Last month I had to privilege to attend the Wikimania conference in Montreal, Canada, where 900 people from around the world gathered for two days of hacking and building and then three days of conference sessions. The conference scope includes not just the Wikimedia projects but also the big themes of open education, open access, community building, and privacy and rights in the digital age. One blog post by one attendee is only going to capture a sliver of what went on, and here I am summarising some big projects of most relevance to university research projects and GLAMs.
This time round, Wikidata rather than Wikipedia was generating the most excitement. Wikidata, the free structured knowledge-base, is going through a period of explosive growth, helped in a small part by data shared from partner institutions including Oxford University, and the conference brought together many people using Wikidata to document cultural heritage and current knowledge.
The author and hundreds of other Wikimedians. Photo by Victor Grigas of the Wikimedia foundation, CC-BY-SA 4.0
