2022/Schedule

WikiConference North America 2022 (WCNA), November 11–13, is partnering with OpenStreetMap US's 2nd annual Mapping USA to host a virtual event celebrating the OpenStreetMap and Wiki communities of North America. Mapping USA will start with their Mappy Hour on Thursday, November 10, 8–9pm ET. The joint conference will continue with a half day of talks on Friday, and a day of workshops, birds of a feather sessions, local meetups, editathons, and mapathons on Saturday. WCNA 2022 will continue with an unconference and other programming events on Sunday, November 13.

Friday, November 11, 14:00–19:00

Please note: this program is still in development as speakers are confirmed and is subject to change.

Time (Eastern Time, UTC−5)	Session Info
14:00 – 14:20	Welcome to Mapping USA + WikiConference NorthAmerica
	Opening Keynote: The Case for Sister Projects Minh Nguyễn Sister projects are the unsung heroes of Wikipedia’s success. Disputes between inclusionists and deletionists led to the creation of Wiktionary, Wikibooks, and more, fueling new contributions to the sum of human knowledge while reinforcing Wikipedia’s culture. OpenStreetMap is no stranger to deletion debates. Nascent sister projects like OpenHistoricalMap offer an outlet for more mapping, creating a more vibrant community than a fork ever could. As always, the hard part is starting from scratch. How can we learn from Wikimedia’s experience with sister projects to build a similar ecosystem?
14:20 – 14:25	Break
14:25 – 15:25	At 18 years old, is OSM entering adulthood? Jennings Anderson & Martijn van Exel OpenStreetMap started 18 years ago with a blank canvas and the ambition to become the best map of the world. All we could do in the beginning was create: draw all the roads, houses, businesses, lakes and forests. Now, 18 years in, OSM looks “done” in a lot of places. Our responsibility now shifts from creating to maintaining—but not everywhere at once, or at the same pace. Jennings and Martijn uncover the fascinating and perhaps unexpected dynamics of a map in its teenage years by first looking at global trends and then diving deeper into the vast community maintaining the map in North America
	Linking Wikimedia and OpenStreetMap/OpenHistoricalMap Richard Welty This session will cover the mechanisms that exist for specifying cross connections between various wiki media projecrts (commons, data, wikipedia) and OpenStreetMap and OpenHistoricalMap. There are connectivity mechanisms in existence that can significantly enhance both projects.
	Collaborative Corridors to Address OSM Underrepresentation Bill Wetherholt US Highway corridors provide a collaborative springboard to connect vested OSM interests across underrepresented regions. US-40 offered a link between Fall 2022 mapping courses in the Department of Geography at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Maryland and the Department of Computer Science, Information Systems and Engineering Technology at PennWest California in California, Pennsylvania. This talk explores filling in the map along the seventy miles of US-40 separating the two Appalachian universities and provides a blueprint for others interested in similar endeavors.
	Mapping the Virtual Border Wall with Public Records, Satellite Imagery, and Virtual Reality Dave Maass EFF Director of Investigations demonstrates how his team is combining public records, satellite imagery, and virtual reality to reveal the locations of Customs & Border Protections surveillance towers.
15:05 – 15:15	Break
15:15 – 17:20	Come Here or Go Away?: Identifying Challenges to Scholarly Wikipedia Editing Savannah Cragin, Dr. Jennifer Johnson This talk investigates the challenges of establishing pathways for academic contributors to edit Wikipedia. While there is powerful alignment in the educational missions of the Wikimedia Foundation with those of the academic humanities, tensions still exist between the Wikipedia and scholarly community, fostering distrust and burnout from scholars. This talk will investigate the contextual background of these tensions as understood by the CCCC Wikipedia Initiative and provide useful pathways for fostering understanding between Wikipedia and scholarly values.
	Parks, Spawns, Nests and Pikachu: OpenStreetMap and Pokemon GO players Christopher Greene-Szmadzinski In October 2022, Niantic publicly announced using OpenStreetMap to update its popular mobile game, Pokemon GO! The use of OSM data for PoGO has long been known by players and OSM contributors alike. In the past, this has meant accidental (or intentional) vandalism by well-meaning (and sometimes not so well-meaning) players. Let's look at how PoGO is using OSM data and ways to turn this pain point into a positive experience to encourage new contributors while preserving the integrity of our data.
	Print an OSM Extract: Trailheads maps from OpenStreetMap Rob Chohan "Non-Profit land trusts have map needs.  Docents want to lead a hike and describe where to meet for the monthly wildlife talk.  Land trusts want to raise awareness via social media or for public presentations.  Local educators want to get more students in the outdoors. A decent map stack & architecture for web, print & mobile can help solve all of these needs.We will discuss how we used FOSS4G tools to make a kiosk trailhead for the “Build Lebanon Trails” group in Lebanon, Oregon.  The tools we used are OSM extracts, QGIS, and Cloud Optimized GeoTiff. A decent map stack & architecture for web, print & mobile can help solve all of these needs.
	Find your 'emergency eyes' - what to map near you Nicole Martinelli Wildfires, floods and heatwaves are just some of the “new” emergencies that have become more frequent in the United States. While we’re used to preparing for major disasters - earthquakes, hurricanes, cyclones - it’s time to start thinking about how good maps can save lives in these common emergencies. We’ll take a look at features worth mapping (parking lots, vacant businesses, gas stations that you might overlook.
17:20 – 17:30	Break
17:30 – 18:00	Wikimedia New York City, Sure We Can Wil540 art I propose giving an informal 5 minute lightening talk about editing Wikipedia and how a Pear Tree inspired the Cartography of New York City article. I will go over the history of this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartography_of_New_York_City which I started relatively recently in May 2021 and ask for comments.
	Magic Wand: A Plugin for JOSM Junior Flores Plugin created for the JOSM tool, allows you to create geometries from selected areas. the areas are selected according to the uniformity of the colors, it is also possible, also, it is possible to add and subtract selected areas.
	Swiping into a love of OSM Dan Joseph Learn how the open source MapSwipe app fits into the toolkit of ways that the American Red Cross engages volunteers and partners in learning to love OSM.
	WikiCred 2022 Grant Cycle Overview Ariel Cetrone (WMDC) The WikiCredibility Grants Initiative (WikiCred), a project of Hacks/Hackers, is pleased to announce the launch of its 2022-2023 grant cycle. Applicants are invited to submit proposals seeking funding for tools, projects, initiatives, or events that explore ways to improve the credibility of Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia DC is assisting with the administration of this grant program. Applications are welcome via WikiCred’s Meta page through November 28, 2022. All are welcome to apply regardless of geographical location. Grant awards will range from $1,000 to $10,000. This year, WikiCred is particularly interested in supporting the development of Wikimedia tools, projects or initiatives that will benefit underserved communities or improve content related to timely topics such as, but not limited to, reproductive health care and election misinformation. WikiCred also welcomes applications seeking funds needed to facilitate Wiki meetups or gatherings. Sample attendees may include journalists, librarians, editors, teachers, media literacy groups or NGO’s. Applicants should expand on the ideas, themes, and work of past WikiCred projects. In short, applicants should think about how their tools, initiatives or events can generate momentum for themes and ideas behind 2020’s slate of successfully funded WikiCred projects. Once applications are submitted using WikiCred’s dedicated Meta page, applicants will be invited to present their ideas virtually to the grant review panel and fellow applicants. The panel, which consists of experienced and active Wikimedians, will review and score applications. Awards will be announced in December of 2022 and funds will be disbursed by May 31, 2022. During this lightning talk, Ariel Cetrone of Wikimedia DC will discuss the application process and review how new applicants can align projects with the themes of previous ones. The session will also include a Q&A for potential applicants. WikiCred's full CFP is available on Meta. Funding for WikiCred is provided by the Wikimedia Foundation and Craig Newmark Philanthropies.
	Future of North American Wikimedia affiliates Peter B Meyer I'll describe briefly some of the administrative aspects of running a Wikimedia affiliate, based on my experience as an officer of Wikimedia DC and consultation with others. I can list several of the North American affiliates -- chapters especially. These groups are doing a lot substantively on the projects and in partnerships with other organizations who contribute to them or benefit from them. However our affiliates per se are weak. They have far fewer employees than affiliates on other continents. Sometimes they struggle with some basic responsibilities or they wink in and out of active existence. To me this problem comes about because they are too small. Note by contrast that OpenStreetMap USA has a basic national organization that handles administration, and more staff than all US Wikimedia affiliates together. The WMF has invited affiliates to propose larger organizations, called Hubs. A Hub might help support many small affiliates, and it might take on a larger multi-year visionary roles such as developing and supporting software, supporting Wikimedians in Residence, holding conferences, and systematically conducting training on a larger scale. A key element would be simply to apply for enough grant funding to sustain our existing user groups, chapters, and partnerships, and keep them out of financial or legal danger. Affiliates around the world have begun Hub pilot projects, generally funded by WMF grants. We can probably adopt their models to get started experimentally. To do this requires some consensus on what to try, and perhaps a grant application. Likely member/partners would include at least WMNY, WMDC, WCNA, and quite possibly many other Among many open questions: What geographical scope do we want to try -- US-only? English North America? All North America plus Caribbean? A Hub need not be geographically exclusive, so it is not necessarily in conflict with existing affiliate partnerships organized by language or other interest (Ibericoop, Francophone alliance, Wikisource, user group, Black Lunch Table, LGBT editors, etc.) What kind of visionary elements should we include? GLAM partnerships? Software development, e.g. related to WikiCite or Commons? The lightning talk will highlight the issue and some basic facts.
18:00 – 18:20	Closing Remarks Announcements from OpenStreetMap US & WikConference North America
18:20 – 19:00	Open socializing Use this time to socialize virtually, ask questions of speakers. The event platform will be moderated until 19:00 ET.

Saturday, November 12, 11:30–17:00

Please note: this program is still in development as speakers are confirmed and is subject to change.

Icon Key

Presentation   Discussion   Panel   Workshop   Edit-a-thon
English   Spanish   French   Human-translated   Machine-translated
Gender gap (Hoosier Women at Work tie-in) No photos or recording for this session

Time (Eastern Time, UTC−5)	Track 1	Track 2	Track 3	Track 4
11:30 – 12:00	Better tagging, better bike lanes, better cities We’ll be discussing a proposed schema for detailed tagging of bicycle lane protection. We’ll talk about how to improve the proposal and how to use it in practice. By promoting better data on bicycle ways, we won’t just help cyclists pick the safest route - we’ll help city planners across the country and the world create better cities. Facilitator: Taylor Reich	Atlas of Surveillance: Building a crowdsource map of police technology In this session, EFF researchers will explain some of the common surveillance technologies, then work with attendees to submit more data through our "Report Back" tool, which assigns micro research assignments to volunteers and students. Facilitators: Dave Maass, Beryl Lipton and Paul Tepper	TBC	Wikimedia Indiana: A New User Group Rooted in Cultural Heritage Wikimedians in Indiana would like to use the occasion of WCNA to announce the formation of a new prospective user group, Wikimedia Indiana—currently being reviewed by the Affiliations Committee for affiliate status. This new group, led by several longtime Wikipedians active in the GLAM space, has been kickstarted by work centered on IUPUI University Library in Indianapolis and its many community partners. We are a small group, but we have already held several events and training in the past few months and would like to share our successes and invite others to collaborate. In 2022, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis received a grant from the Central Indiana Community Foundation (CICF) Library Fund to increase public participation in Indiana’s history and cultural heritage by implementing two inter-related projects: 1.) contributing images to Wikimedia Commons from Indiana cultural heritage sites that take part in the Indiana Memory Project and 2.) fostering a community of Wikipedia contributors in Indiana with a campaign of public programs, training, and other outreach. Launched in June, the project has already resulted in over 10,000 uploads to Wikimedia Commons from 3 Indiana cultural institutions, 2 editathons (with 2 more scheduled on Nov. 1), 6 successful DYKs, and staff training at multiple local cultural institutions. With this core, funded project in motion, Wikimedians are invigorating a new community in Indiana with the hope that it can sustain activity and grow beyond the university library. During this presentation, we will discuss the Wikimedia community in Indiana, the state of the IUPUI project, the grant process, and advice from the team on starting new initiatives in areas of the country without much activity. The proposed session will also look to the project's future and discuss how the rest of the Wikimedia community, anywhere in North America, can help the effort. Facilitators: Dominic Byrd-McDevitt, Jere Odell, Jamie Flood
12:00 – 13:00				View it! tool: utilizing Structured Data on Commons for image discovery View it! is a user script and Toolforge-hosted media search tool to show Wikimedia users (editors and readers) Wikimedia Commons depicting– or otherwise related to– the article they are viewing. View it! helps editors easily find and add relevant items to a given Wikimedia page and can be used across all Wikimedia projects and language versions. The tool allows users access to the full catalog of relevant, tagged images on Wikimedia Commons vs the finite, highly curated images you may find on a Wikipedia article or Wikidata item.   View it! has refined its search capabilities and now offers a standard and advanced search option. The team will walk attendees through View it!’s capabilities and structured data usage and discuss the user interface’s final manifestation. We will show how results have changed throughout the development process and discuss ways View it! has been found helpful by early adopters. View it! is currently available for installation, and we will discuss our efforts for language localization—and invite participants to install and provide feedback for the team.
13:00 – 13:45	Tagging Party Come with examples of things you aren’t sure about how to tag in OpenStreetMap. Try to stump us with the gnarliest edge cases and most blatant gaps in our tagging system that you can think of. The rest of us will try our best to suggest a tag – or five. Afterwards, we’ll put together a list of what we’re stumped on and post it to a wider forum for ideas. Facilitator: Minh Nguyễn	TBC	OSM Education Birds of a feather Listen to presentations from two educators, Jamie Dickinson & Celeste Reynolds on using OpenStreetMap in the Classroom, followed by a discussion for those sharing an interest in open mapping in education. The discussion is open but should focus on what the project needs to do to identify and remove obstacles to adoption by a broader community of educators in a broader variety of institutions. This could include new tools, tactics, and techniques to assist uptake by students of all stripes. Facilitator: Steven Johnson (TeachOSM)	TBC
13:45 – 14:30				TBC
14:30 – 15:15	Catskill Park, NY forest landcover mapathon Catskill Park is a popular tourist destination for people in New York state, and some OSMers have been there, it would be nice to make the map look better than what's on a trail map! There's already an OSM Tasking Manager of it, which I will share during the session. Facilitator: Attila Kun	Digital platforms as repositories of shared knowledge about conflict During this session, we aim to discuss the impact of technology on collective memory and to explore how open source platforms are increasingly becoming the dominant way to remember past atrocities. Similarly, this session is intended to broaden our understanding of how platforms such as Wikipedia can ensure that what happened in the past is not forgotten and become a primary vehicle for collective memory. Facilitator: Valentina Vera-Quiroz	How Wiki Education supports 12,000 new editors a year In this panel, three Wiki Education staff (Senior Program Manager, Wikipedia Student Program Helaine Blumenthal, Senior Wikipedia Expert Ian Ramjohn, and Chief Programs Officer LiAnna Davis) will explain how we successfully bring 12,000 new editors to the English Wikipedia each year through our Wikipedia Student Program. We'll cover: How do we find new instructors to join the program, particularly those who teach in diverse subject areas or at diverse institutions, to promote our movement strategy of knowledge equity? How do we communicate with the thousands of instructors who have now taught with Wikipedia, and who we want to encourage to participate in the program again? What technical tools do we use? What tools do we use to get instructors who've never edited Wikipedia up to speed on how to teach with Wikipedia? How do we provide Wikipedia training for that many students using technical tools? How can we possibly track what that many new editors are doing at once?! Why do we use paid staff and not volunteers for our work? How do we evaluate the quality of the work students add to Wikipedia? What are some examples of the types of content student editors add to Wikipedia through our Wikipedia Student Program? How do we encourage courses that added great content to participate again? And some open time for audience questions! We'll focus on how we've scaled up our impact, from supporting 200 students initially to routinely supporting 12,000 student editors and growing. People who attend this session can expect to learn how Wiki Education harnesses the power of technical tools like the Dashboard, Salesforce, and Pardot to scale the impact of our program. Participants are encouraged to ask questions and learn more about how Wiki Education works! Facilitators: LiAnna Davis, Helaine Blumenthal, Ian Ramjohn	Wiki99 and the global canon Wiki99 as the canon for global discourse presents: Wiki99, a project to encourage Wikipedia translation Module:Wiki99, the tool which supports the project the concept of the global canon, which Wiki99 produces Wiki99 identifies the 99 most important topics for a broad subject and stages those topics so that humans and Wikimedia tools can more easily review and development them can more easily develop them. A consequence of this project is the establishment of a global canon of essential information which everyone in a field, regardless of geography, culture, or language, must know. After briefly presenting the technology, we discuss the social and ethical issues which arise from the establishment of canonical lists. Keeping with the theme of the conference, we propose the establishment of Wiki99 projects as a way to invoke Cunningham's Law to recruit open knowledge allies to correct the global canonical lists. To ensure that everyone in the world has access to basic information on LGBT studies, Wiki99/LGBT+ asserts that 3 of the 99 essential topics to translate are LGBT, >sexual orientation, and same-sex marriage. Facilitator: Lane Rasberry
15:15 – 16:00			Wikifunctions - a new Wikimedia project Wikifunctions is a new Wikimedia project we are working on with the goal of allowing a community to create and maintain a library of functions. The main goal of Wikifunctions is to support the creation of Abstract Wikipedia, a Wikipedia where the content is created and maintained only once, but can be read in any of the more than 300 languages Wikipedia supports, and can be edited in any of those languages. But Wikifunctions explicitly aims for a wider goal: to provide a library of functions for many different use cases. Functions answer questions. And as such, functions are an integral part of knowledge for a modern world. Besides the functions necessary to support the goals of Abstract Wikipedia, i.e. functions which allow for natural language generation, we envision also to support functions for other domains. Maps and geographical data provide a rich environment for the application of functions. We will be able to use functions in order to ensure constraints on the geographical data in Wikidata or in projects such as OpenStreetMaps, or to use the data in novel ways and thus also to encourage the creation of more data. Wikidata has still large gaps regarding for example historical maps of former countries, distribution maps of species, or for describing the geographical extension of climates or ecosystems. In this talk we will present Wikifunctions, the current state of the project, and the plans regarding Abstract Wikipedia. We will also present some possibilities regarding how geodata can be used and leveraged with Wikifunctions, in order to start a conversation with the community, collect ideas and to see how interesting certain use cases might be. More information about Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia can be found here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia Previous presentations and articles about the project can be found here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Papers,_press,_and_videos Facilitator: Denny Vrandečić	WW, WWWWW (Wikiproject Witches, Who, What, When, Where, Why) & A Woman of the Century This double session will include the talks: Wikiproject Witches is a coordinated campaign on Meta, associated with various sister projects including Wikipedia (in multiple languages), Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons. While a lot of work has been done (in some language Wikipedias; on some items in Wikidata), I envision an expansion of the scope and this session is meant to address that. While most of the work done so far addresses historical people and events (15th, 16th, 17th and 19th century), witchcraft is common in the present-day, too. By promoting the scope of this project to more wiki language communities, as well as to academics (e.g., via WikiEdu) and other experts in the field (e.g., via 1000 Women in Religion), we can address additional gaps associated with Witches. I've been following the work for about a year, and addressed scope expansion at the Wikimedia Summit (Berlin, September 2022) and it was positively received, including by editors from other language communities not currently associated with the project. If this session is accepted, I will invite the editors who co-founded the project, those that have expressed interest in joining, as well as experts in the field to a panel discussion. See also: WikiProject Witches Heksen in de Lage Landen 20200307.pdf (in Dutch) According to Wikipedia, A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred Seventy Biographical Sketches, Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women, in all Walks of Life (1893) is a compendium of biographical sketches of American women born in the 19th-century. For years, editors have worked on various components (creating Wikipedia articles; uploading the women's images to Wikimedia Commons; adding Property:P1343 to the Wikidata item) associated with the entries in this book, but there is no coordinated "project" across sister projects (WikiSource, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikipedia). As I've created many of these women's biographies on EN-WP, I've come to see a need for coordination to fill gaps. In my session, I'll articulate the state of "A Woman of the Century" in each sister project, and then make a call to action for coordination. Some useful links: A Woman of the Century Category:Wikipedia articles incorporating text from A Woman of the Century Woman of the Century wikidata:Special:WhatLinksHere/Q24205103&limit=500 Presenter/Facilitator: Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight
16:00 – 17:00	Wikidata's tenth birthday Wikidata turns 10 at the end of October, 2022. There is a map of global activities. We can have a little online celebration, with quick talks and demos and commentary. It's not organized yet, but several speakers/demonstrators have materials to show: Minh Nguyen on how OpenStreetMap uses Wikidata information (and perhaps future prospects). Possible sources: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] (p22 of SotM 2022 by Dsoua, Schott, and Lautenbach) Andrew Lih, on many projectsHighlight of training materials from the regular Philadelphia WikiSalonPharos and econterms on a demo project on Wikispore showing data on nonprofit organizations drawn from Wikidata.Room for more. We can actually sponsor a cake or something, but we have the problem that we are not all together. Facilitator: Peter Meyer

Sunday, November 13,

Please note: this program is still in development as speakers are confirmed and is subject to change.

Icon Key

Presentation   Discussion   Panel   Workshop   Edit-a-thon
English   Spanish   French   Human-translated   Machine-translated
Gender gap (Hoosier Women at Work tie-in) No photos or recording for this session

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