Grants:TPS/Kiril Simeonovski/Wikimania/2016/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2016!

Participant

Your username goes here

Your home wiki goes here

Macedonian Wikipedia

Outcome

Option 1: Shared Experience: What is one way you shared something from your experience with your community (either locally or globally), after the event?

Add a link here to a blog post or newsletter you wrote about your participation afterwards, or to a meet-up you organized to share your experience with your local community.

Wikimania 2016 was a completely new experience to me, which largely accounts to the novelties that the organisers have implemented. The programme was a bit poor and less intensive compared to the last Wikimanias, but it, on the other hand, allowed spending more time in discussions and meetings. In order to make a structured overview, my main insights from the conference are divided into the following three groups: 1) sessions, 2) discussions and 3) meetings.

The most productive and useful sessions for me at the conference where "The coolest projects of Wikimedia Chapters - be inspired", "State of Wikimedia Research" and "OpenStreetMap". The session about the coolest projects of the Wikimedia chapters helped me a lot in understanding some practices that are used in other countries for similar activities; the session on the Wikimedia research was informative in providing access to research literature and also inspired me to think about some relevant questions that need to be included when surveying our editors and readers; the workshop on using the OpenStreetMap was very practical in learning some tips when editing these maps and properly linking them to Wikipedia.

The discussion on the topic "Going mobile and keeping editing: needs and challenges to edit Wikipedia from mobile devices" was particularly important for me because my explanation for the negative trends in the editorship has always been focusing on the development of the mobile technology and the changes in the user preferences. I was glad that we had a fruitful discussion, resulting in expressing clear needs for improving the mobile application.

The meetings were perhaps the most important part for me as president of Shared Knowledge. I attended the Chairpersons meeting and found out that there is a detailed page on supporting future board members with tips on the eligibility criteria and the avoidance of conflict of interest. I have also had an informal meeting with members of the Affiliations Committee regarding the status and the name of Shared Knowledge, where we discussed that the promotion of Shared Knowledge from a user group to a local chapter would be done by February 2017 and that the Affiliations Committee will take charge of the current inactivity of Wikimedia Macedonia.

After Wikimania 2016, I organised a meeting with the main goal of sharing the experiences of our participants at the conference with the other community members. My experiences shared at this meeting where in the form of conclusions on what we should do and how to improve our practices. They are the following:

besides collaborating with theatres on taking images from notable actors for use in articles, it is also useful to contact people for which we have articles with the intent of providing images from them (practiced with success by Wikimedia Israel);
besides giving the students assignments to edit articles on Wikipedia temporarily, it is of crucial importance to re-consider our Education Programme with the aim of attracting new very active editors (practiced with success by Wikimedia Armenia);
it is necessary to amend our eligibility criteria and to adopt a clearer definition of the conflict of interest when electing board members with the information already available on the Board Member Support page; and
it is important to stay in touch with the members of the Affiliations Committee in finalising the process of resolving the problem with the currently inactive Wikimedia Macedonia.

Connections

Wikimania 2016 was very special in making and maintaining connections with other people, as the concept of the conference was primarily meant to support it. I liked the idea of randomly delivering vouchers for lunch and breakfast to participants in order to enable them to meet with new people because it really worked that way. Since this year's conference took place when the UEFA Euro 2016 was ongoing, it also helped me make new connections while watching football matches with the others.

Anything else

Thanks for the scholarship!