Post : Wikimedia at FOSDEM 2015
URL :
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/02/11/wikimedia-at-fosdem-2015/
Posted : February 11, 2015 at 17:39
Author : asherman2015
Tags : developers, FOSDEM, free software, software, Wikimedia,
Wikipedia
Categories : Chapters, Events, Technology
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brussels-FOSDEM_2015_(12).jpg
The Wikimedia Foundation hosted a booth at FOSDEM 2015, the annual Free
and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting. Photo (
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brussels-FOSDEM_2015_(12).jpg )
by Romaine (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Romaine ) , licensed
under CC0 1.0 (
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en ) .
FOSDEM 2015 (
https://fosdem.org/2015/ ) , the annual Free and Open
Source Software Developers’ European Meeting, took place in Brussels,
Belgium, from January 31 to February 1, 2015. The Wikimedia Foundation
hosted a booth throughout that conference, in collaboration with
Wikimedia Belgium, the Wikimedia Shop (
http://shop.wikimedia.org/ )
and Wikimedia Deutschland.
We are happy to say that our Wikimedia booth received a lot of attention
at FOSDEM. We experienced a remarkable turnout by women editors, despite
our gender gap (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_gap ) issues.
As a result, we learned more about how our female editors like to engage
when creating content on Wikipedia: it appears that in-person
collaborations and social settings appeal to female contributors and
keep them coming back.
Based on these and other conversations, it seems these best practices
could increase gender diversity:
* host more face-to-face workshops or edit-a-thons, where participants
are encouraged to interact with each other in person.
* develop social software that makes it easy for users to form groups,
so they are not feeling alone and can work with others in their group.
* provide groups with a central discussion page, recent changes showing
the activity of other group members, as well as a way to create tasks,
and host a wish list.
Our FOSDEM booth was originally focused on providing information about
Wikimedia and Wikipedia, but we had many questions about Wikidata (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata ) and MediaWiki (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki ) . Our software developers
were able to answer most of these questions, but next year we plan to
have more materials to cover these topics, due to this high level of
interest. We also gave free Wikimedia T-shirts, water bottles or hoodies
to participants who tweeted about the shop -- or who demonstrated that
they had edited Wikipedia or Wikimedia projects.
Quim Gil and Andre Klapper made a presentation about our Phabricator
collaboration software: “Wikimedia adopts Phabricator, deprecates seven
infrastructure tools – First hand experience from big free software
project on a complex migration”. Read more about their presentation (
https://fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/wikimedia_adopts_phabricator/ )
and check out their slides (
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phab-FOSDEM2014-clean.pdf ) .
FOSDEM 2015 (
https://fosdem.org/2015/ ) was a very productive
conference, and we hope that next year will be even better. Thanks again
to Quim and Andre for presenting. And thanks to everyone who showed up
at the booth to ask questions and share their insights. We appreciate
all your support and interest in our cause.
Romaine (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Romaine ) , board member
of Wikimedia Belgium
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