Monday, July 04, 2016

#Wikimania - What have we learned, how to experience it


We have not all been to Esino Lario. It is where Wikimania 2016 happened. That does not mean that it is not possible to see many of the presentations. You may find them on YouTube, maybe elsewhere. The same goes for presentations of previous Wikimania's.

In the history of Wikipedia and our movement, these presentations are notable. It even makes the people who presented notable. As I have been watching several presentations, as I argued that we are really bad at recognising our own notability, I have created a list; they link to lists of presentations for previous Wikimania's. The cool thing is that they are updated regularly by the ListeriaBot. So when I or someone else adds a Wikimania talk, the talk will magically appear.

What you find is rather basic but it works. You will be linked to the presentation on YouTube, You will be linked to the items for the "author", the language used for the presentation and the talk itself. At this stage Wikidata like Commons is mostly a repository. For best effect use Reasonator. Compare Wikidata with Reasonator for the presentation of James Heilman for instance..

I am really happy to have been helped by TweetsFactsAndQueries. He helped a lot in getting the SPARQL queries in a reasonable shape. He figured out how to show only the YouTube video ID instead of the full URL. It is probably possible to show an icon instead but that is for later. What is missing are links to the presentation (the power point) and the submission paper. I have no idea yet how that is to be modelled in Wikidata.

It is important to include such data for several reasons. First it brings access to the presentations for the people who are interested. Secondly it documents what we do puts a timestamp to our thinking in time. Thirdly it documents our history.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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