WikidataCon 2021

Mike Peel


Sessions

10-30
08:00
60min
Global templates: Towards a New Age of Cross-wiki Data Collaboration
Mike Peel, Amir Aharoni, Tpt, Galder Gonzalez, Kimmo Virtanen, Sergey Leschina

Templates and modules are the most important tool that the community of editors on all wikis have to enhance the wiki pages with efficient, uniform, structured and nicely-presented data. They are enormously versatile, and they are used on nearly every wiki page, but because their code is stored on every wiki separately, this makes collaboration across wikis and sharing of content and structured harder than it should be. Since 2004, there were several proposals to allow cross-wiki transclusion or a "global templates repository", and this finally seems to be gaining wide support from the editors community and the leadership. However, once the infrastructure is in place, how will the wikis actually collaborate with each other on developing templates? This panel will present the problem, and attempt to brainstorm on this, with a famous example relevant to Wikidata: the auto-filled Infobox. Several wikis developed Wikidata-driven infoboxes with similar functionality, but different internal implementation. Will they be able to merge at least some of the code and improve the collaboration and the sharing? We'll try to answer.

Sister projects
Room 2
10-31
14:30
10min
Outreachy Internships to create Wikidata bots
Mike Peel

Outreachy is a diversity initiative that offers paid internships to work on open source software for three months each summer and winter. The Wikimedia Foundation participates in Outreachy, typically offering around four internships. This year, I have been working with several Outreachy students to write pywikibot scripts to synchronise content between Wikipedias and Wikidata. I will give a brief summary of Outreachy; describe the contribution period that leads to the selection of the interns (no CVs are involved!); and the outcomes from two internships from earlier this year.

Education & science
Room 2
10-31
15:00
55min
Wikidata & Education: A Global Panel
Houcemeddine Turki, Mike Peel, LiAnna Davis, João Alexandre Peschanski, Shani Evenstein Sigalov, Martin Poulter

A chance to globally discuss the state of Wikidata & Education.
With 2 years passing since our panel in WDCon19, this panel would offer an opportunity to the community working on implementing WD into Education a chance to connect and discuss burning issues. What are some interesting initiatives globally? What has changed? What are some of our current challenges, especially during COVID? and what can we do, globally, to enhance this global effort? These will be some of the questions we will be discussing with invited panelists from around the world and the audience attending this session.

Education & science
Room 2