Events/Wikimedian in Residence Summit 2016
Attendees
- Jason Evans
- Ewan McAndrew
- Martin Poulter
- Alice White
- John Cummings
- Navino Evans
- Daria Cybulska
- Stuart Prior
Introductions
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