User:Bidgee/Wikimania 2018 report

Wikimania for 2018 was held in Cape Town, South Africa during 18-22 July, with the main three day conference being held 20-22 July, the theme of the conference being “Bridging knowledge gaps: the Ubuntu way forward”. This was my first Wikimania, which I attended as a representative for Wikimedia Australia, with over 700 attendees at the conference, made it an extremely valuable conference to share and learn ideas for sharing knowledge and how we can learn from each others successes and failures.

The future of the Wikimedia Conference (WMCON) held annually in Berlin was discussed, with major changes taking place next year. From March 2019, WMCON will be a single track on Strategy and Governance, rather than the three tracks that had been part of past WMCONs and will be limited to a maximum of 200 attendees, with one person from each affiliate. The new format will be held for the next three years, with the name of the conference being also changed to reflect the purpose and direction. It has recently been announced that it will be called the Wikimedia Summit, with a list of eligible chapters, affiliates and usergroups.

Attendees were also shown a sneak peak at the Wikimedia Foundation’s new WordPress based website, which will have multilingual support and has been redesigned, with the move away from the MediaWiki software to enable to features it required. The new website was unveiled in August.

The Wikimedia Foundation is still looking for more volunteers as part of the 9 Working Groups on 9 Thematic Areas, with a maximum of 15 members in each group. Wikimedia chapters and affiliates were encouraged to inform their communities of the strategy working group and to recommend that those who had not originally applied to sign-up to be part the working groups.