User:ネイ/ESEAP Conference 2018 Report

First of all, it is a great honor to join ESEAP Conference 2018 and I would like to thank everyone in the organizing committee for their tough work before and during the conference. Also, a big thank you to everyone I have met in the conference - your experience is of a great plus to Wikimedia User Group Hong Kong (WUGHK), especially since it is in planning stage and not yet officially created that we badly need the expertise from other regions. It is also my first time hearing from the experience of Wikimedia Movement participants in other regions, so it was really (apologies for the jargon word) an eye-broadening expereince.

Things I learned

In the conference, User:春卷柯南 and myself are considered as representing WUGHK, so we have split our work and when there are two activities going on at the same time (see Program of ESEAP 2018), each of us attend one of the activities.

Below are the activities that I have attended:

Community Outreach
- Joseph went through the points to note in order to conduct a successful edit-a-thon. WUGHK, although not yet officially created, has conducted a few edit-a-thons, with a varying level of success. We do have several points noted during these experience and have been feeling that we are improving, but Joseph's summary has gained us a few more points that we could note.
- User:Takot gave us an introduction on Wikipedia Town, a type of edit-a-thon frequently held in Japan. In Japanese Wikipedia, there have been articles from these events being reviewed and rated as Good Articles, but we also see articles deleted for reasons such as copyright infringement and insufficient notability. I have read about Wikipedia Town in Japanese Wikipedia before, and Takot's introduction, other than acting as a refreshment, provides more details on how it is being conducted and on self-identified improvement points, which I have brought back and shared in a meet-up in Hong Kong this month.
Initiating Partnership and Collaboration: There were presentations regarding cooperation works with South Korean Government and University of Philippines. WUGHK has worked with some non-governmental organizations but not the government or universities so this is an area that we would like to explore.
Planning for learning with Wikimedia Projects / Program planning and evaluation: Both of these are activities held by Nichole. In my opinion, this was the most interesting activity :) While most of the activities are talks or presentations, Nichole's sessions were organized as fun games followed by group discussions. As she has mentioned during her sessions, it was a pity that she only had one hour per session. As for the things learned - the most enlightening idea of the former one is to provide a short and concise learning outcome statement, then determine the evidence needed. This is namely to use "backwards planning". The latter one gave the idea of getting to the root cause and long-term effect using "five whys" and five "what is the effect". In WUGHK, the events we have organized so far are either casual meet-ups or edit-a-thons with a vague objective (something like "teach newbies to Wikipedia on how to write an article"). I hope we can make use of the tools and frameworks that Nichole went through when we organize future events.
Ups and Downs of Organizations: Reke's presentation on a Board Structure will be relevant to WUGHK in the long future; the main gain was to meet the folks from Wikimedia Taiwan and learn more about how they operate and organize events (and it ended up that one of the organizing members of WUGHK is heading to Taiwan this month to meet them!). Butch's presentation focuses on issues that may be faced by Wikimedia Affiliates. The previous Wikimedia Hong Kong failed to sustain, so this presentation acted as a reminder to us that we should be thinking in a longer term, to make the User Group sustainable.

Writings during the Conference

At late nights I have also done a bit of article translation - results are ja:ハイド・パーカー, ja:マリアーノ・ペルフェクト and some parts of ja:ベルギーの歴史. マリアーノ・ペルフェクト is one of the articles mentioned in the lightning talks regarding Bikol Central Wikipedia.