Wikimedia New York City/Reporting 2019-2020/Program Story Midpoint

This program story is an appendix to Wikimedia NYC’s midpoint report for the 2019–2020 reporting period, showcasing the chapter’s community-building achievements.

Background

A Wiknic is an informal, convivial meetup for the Wikimedia and Free Culture communities. Featuring picnic food and games, it is the kind of setting that encourages the relatively rare (in these communities) offline discussions about the present and future of Wikipedia and its sister projects. The apparent ease with which partnerships blossom and new connections are forged at these events is what makes them a tried and tested cornerstone of community-building and outreach.

While Wikimedia NYC can claim to be the Wiknic pioneer, having held up the tradition since the first-ever Wiknic in August 2007—and even having emerged as a then new chapter out of conversations sparked there—, the concept has also caught on in other countries, most prominently in France. The idea found its way into The Washington Post’s reporting in 2011 when Wikimedia NYC first encouraged its sibling organizations across the USA to host similar events that would collectively become known as the Great American Wiknic. It has historically been a model for community-building and several multi-location Wiki Loves X campaigns globally.

Wikimedia NYC held its first Wiknic (then named “WikNYC picnic”) in Central Park in the borough of Manhattan. But the location rotates boroughs every year, and on July 14, 2019, a public park on Roosevelt Island saw NYC’s latest installment of this successful series of events.

2019 Wiknic at Roosevelt Island

A bustling community and a bucolic spot

On any regular summer Sunday, Southpoint Park, this surprisingly bucolic and quiet pocket of the metropolis, is the scene of tourists and residents alike leisurely perambulating, reclining on lush lawns, and gazing out onto the East River, at local landmarks like the United Nations headquarters across the West Channel and the would-be Amazon headquarters, or instead perhaps the Pepsi-Cola sign, across the East Channel. But in mid-July of 2019, when a vanguard of veteran volunteers hauled in sizable quantities of taco ingredients and tied a large “Wikipedia/Wikimedia NYC” banner to a tree to steady it in the gentle breeze on that pleasantly warm day, a much more bustling microcosm was soon going to take over for a few hours.

Wikimedians, often considered creatures of notoriously online habits, can be hard to coax into real-life interactions. But the organizers had promoted the event through a CentralNotice banner displayed online to registered editors in the New York region, leveraging a technical capability for subnational US targeting that was developed for Wikipedia Day earlier in the year and applied to events in several other cities as well. And so by the time the event was set to begin, about 40 Wikimedians had signed up on-wiki as ‘likely attendees’.

In the spirit of the “picnic anyone can edit”, community members brought much potluck, while the chapter provided a core reserve of tacos.

Participants from all walks of life

The Wiknic drew out to Roosevelt Island a wide range of participants, with several editors new to the chapter attracted by the online banner, a number of WMF employees in the region, and had a child-friendly atmosphere with a record number of young families joining. One new participant was a longtime Commons contributor, another was a former English Wikipedia administrator who used this opportunity to rejoin the community, another was an organizer of the city’s wireless community network.

There were about 50 attendees, a number only surpassed by the 2012 Wiknic that saw the participation of international Wikimania visitors, and roughly doubling the attendance compared to more recent years.

Strategic discussion in an convivial setting

Woven into the 2019 Wiknic was an engagement with the Wikimedia Movement Strategy process, similar to counterpart events in the cities of Chicago and St. Louis. The Wikimedia NYC organizers had scheduled a 30-minute session each for discussion around two of the strategic questions:

• “How do we, as a global Wikimedia movement, avoid the pitfall of recentism, tapping in to elder networks, LGBT networks, women’s networks, indigenous communities, etc. to develop volunteers for the project as writers, developers, and document gatherers to find and preserve our hidden collective history?”
• “How might we build Wikimedia into an effective convenor of impactful partnerships, coalitions, and collective action based on a shared vision of open knowledge and the “Big Open” Movement?”

Each session had a discussion leader and a notetaker, and individual input proceeded round-robin around a circle of all Wiknic participants sitting, standing, or lounging on the grass, with everyone getting their say on the first go around, and then follow-up with more back-and-forth conversation.

The first discussion touched on points of notability, languages, and support for underserved communities. What counts as an authoritative source, and the role of oral knowledge. One example issue relating to language concerned Yiddish, serendipitously shared by a passer-by on a stroll with their kids, who saw the chapter’s physical banner: They pointed out that the Yiddish Wikipedia edition is written in academic Yiddish rather than the vernacular Yiddish of most current speakers. The gathering discussed the need for more systematic engagement with organized groups serving communities, and finding social and also technical spaces for them inside the Wikimedia movement.

The second discussion ranged over more technical issues, examining how the Wikimedia community can work with others in the Free Culture movement, and build relationships to other software and content projects. OpenStreetMap was a salient example of a different genre of wiki content, and discussion ensued how other genres might be possible. Examined also were potential collaboration with other tech non-profits and mutual organizational support in New York City.

Impactful outcomes

One of the outcomes of the Wiknic, drawing from a convergence of ideas in the two discussions, was the Wikispore proposal for a new Wikimedia sister project, made by a chapter member in their individual capacity and inspired by the presence of an experienced MediaWiki developer and sysadmin, and posted to Meta the next day.

The aim of Wikispore is to lay the groundwork for a fruitful wiki farm where contributors can germinate anything that is interesting, factual, and non-privacy-violating. If a topic can have a Wikidata item, it can have a narrative page too, and the multiple “spores” on the project are experimental places to implement new standards on sources (including oral knowledge) and notability for different subject areas.

The Wikispore proposal subsequently spread at Wikimania and other conferences, and received support from Wikimedia Cloud Services staff to launch a prototype site using MediaWiki-Vagrant architecture. The site has since been linked to Wikidata, and has hosted content such as current events coverage of World AIDS Day 2019 globally.

The origins of WikiAlumni, a student-run network connecting new and experienced student editors with a background of using Wikipedia in college classroom, GLAM, or other academic settings, can also be traced to Wikimedia NYC’s 2019 Wiknic.