Wikimania 2024 Day 2: The next generation

This year’s Wikimania welcomes the next generation of the Wikimedia community – this is the first Wikimania for over half of registrants. For many attendees, this is their first opportunity to share skills and solve problems in real time with hundreds of people who share their passion. And, having recently welcomed 25% more contributors to MediaWiki core, the opening of the Hackathon today felt extra special. You can learn about the many bug reports, fixes, and improvements they’re making on Phabricator.

This Wikimania is also a unique celebration of young Wikimedians, with more than half of registrants under the age of 35. Young people are heavily represented amongst the Core Organizing Team, within the Wikimedian of the Year winners, and throughout the program. 

With over 40 sessions and over 20 meetups, the day was eventful! Some highlights:

• A meetup for young Wikimedians and a session from the CEE Youth Group, detailing the work they are doing to improve collaboration among young volunteers and between regions
• A presentation from the Spanish LGBT Wikiproject on how they went from 5 to 750 new articles per year
• A volunteer-run session on how new developments in revision quality algorithms can help prevent vandalism, reviewing available models and infrastructure
• An exploration of smell on Wikidata, learning about and discussing the ways that smell-related data can be presented on Wikidata
• A discussion on the threat of GenAI tools reducing traffic to the Wikimedia websites, and the feature improvements we are making to Wikimedia sites, including a live demo during the fireside chat with the Foundation

Tours and side events connected Wikimedians to Katowice including a pottery workshop, where participants painted their own Bolesławiec pottery mug; a guided tour of historic settlements of Katowice; and a visit to the Silesian museum, among others.

With two days to go, we are looking forward to the many sessions, meet-ups, and events to come!