Hello all,

On this day of Wikidata’s birthday, I’m excited to announce some news about the next edition of the WikidataCon.

The WikidataCon is an event organized by Wikimedia Germany and focused on the Wikidata community in a broad sense: editors, tools builders, but also 3rd party reusers, partner organizations that are using or contributing to the data, the ecosystem of organizations working with Wikibase. The content of the conference will have some parts dedicated to people who want to learn more about Wikidata, some workshops and discussions for the community to share skills and exchange about their practices, and some space left to include side events for specific projects (WikiCite, Wikibase, GLAM, etc.).

During the first two editions, we gathered an international crowd in Berlin for a few days. However, as the global COVID pandemic is still hitting the world, and the forecast for 2021 doesn’t indicate much improvement, the situation doesn’t allow us to plan a traditional onsite international conference. In order to allow the event to take place, and to ensure the safety of all participants, we had to make some clear decisions. In 2021, we will not gather all participants in Berlin, and we will avoid any international travel. Instead, we are experimenting with a hybrid format for the conference: most of the content and interactions will take place online, and small, local gatherings will be possible, if the situation allows it.

In a similar way to the distributed Wikidata birthday events, we will encourage Wikimedia chapters, local groups and communities to organize their part of the event, to support and gather people inside their country, and to contribute to the content, for example with running talks, workshops and discussions. Wikimedia Germany will provide the technical infrastructure and support the coordination of these distributed events. We’re already inviting Wikimedia organizations to include the event in their 2021 plan (especially if you’re requesting an APG), and to reach out to me if you want to be involved in the distributed conference.

On top of this, we would like to partner with a Wikimedia organization outside of Europe/North America, to strengthen the Wikidata community in their country and to allow a fairer distribution of content and speakers. We are currently evaluating several possibilities, focusing on groups who have been very active with Wikidata-related events over the past years. Our criteria include not only the motivation and past activities, but also the ability of the group to support part of the WikidataCon organization workload. The choice of the partner organization will be announced at the end of November. If you would like to know more about the process, feel free to contact me off-list and I’ll be glad to give you some details.

In these quite unpredictable times, organizing an event is a challenge, and the WikidataCon 2021 will definitely be one of a kind: we will have to adapt, to be agile, to make the best out of the situation, and to work closely with the local Wikidata groups all over the world.

Since the first WikidataCon in 2017, I am deeply committed in providing a nice experience for everyone and making sure that this event remains a gathering for and by the Wikidata community. I’m really excited to coordinate this project and run this new experiment with you all!

If you’re interested in joining the effort, if you have questions, suggestions for formats, etc.: feel free to use this talk page or to reach out to me off-list.

Cheers,