WikiConference North America 2019
November 8-11
You're invited to Cambridge, Massachusetts to join Wikipedia and Wikimedia enthusiasts for the annual continental conference.
#WikiConferenceNA
Boston skyline by King of Hearts (CC BY-SA 4.0)
WikiConference North America is the annual conference of Wikimedia enthusiasts and volunteers from throughout North America, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. The 2019 conference will take place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 8-11. Join Wikipedia, -media, -data, and -cite enthusiasts for a long weekend of collaboration and discovery.
- Our main host is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- This year's theme is reliability/incredibility
- Participation in conference activities includes compliance with our friendly space policy.
- Scholarship Applications: Closed
- Programming Submissions: Closed (add ideas to our unconference)
Programs & activities
Location
Stata Center, MIT
Address: Building 32, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge MA, 02139
View of Stata Center from Vassar street
- This is a draft; details are subject to change. A full schedule is coming soon.
- Dates
- November 8 - 11, 2019.
- Friday, November 8
- Culture Crawl, a day-long event where we collaborate with local museums, libraries, and cultural institutions to host free backstage tours, edit-a-thons, and more.
- Training sessions around GLAM and Wikidata.
- Kickoff to our conference-long hackathon, challenging participants to ideate and come up with solutions for problems around information reliability.
- Saturday + Sunday, November 9 - 10
- Keynotes, community presentations, round-table discussions, panels, and lightning talk sessions.
- Main session themes to include: credibility and reliability; flexibility, experimentation, and unreliable draft spaces; news and current events; citations and sourcing.
- Other tracks will include content related to relationship building & support; inclusion & diversity; editor recruitment and retention; tech & tools; harassment, civility, & safety; and education.
- Monday, November 11
- A reliability summit, providing a deep-dive into the reliability of information.
- Bringing together participants from the Wikimedia Movement, the credibility space, and external organizations to discuss the biggest challenges being faced.
- Focus groups to discuss current problems and future solutions.
- Reflecting on learnings from the weekend.
Organization
Team
History
Our previous events had unique themes and were located in different cities: New York City (2014), Washington D.C. (2015), San Diego (2016), Montreal (2017), and Columbus, OH (2018).
WikiConference North America User Group was formed in 2016 after that year's conference. It is a recognized Affiliate by the Wikimedia Foundation. The purpose of the User Group is to assure that the experiences gained at one conference are shared with future year conference organizers. The mission of the User Group includes coordinating the planning and hosting of events under our purview. Additionally, the User Group documents best practices and shares lessons learned with other Wikimedia communities planning and hosting conferences and similar events.
WCUSA 2015, Washington D.C.
WCUSA 2014, New York City
