Hi Quim,

Although I have used MediaWiki as a mechanism to submit conference

proposals (here and in my previous job), I don't think I know any MediaWiki user or any event organizer out of Wikimedia using MediaWiki to handle a call for participation. Wikimania and some WikiCons do, but I don't know the reasons why they do it, neither how happy are the organizers and the participants using those MediaWiki-based processes for an event.

There's SMWCon (the Semantic MediaWiki Conference), although you could say that this too is an example of "dogfooding". But the annual Chaos Communications Congress [0] also uses MediaWiki for its talk submissions, and that's a real conference, which had over 13,000 attendees last year.

Most relevantly, the Chaos Communications Congress wiki uses the Semantic Forms [1] extension to handle submissions - speakers use a form to enter their talk proposals. I don't know how exactly talks are approved, or whether the form is used for approving/rejecting talks too - or, for that matter, whether they have any sort of real screening process. But the basic mechanics are that forms are used for entering all the relevant information about each talk, including tags (among many other fields).

Here's an example of one such page for a session:

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2015/wiki/Session:A_New_Business_Model_for_th...

...and here's the form used to create/edit it:

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2015/wiki/index.php?title=Session:A_New_Busin...

Why have Wikimedia events never used MediaWiki + Semantic Forms to manage their talk proposals? I don't know - it might be a case of "not invented here" syndrome, ironically, since Semantic Forms is a non-Wikimedia extension. But it's certainly an option.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Communication_Congress [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Semantic_Forms

-Yaron