Grants:TPS/Sky Harbor/Wikimania/2015/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2015!

Participant

Sky Harbor

English, Tagalog and Spanish Wikipedias

Outcome

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

Add a link to something new that was created as a result of your participation in this event (for example, you might link to a new tool that you and your co-participants worked on at the Hackathon, or to pages created in a workshop you participated in).

During Wikimania 2015 and with the help of the Content Translation Team, I finished translating the Content Translation interface into Tagalog: one of only eight languages where the inferface had been translated in its entirety.

In addition, during the Wikimedia Asia meetup, we decided to work on a new content generation initiative, the Wikipedia Asian Month.

Finally, there was support among Spanish-speaking Wikipedians during the conference for a development program for Spanish-language Philippine content which was discussed in my session, "The Philippines and the Spanish Wikipedia: a roadmap towards building a new, healthy community".

Connections

During Wikimania 2015, I had made several connections and restored a few ones, plus made many more. Due to the sheer number of people I've met at Wikimania, I won't list everyone here, but I will summarize them into broad groups:

Affiliations Committee

The members of the Affiliations Committee who were present at Wikimania (Varnent, Galio, Salvador alc, Keilana, Kirill Lokshin, 80686 and myself) had a couple of informal meetings over the course of the conference, both among ourselves and with our advisers (Bdamokos and Effeietsanders) and Board liaisons (Jan-Bart and Lyzzy), and in the process we worked on approving five new affiliates. These included Wikimedians of Korea, an affiliate that I'm liaising with in my capacity as a Committee member, and the WikiWomen's User Group, which broke the record for the fastest application ever received by the Committee from receipt to approval.

I also met with a number of Wikimania attendees affiliated with user groups to get their recognition status fast-tracked and/or sort out some legal problems of their own, connecting them with the WMF Legal team (mostly with Slaporte (WMF)). These were Mineralsab from Wikimedians of Korea, Mardetanha from the Iranian Wikimedians User Group and Ladsgroup from Wikimedia Persian.

Filipino Wikipedians and members of Wikimedia Philippines

In my capacity as President of Wikimedia Philippines, I led the Filipino delegation to Wikimania 2015, which was composed of myself, Namayan, Carlojoseph14, KisekiLacroix and Exec8. Among other duties, we coordinated regarding which sessions to attend as well as talked to persons interested with our projects.

During the conference, Wikimedia Philippines was approached by Emnamizouni about replicating the Cultural Heritage Mapping Project in Tunisia, and we also met with other Wikimedia affiliates who were interested in doing projects with us.

Wikimedians in Asia

As the organizer of this year's Asian Wikimedia meetup, I met most of the Asian Wikimedians present at Wikimania this year (some of the ones I'm most familiar with include Meursault2004, Psubhashish, Netha Hussain, Takot, AddisWang and Taweetham). The crowning achievement of this meeting was Addis' proposal for the Wikipedia Asian Month which we look forward to implementing across several Asian communities, as well as Ravidreams' proposal for a unified Asian bloc in future Wikimedia Foundation Board elections.

One of these interactions has led to something fairly significant on a more personal note: mxn and I are discussing holding a panel on Americans building Wikimedia communities outside the United States for this year's WikiConference USA.

WMF Board members and candidates from the 2015 Board election

A number of candidates for this year's Board election were present at Wikimania, and I took time to meet and talk with some of them. Hindustanilanguage and అహ్మద్ నిసార్ were present during the Wikimedia Asia meetup, while I talked with Pgallert a number of times during the course of the conference. In addition, I was approached by Pundit, Doc James and Denny to share some of my perspectives on the movement at large, how the Board ought to move forward, and what they can do now that they have been elected to the Board.

I also met outgoing, former and incumbent Board members over the course of the conference (excluding Alice and Jan-Bart, who I already mentioned earlier): these were Phoebe, Sj, Raystorm, Bishdatta, Anthere, Stu, Patricio.lorente, Frieda and, of course, Jimbo Wales.

WMF staff members

I've met several Wikimedia Foundation staff members over the course of Wikimania, encompassing several departments. I've met people from the Community Engagement, Legal, Communications, Engineering and Product (elaborated below) and Advancement teams. Partially as a result of these interactions, Wikimedia Philippines will be promoting WMF job openings during the Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations (HPAIR) career fair in Manila on August 22nd.

"Technical people" (developers, coders, etc.)

I've had the privilege of meeting with a number of MediaWiki developers and WMF technical teams during the course of the conference. Most especially, I was able to meet with the Content Translation team in order to iron out some kinks with regards to localization and system bugs.

Others

During the conference, I also had the chance to meet many other people who were non-Wikipedians, including educators and other people interested in open source, both from Mexico (mostly during my talk) and elsewhere.