[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation Mid-Year Presentation to the Board of Trustees

[Steven Walling]

On Tuesday, March 6, 2012, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt at gmail.com> wrote:
> Finally, a question. Slide 31 says that in the future the WMF will run
> "Worldwide convenings of highly active contributors in mature Wikipedias".
> I know the noun "a convention" and I know the verb "to convene" but I
don't
> recognise the noun "a convening". What is it? Is it the same as "a
> conference"?
>
> -Liam

Even though it is unusual, we have used the word convening intentionally,
in order to differentiate from a conference (which can imply a whole host
of styles of gathering, usually with multiple tracks) or a simple meetup
(which sounds too unstructured). There is more documentation on Meta.[1]

It's serendipitous that you should mention having the community be the
solution to editor retention issues, because that is precisely our purpose
with these convenings. In addition to the Arabic Wikipedia convening Abbas
mentioned, Maryana and I are on the last day of a four city trip to Brazil
to hold discussions with Portuguese-speaking Wikipedians.

We have met with dozens of the most active contributors to PT WP and
created a set of the issues everyone felt were the biggest barriers to a
healthy and growing project -- focusing on things the community controls
locally, such as policy, mentoring of new editors, anti vandalism work,
etc., as opposed to purely technical solutions or large scale programs like
the global education work.

This is our first pilot convening in the Community Dept, so whether we do
more is really dependent on our retrospective for this Brazil work. There's
lots more forthcoming, but for now the most discussion is on Portuguese
Wikipedia's *Esplanada*.[2]

Steven

1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_convenings
2.
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Esplanada/geral/Wikip%C3%A9dia_Encontros,_Brasil_(24jan2012)