The best way to measure the value of Wikimania IMO is through stories. So
here are a few of mine:
1) In Washington, DC a group of us meet regarding a new sister site. Partly
from this, two editing communities working on travel content were brought
back together and Wikivoyage was reborn as a WMF site.
A gentleman from the World Health Organization flew in to meet with some
medical editors. A six month Wikipedian in Residence at WHO followed, I was
invited to speak in Geneva, and the Bulletin of the World Health
Organization is now under a CC BY SA license with work for them to more
fully adopt an open license.
2) In Hong Kong I meet with the gentleman who runs Healthphone
http://www.healthphone.org/ He has subsequently agree to release some
amazing pubic health videos under an open license one of which you can see
here on Hindi Wikipedia
https://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%AA…
Discussions are ongoing to have WP's medical content included on 2 million
SD cards being shipped to healthcare workers in India.
3) In London I was introduced to volunteer programmer through a friend of a
friend. We had an idea for a copy and paste detection bot and we just
needed someone who knew how to code. Eran did the coding during the
conference. The bot is now live on all of En WP with other languages in the
works
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EranBot/Copyright/rc
4) In Mexico we continued to improve the copyright bot and pulling in a few
more programmers. Our community liaison for the project got to meet
community members face to face for the first time. We also solved some
issues regarding maps that had the potential to go sideways.
I am certain many other have similar stories. I have personally found
Wikimania invaluable. Attempting to bring us together once a year is not
too much.
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com