Events/Wikimedian in Residence Summit 2016

Attendees

• Jason Evans
• Ewan McAndrew
• Martin Poulter
• Alice White
• John Cummings
• Navino Evans
• Daria Cybulska
• Stuart Prior

Problems with being a WiR

• WP:RUMTRUM - bureaucratic procedures
• Scottish Wikidata problems - Nationality
• Lack of help pages to explain, and lack of videos to help
• Lack of help file to get started, no one file to rule them all, or "Here is the help area". 1-2 min videos etc
• Not enough time, 2 days a week, scheduling meetings, planning in long and short term.
• People thinking I'm a comedian in residence
• Keeping metadata current, maintenance of metadata to keep it current, updating based on new knowledge.
• At an institutional level, organisations do not understand what they want, and it's quite a delicate piece of work to arrive on a shared understanding of a project
• Editathons being reverted by admins.
• Notability debates - a lack of clarity and inconsistency

Best things about being a WiR

• A feel that it's the cutting edge of Wikimedia outreach, engaging experts
• Answering a need for innovation, creating specific solutions
• Being asked "What do you do?" and then pitching what it is
• Working with a diverse group of people
• WiRs are deep projects that connect Wikimedia to the wider world, in a way that doesn't just draw people back to Wikipedia, but uses Wikimedia to help other areas.
• People's excitement about adding content to Wikipedia for the first time
• Boring data coming to life for the first time
• The richness of combined datasets
• All the editathons

Why is it good for the organisation, or why do *they* think it's good

• A single sustainable site for Wellcome content
• Reducing the gender gap
• An official point of contact for Wikimedia
• Dissemination of knowledge requires a relationship with the largest source of knowledge in the world
• The digital literacy of the staff of the organisation
• To be seen as innovative, to be associated with the internet
• Press attention
• Outreach activities with a measurable impact
• PR
• Something concrete that an organisation can do.
• Fits in with a library's mission, a reputational gain, and sharing
• Organisations giving their content more reach
• An excuse to finally do something....

Creating an overview of the process steps of organisations becoming open (and a WiR role in it)

Problems

Setting up WiR

Strange people apply

General -

Disconnect between WiRs & Community

Expectations of existing community

WP:Rumtrum = Bureaucratic processes that are slow and obstructive

Tricky to explain what's important

Institutions not understanding what a WiR is

"Help" pages that don't help

Bad documentation

How to guides are like Wikipedia articles

Lack of video tutorials

Unhelpful replies to questions

Fumbling in the dark: A "do it" over "model it" methodology

Tools to measure re-use are buggy

Not enough tech support

Lots of potential, but projects aren't linked

Templates are tricky

Diffculty of capturing impact, wrong metrics

Ending without a sustainability plan

Wikipedia -

Notability debates

Commons

Lacks features

Mass uploads are very technical

Keeping metadata current? How?

Maze of metadata formats

Wikidata

Wikipedians resistant to Wikidata

Incorrect data