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Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Miscellaneous/Global events calendar

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Global events calendar

  • Problem: It is hard to keep track on what events are planned, going on or happened, especially online ones (across time-zones) which leads to people that would have enjoyed, and constructively contributed to, are missing some events. This is due to several factors, and mostly in escalation of events (and meetings) online, as it makes it possible to attend previously local/physical events.
  • Who would benefit: All users that are (potentially) interested in organizing and attending events.
  • Proposed solution: A single place to promote and coordinate events. The most important part is that this calendar manage to capture all events in the entire movement, no matter what type they are or which part of the community is organizing it. This should be filterable by language(s) used, place and platform, but also possibly by project, theme, capacity, urgency or even custom #hashtag. The system should have few good calendar view options. A feature to export events to your personal calendar would be nice to have. Another nice to have feature (if it's not possible to the regular watchlist) is to subscribe to changes via email or via user talk page. Perhaps a feature that would really make this spreading across the projects quickly would be the ability to transclude a filtered selection of the events in another project.
  • More comments: There are some previous work in this topic, the best working solution in my opinion right now is Events calendar. On meta there is also Events and the experiment on Wikimedia Space was promising.
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: ♥Ainali talkcontributions 09:55, 22 November 2020 (UTC) and Zblace (talk) 12:47, 22 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • I would not mind seeing an option of also projecting tentative event plans in calendar just to avoid collisions and potentially have coordination (or even collaborations) of such events. Zblace (talk) 16:45, 22 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    That's perhaps a useful tool, but then it's not just a calendar anymore but almost a full-fledged project management tool. Let's keep this proposal to something smaller. ♥Ainali talkcontributions 16:51, 22 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Awesome! Note that Wikimedia CH is developing this wiki-Calendar with federation in mind that may be our solution: Meta:Wikimedia CH/Cronos --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 08:37, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    @Valerio Bozzolan: would you mind writing some kind of introduction on that page? Like what is it for, who is building it and what is the timeline? Right now it's quite hard to get a grasp of and even though you posted the link here several times, I didn't understand the purpose of it. ♥Ainali talkcontributions 16:40, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    @Ainali: Ouch... yes that homepage was terrible... is it better now? --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 00:02, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I totally support this proposal :) As more and more events are organized by various stakeholders, a real calendar tool is very much needed. As Jan mentioned, the attempt on Wikimedia Space was promising, but was mostly a blog post tool tweaked into a calendar, which came with issues, such as the unability to list events tagged with a certain tag in the order of the date. See also a former discussion about needs for a calendar tool for Wikidata-related events.
    I'd also mention the need of dealing with various time zones. For the Celtic Knot Conference 2020 we had a dedicated user script, for the Wikidata birthday we used an external website, none of these options are ideal. Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talk) 17:06, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I support this proposal. This allow small to large organizers notify the community on what event they plan to organize, and to make it easy for users to plan their commitments ahead of time. This also reduce the burden of doing an extensive search in meta pages & local language wikis. Exec8 (talk) 14:12, 27 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes! there have been a few attempts to do this, and it's harder than it seems because of issues of multilingualism and helping people know the calendar exists, but it's very needed. -- phoebe | talk 15:48, 27 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • absolutely necessary to track all community meetings and events so people can allocate time as necessary Gnangarra (talk) 04:17, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I've noted elsewhere, but it's worth reiterating that a highly valuable open source tool for collaborative event scheduling was developed for the open publishing fest. The full code and implementation is at this github link. If possible, it would be more efficient and effective to use this system compared to organising only on-wiki (e.g. ability to filter events by region, theme, and format). I am certain the devs (Julien Taquet, Yannis Barlas, Boris Budini & Kevin Muñoz) could be asked to assist in setting setting up. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 04:26, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I completely support this proposal and invite volunteers to work on translating the same for a greater reach.Rajeeb (talk) 07:00, 29 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • We truly need this proposed Events Calendar and I wholly support it. User:Buszmail (talk) 03:26, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I su
  • While for face-to-face meetups we have the calendar already, but not so for online. This is a good initiative, in which we can have one centralized page of listing all of the online Wikimedia events which are open to public (anyone can join, not just by invitation). I believe we can have that based on sequential date and also by its language medium (if it will be done in English or other language). And also not to forget to list down the topic, preface or minutes from any previous discussion (if that event is a follow up ones). Time should be listed in that particular country timezone (usually the main organizer/speaker) and UTC/GMT timezone, plus we shall add a one-click timezone converter (for time & date adjustment). Chongkian (talk) 04:23, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I totally support this proposal and we need this. Ninja✮Strikers «☎» 05:20, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hello, I'm Chris on the Movement Communications team at the Foundation. One possibly I've been talking with the Events team about recently is a central community calendar. Folks at the Foundation (like those on the Events team and myself in Comms!) agree that it's a problem for the movement to not have a centralized, well-supported, easy to use calendar. One possibility we're considering was a calendar in Diff, the community-focused blog. It's the successor in many ways to the Wikimedia Space prototype Jan mentioned. Diff runs on WordPress (open-source, pre-existing, and well-supported), is multilingual, open to participation, and soon you'll be able to authenticate with your Wikimedia account. While it's early in the discussions, I've been looking at something like The Events Calendar plugin (demo). I'd love to hear your thoughts. I personally think supporting a central resource like a community calendar is something the Foundation is well suited to do. :) CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 15:50, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    @CKoerner (WMF): As already note (apologies) here a relevant prototype: Meta:Wikimedia CH/Cronos, that is a MediaWiki calendar trying to be accessible (no JavaScript), federated (support multiple sources - still needing some thoughts), and it works without extensions or gadgets. Could it be interesting? --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 16:35, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    Having a link named "calendar" beside the "logout" option on the upper right across all wiki projects (meta, wikipedia, etc) will allow any user peek though events of the movement. Exec8 (talk) 06:14, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    @Exec8: Interesting feature. I want to bring your idea to the attention of the Meta:Cronos project manager. --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 15:45, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • This would be a great proposal if it also offers reminders to be written on user talkpages. It could become part of a wider set of tools for remote participation, something that this corona year has shown to be very desirable. I think remote participation options can enable not just better documentation beforehand due to capturing and answering more questions beforehand, but also perhaps enable better documentation during and after the event, just because more people can attend. Jane023 (talk) 18:03, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • We (WikiDonne) tried to adapt Les sans pagEs's French calendar (in this moment I cannot find to give it as example) to our uses, but an international one to be used in all projects (with an icon for the related project which is refered) is much needed. --Camelia (talk) 16:44, 1 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is so much needed!! From Europe, I pointed our fairly new Caribbean contributors to the Wikimedia North American conference which I happened to come across. I would have never seen that, had I not stumbled on the request for a CN banner on Meta. So yes: help the word get around and create one big overview! Ciell (talk) 16:07, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I support this as it is so badly needed now that we do so many things virtual and not in person. However, any system must be flexibly editable via wiki or other platforms. That is, we need a system to sync up changes so that whether things are edited on wiki, or in a modern calendar system (Google, Airtable, whatever) they are reflected back out to the systems of users. Otherwise, requiring all the event content to be centrally locked up in one place would seem to defeat the purpose of such a system. -- Fuzheado (talk) 18:19, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    It could be Wikidata Bridge like solutions right? Like, all the "actual" editing could be happening in only one place, but the user doesn't need to leave their wiki to edit. This removes the need of "syncing" since it's all stored in one central place (just like Wikidata). (And also, "locking things up centrally" in Commons and Wikidata was a great improvement even without Bridge and so I think a centrally edited solution would be an improvement even if it is not a perfect system.) ♥Ainali talkcontributions 08:03, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    @Fuzheado: any system must be flexibly editable via wiki or other platforms: 100% sharing your values and working on this prototype to cover your ideas: it keeps everything on the wiki, allows to create or edit an Event using wikitext, using VisualEditor or add one event using one easy external web form but keeping everything on the wiki also in this case. Well, we can stay in touch to improve/test/fix some features to discover if this prototype makes sense. --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 09:18, 3 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Just a note, I have moved this to the Miscellaneous category as it was the only proposal in Programs & Events. Best, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 19:30, 7 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • It is really interesting to observe how the same idea appears simultaneously in different places. In October, I started making a tool that could collect information about events from different pages: events.toolforge.org. And as it turned out, this is not such an easy task, because in the Wikimedia community there are dozens of different places and formats in which planned events are announced (most of them are not machine-readable). It also turned out that we globally do not announce recurring events, and in the end I decided that the best option at that moment was to improve the Events calendar. There is also a @wikimedia_events Telegram channel works now and it broadcasts events from the calendar, but there are still problems with the update timeouts (we also use similar announcements in one of the Russian-language channels). But all these actions are just an attempt to somehow improve the current situation with a complete lack of communication between different parts of the Wikimedia community. I'm not sure which solution we need: will it be a tool for adding events or a tool for parsing events, or maybe we just need to ask all the Wikimedia teams and organizations to just start publishing their events in one of the existing places. But we definitely need a solution that allows users to be aware of all the events that take place within the Wikimedia community. — putnik 17:30, 9 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Wikimedia CH and Cronos, the cross-wiki calendar

Hello everyone, I confirm that the problem of a cross-wiki calendar was a very sensitive issue for Wikimedia CH which immediately proceeded to find a solution already in 2018 for a cross-wiki calendar to serve all communities. Not having a single Wikipedia community, as Switzerland is multilingual, the issue had a high priority as we have a calendar for German community, another for French community, another for Italian community, another for the association and another for Wikidata community. We currently have a calendar but it requires manual updating and, like all calendars, it can't sync with others.

We looked at the existing solutions but they didn't satisfy us for several reasons. For example, it required the installation of a gadget or someone was not adequate on mobile but the main issue is that they were not able to be federated.

So in 2018 we dedicated part of our budget and set an expert team (Valerio Bozzolan and Wiki Valley) to create a new solution for us that had these characteristics:

  • possibility to include the calendar in every wiki using a template
  • facilitated insertion/update through a single form for all wikis but allowed only to users logged in through Oauth
  • easy configuration of the federation of calendars
  • responsive interface
  • no installation of gadgets or configuration of JS by the user

The project has been completed in its first version and will be released shortly on our pages. The same project can be used safely by any Wikimedia community. We are working on better documentation. --Ilario (talk) 10:59, 11 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  • Evidence that the support button does not work properly. It has put it here, instead of in the right place.

Export and zoom - videoconferencing

Voting

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