[RCom-l] Notes from Wikimania

[Dario Taraborelli]

Here some notes from Wikimania 2011.

Dario

This was my first Wikimania and it was a tremendously enriching experience. I met a lot of passionate Wikipedians and friends and finally got to meet face to face with some RCom members I had only spoken to via skype or IRC. The organizers did an excellent job and the social events have been some of the best I've seen at a conference. Last but not least, having a female Wikipedian, amazing storyteller and PhD candidate in comparative history of religions as a guide on the Sunday tour to Jerusalem was possibly the best tribute to the resources we have in our community.
Here are some highlights from the conference:
[edit]Strategy and product development

I spoke to several people about how we make decisions on new features or large-scale experiments at WMF and on the need for the community to trust us while we run these experiments. This was also, incidentally, a point explicitly made by Jimbo in his closing remarks and it was really good to hear him mention this. I heard people frustrated by not being adequately listened to for their contribution to the product development or strategic planning. We should find better ways to listen to our community without necessarily making our product development an unmanageable form of radical participatory design. We should tap into the strategy wiki as a repository of ideas and try to better connect them to our current agenda. We should allow people to experiment more without relying on WMF to do so (see below for some ideas on how to make this happen). The strategy planning is over and we currently don't have a solution to harness the creative and intellectual potential of our community on an ongoing basis: that's another source of concern. Apart from this, one of the big takeaways from the conference was the fact that I think we managed to persuade our community that experimenting with new forms of social engagement does not mean turning Wikimedia into Facebook and I was glad to see a broad support to our work from different parties (editors, chapter members, board members).
[edit]Wikipedia as a platform/decentralizing innovation

Diederik, Ryan Lane and myself hosted a panel on how to open up Wikipedia's data by allowing third parties to not only reuse our contents but also to build real applications on top of these data. We gave a short presentation of what a relatively modest allocation of effort to support OpenID and OAuth could produce in terms of positively disruptive experimentation and decentralized innovation. This would allow WMF to focus on core projects and anybody else to develop new applications for our community and to explore collaborative models that are relevant to our mission but we currently cannot support because of limited internal resources. On my way back from Wikimania I discussed these ideas with many WMF people to find out that there would be some large internal support for this if we put together a proposal: that's currently in the pipeline.
[edit]Expert participation

I presented the early results from the expert participation survey (a collaboration with Daniel Mietchen, Giota Alevizou and some external researchers in Germany and the UK) and I got a lot of valuable feedback in 1:1 conversations after the talk. People involved in the higher education program were particularly excited at finding ways to engage with researchers and academics, outside of the classroom. Cheryl Moi, one of the campus ambassadors for the education program, was recently contacted by people at the National Academy of Science and we are now considering whether we should start a program similar to the Wikipedian in Residence initiative to increase the integration between scientific institutions and Wikimedia (expanding on Daniel'sWiR model).
[edit]Source-centric collaboration

I had 1:1 discussions on collaboration centered on sources with a bunch of people (including Andrew Lih, Benjamin Mako Hill, Heather Ford and Achal Prabhala). I am putting together some ideas partly based on these conversations and partly based on existing projects, on how to better support the selection, evaluation and discussion of sources that are cited in Wikipedia articles.
[edit]Research outreach

I participated in Daniel's presentation on open access/open data and participated in a panel moderated by folks from Wikimedia Germany about EU-funded research consortia and Wikimedia'sparticipation in research projects. It was great to hear that chapters are starting to join research consortia as partners and we discussed the barriers they are currently facing when they are approached by research groups. I gave an overview of what the Foundation (and RCom in particular) is doing to strengthen ties with the academic community (via the Research Index, the open data project, the Research Newsletter, the research fellowships etc). My feeling is that these initiatives were really well received but we should put more effort into disseminating them.
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