Talk:2019/Main Page

Some ways to help

Community

• Students: ideas for working w/ uni, high school, and younger students
• Wiki communities: liaising w/ major wikiprojects, chapters, and the wmf
• MIT community: engagement w/in the venue + on campus (see SJ, Sarah, Phoebe)
• Credibility + journalism communities:

Program

• Program: help w/ workshops, tracks, and hackathon;
• Speaker support: rallying + tending to speakers
• Hackathon parallel to the crawl
• Culture crawl(s)

Virtual conference

• Remote participation for people across N. America (and the world)
• Connecting local wikimedians in the other 22 countries; language + networking issues (see Global Voices)

Partners + sponsors

• Sponsors+partners: institutions, foundations, companies, and in-kind sponsors
• Local partners: food, drink, venues, and city partnerships
• Handling submissions + final format of talks

Quality of conf

• Food: local catering (see Antonio + J8)
• Parties: organizing opening + closing (+ other optional) parties
• Lodging: couchsurfing and room shares for visiting students (hotels: see Antonio)

Website + publicity

• Maintaining the site + imagery
• Announcements, dealing w/ press

Logistics

• Registration: online + in-person reg, total event-size management
• Other logistics: Help organizing local volunteers, manning tables

Speaker ideas

Tradition

• Ward Cunningham, Erin McKean
• JI/Z

Non-wm speakers

• Trad news publishing: AG Sulzberger, ?
• Trad social news platforms: ?
• Reliable source vetters: ?
• Collab news sources: WikiTribune, GlobalVoices (in en, es, fr)
• Someone from PRSA or similar type of organization who can discuss ethical engagement in Wikipedia for PR professionals.
• Experts in the field of public health communication, science communication, climate change psychology, etc. - what ideas do they have on how to make Wikipedia communicate more effectively?

Ideas for the 2019 conference

General structure

• Theme: Credibility + Incredibility (co-planned w/ CredCo)
• Dates: November 9-11 (Sat-Mon, a long weekend)

  November 8 for satellite events, in nearby spaces (a few 20-50-person gatherings)

• Venue: We currently have most of the Stata Center reserved, w/ spaces on the 1st + 4th floors. Looking for spaces for satellite events, dinners, parties.
• Lodging: We're looking for inexpensive options for visiting students. Perhaps we have enough locals to support couchsurfing for some?

Art

• A Hatnote installation w/ delicious acoustics
• A related dynamic world-map... (of people and bots, data / images / minor edits / major edits / new pages / new accounts)

Potential subthemes

• WikiCite (possible on the satellite day)
• News crediblity (hello CurrentEvents, Wikinews, Wikitribune, Civil? The Correspondent?? FB local news???) (possibly on the satellite day)
• Disinformation and AI (ORES, other mechanisms, non-wiki approaches)
• Education (WikiEdu is often a sponsor, hopefully again this year)
• Librarianship and curation
• Experimentation and unreliable drafts (importance of simplicity + all-can-edit!)
• Wikipedia and international students and/or English language learners
• Advocacy & public policy

Potential events / fun sessions

• Sockpuppet Theatre (reprise, for all ages)
• Sessions for high-school and younger students
• Web 2.0 Elevator Pitch Contest (reprise)
• Creative childcare (for attendees w/ kids)
• Wikipedia edit-a-thon or chapter sticker or button exchange
• Wikipedia PR sharing table: with posters for events, other materials created for PR

Potential wiki moments (just dreaming here...)

• Get Ward C + some Meatballers to join
• A vigorous Federated-MediaWiki/Federated-WD/
• A vigorous WN/WTrib/CurrentEvents showdown
• A vigorous Wikiversity/Wikieducator/OCW/EdX showdown

Call for Proposals

When do you anticipate sending out a call for proposals? I am interested in presenting some research I've done this year. Additionally, I'll add my name to the list of volunteers. I have lots of experience with planning programs, but I wonder if this is a COI if I also want to submit a proposal to speak?

Thanks! We would welcome help with this. There's not much COI there, though the proposal would be reviewed by others. Sj (talk) 19:38, 16 August 2019 (UTC)

Great! You can hit me up by email or through my talk page when the time comes. --Mcbrarian (talk) 15:28, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

• Submissions: Currently we have a wiki form. Is it enough?

Have there been any concerns about the wiki form in previous years?--Mcbrarian (talk) 15:32, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

With our collaboration with CredCon and general potential for more non-wiki folks to join the conference each year, we had concerns that asking people to fill out a wikimarkup form wouldn't be the best experience for them. We've remedied that by using an extension that lets us use a nice form UI. ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 07:18, 6 September 2019 (UTC)

Coordination

Calls

Weekly on tuesday, 7pm

Slack

WCNA messaging

Wiki

This wiki for longer-form documents and updates

Dreams [dream outcomes] for the conf

1. Newbies: A track for newcomers! cf SF's newbie effort
   • Journalistic theme for newbies too?
   • 'under the hood' literacy course via Merrilee? Take you to the point/purpose of editing ... (MP could co-teach w a journalist / educator)
2. Newbies: track for youth?
   • Active programming for hs and college students
   • not just WP: WSource (Jim), Commons, Data, ++
   • cf WordCamp's kids' camps. cf permissions, childcare
   • work w/ educators at MIT and elsewhere

3. Great experience for people from small communities/outside the US/Can
   • Make an event w/ cool people who run their own rural/local events
4. Result: Make a new WikiNews -- destroy the old and create anew
5. Program: Have an all-library conference (aww)
6. Meta: Inspire new recurring headlines about the movement [in the news]
7. Result: Cite Unseen takes over all wikipedias

8. Culture: American music! Sokha, calypso ... [Sherri]
   • WMSummit: everyone sent in music; danced for hours.

9. Sites: consider all of Boston! [Af Am cultural museum + schoolhouse], full Freedom Trail.
   • Gardner museum: potential site, wants to partner! Next steps? Sat/Sun social? Part of the crawl? Wants to augment their collections.
10. How we cani collaborate on facts and fact-checking w/ deep provenance [WD+]

11. Reader consideration?

Current needs

• Volunteer organizing x
• Sponsorship one-sheeter (review, sharing)
• Speaker ideas
• Recording sessions! Give feedback to OL
• Remote participation: decide where to have such interactions [get OpenCon feedback -- Nick Sh instance]
• Reach out to parallel folk (Naomi, Jess, Nick Sh)

Please enable proper display of non-image files

File:ScidataCon 2018 poster 168 - WikiCite and Scholia - a Linked Open Data approach to exploring the scholarly literature and related resources.pdf File:Open Science Radio OSR051 WikiCite2016.ogg File:Citing sources tutorial, part 2.ogv

Right now, things like PDF, OGG and other non-image media formats do not display well, which hampers the use of such media on this wiki — see the examples I included in this section. --Daniel Mietchen (talk) 17:40, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for noting, I'll try to look into this ASAP. ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 18:29, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

Dealing with spam: This wiki has become very difficult for new users to edit

All,

In recent weeks, this wiki has become a target for spammers. About two dozen new accounts are created every day; many are populated with reasonably plausible user page content, while others make no edits at all (i.e., they are being set up as "sleepers" to spam in the future.) Some new spam pages are created also, I would say this is about two per day at present.

This presents two problems:

1. It's an administrative hassle to manually delete the content and block the users.
2. Because of the extensive deleting and blocking activity, it becomes very difficult to discern the occasional good faith user who happens to register; and highly likely that occasional good faith users will be inadvertently blocked.

It's #2 that I'm mainly concerned about. The value we share is being open and accessible; but if we are too aggressive in being open to new users at the outset, it leads to anti-spam measures that make the site difficult to join and edit.

What is the best path forward? I know SuperHamster has done some work on the CAPTCHA and AbuseFilter settings; is there more that can be done with that? Could we move to a model where new users request an account, rather than creating one on their own? I am a bit out of date on what options exist with MediaWiki, so I'm curious what others suggest.

Pings to others who have worked on this: User:SuperHamster, user:James Hare -Pete Forsyth (talk) 18:32, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

I went ahead and changed the CATPCHA question; hopefully that halts things for at least a little while. This format of spam accounts ("real" name with 2-3 numbers, basic introductory userpage that usually has a random external link) is unfortunately very common amongst smaller wikis. Fortunately I have very rarely seen these types of accounts actually operate as sleepers over the years, so I'm not too concerned about that. I have yet to implement the AbuseFilter actually, I'll have to take a look at it this weekend and see what settings are used on other wikis to combat this same sort of spam. Since AbuseFilter would autoblock + delete spam pages based on patterns, I'll have to careful setting it up to prevent false positives. Let's see if this CAPTCHA change helps at all, otherwise we can start looking at other limitations, like account requesting. ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 04:55, 25 April 2020 (UTC)

SuperHamster: Thanks for all this! Sounds like you have much more recent and relevant experience than I do with the various technologies, so I am glad you're on the case, and I can't offer much in the way of substantive feedback. The waves of new users do appear to have abated immediately, though -- so thank you! I'll do my best to keep an eye out for further outbreaks, and I'll ping you if I see anything significant. -Pete Forsyth (talk) 03:41, 26 April 2020 (UTC)