Grants:TPS/TMagen/Wikimania/2018/Report

Welcome back from Wikimania 2018!

Participant

TMagen

hewiki

Outcome

Option 3: New Creation: What was one useful outcome that was created at the event for the Wikimedia movement?

Add a link to something new that was created as a result of your participation in this event (for example, you might link to a new tool that you and your co-participants worked on at the Hackathon, or to pages created in a workshop you participated in).

One of my main goals for the coming year and beyond, is enhancing my own use of Wikidata, and incorporating Wikidata into my Wiki Women TLV projects. To this end, I attended the Wikidata training sessions, and I am using the knowledge I gained there, and plan on building upon it. There are several ways in which this is already taking shape, and some others that are in the planning/definition stages:

• Together with a fellow Wikipedian from Hebrew Wikipedia, we are attempting to add an element to movie infobox templates indicating whether the film passed or failed the Bechdel Test. He is adding the template part that sources the information from Wikidata, and in conjunction, I have decided to make a project of adding this information to films in which it does not exist. Not surprisingly, the initial and rather simple query I wrote (my first, though :) ) returned over 200,000 results, which is not a number I will ever overcome on my own:

Screenshot of my first SPARQL query - listing movies that do not have Bechtel test information in Wikidata

You can see this query and run it using the following link: http://tinyurl.com/yatgt7np (ALL films without Bechdel test results ( > 220,000))

Note: The Wikidata query service uses tinyurl as links, and this page does not allow these to be published, that is why the link is not live - just copy and paste into your browser.

So now, I've refined the search to return films that won, or were nominated for major awards, and do not have Bechdel test information.

Screenshot of the updated version my first SPARQL query - listing movies that do not have Bechtel test information in Wikidata, this time refined for films that won, or were nominated for major awards

You can see this query's results at the following link: http://tinyurl.com/yd7codv7 (Major films without Bechdel results)

Note: The Wikidata query service uses tinyurl as links, and this page does not allow these to be published, that is why the link is not live - just copy and paste into your browser.

Now, there are 136 results. I can manage that, and when I'm done, I can refine the query to add different parameters, thus adding this information to the films people are most likely to view in Wikimedia projects.

• The next result of this knowledge will be the incorporation of Wikidata training into my new work group/training session for new Wiki Women Wikipedians, which will begin in September.
• Once the new group is up to speed, I will invite the new and veteran Wiki Women to participate in more Wikidata training at the GLAM conference that will take place in Tel Aviv in November. To make the most of this opportunity, we will also be conferring with Shani Evenstein Sigalov, who is one of the conference organizers and our local Wikidata maven to brainstorm how to make the most of the expertise and power of Wiki Women, and the power and potential of Wikidata, in GLAM settings, to promote more, and better participation by women and content creation that is gender-positive (in the sense of promoting the goal of eliminating gender gaps).
• One example of a possible outcome is the future goal of using Wikidata tools, such as Listeria, to create and maintain our Women in Red lists (we do this now on a very limited basis for various reasons, hopefully all these activities will take Wiki Women TLV to the next level, where more automation will be a benefit).

Connections

Meeting people is probably the best part of Wikimania. I hope the connections will lead to collaborations. After Wiki Women's Camp in Mexico City we talked about trying to create a space in which we can collaborate across wikis, and it didn't really materialize. We discussed it again at Wikimania, and I'm not sure if this time it will "take", but I know it will eventually - each time I meet new and different women working on gender gap and promoting participation of girls and women in Wiki projects, and it's exciting, and we have a lot to learn from each other. We do a little of this at the conference, but to really make the most of it, we need to do more. I expanded my circle to some of the participants from African countries. I know the Spanish language Wiki Women have a good collaboration model (this is something I learned at this Wikimania!) and I think we can learn from them, and create channels in English too.

I was also really happy to meet the volunteers, learn about the local chapter, and about Cape Town, and I hope I influenced some of their decisions to become Wikepedians, with awareness of gender issues.

Anything else

I just want to say thank you again, not only for the scholarship, but for Wikimania itself. It is a wonderful and unique setting, I never cease to be amazed at all this incredible work and knowledge being created and propagated by volunteers, just for the love of the thing. Every time I am exposed to how many different fields, specializations, types of participation (libraries, medicine, programming, gender and other representations, language, data, models of knowledge, and of course the list goes on) I am reinvigorated and moved to expand my own knowledge and extend my fields of operation (such as what I am now doing with Wikidata - a year or so ago I had rarely even visited the project, then I started editing and adding information, and now I am already using tools to create and promote knowledge, and working on future incorporation of this into existing and incipient projects. That's just amazing.) I can't wait to find out what's next.