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Grants:TPS/Nischayn22/SMWCon 2012/Report

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Event name:

SMWCon_Fall_2012


Description of your participation:
Met with the Wikidata team, attended the SMWCon in Cologne and presented two talks.

  • On Monday I met with the Wikidata team, learned about the workflow of Wikidata.
  • On Wednesday I met with my mentors and discussed the release of SMW 1.8
  • On Thursday I presented my work done in the Google Summer of Code project under Wikimedia Foundation and recieved reviews on it.
  • On Friday I presented a demo on the new features in the Semantic Maps extension.
  • As part of the concluding talk of the SMWCon I spoke about participation in Google Summer of Code and explained how it helped me to get into open source communities.


What lessons were learned that could help others in similar events?

  • Work in open source can also be driven by force as done in Wikidata, where scrum methodology is used.
  • People look onto Wikidata and SemanticMediaWiki from a business point of view and want to make more money out of it.
  • Research areas are widely available in the area of Semantic Web.
  • Importance of interaction between users and developers of open source projects.
  • How open source can benefit all, work done for one project can be used elsewhere.

What impact did your participation have on the Wikimedia Mission goals of Increased Reach, Increased Quality, Increased Credibility, Increased and Diversified Participation?

  • In my visit to Wikidata team I was able to understand the workflow of Wikidata, the various extensions its based on and its use cases. This will help me to contribute patches to Wikidata and hence increase quality.
  • During the conference I was able to...
    • Reach out to about 50 users of Wikis and encourage them to learn coding and take part in contributing to MediaWiki and other extensions
    • Discuss how Google Summer of Code under Wikimedia Foundation went for me and encourage others to take part in as well, or refer to students about it.
    • Gather more information on the Semantic Web technologies like RDF and OWL which will help me in my research project. This project can be beneficial to SemanticMediaWiki and Wikidata as well in the future.
    • Discuss use cases, editing tools, etc of Wikidata with users of SemanticMediaWiki and give feedback to the community.


Detail of expenditures: This was taken care of directly by Wikimedia Deutschland.