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/running WiR

Strange people apply

No money

Org restructure

Difference of opinion with org

Loss of contacts

Not enough time

Institutional sloth

Professional suspicion of "open"

Struggle to be seen as relevant to everyone's work

General -

Disconnect between WiRs & Community

Balancing engaging wiki community with new member engagement

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

Difficulty of capturing impact, wrong metrics

Ending without a sustainability plan

Wikipedia -

Notability debates

Arbitrary decisions limiting content translation to users w/500 edits

Admins reverting edits during editathons

Speedy deletions

Making templates work with VE is hard and undocumented

Creating accounts from IP addresses max per day

Knowing which hashtags to use

Commons

Lacks features

Mass uploads are very technical

Keeping metadata current? How?

Maze of metadata formats

Wikidata

Wikipedians resistant to Wikidata

Incorrect data

Difficult to get consensus on structure for data import

Importing data into Wikidata is time-consuming

Struggling for help

Importing data and then people "fixing it"

No easy way to keep data imported in-sync

No templates to follow for how to run simple queries on Wikidata