A milestone for me: Wikimania 2024 Katowice (Day 3)

Everyone can have milestones in their lives. For me, Wikimania 2024 Katowice is a milestone. I would like to share with you my experiences at Wikimania 2024 Katowice, which took place between 7-10 August 2024.

Today is the big day. The day when Mari and Nikos and I will make our presentation about the CEE Youth Group that I have been preparing for a while. So I had breakfast early in the morning and set off for the conference center as soon as possible. I also attended several sessions and I would like to tell you a little bit about some of them.

AffCom meets community by Mehman

I listened to Mehman’s presentation on AffCom (The Affiliations Committee) until my own presentation with Mari. The presentation provided the audience with a lot of useful and interesting information such as AffCom’s objectives, members and subcommittees.

As far as I checked my notes, AffCom has 9 members, 6 advisors and 3 subcommittees; Conflicts Management, Affiliate Recognition and Communications. AffCom lists its objectives as Affiliate Recognition and derecognition, Affiliate conflict management, Affiliate capacity building and Movement contribution.

Mehman then explained how they go about evaluating an application for the establishment of a user group. It’s an important point, the process now includes new elements like a live interview, a requirement for applicants to publish a public letter of intent, and a one-year trial period to demonstrate their effectiveness, which is particularly important for showcasing the group’s potential. Later in the presentation, Mehman also talked about some detailed processes such as Chapter/Thematic organization recognition, Conflict intervention, Compliance monitoring, Affiliate Health Criteria and workflow management.

CEE Youth Group: a successful youth organisation within the movement by Mari Avetisyan, Nikos Likomitros, and Y. Caner Özyayıkçı

Introducing CEE Youth Group! The group of young Wikimedians in the CEE region (Central and Eastern Europe) is still very new, but it is already known by many people. Me and my friends Mari and Nikos, as members of this group, gave a presentation about our group, our aims and what we do. We also talked about what young Wikimedians in our countries are doing. At the end of the presentation, we invited some of the youth group members who were listening to us to the podium to talk about their experiences from their own perspectives and we got some good information. Afterwards, we answered the questions and ended the session.

I would like to give you some highlights of our presentation:

CEE Youth Group was first established in May 2023 by CEE Hub coordinator Barbara Klen and SC member Klára Joklová. Our purposes include creating a safe space for young Wikimedians in the CEE region, building capacity among CEE Young Wikimedians, facilitating connections, sharing experiences and encouraging young people to contribute to Wikimedia projects.

We come together every 2 months to evaluate my current work and exchange information. Our first face-to-face meeting and presentation took place at CEE Meeting 2023 in Tbilisi. In November of the same year, we met in Prague and discussed the current situation and future of our group.

So what do we do socially as a youth group? Although the day is not fixed, some evenings we gather together on what we call CEE Youth Game Night and have fun playing games together. This way, the participants are both motivated and meet their peers.

Let’s talk a little bit about youth work in the countries. We mentioned that there are many local youth organizations such as Wiki Student Clubs Türkiye, Young Wikimedians in Greece and Wikicamps and WikiClubs in Armenia.

There are many different activities for young participants in Armenia, such as WikiClubs, WikiCamps and Internships. As of the date of this presentation, there are 8 different WikiClubs across the country with a total of 192 members. Also something very interesting; Wikimedia Armenia collaborates with 4 universities in Armenia and 145 people did internships in 2024.

Young Wikimedians in Türkiye can participate in many different activities such as Wikipedia Education Program, Wiki Student Clubs, WikiCamp and edit-a-thons on various themes. Wikimedia CUG Turkey organized various events at 25 universities in 12 cities in Türkiye. In addition, young Wikimedians, have established Wiki Student Clubs in 4 different universities in the last 2 years and organized edit-a-thons, photowalks and international collaborations on various themes.

In Greece, they organized various workshops, online presentations and hackathons. They also collaborate with other WikiClubs around the world.

Building the CEE hub – how it looks from the staff’s perspective by Barbara Klen and Toni Ristovski

In this presentation Barbara and Toni give the perspectives of two full-time (project-based) staff members on the implementation of the CEE Hub project, their communication with more than 30 communities in the region and their collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation.

What were identified as necessary steps in the presentation: HR process, communication with Wikimedia Foundation, relationships between SC members and staff members, building relationships with staff and communities and restructuring activities

WikiPortraits: Transforming the Wikipedia photo desert into a green oasis by
Kevin Payravi, Jennifer 8. Lee and Andrew Lih

I may have waited a year to listen to this presentation! Because when we were thinking of realizing a similar project with some Wikimedians in Türkiye, we learned about WikiPortraits as a result of our research. It was a great chance and an exciting moment for me to hear the project live directly from the people who worked on it.

They say that the main problem when they started this project was that quite a lot of Wikipedia biography pages had bad photos. (After seeing the examples they showed, I strongly agree with this) However, they noted that there were some challenges in this process, such as free licenses and taking good quality photographs of noteworthy people.

But with WikiPortraits, they overcame these challenges. WikiPortraits; is an initiative and brand for providing press access to events for photos to be uploaded to Commons. It brings both existing Wikipedian photographers and outside photographers into the Wiki Movement. (Sounds pretty cool and exciting)

CEE Extravaganza

We gathered together as participants from the CEE region to listened CEE Spring, preview of the CEE Meeting 2024 that we will host in Istanbul in September, updates from the CEE Youth Group of which I am a member, and finally we tested our knowledge together with the CEE quiz.

Karaoke!

For the first time in my life, I found myself singing karaoke for the first time on a spur of the moment dare, and not by myself, but as a duo with a friend from another country. I apologize if I disturbed the listeners’ ears 🙂