User:Erwan WMFr/WCN 2016
 This diary has been written in two different languages: English - français
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This diary has been inspired by the one of Ziko on the WikiConvention francophone, which you can read here. Here I'll write about what I've learned from the Wikimedia Conferentie Nederland 2016 and the nice projects I've discovered.
Hartelijk bedankt to Xenophôn, Nathalie, Ziko, and Denise for letting me get part of this conference.
Utrecht edit
I came to the Netherlands one day prior to the event and overslept in a hotel close to Utrecht Centraal and thus close to where the conference was held. The conference is held every year at the same venue inside Hoog Catharijne, a huge commercial center right next to the central station. You have to know that Utrecht CS is the main station in Utrecht and maybe in the whole Netherlands: almost every trains from any major Dutch city goes through this station, thus the choice of helding this event in Utrecht is wise as every Dutch people can take part of it quite easily.
Sessions edit
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Saturday was the big day as I could finally take part of a WikiCon as a participant for the very first time, having attended only once such a event but as an organizer during the Wikiconvention. There is less stress as you come in as a participant, even though I had to be a speaker at a certain time. The first you see as you enter the Meeting Plaza is that there is a nice and friendly atmosphere. The conference has been opened by a short speech of Frans Grijzenhout, president of Wikimedia Nederland, who welcomes people to interact with each other for a couple of minute so you can introduce yourself to the others and know a bit more about the other participants — a very nice idea. Then started the key note presentation about the history of searching engines. I may speak a bit of Dutch, this was a bit tough to understand the whole thing but one of the Dutch participant told me that it was even harsh for her to catch everything. Maarten de Rijke, the keynote speaker, talked about an open source project related to the searching engines, named TREC Open Search, a nice project of which Wikipedia could learn a lot of.
After this first collective session, I stayed in the room and attended the presentation about Wikipedia and school. The projects where Wikimedia Nederland is involved are mainly related to Dutch Universities. Then I went to a session about war archive and sources, where Edwin Klijn told how NIOD works and how they try to link different sources between them to enrich war archives and make them more useful. At that moment you can realise that Wikimedia Nederland is a dynamic chapter who has fascinating partnership: from universities to cultural institutes.
Then Freddy2001 explained us why support of under age Wikipedians can make a change. Talking from his own experience and point of view, as a 15 years old Wikipedian member of a German kind of user group dedicated to the youth, he explained that we should help the young Wikipedians rather than criticise their mistakes. We could say that they are the seeds we have to take care of, and talking about seeds someone gave small papers fulfilled of flower seeds to invite us to create the missing flowers articles on the Dutch Wikipedia.
Lunch time. The catering was very good and far better than the one we had at our WikiConvention — something for sure we will do our best to make it better next year! After this tasty break, I've learned about WikiWerkers, a group of people who helps others to create their own wiki using MediaWiki. A great project who was born from their own experience as they have created their own wiki dedicated to Church songs.
The day ended with two young writers, Arts and Lentes, reading their writing they had done during the conference. They were commissioned by the organizers to add an artistic aspect to this event and it was as fun as poetic. Unfortunately, I don't think we could do such a thing in France one day as this, in my opinion, was something really Dutch: The Netherlands has a stronger literature culture than we have, as weird as it could sound to a French ear. But this artistic aspect was also to be found at our event as we had a drawer — which is more French in a certain way.
Wikimedia Events in Europe edit
On top of all this, I have been allowed to share our experience about making a WikiCon. A very nice moment to tell Ziko about how it went as he is one of the WCN organizer, one of the inspirational event of the WikiConvention. It was interesting as well to learn from Germans experience as their event is maybe two times bigger than ours, and great to see that Italians plans to make their own WikiCon as well!
At the end of the day we all went to the borrel where we all had informal chats about various subjects, a very pleasant way to end this — too short — day. This conference can be summed up in two words: fascinating and gezellig!