Interested in Product and Tech? Here are some Wikimania sessions you don’t want to miss

by
Translate this post

Wikimania 2024 is about to start, and the full program is live. Everyone can build their personal schedule, but choosing sessions may be difficult – there are more than 200 of them! To help you out, we would like to bring your attention to some of the key sessions by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Product and Technology department. Log in on Eventyay, open the program on the live event website, and click the stars next to the following:

Wednesday

  • Data Products as tools for Collaboration – How can we make good decisions? What is measurable? How can communities and affiliates use the available data? How can this contribute to transparency and community health? This session is for just anyone!
  • Trust and Safety Product: Getting Better at Blocking Bad Activity on the Wikis and Temporary Accounts are coming. Will it be possible to block abusers effectively, relying on IP addresses less, and without damaging good-faith users? What will be temporary accounts, and how will these be different from IP editors? These are for wiki-functionaries like admins, but also patrollers, mentors, and developers.
  • Future of MediaWiki – how will MediaWiki be developed? How will it be handling billions of page views per month, thousands of wikis in hundreds of languages? This is for developers, but also not technical Wikimedians curious to know how wikis really work.
  • A happier, healthier, more impactful Community Wishlist – a presentation and a workshop. How will the Wikimedia Foundation be granting technical wishes? What’s new about the Wishlist? How can volunteer developers get involved? This is both for those who may have wishes as well as those who may want to grant them.

Thursday

  • First day of the Wikimania Hackathon. It will be running throughout the day on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Drop by for a while or between sessions, or stay longer–you may write code, but also talk about gadgets, design, community wishes, old and new projects–you don’t need to know how to code to contribute to the technical side of Wikimedia!
  • Charts, the successor of Graphs – what will the graphs be replaced with? How will it work and how will it be different from graphs? This is for anyone interested in data visualization on wikis.
  • Community Configuration – how can communities customize different features? How can technical decision-making for wiki communities be more decentralized? Which features may be configured, and how? This is for administrators and anyone who is wondering how to adjust the software to their communities’ needs.
  • Volunteer archetypes – what types of users decide to start contributing to different online platforms? To what motivations can we appeal when recruiting volunteers? How does this relate to the sustainability of our movement? This is for anyone interested in strategy, research, or just building new tools and features.
  • Fireside Chat with the Wikimedia Foundation Executives – a panel and Q&A with Maryana Iskander, the CEO, Selena Deckelmann, the Chief Product and Technology Officer, and Lisa Seitz-Gruwell, the Chief Advancement Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. Come to ask questions to the Foundation leaders!

Friday

  • Wikimedia & GenAI – how is GenAI used by Wikimedians now? How does it impact us? What can we do to ensure that our content is reused by GenAI ethically? A panel by Maryana Pinchuk, leading the Future Audiences team, and Shani Evenstein, a Wikimedia Foundation Trustee.
  • Parsoid is coming! How do I keep up? [[Wikitext]] in 2024. – what are the changes to the wikitext parser? How will community-maintained tools be affected? What will be the new wikitext features? This is for technical editors, tool-maintainers, owners of third-party wikis, and other technical members of the movement.
  • State of Language Technology and Onboarding – how do we approach the language diversity in the Wikimedia movement? How do we support different languages, scripts, and translations? How do we create new wikis in more languages? This is for anyone interested in language-related topics. 
  • Co-Creating a Sustainable Future for the Toolforge Ecosystem – a roundtable for tool-maintainers, users, and supporters of Toolforge. How to make the platform sustainable and how to evaluate the tools available there? What factors concerning tools and what community needs to take into account?
  • WMF AI activities update – how does the Foundation respond to the development of generative AI? How different departments, including Product and Tech, but also Advancement and Legal, work with and on AI? What will they do next? How you can get involved?
  • “Written by AI” – moved to Saturday

Saturday

  • State of Wikifunctions – what was done in the first year after the launch of Wikifunctions? What are the plans for the future? How could Wikifunctions be connected with Wikipedia? This is for anyone interested in distributing the free knowledge more evenly across languages, which is the goal for Wikifunctions.
  • “Written by AI” – a presentation and a workshop. In what ways does the new generation of readers want to discover information on Wikipedia? How could we make use of AI? What features should we build in the near future, and how to make them controllable for the communities? This is for anyone curious about the readers’ needs, as well as for community members involved in content moderation.
  • WMF Future Audiences experiments – what does the Wikimedia Foundation know about the future readers and contributors? What has been done to better understand the opportunities for the future of Wikimedia projects? This is for anyone who wonders about the further future of Wikimedia.
  • Organize better – a workshop for the organizers of editing campaigns, WikiProjects, and editing events. How to keep the participants engaged? Learn how to use the Event Registration tool, and share ideas for improvements. This is for WikiProject leaders, and editing campaign and event organizers.
  • Hackathon Showcase – a session where the Hackathon participants may share the effects of their work at the event. The Hackathon equivalent of the closing ceremony with the format of the lightning talks.
  • Coolest Tool Award – it’s a celebration of the volunteer developers’ work. Often they are the first to notice technical needs, and they address these by creating gadgets, user scripts, Toolforge tools, bots, and many, many more. We will announce this year’s winners at the beginning of the Wikimania closing ceremony.

In-person only

If you are joining in Katowice, take advantage of the following sessions and opportunities for discussion:

Join and get involved. See you in Katowice or remotely on Eventyay!

Can you help us translate this article?

In order for this article to reach as many people as possible we would like your help. Can you translate this article to get the message out?