the organizing country, we wanted it to be traditional every year at the end of the conference, and just as Marrakesh and the subject of languages and dialects in the Arab world were the subject of openness towards knowledge expansion accelerating the absorption of knowledge in the Arabic letter, sensitive topics that produced a lot of digital letters, but they are necessary,

Closing ceremony :

Reading in the outcomes and announcing the organizing group for 2022 and passing the torch to it, the new Emirates group

 

Its text stated: As the first Arab remote conference in view of the pandemic, and this conference, which came under the title of openness to free knowledge, and based on the problematic of the conference, which raised what is how the Arab Wikimedia community can push for more dynamic openness, what is openness and how can we touch it by increasing the quality of content In the Arabic Wikipedia and its sister projects with any strategy and towards any future prospects, all user groups from Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Syria, Sudan and the Emirates, and the continental Wikimedia community from Asia and Africa participated in the conference.

To be a window of openness to all countries and parts of the world...

Through this conference, we come to the outputs that are:

Accumulation of cognitive expressions that have been since the first Arab conference in Tunisia, all the interventions were focused on the openness debate

An important discussion took place about the periodicity of the conference and about the formation of an Arab council to decide on the appointment of at least two teams for the next two years, with a proposal for the groups to express their desire for 2022. This discussion was [2].

Final questionnaire

18 users participated in it, including 75 speakers and 20 % of the participants

[Intervention Programme]: 81% is great

[Featured Topics]: 87% are awesome

[presenters Quality]: 66 % awesome

[Organization in General ]: 76 % awesome

[sharing the event via social media]: 87% awesome

[Social Event]: 80 % awesome

[Lecture hall idea]: 76 % Fantastic

Presentations that caught our attention

Day One

  • Round of discussions with the executive director of the Wikimedia organization.
  • Opening Ceremony
  • Roundtable discussion with Farah Mutakallim
  • Mariana Iskandar spokesperson
  • Presentation by Hani Yakan from the Emirates
  • Meeting with the CEO of the Foundation
  • Anass sedratti and Reda benKhadra, entitled "Volunteering in the Wikimedia movement".
  • Presentation of the idea of volunteering within the encyclopedia
  • Measuring the health of the Arabic community at Wikipedia: Are we "open" to community growth and renewal?

Building partnerships / Measuring the health of the Arabic Wikipedia community: Are we "open" to community growth and renewal?

  • Building together with partners

Day two

  • Qatar National Library Wikipedia Past and Present Projects
  • Speaker Kamal Salai: Arab ideas between the challenges of rationalization and the challenges of humanization
  • Show the transition of Wikipedia activity from randomness to organization
  • Submitting posts and examples
  • Proofreading of the Wikipedia service by Taha Zerrougui
  • Experience of the Palestinian Translators Project
  • Building together with partners
  • A round table for UG in the Arab world

The last day

  • Speaker Abbad Deranieh: A review of the status of Arabic wiki projects
  • The closing ceremony was very nice
  • Written writer for the Emirates UGroup
  • Presentation of Muhammad Hijjawi Beit el hikma
  • User group between the past, present and future
  • The experience of Syrian wikis
  • Introducing growth benefits to retain newcomers in Wikipedia

Participants' feedbacks

A question about what did you benefit from the conference?
  • Since I am a new user, I have enriched my information about the encyclopedia, their experiences were inspiring.}}
  • Various topics of interest to the Arab community, getting to know some colleagues and contributors to the community, exchanging views on many issues affecting the Arab community.}}
  • The conference opened the opportunity for discussion between many parties from the Arab community, and to learn about the challenges and solutions facing the work of the Arabic wiki, and I discovered a number of sister projects to Wikipedia.}}
  • I gained new qualitative relationships, gained new relationships with Arab Wikipedians, got an opportunity to talk about my work and present it to the Arab community., especially fruitful discussions about the future of the movement and local affiliates.}}
  • A variety of topics, a third meeting room to meet the community and participants, in addition to the presence of simultaneous translation of the presentation in foreign languages.}}
What did you like the most about the conference overall?
  • Tight organization despite the difficulty of organizing virtual conferences
  • Organizing, and technical assistance prior to the conference, as the organizers were constantly present for technical experience
  • Multiple themes
  • The organization was very professional, very excellent, and the platform was good. I enjoyed the experience, attending and contributing to the conference, and I was satisfied with everything.
  • For an online version, I think a lot has been done
About question, what do you think can be improved or done in another way during future editions?

Organizers voice and conversations can undoubtedly reduce echo by sitting in a small confined space or by soundproofing the speaker.

  • Internet speed
  • Can last more days
  • Improving the quality of audio technologies for speakers, we want to hear them well first and then see them clearly
  • Not broadcasting the interventions at the same time. Each hall opens its lectures at a different time, as you find us moving from one hall to another, so the benefit is lost.
  • Downloading the entries on YouTube was modest
  • Involve the encyclopedia community more with the event and convince it, the list of times is in UTC, not in the local time of Algeria. creates confusion. It was also difficult to use the technical platform and practice it on the speakers
A free word for you about the Wiki Arabic Conference Algeria 2021
  • Thank you very much, my friends, and may God bless you for the wonderful effort
  • straight ahead
  • great experience
  • Thank you very much, the conference was wonderfully organized, before its launch, we saw cooperation from the technical staff, and during it there was a continuity and after that, the organization and publication of all participations and all respect and appreciation to you and your efforts
  • Kamal Salai is my favorite presenter
  • God bless the efforts
  • I congratulate the Arab community in general and the Algeria group freely for the success of the first virtual Arab conference despite all the difficulties and challenges

May God bless you and your work always towards brilliance and sophistication

  • Frankly, I liked the conference, its organization and program, and I corrected many concepts that were not clear to me about the encyclopedia, the technical team was wonderful
  • thank you
  • Big thanks to the Algerian organizing team and volunteers who made it possible to have a new version of WikiArabia despite the global pandemic

Conference media

WikiArabia album

PDF Entries

Conference Videos

Documentation

Additional links