[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Report to the board: WikiCon in Dornbirn, Austria

[Ting Chen]

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