Grants:TPS/Hindustanilanguage/Wikimania/2015/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2015!

Participant

Hindustanilanguage (Syed Muzammiluddin)

Wikimedia Commons - although my main activity is now focused on Urdu and Hindi Wikipedia.

This is my first Wikimania

Outcome

Hackathon event during the conference helped in addressing some of the nagging bugs of the Urdu Wikipedia.
It was also instrumental in suggestion for activating a categorising bot for Hindi Wikipedia similar to the ones in Urdu.
Sometime back I suggested the idea of Shahmukhi-Gurmukhi Punjabi Wikipedia integration in a WMF blog. I am glad to find that two of the interviewees - Satdeep Gill and Khalid Mahmood actually met each other and discussed further avenues of cooperation.
I am glad to meet one of the Esperanto Wikipedians. I had earlier blogged for Esperanto Wikipedia on WMF blog.
I met Ozkan from Turkish Wikipedia whom I had interviewed (User:Rapsar) sometime back. I asked help from his side to interview other Turkish Wikipedians for a possible WMF blog coverage. I am glad that a discussion on this issue has started on Turkish Wikipedia for this purpose. Some of the responses from Turkish Wikipedians have already been recorded.
A great idea evolved during Wikimania was to form "Wikimedia SAARC" during Indic Languages Meetup, to include other SAARC nations and languages.
Also discussed during during Wikimania is the idea of a Pan-India Wiki Conference, similar to 2011, which I had attended then.
I strongly argued for a Pan-Urdu Wikipedia Meet involving participants from both India and Pakistan during the Indic Languages Meetup.
During the Indic Indic Languages Meetup, I asserted the need for holding Hindi Wiki Sammelan and listed the developments in this direction from the group meeting held earlier this year.
I was glad to meet Biplab Anand and Wikimedians from Nepal. I had interviewed him for a WMF blog on Maithili Wikipedia and also worked to jointly take Maithili Wikipedia out of incubator.
Nepali Wikipedians also discussed with me about the possibility of getting Awadhi Wikipedia out of incubator as well as opportunities of showcasing developments of Nepali Wikimedians on WMF blog.
I was also able to discuss the prospect of holding a comparative study of user perceptions of Wikivoyage and Wikitravel. This perceived project was hamstrung because of two issues:

Unlike classified statistics of Wikivoyage which can reached on Wikistats, there is no easy avenue for analyzing Wikitravel statistics.
Unlike Wikimedia projects where users enjoy lots of freedom on talk pages (user talk/ article talk), Wiki-mail, etc, Wikitravel seems to impose many restrictions as can be seen in these exchange of communication.

I discussed with Lane Raspberry some of the issues confronting Indian Wikipedians on English Wikipedia.
Other important observations during Wikimania were the different editing cultures of Wiki communities, e.g. the degree of interpersonal interaction on-Wiki v/s off-Wiki (social media/email,etc) among the users, projects, bots, etc.
I also discussed several important points about WMF blogs with Joe Sutherland.

* It was also a great learning experience and I attended a number of sessions in this Wikimania.

Connections

During this Wikimania, I was able to interact with a number of personalities. While it is difficult to list all names, I am listing a few of them:

WMF Team

Ellie Young
Asaf Bartov
Rosemary Rein
Victor Grigas
Katherine Maher
Joe Sutherland
Walter Gomez
James Heilman
Yurik
Patricio Lorente
Naureen Nayyar
Phoebe Ayers

Countrywise Connections

All Indian Wikimania attendees.
Stall/booth operators of Wikimedia User Groups/Chapters from Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland, South Africa, China, Ukraine, Algeria,Egypt and Nepal.
Individual connections with several individuals, including Lane Rasberry, Josh Lim, Ozkan, Mardetanha and several other individuals who participated in this Wikimania.
Interaction with people working on diverse project such as Dr Ziko van Djik and Sara Mörtsell
First time awareness and interaction with Nahwat language, people and Wikipedians