Wikidata Istanbul Conference Report

• 
• 

Overview

Event

Wikidata Trainings For Turkic Wikimedians (or Wikidata Istanbul Conference) was a 3-day international Wikimedia event held between 21-23 October 2022 at Istanbul.

Purpose

The event was designed for bringing the active volunteers of the Wikimedia projects from Turkic world together for the following purposes :

• increasing their Wikidata skills;
• increasing their awareness about how to use Wikidata effectively for Wikimedia projects and beyond;
• providing a floor for getting to know each other and discussing any Wikimedia related issues;
• celebrating 10th birthday of Wikidata!

Audience

The event was open to anyone who register in advance. The target audience was the active contributors of a Wikimedia project and Wikimedia volunteers in any capacity from the Turkic world and regional communities. A number of scholarships were offered to cover the cost of selected individuals' travel and accommodation to attend training days using funding provided by the Wikimedia Foundation. The participants from the Turkic and regional communities, as well as participants from Turkey who live outside of Istanbul were eligible to apply for scholarship.

Language(s) of the event

This was a three-language event. The presentations were made in one of those three languages and live interpretation was offered to other two: Turkish, Russian, English. Onboarding material was provided in three languages. The event pages, registration form were also offered in all three languages.

Organization Team

The event was organized by the Wikimedians of Turkic Languages User Group in cooperation with Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey with the financial support of the Wikimedia Foundation. The program team was composed of ten people from those user groups and from Üskuddar University where the event took place.

• Overseer & Liasion: Mehman97, Zafer
• Program Officer: Basak
• Liasion: HakanIST
• Communications Officer: Elderado, Kurmanbek
• Administrative Officer: Maurice Flesier
• Scholarship Commitee Member: Mardetanha
• Logisstics: Selman Utky
• Trust&Safety Officer: Eminence grice

Logistics

A truly first experience

This event was the first big international Wikimedia event organized by the Wikimedians of Turkic Languages User Group and also the venue of the event, Turkey, was a country that is not familiar to host Wikimedia events. Since its establishment, the Wikimedians of Turkic Languages User Group has been meeting online; and additionally had some experience of organizing hybrid events where members from only one country meet in-person, others join online. This was the first time the members from different countries were together in the same room; therefore for the first time it was required to make arrangements for international travel, accommodation, food, and free-time activities. All of this was a big experience for the team.

What made the work even more exciting and challenging was knowing that this was not going to be an event made with the participation of those active Wikimedians who are regular attendees of Wikimedia events. We very well knew that for most participants both local and international, this event was going to be the first Wikimedia event in their lives, and for many of the international participants this was going to be their first trip abroad. These qualities of attendees put more responsibility on the organization team about creating a welcoming atmosphere and providing good support in all arrangements related to the travel and event experience.

Additionally, the committee decided that the event had to be a three-language event; therefore for the first time simultaneous interpretation had to be provided in three languages: Turkish-English-Russian.

The logistics were managed by members of the group; it was the team members living in Turkey who mostly played a role on finding a suitable venue and translators, making accomodation and food arrangements, planning the social events.

Üsküdar University

The venue was the key factor for the success of the event. We were lucky that Üsküdar University, a good partner that hosted two previous events of Wikimedia User Group Turkey, accepted to use its conference hall located at a very central place for free. The hall had experienced technical staff as well as security and cleaning personnel to make sure that everything was handled professionally.

Whenever possible we preferred buying services from the Üsküdar University personnel and their partner organizations and enjoyed their experiences and better prices (i.e we hired simultaneous interpretation equipment and booths from a company who have worked in the same hall for many previous events; we bought the lunches and snacks from the school cafeteria and school bakery; assisted by a photographer from the school...)

Assistant students

One advantage of being in the university was being able to easily form a team of conference assistants from the university students. The 15-member team consisted of Turkish and international students, all of them did speak English since the instruction language is English; and two international students also could speak Russian. Therefore it was possible to ensure there were no language barriers between the participants and conference assistants who worked at the registration desk and in the conference hall.

We had two meetings with the assistance team before the event to explain their tasks. We also talked about the Wikimedia movement, Wikimedians, the global and regional Wikimedia events, the projects including Wikipedia and Wikidata. We were expecting to create an interest about Wikimedia projects that would go beyond the event. We were delighted to see that during the event, the students in the conference hall were not limiting their role with the tasks given to them (running a microphone around the conference room, reminding remaining time for the speaker..) but listening the presentations and asking questions. We are further excited that after less than a month from the event, the first Wikipedia University Club in the country was established in that university.

The hotel

Thanks to the central location of the university, accommodation options were plenty; we were able to accommodate the guests at one hotel within walking distance to the conference hall. Considering traffic problems in Istanbul; having the hotel within walking distance was effective for ensuring the conference sessions with no delay.

Interpration

During the conference 3 interpreters worked to and from Turkish, Engslish and Russiang languages. They were provided information about Wikidata and Wikimedia Movement before the event; some materials were shared for their preperation (Wikidata related speech videos and the presentations documents of the presenters of this event), three-language glossary about Wikidata was prepeared by the organization team for the interpreters.

Travel arrangements

The members of the organization team organized the travels for all participants. Main difficulty was the fact that we had many participants from territories of the Russian Federation and when Russia announced partial mobilization some had to cancel their participations; the organization team had to make many changes related to travel arrangements and they had to deal with many last minute changes which made the work very stressful.

Completion of the metro extension line to Sabiha Gökçen Airport (Turkey’s 2nd busiest airport) right before the event was a great development. This solved transportation problem of those participants who arrives to that airport. For those who arrives at Istanbul Airport (Turkey's 1st busies airport), our group members provided all assistance needed including meeting the guests in the airport late at night.

Social events

Program included those activities for the night of the second and third day of the conference: Going to European side of the city together to walk along Istiklal Avenue and have dinner at a restaurant at the end of the 2nd day; having 2-hour boat trip at Boshphorous at the end of the 3rd day. The biggest challenge was the great difficulty to find transportation to go back to hotel after the dinner night. This was resulted from staying longer than the planned time in the restaurant.

Program

The Process

The Wikidata Training for Turkic Wikimedians was a single-track event. The program was designed to help about those common shortcomings of Turkic language speaking communities:

• lack of awareness and skills on wikidata;
• lack of awareness on fellow Turkic-speaking Wikimedians works and projects;
• lack of engagement with Movement-wide discussions and 2030 Strategy.

Between June-August the organization team have made a list of the suggested topics and speakers who could give training/presentations that would be helpful about above problems; contacted the prospective speakers; asked their opinions about what they would like to present for Turkic communities and their availability for -online or in-person- participation as speaker. It was decided to have 14 speakers (2 online, 12 in-person) giving 16 trainings/presentations. The schedule was prepeared at the end of August when the members of the organization team from different countries and different cities of Turkey were met in-person at Istanbul for the first time.

After the draft schedule made the team asked support from the program officer; and received recommendations about arranging the beginning time, duration of the sessions and breaks, time allocated for social events.

The opening and closing sessions were designed in October. The president of the Üsküdar University was included to give the opening speech and committee members to make the welcome speech was decided.

Outline

Day 1 and Day 2

• Wikidata related presentations starting from beginner level introduction to Wikidata.
• Morning sessions allocated for trainings to understanding how Wikidata items created and how to query
• Afternoon sessions allocated to presentations focusing on inspiring works based on Wikidata, discussions about future of Wikidata. Also presentations of representatives of two other open-culture organizations in Turkey (Creative Commons Turkey and Yercizenler - Open Street Map Turkey-)

Day 3

• presentations of representatives of Wikimedia communities to give floor for inspiring each others work
• a presentation about 2030 Movement Strategy implementation from a MCDC representative.

Points to consider for interpretation

The presentations were made one of those three languages:Turkish, English or Russian. One point that was taken into account in making the program was the language of the presentation; for giving interpreters opportunity to work in turn; we have put presentations in different languages one after another. We paid attention not to have presentations in the same language fore more than one hour; and when one person had training sessions that takes more than one hour; we have put a coffee break after one hour.