If you ever use Wikipedia, read on. If you never use Wikipedia then this post is probably not relevant for you.

As many of you know, I have been active on Wikipedia for some years now, working on improving the WASH and SDG content that people can find on Wikipedia in many different articles (for more about Wikipedia + SuSanA see the threads here: forum.susana.org/198-wikipedia)

In August I attended the annual Wikimania Conference which happened to be in Stockholm, and was focused on the SDGs as well:
"Stronger Together: Wikimedia, Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals".

The conference was interesting and reminded me a bit of SuSanA meetings with respect to the amount of positive energy and enthousiasm that was evident (but much larger - about 800 attendees). The Wikimedia Foundation is also much larger than the SuSanA secretariat. (As of June 16, 2017, the foundation had approximately 280 employees and contractors)

What is Wikimania? "Wikimania is the annual conference celebrating all the free knowledge projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation – Wikipedia, Commons, MediaWiki, Meta-Wiki, Wikibooks, Wikidata, etc – with three days of conferences, discussions, meetups, training, and workshops. Hundreds of volunteers and Free Knowledge leaders from around the world gather to discuss issues, report on new projects and approaches, and exchange ideas."

The program of the conference is available here:
wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2019:Program

I attended mainly the streams on "research", "education" and "environmental sustainability". For example, presentations on these topics caught my interest: "Engaging researchers to contribute to Wikipedia" and "Assessing the Contribution of Subject-matter Experts to Wikipedia",

This is a slide from Stuart Ray's presentation on "Editing Wikipedia as a health expert - are the challenges simply academic" ( here ).



These are some presentations that I attended and found interesting in the research stream here: wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2019:Research:
- Gender Equality in Wikipedia: What can we learn from Behavioral Economics
- Evidence of Dark Matter Assessing the Contribution of Subject-matter Experts to Wikipedia
- Characterizing Reader Behavior on Wikipedia

Also interesting was the stream on “education” which included a lot of the work of the Wiki Education Foundation in the US:
wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2019:Education

Very relevant for us at SuSanA: "Engaging researchers to contribute to Wikipedia" by Olle Terenius from Uppsala University in Sweden:
Video:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Engaging_rese...Wikipedia_video.webm

And I attended a few in the stream on “environment” (the conference was indeed very "green"; Example: all food served was vegetarian as the main option, with only small offerings of chicken and fish as a small alternative option (but no red meat offered)):
wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2019:Environmental_sustainability

The website is not very good to find the actual presentations though.

Most of the presentations were videoed and will be uploaded to here (not yet complete): commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimania_2019_videos

Some of the presentations are here (also not yet complete): commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wiki...a_2019_presentations

Regards,
Elisabeth