User:Graham87/Wikimania report

On Thursday, the first day of the conference, I was interviewed by the Wikimedia fundraising team and spoke about my work on articles about Australian Paralympic competitors with the HOPAU project, vandalism reversion, and how I use a screen reader to edit Wikipedia. I noted that some Paralympians have offered feedback on my articles about them.

Friday was the day of the presentation about accessibility. I later initiated a discussion about it at WikiProject Accessibility's talk page: The discussion among members of the accessibility project (including User:RexxS, who I had the pleasure of meeting at the presentation), concluded that the ideas suggested at the presentation were more focused on following the standard accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2.0) rather than adapting them to Wikipedia. However it was great that Wikipedia's accessibility issues had been mentioned in such a public forum. I also enjoyed the [presentation about Wikidata, a central data repository that is aiming to become the "Wikimedia Commons of data":

I envisage its use in articles like "Athletics at the 1960 Summer Paralympics/Olympics", where if a user wants to update some data (e.g. a first name), they have to do it in each language version of Wikipedia. With Wikidata, one could update the info in one central location and have it propogate to all Wikipedia languages.

On Saturday, the last day of the conference proper, I met Liam Wyatt, who put me in touch with Brandon Harris, the developer of the new Athena skin. I plan to liaise with Brandon to make it as accessible as it can be. I also naturally enjoyed the submission about the history of Wikipedia, where I provided some feedback

I also particularly enjoyed the closing speech from David Ferriero, the archivist of the United States, especially his quote from a blogger: ""If Wikipedia is good enough for the Archivist of the United States, maybe it should be good enough for you."

I didn't get much out of the unconference on Sunday, but it wasn't well attended and I found it difficult to figure out what was on where.

In closing, thanks very much to Wikimedia Australia for the opportunity to attend Wikimania. I had a blast there, meeting some amazing people, some of whom I had interacted with online, some of whom I enjoyed meeting for the first time. As I am totally blind, I required a person – in this case my mother – to assist me while attending Wikimania; thanks very much for paying for Wikimania-related expenses for both of us!

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