#Wikimania Mexico City - Day 1

Day 1. Conference!

 Nachts im Museum

So, the conference started - as should any conference - with the opening. A real nice video by the organizing team (soooo sweet), a nice speach by Protoplasmakid aka Ivan, THE guy from Mexico, and very cool Mexican dance presentation, and Lilas opening speech. I really enjoyed it, but I also discovered: all the people who have already seen opening speeches at Wikimania liked it better than those who haven't.

Okay, Lila doesn't have any charisma on stage - but hey, that fits well into the Wikipedia world and I'm not sure if these "you are the vineyard" and "THE BIG WE" were really necessary. But, hey, she was taking about Wikipedia and the projects and not about world hunger, the plight of children in developing countries and whatever other random problem but she was on focus. And most of what she said about Wikipedia and the development of the foundation made sense. I'm still more than happy and maybe I'm becoming a Lila fanboy.

Doing Citations: A pain in the ass since 2005 and ignored by the foundation since 2005. I'm more than happy that now its even such a priority to get mentioned in the opening speech.

 

Just one graph in Lila's speech: And it actually made some kind of sense.

 

Opening ceremony dance. Good photos but not too much so see for everybody else.

The Workshop. I don't need to become a Rebecca-fanboy because I already am. The was talking a bit about typical projects and how to measure if they have any success. But mostly she was asking and discussing. The people in the room weren't too many, but the rights ones. We discovered: for most of the stuff the movement does we still don't know how effective they are and if they really make sense because we hardly have numbers. People don't bother to get the data, it's way to complex to aggregate and the Foundation has "tons of resources" - but too me that's part of the problem. You completely get lost. Even in this highly self-selected panel only one third to one fourth of the people knew about the evaluation portal of the Foundation for example. So I guess, there's some work to do next year: find easy ways to measure if yourproject had any success.

Talks: one about the Visual Editor the world didn't need. The first half was going on about the why it is so difficult (templates, pictures etc. - I guess I heard that already at Wikimanias 2013 and 2014) and on the second half I lost track completely and had no idea what he was talking about.

Another one about "bigquery" - a tool from google that allows so do database searches on huge lumps of data in just seconds. The guy who talked was a Wikimedian working at google - but hey, he was sooo happy presenting his great toy that everyone could use and that everyone could share - he was almost jumping out of joy of all the crazy things he can do. 

And then the national anthropolocigal museum. WOW. What a treasure, and how nicely presented. A bit they lost the chance by having guided tours and keeping the Wikipedians close to the guide - otherwise by now they would have digitized their whole collection in high quality. But still: WOW

  "Everyone say Aztec!"