Grants:TPS/अभय नातू/Wikimania/2018/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2018!

Participant

अभय नातू

w:mr

Outcome

During Wikimania and after the event, I posted updates and inspiring information about the movement, such as highlighting selfless contributions by users like Poco a Poco. This generated a chain of posts and shares that brought into focus how Wikimedians are changing the world, with no care for personal gain - https://www.facebook.com/abhay.natu
I attended several sessions on Wikidata and guided my community on w:mr about the use of it. As a result, there is a significant effort underway on w:mr to wikidata-fy our templates and other artifacts. This will help clean up the Marathi Wikipedia, a project with promise.
During the event, I met with Trevor Bollinger to discuss user banning tools. I offered several suggestions for improvements that can help admins to use banning more precisely, rather than a broad-brush banning strategy. An email exchange is copied below -

Hello Trevor,

It was a pleasure talking to you today. Here're the things I referred to -

1. Rate limit - Limit post limit to a configurable value (either sitewide or user-specific)
2. Spatial fencing - Allow admin to build a ban-list using
   a. Root article and {configurable value} spider depth
   b. Machine intelligence/learning to create a candidate-ban-list
   c. Admin discretion/qualifiers to create a candidate-ban-list
   d. Combination of (b) and (c)

Let me know if I can help with clarifying any of these or if you'd like to bounce ideas off me. i'll be happy to help.
-------
Trevor Bolliger 

Aug 13, 2018, 3:58 PM
to Sydney, me 
Hi Abhay;

Sorry for the delay in responding — I traveled back to California & had a lot of work to catch up on!

Our blocking project is progressing nicely, we hope to have something testable in the coming weeks. We will be looking for wikis to beta test the feature, so please let me and Sydney (CC'd) know if Marathi Wiki would be interested in beta testing!

We don't have any immediate plans for rate limiting, but it could be something we pursue in the future. We are no longer going to build category blocking but I like your idea of Spatial fencing. We already have a 'Related Pages' API that we will explore to create the candidate-ban-list: phab:T201102.

Connections

During Wikimania 2018, I met Diego, aka Poco a Poco, a prolific contributor and admin on Commons. I was taken aback to see how unassuming he is, even after being one of the top contributors to Commons and influencing so many people around the world. This is really an inspiration and a reminder to stay grounded in spite of one's achievements. I also sought out dozens of people from very diverse geographical, social and wikimedian backgrounds to understand how the movement is affecting and is affected by folks around our world.

Anything else

My perception during the event was that there was a large percentage of attendees in their 4th, 5th, 10th... Wikimania. I completely understand the need to reward great contributors every year for every year's worth of work they put in, however, I believe the movement will be even more strengthened by bringing in a larger percentage of fresh blood - first, second timers who will be inspired by the event and will in turn inspire more and more contributors in their sphere of influence. Perhaps a quick analysis/histogram of attendees and number of wikimanias attended will help?

Attending Wikimania 2018 and interacting with such a diverse set of people united in their vision and focus was an inspiring experience. I'd like to thank the Foundation for making it happen!.