User:CKoerner (WMF)/Notes from the 2018 Wikimania and Hackathon

This was an unexpected and welcome trip that turned out to be the best Wikimedia-related event I've yet attended.

Originally my wife was going to attend given her work in the movement and I was going to sit this one out in my staff and volunteer role. A last minute opportunity to attend thrust me into the role of her +1. I quickly filled my dance card with activities. I left the event feeling productive, energized, and ready to get shit done in the coming year.

General
While I'm far from claiming longest travel time of my peers, the 24+ hours of travel were long, but mostly unremarkable. Having someone to travel with make this much more enjoyable. Once I arrived onsite the facilities and staff at the hotel were top notch. Throughout the event I was impressed with the organization and professionalism of everyone involved in hosting the event, from the volunteer staff to the folks working in the hotel. Having the venue be the same location as our rooms was an incredible plus. No need to worry about getting to the right place a few blocks away, weather couldn't impede taking a break, and I could sleep in. :)

Cape Town
I was advised, and frequently reminded, of the dangers of roaming about the city; particularly at night. However I was fortunate enough to not have any issues in my excursions. I understand others did. The city was vibrant, with activity throughout the day and well into the evening in pockets of actives around restaurants, the waterfront, etc. At one point my wife and I walked between locations well into the evening and were greeted by the unsettling realization that during our entire 20 minute walk we didn't pass another human soul. That was a little odd. The weather could not have been better and I found everyone I talked to to be friendly and accommodating. The food - both at the venue and throughout the city - was delicious and unique.

Hackathon
I love hackathons, but as a non-developer always feel a little like an interloper. I can talk to folks, I can suggest ideas, but I struggle in my amateur barely-able-to-write-a-script skills. But not this hackathon! I was happy to help the Readers web team organize a table and some user interviews around what interfaces and workflows would be most wanted on mobile web. We interviewed about a dozen folks in the first few days and the PM and designer on the team felt more confident about their planned work with some concrete feedback from volunteers. It felt rewarding to have a focused effort during the hackathon and have results to show for it. 

Friday
Africa's Wikipedias. I found this first session to be interesting. I noted that most of the panelists were from South Africa, which makes sense given that is where we were, but I wonder if we could have had better representation of the whole of the African continent? This isn't to slight the insightful commentary by the panel, but an enduring wish for more inclusion.

One thought I had during this session was the difficulty young wiki communities have in building critical mass. One crazy thought. What if there was some way to fund new communities? A short-term engagement based upon time or articles or # of active editors (some metric) that would provide support in programming, events, and financial support for contract staff in the community to advocate and evangelize the local language community. Not "pay to create articles" but, "pay to grow a community until it can get it's feet under itself".

One quote of note. "Experiences are shared via Wikipedia". I liked that sentiment. The social part of our work is sometimes underrepresented. We should be more mindful of that. People share their life and experiences through their contributions.

Dumi (User:Thuvack), one of the panelists, noted that his local wiki (Tsonga) started with 10 articles, mostly stubs, in a language community of 8+ million speakers. From small beginnings...

Freedom, as a message from the decolonizing the internet pre-conference, came up again. As one presenter put it, "The struggle continues". It was inspiring and invigorating to hear people talk about their efforts to make a space on the internet for their culture and identities. It's frustrating that they have to put such effort into it whereas folks like me can benefit from assuming the default. 

One of the thoughts I had after some insightful comments by Cristal was around the influence exist projects have on new wikis. For example. How do meta strictures in existing projects (templates, workflows, governance process) influence smaller and newer wikis? Does copying from English Wikipedia influence their structure and agency as a form of drug-along colonialism. Not intentional, but as a side-effect?

The quotation of oral sources in a decolonization context

How does literacy and unwritten languages - not wanting to share knowledge publicly because it's special to a community - jive with our mission? How does our ideas of openness perhaps create obstacles for these languages and cultures to be represented?

Could we create private wikis to pass down knowledge with in a community? Not public, but still documenting and sharing - in a smaller context than the general public?

What about endangered languages where volunteering might not be enough. There could be only a handful of speakers left, many in advanced ages. How do we document that?

One commenter had the observation (Peter I believe was their name) that other folks coming in who have studied a language - but are not a native speaker - have the effect of being an alien writing. Another colonist tool to write the history. He wants to see more than just translations from/to English happening (which are welcome) but to see people within a native language community actually writing! Hear hear! :)

Related to the presentation: https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/hz/Omimbonde_Vitano - the Wikipedia article about the sacred Camelthorn trees.

Sister project incubator - or, how to deal with knowledge gaps inherent in "What Wikipedia is not I thought Gergo's framing of the conundrum of creating new projects to be that of "stagnation" as a little down. My interoperation is that perhaps we've reached a phase of general stabilization. Where the difficulty for creating new experiments has a higher cost as we expect more stability and structure than what exists in the primordial early days of a new species. How do we prevent stagnation - to be bold, actively promote! the idea of new projects - while keeping existing communities on the right path is a challenge. Not to say we can't knock off a bit of them to create a moon, but we need to do so meaningfully.

Funny note. A slide Gergo shared quoted Jimmy Wales in 2005 saying, "Free the Maps". Well, we've kind of did that.

https://wikimania2018.wikimedia.org/wiki/Invited_speakers#Martin_Dittus great, but at the end of a long day (and jet lag) was hard to keep up with. Upon rewatching I was reminded of the wonderful visualizations via maps.

Knowledge Equity and Spatial Justice on Wikipedia This presentation is recorded and I recommend you watch it. The presenter is a digital geographer and data scientist and did a splendid job telling a story about the data he has collected during his research. I enjoyed the visualizations that Martin shared showing how broadband access doesn't exactly equate to equality. The visualizations were easy to digest and spun off a thousand ideas for similar research (I'd live to see the same analysis done on other Wikimedia projects like Wikivoyage).

One take away phrase from the presentation, "Our digital rights to the city." Poetic.

Saturday
The Decolonizing Debate: Social Media as Source Archive and Wikipedia

While I found this presentation to be rather academic I did appreciate the effort Dr. Jacobs went into his preparation and for sharing his research and thoughts. Again, another plenary you should watch.

One large, groan-worthy, take away. There are more articles about Middle Earth than any single African nation. That is to say our community has invested more time in documenting knowledge of a fictional world than the real world. Perhaps a hint as to the success of projects like Wikia and Gamepedia? A definite shortcoming in our own collected knowledge.

Wikipedia for Indigenous Communities A lot has been said about polices like Reliable Sources and their impact on including more knowledge from indigenous languages. This presentation was a bit abstract - I'm not sure what action should be taken - but I support the efforts to remove barriers like bias and allow for more projects to flourish.

Sunday
The Dangers of Supremely White Data and The Coded Gaze Go watch Joy's presentation. Hers is hands down the most interesting and well presented plenary of Wikimania. Engaging, well researched, and relevant to bleeding edge endeavors within the movement.

I hope Joy is engaged with future Wikimedia efforts as her insights and experiences are very useful for emerging technologies like AI and pattern recognition. It puts our bias in sharp relief. The social implications of relying on biased data to make decisions will be important for our movement wherever it manifests. Being aware of it early and recognizing limitations early will put us ahead of other initiatives in the world that are late to recognizing - and correcting for - these limitations. Also, she's the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, which just sounds badass.

Research on gender gap in Wikipedia: What do we know so far? Meta and Reem's presentation illustrated our reliance on English Wiki as a benchmark of progress and shortcomings. A well-researched summary (as it should be) that covered questions like "Are women's edits reverted more?" and " How does Wikipedia’s fighty culture affect women?" Answers to appear to be, "Yes" and "Negatively". I liked that the presenters also shared potential solutions in their takeaways. Actions individuals and communities can directly take to improve representation.

What can we learn from the Feminist movement for knowledge equity? Dovetailing nicely with the previous session was Asaf's. His talk took a practical look at the lessions we can learn from the feminist social movement and apply it to our own movement to further progress our own work in including others in participation and representation. Not just specific to gender, which I found insightful and refreshing. I liked the encouragement to consider that everyone should speak up when witnessing issues. That having a "not our job" attitude is a form of silent assent. Those with privilege should use that privilege to help others. It's a privilege to be privileged.

Neat things
A few links and items discovered during Wikimania.


 * Victor from Google User:Xinbenlv was present and shared a demo of Wikiloop =, "sharing data back to Wikipedia from Google, first example dataset: cross-wiki conflicting birthdays"
 * https://openknowledgemaps.org - an interesting way to visualize research topics
 * https://www.ajlunited.org - Algorithmic Justice League (if you watch one presentation from Wikimania, watch Joy’s!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSJXKoD6mA8&index=2&list=PLhV3K_DS5YfJ5raH7_jw3DVvLHWwoxJzR
 * http://zone47.com/crotos/
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EpochFail/ArticleQuality.js - show the ORES article quality score as a little color-coded square in page histories.
 * User:MassiveEartha has a list of articles we need help on. I added an image to the English article on Barracoon.
 * As someone educated in the American public school system I knew nearly nothing of the Arab slave trade. We studied purely the history of Atlantic slave trade. My ignorance has been corrected by the substantial English Wikipedia article.
 * https://atj.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otitikowin was a new Wikipedia I learned about
 * While at Wikimania a missing genus of fish was added to English Wikipedia. I thought fish were one area we would had "solved" a long time ago.
 * Cape Town and the Cape of Good Hope are beautiful.
 * Ethiopian food is delicious.