Grants:TPS/Sannita/Wikimania/2018/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2018!

Participant

Sannita

Italian Wikipedia / Wikidata

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?

Wikimedia Italia requires that all Italian participants to every Wikimania share details with other wiki(p|m)edians with a written report, as well as online/in person meetings for discussing what happened and what new things were discovered during the event. In particular, we're discussing the possibility of holding several advanced lessons and workshops about Wikidata and Structured Data for local coordinators, which will cover also the recent developments.

Option 3: New Creation: What was one useful outcome that was created at the event for the Wikimedia movement?

This is still to be confirmed and further discussed, but probably the most important outcome came from the WikiCite meetup, where we discussed what to do with the project in the next years. Current consensus is that WikiCite might become a stand-alone Wikibase-powered project, deeply connected with Wikidata (in a similar fashion to Structured Data), in order to better store citations and references from the Wikimedia projects, as well as providing a better-suited environment for librarians who approach the Wikimedia universe for the first time. This also takes into consideration the different needs and approaches of the Wikimedia community on one hand and the global librarian/museum operators/cultural operators community on the other hand.

Details still need to be ironed out, but IMHO this is going to be a great step ahead for several reasons:

1. it will help cement the idea that Wikibase is a reliable software for storing and maintaining catalogues;
2. it will help partners in producing Linked Open Data and exchanging data with us;
3. by separating Wikidata and WikiCite, we will create an environment that will reduce the frictions between Wikidata's and GLAM's ways of mapping instances of books and publications;
4. it might be a first step towards a construction of a "federated network" of Wikibase instances - not necessarily all within WMF perimeter.

Connections

I attended lots of meetups this year (WikiCite, Wikidata, OTRS agents, Communications, Wikimania 2019, Wiki Loves Love, and Wikisource). I never attended so many meetups in the past Wikimanias, so this time it was an interesting new thing to do. It was also an interesting way of networking with old and new people, as well as an opportunity to discuss new initiatives and to deepen certain ideas.

Each meetup was productive in its own way, but IMHO the WikiCite and the Wikimania 2019 ones were the most interesting in my opinion, since they both produced new ideas that will be of a certain interest for the next years, if implemented (for WikiCite see above).