Wikimania 2018: Learnings and Experience

Hello world! After my most successful Wikimania ever, I finally managed to get some time to share my learnings and experience at Wikimania 2018. As usual, I will *try not to* keep the content boring but keep it crisp and informative. So, let's start!

Bridging knowledge gaps: The Ubuntu Way forward

The theme of Wikimania 2018 was, "Bridging knowledge gaps—the ubuntu way forward". Here "ubuntu" doesn't refer to Operating System Ubuntu, but is much broader than that. Ubuntu, as per South African philosophy says, means, "I am because you are." This in itself is quite deep and much of what we can gather from this statement means, "the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity." Since volunteer community-driven projects like Wikipedia follow this vision as well, in my opinion, no better theme than this can exist.

My learnings before pre-conference days

Before the pre-conference, I managed to free some time from hacking and completing my session presentation. Me along with Amir E. Aharoni, Andreasmperu and Olga Viota went to see the penguins at Boulder's Beach. We went via train till Simon's Town and then we walked till Boulder's Beach. On our way, Amir taught us (especially me), my native language, "Hindi". I was surprised that he knew about my language more than me. I never tried to go into the technicalities of Hindi, but he made sure that I know them by the end of our trip. Andreasmperu contributes to Wikidata and Spanish Wikipedia. She enlightened us with Peru, her home country and told us about Peru Wikipedia community and the challenges that the community are facing. Olga, who is from Bolivia, contributes to Spanish Wikipedia. She shared her experiences as well.

Another very informative thing I learnt is about Basque language community. I always thought about the complexity of words in Hindi Wikipedia and whenever I tried to persuade my friends to contribute to Hindi Wikipedia, they became dazzled after a while due to its complexity in sentences. They mentioned it to me, "as if a Hindi scholar wrote this". I discussed the same with Amir and he told me how Basque community has already come up with their own solution to which they named, "Txikipedia" (thanks to Amir again for reminding of it). It is a simplified version of the Basque Language in order to attract high school kids to edit Wikipedia. This initiative is quite brilliant!

Me with Amir beside me. In front of me is Andreasmperu and Olga is beside her.

My learnings and experience during the pre-conference days

Pre-conference was very much important for me. I had a scheduled Lightning talk and I was also leading a session on volunteer recruitment and engagement with Reem Al-Kashif and Walaa Abdel Manaem. I attended Wikipedia & Education meetup. Nik Skaull explained about South African Education System. He mentioned the diversity in South African Economy and how badly it impacts the education system.

Children belonging to Chronic Poor -> Get Poor High School Education -> Do not go to College

Me, Mina and 2 other Wikipedians sat together after Wikimedia & Education meetup and after a long discussion on Non-Wikipedia Wikimedia Projects, we came up with a list of ideas. They can be accessed here.

I shared a lightning talk on "Using Blogs as a tool to attract people from other open communities". You can access the slides here. In this lightning talk, I shared my experiences in writing blog, what to write, how to share, whom to share etc. The talk went good and people appreciated it. Yay! Listening to other talks on various topics like Gender Gap, Education Programs, Photography etc. gave me a lot of inspiration.

I lead a session on "Non-Wiki Activities: A motivation to edit Wikipedia" in which I shared unique ways to motivate students to edit Wikipedia. This went far more better than my expectations. I won't go deep into details but you can access the slides here and if you ran into some question, please feel free to drop it on my talk page here.

Author: Reem Al-Kashif (She is the best). Shared under CC-BY-SA 4.0 license

My learnings and experience during the main conference

This year, I finally started my journey with Wikidata which I wanted to do from a long time. For this, I attended a 2 hour session by Asaf Bartov and finally learnt how I can contribute to Wikidata. I learnt the basics and then after the session tried implementing complex SPARQL queries on my own. Oh, I just found a new love. It's Wikidata <3.

I also attended a session on "Using artificial intelligence to keep Wikipedia open" by Aaron Halfaker. The session demonstrated how AI is being used at different elements of Wikipedia. Being a AI enthusiast myself, I was very keen in knowing the Machine Learning models being implemented so, I managed to take a photograph of it.

The keynote session by Joy Buolamwini on "The Dangers of Supremely White Data and The Coded Gaze" was one of the best keynotes I have ever been into. She showed the dark side of AI and how billion dollar companies' "production-ready" AI can't even detect the gender of non-white people. I would say, this was one of the best sessions at Wikimania.

I attended a workshop on Scholia tool and the tool showed a very good practical application of Wikidata. I volunteered for the event with Daniel.

The last workshop I attended was on Pattypan. I was successful to make a Pull Request while the session was going on.

Meeting a lot of people at Community Village, Breakfasts, Breaks, Lunch, Excursions etc. was just awesome. This Wikimania, I met 100+ new people with whom I hope to communicate and collaborate.

P.S: I hiked up the Table Mountain, yay! ^_^

Okay, that was it. I finally complete this blog. I know most of you won't bother reading it (except my Wiki friends), so here are the key takeaways:

Learnings

• Basque Language Wikipedia and Txikipedia
• A lot of innovation in Wikipedia Education Program
• Gained better insights on issues like Gender Gap, Community Health, Volunteer engagement etc.
• Wikidata and SPARQL!!!
• Grants proposal
• Tools like Scholia, Pattypan
• AI powered Wikipedia
• AI and it's dark side
• Experiences from world-class editors, coders, leaders, innovators (they all are Wikipedians)!

Told ya, it will be small.

Why open access?

Today, I was scrolling the internet for some information which was very necessary for me. I got it from an open journal. I have used open journals a lot of time but today was different. I know about open access from a long time and I have been working on it directly or indirectly such as running awareness campaigns, running open clubs, writing here on my blog etc. Today, I write about open access and explain you why it is important for anyone.

What is Open Access (OA)?

In the most simplest terms, Open Access (OA) is the research that has been distributed in either online or printed format in order to let people read and know. Suppose, you have wrote a research paper that identifies blockchain as a replacement of traditional databases by matching same speed for read and write operations. You are confident about it. You know it's unique. You know no one has ever thought about it. You are excited to tell people about your research. You upload it to Google Scholarly Articles, Open Journal System, Archive.org etc.

Wait, can your research come under copyright infringement? Can someone just copy your material, modify its bits and release under his/her name? Woah, yes it's possible. So, there are 2 degrees of Open Access:

1. Gratis

Gratis open access refers to providing everything your research for free without any further re-use permissions.

2. Libre

Libre is an extension of Gratis by providing readers re-use permissions under specific conditions. Most of the Libre work is released under Creative Commons license. (CC is actually very cool stuff)!

My personal preference is inclined more towards Libre because it clearly supports open access to its full potential. I also motivate people to release their research under CC license. This way, their work has a copyright and everyone can re-use and distribute it but the original author remains the same.

Why Open Access?

I could argue whole day in support for open access. I always like to explain people in the form of an example. So, let me take a very good example in order to make you understand why open access is necessary. How would you feel in an environment where you have to pay to gain knowledge on anything? So, you know you have internet. What happens if Wikipedia ever asked you to pay for each article you read? What would happen if every research paper was locked only for riches. Sounds hard? No, it sounds awful. We always want knowledge to open and free for all. Open Access is a crucial initiative in this huge movement. With Open Access, you get to

• access any research free of cost
• re-use and distribute it as per your needs
• claim your copyright on your own research
• share it with the world without worry
• dive into pool of knowledge for free

Well, these are just some good reasons for you to get involved with open access. The true meaning and value is hidden beneath. Support Open Access, Support Open Education, Support Free Knowledge, Support Open Data and Support Open Source!

How Wikimedia helped me explore the world of openness (awesomeness)

For a long time I have been willing to write this, I had it all in my mind but I kinda failed to express it in words. Wikimedia, the parent organization of Wikipedia believes in

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.

Us volunteers, thrive each day for the global knowledge movement. But Wikimedia is not just a knowledge movement, it's more than that. It helps you explore the world of openness. Now, what's openness? Well, if I were to define openness, it would be:

A world where everything is open for everyone and everyone has access to it.

Openness includes but not limited to Open Education, Open Web, Open Data, and Open Source. You must be wondering how Wikimedia could help someone enter the world of openness? Well, Wikipedia Community welcomes people from all the backgrounds, coders, writers, researchers, educators, etc. We have a place for everyone.

Open Source

When I started my journey with Wikipedia as a Google Code-In student in 2015, I submitted patches for MediaWiki, migrated existing articles to make them ready for translation etc. This way, Wikimedia introduced me to the world of open-source. I developed a huge interest in programming, so I continued my studies with major in Computer Science.

Open Education

Following that, I went to Wikimania, the annual Wikimedia conference as a scholarship recipient in 2016, where I learnt about Wikipedia Education Program. Being an active education leader spreading free knowledge movement in India, I really liked the idea of integrating Wikipedia in the current education infrastructure in India. With this, I started Wikipedia Education Program with schools and then in colleges nearby where I received positive feedback. This way, Wikimedia helped me enter the world of Open Education.

Wikipedia believes in the principles of Creative Commons always make sure your work is licensed and freely available at the same time by encouraging editors to license their work with Creative Commons Licensing. I have taught and raised awareness among people on why license is important and how it will help you individually.

Some other open issues I care about..

I believe in free and open internet. Being a Wikipedian myself and with its learnings, I support net neutrality, equitable access to information and freedom of speech. They all constitute to Open Internet. I personally believe that this is some movement that everyone should care about. Countries like Turkey where Wikipedia has been recently banned is a huge setback on the free knowledge movement. A lot of research on data is to be done to make sure the content on Wikipedia is free from censorship with respect to all countries and articles follow the norms of country-specific laws. At the same time, public policy must be curated from time to time to make sure there is no violation.

So, these were some of the learnings I got from Wikipedia or Wikimedia Foundation and helped me explore the beautiful world of openness. Let me know in comments what learnings you got from Wikipedia or any other organization you work for and spread the love for openness.

MediaWiki Training 2018 (MWT 2018)

This year, MediaWiki Training 2018 was held at Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bangalore. It was a 2-day event. We call it MWT2018. People from different communities arrived including people from English Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia etc.

It was an invite-only workshop held under the A2K programme of CIS. Our mentor for the workshop was Tony Thomas. He is a past GSoCer and GSoC mentor for Wikimedia Foundation. He proved to be a great resource person for the event. Since it was a 2-day event, I will give a brief overview on what we did each day with respect to MediaWiki.

DAY 1

We started off with setting up MediaWiki and Gerrit in all systems. Then, we learnt on how to submit patch to Gerrit. Then, we continued it with building our own extension using the BoilerPlate extension. Tony taught us different methods that is provided to us by mediawiki-core and how can we use them to build our own extensions.

Later, we started hacking our own extension that sends us a Echo notification whenever we edit a page. With a good amount of hard work, we were finally able to build one. It really paid off.

DAY 2

Our day 2 started with understanding the extension structure, the use of extension.json file, i18n and l10n. This was led by Mr. Jay Prakash from Hindi Wikipedia. Then, there was a live hangout scheduled with Quim Gill for discussing the Indian MediaWiki Developer Community. There was an unexpected entry from Srishti Sethi who also works at WMF. The hangout was pretty good and resourceful.

After that, I started working on the Book Uploader Bot (BUB) as it was reported by Bodhisattwa Mandal from Bengali Wikipedia that the tool is broken. Apparently, I will soon fix it or make it from scratch.

Learning Outcomes

• Understanding of various core functions and their use cases.
• Understanding the extension structure, l10n, i18n etc.
• Using Echo extension to send notifications.
• Submission of patches, review process etc.
• Building our own extension from scratch.

Resourceful outcomes

• Really great connections.
• Set up of Indian Developer Community for MediaWiki.
• Getting the support from WMF.
• Working on projects that are worth it.

In the end, I would like to extend the thanks to CIS team for setting up this really great event for all of us. It was very well managed and executed. I hope to see and visit similar events in future. Till then, happy hacking!