Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-04-25/WikiConference report

WikiConference report

WikiConference North America 2023 in Toronto recap

group photo of WikiConference North America

WikiConference North America 2023 Toronto was held 9-12 November 2023. Here we share outcomes of this event including newly published videos and photos, the archived conference website and program, and share some attendee reflections on its significance.

Background

WikiConference North America 2023 featured three days of programming

WikiConference Toronto was the 10th annual WikiConference North America and the first in-person conference since 2019 in Boston before the COVID-19 pandemic. Wikimedia volunteers organize the conference for other volunteers, and the invited programming includes whatever issues seem most important to the volunteer community. The format of the conference is to have a day of "culture crawl", which are trips to local museums and sites of Wikipedian interest, followed by two days of presentations and workshops. The conference attracts on average 350 attendees. Scholarships to attend come from the Wikimedia Foundation, which has a practice of sponsoring diversity in participation. Other funding for this conference came from nonprofit organizations Hacks/Hackers, which promotes community journalism, and from Credibility Coalition, which is concerned with increasing accuracy in popular media.

As the conference changes city with every iteration, local people wherever it is held are always a large portion of the attendees, and the most likely to attend as inexperienced Wikimedia editors. Organizations which have completed a Wikimedia project in the last year use the event to share results, so attendees from universities, museums, and other knowledge centers are always present. Wikimedia functionaries attend the event to have in-person discussions on topics which are challenging to address in wiki talk page posts or virtually otherwise. Every event is also someone's first event, and some new attendees are experienced Wikimedia contributors. Such attendees unfailingly remark and wonder that they have followed the discussion topics online, but did not anticipate how it would feel to talk about them face-to-face with their virtual collaborators whom they meet in person for the first time.

Programming

The conference program is the best published description of the conference topics which framed conversation at the event. Any summary of the conference would be subjective, but many conference attendees remarked that many of the presentations - regardless of how they were described in the program - veered into discussion and bewilderment of how suddenly artificial intelligence is changing Wikimedia activities. Topics discussed included users submitting AI text to Wikipedia, generating AI images for Commons, summarizing long talk page discussions with AI, the state of Wikimedia tools developed with AI features, and especially, what Wikipedia's place might be in a future where more readers interact directly with an AI rather than browse our encyclopedia.

Wikimedia governance was continually discussed. Our Wikimedia Movement Strategy gives recommendations for how to achieve our goals.

The Signpost briefly covered the conference in the month it happened to report a bomb threat targeting the conference and unnamed Wikipedia community members who were accused of bullying.

In their own words

Toronto Public Library interior

User:Bluerasberry invited attendees to the conference to come to the video room and share whatever brief message about Wikimedia projects anyone would like to record. See them and hear their own words.

Victoria Alcántara discusses Wikipedia articles on women
Tim Moody shares medical info through Wikipedia
Helaine and Brianda support student editing at Wiki Education
Cameron Woods supports minority representation in Wikipedia
Peter Meyer argues that Gordo the dinosaur should have a Wikipedia article
Ximena Gallardo invites English literature students to edit Wikipedia
Andrew Leung presents WikiJournal and Wikipedia-connected peer review
Brian Wolff likes repeated community feedback in MediaWiki development

Brian Wolff likes repeated community feedback in MediaWiki development
Martin Ferrera warns how lies in media oppress the people
Daniel Mietchen uses Wikidata to open scholarly communication
Mark Graham at Internet Archive protects Wikipedia references
Kunal Mehta invites beginning coders to develop MediaWiki
Linda Fletcher with AfroCROWD supports African diaspora Wikipedia editing
Lorenzo Losa loves Wikipedia collaboration
Clovermoss attends her first Wikipedia meetup!
Elli brings news journalism into Wikipedia articles
Andy discusses translation of Wikipedia between Spanish and English
Rhonda Yearwood on Wikidata for open museum data sharing
Rosie Stevenson Goodnight on coming to Wikipedia after retirement
Will Kent on Wikidata's usefulness for university knowledge sharing
Adam - Amanda shares how Wikipedia has accompanied them in college and life
Andrew Lih describes Wikipedia's partnerships with museums
Orange Mike edits Wikipedia on Wisconsin politics
Bob Reichert on maps in Wikipedia's neighborhood infobox

Presentations

Commons:Category:WikiConference North America 2023 presentations

Mary Mark Ockerbloom on Defense Against the Dark Arts - Disinformation on Wikipedia
Thamilini Jothilingam presents the South Asian Canadian Digital Archive
Jackie Rubashkin on podcasts in Wikidata