-------- Original-Nachricht -------- Betreff: Report to the board: WikiCon in Dornbirn, Austria Datum: Thu, 06 Sep 2012 08:13:06 +0200 Von: Ting Chen tchen@wikimedia.org An: Board list board-l@lists.wikimedia.org

Hello all,

from August 31st to September 2nd the german speaking chapters organized the third WikiCon, a regional german speaking conference. This is the third conference of this kind, after Lüneburg (organized by SkillShare) and Nürnberg (by the chapters). This is my report about this conference. I will also cross post part of it on wikimedia-l later.

Like on every WikiCon the struggle on the very tight and high relevance criteria as well as the deletionism and the rude behavior in village pumps and talk pages was one of the major topic. But in this year my feeling is that a critical mass is forming and things may move in the other direction on de-wp.

One of the major topics that is new on this WikiCon are wiki projects outside of the Wikimedia projects. There are a few very interesting speeches on this topic. One was about the RegionWiki, where people compile and gather local information, many of them deemed by Wikipedia as not relevant or not encyclopedia content. The other is just started and got financial support from WMDE, with the name ZeitzeugeWiki (a wiki that collects contemperary witnesses). The ZeitzeugeWiki remembers me also on the study of Achal on visual reference. Done right it can really be a valuable project that can have impact. Markus Bärlocher, a very active voluntier on Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and OpenSeeMap is planning a wiki for water sport and asks if Wikimedia Foundation can host it.

This project is also related to a third big topic that surfaced on this WikiCon. More and more projects, especially external projects like OpenStreetMap, is getting interlinked with Wikimedia projects. The WikiData project which is currently still in preparation had inflicted a lot of interest. OpenStreetMap and OpenSeeMap are hoping to tap those data for example. The wiki for water sport is concepted as a wiki that will automatically tap both data from Wikipedia and WikiData as well as from OpenSeeMap. The demand on a possibility to single sign on cross projects is getting louder.

It is very delightful for me to see that on these conferences there are still new people who show up to see if they can still join the community. I spoke with at least four of them in Dornbirn. One of them a very old man, I would guess on his 80s. He is himself an encyclopedist and wrote many thousand articles for a specialist encyclopedia on international laws. And when he said that he want to contribute and asked me on my advice I feel both overwhelmed as well as fearful to lead him to face the anonymous hostility that a newbie often face when he starts in our projects.

Personally I was happy to have the oppotunity to camp again, although the first day and night almost rained continuously. I didn't do it for years and really enjoyed the fresh morning air and even the patting of rain drops on the tent.

As always I provide carpool sharing and this time I took User:Alam_ffm with me. He is native polish and lives almost as long as me in Germany. He is active on both polish and german Wikipedia and is also active in the polish chapter. So during the drive he told me a lot of things about polish german Wikipedia interactions, about cross boarder meet ups and about the polish Wikipedia, which I know very little about, and which, as every Wikipedia language version, has a rich and interesting history.

Greetings Ting