2016/Press release

WikiConference North America will be held in San Diego from Friday October 7 to Monday October 10, 2016. WikiConference North America is the leading conference of Wikimedia enthusiasts and volunteers in the United States, Canada and Mexico. The conference sessions will be held in the downtown Central Library of the San Diego Public Library from Saturday to Monday. Several hundred participants are expected to attend over seventy different conference sessions. Topics will include inclusivity, community outreach, technology, institutional partnerships, and the past, present, and future of Wikimedia projects.

All day Friday will a pre-conference event at Balboa Park, a Wiki "Culture Crawl" where editors and the public learn about and participate in cultural and institutional outreach in conjunction with many of Balboa Park's museums.

Featured speakers at WikiConference North America include:

Katherine Maher, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, will be making her first US public address following her appointment to the position in June 2016. Prior to becoming Executive Director, she was Chief Communications Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation and previously worked at the World Bank, UNICEF, and Access Now. She will speaking on the values and inclusivity of the Wikimedia movement and highlighting its inspirational stories. (Saturday)

Stan Rodriguez is a linguist and language advocate for Kumeyaay culture. He is a member of the Santa Ysabel Band of the Iipay Nation and a San Diego local. (Saturday)

Merrilee Proffitt is a Senior Program Officer at OCLC Research. OCLC, the Online Computer Library Center, maintains WorldCat, the largest online public access catalog. At OCLC, Proffitt is one of the principal figures in the "Amplify libraries and communities through Wikipedia" project, funded by the Knight Foundation. Proffitt will be speaking about the importance of libraries in Wikimedia's cultural outreach efforts. (Sunday)

Dr. Lourdes Epstein is a professor at the Social Sciences and Humanities School and former library director at the Mexico City campus of the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM). She will be speaking about her work with Wikimedia projects and documenting the traditional music of Mexico. (Monday)

Michael Connolly Miskwish is a member of the Campo Kumeyaay Nation. A faculty member in American Indian Studies at San Diego State University, he is the author of "Kumeyaay: A History Textbook". (Monday)

Three editathons are on various topics are planned for the conference and are open to the general public. Editathons are events where editors collaborate to create and improve Wikipedia articles on particular topics.

Saturday will feature an editathon about women philosophers, dedicated to the memory of Kevin Gorman, a California Wikipedia editor who worked to improve coverage of that topic on Wikipedia. Gorman was the first Wikipedian in Residence at a US University, the University of California, Berkeley, and died in August at the age of 24. Sunday will feature a notable chemists and chemistry editathon sponsored by the American Chemical Society. It will also focus on nanotechnology articles in conjunction with National Nanotechnology Day. Monday will feature an Indigenous People's Day editathon. All three ediathons will be held from 1:30 to 4:00 pm. Throughout the day there will also be introductory editing workshops for the general public.

WikiConference North America is all-volunteer conference run by editors and participants in the Wikimedia movement, with assistance from our sponsors and partners: the San Diego Public Library, Balboa Park, the Wikimedia Foundation, the Wiki Education Foundation, the American Chemical Society, the San Diego East Village Association, and General Mills. WikiConference North America began as WikiConference USA, held at New York Law School in 2014. In 2015, WikiConference USA was held at the National Archives in Washington DC. In 2016 its name was changed to reflect its new geographic scope.

Wikipedia celebrated its fifteenth anniversary in January 2016. The English language Wikipedia now contains five million articles, and there are now Wikipedia encyclopedias in 294 languages. Over 29 million editors have created accounts on the English language Wikipedia alone, and about 118 thousand edit each month. The Wikimedia volunteer movement encompasses all of those encyclopedias, as well as other projects including Wiktionary (a free dictionary), Wikimedia Commons (a free repository of images, video, and other media), Wikidata (a free metadata repository), and many others. The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, located in San Francisco, supports and operates all of these Wikimedia projects.

More information can be found on the conference website, https://wikiconference.org. For media inquiries, please contact press@wikiconference.org.