The other two tracks at the Wikimedia Nederland Conferentie were 'Technical sides of wikis' and 'Wiki communities', in which two projects were presented in which R&D is involved: Open Culture Data and CoSyne. But of course, the main draw of the day was the keynote of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Hereby, the play-by-play of a very interesting conference.

Keynote Lydia Pintscher: Wikidata

The first talk of the day was by Lydia Pintscher on Wikidata, which is comparable to the Wikimedia Commons. Where the Commons gathers content which everyone can use freely, Wikidata will do the same for data. Wikidata will also help with enriching the language versions of Wikipedia that are still quite small. For instance, although the English Wikipedia has 4 million articles, other languages are still under-represented. Wikidata will update information automatically across all language versions of Wikipedia. From the questions of the crowd, it base clear it will take a while before the difference between DBpedia and Wikidata will be clear. In short: DBpedia extracts data from Wikipedia articles and structures it automatically, whereas Wikidata users input data by hand that can be used across all of Wikipedia. Interestingly, Google is also a Wikidata sponsor, which means the Google Knowledge Graph and Wikidata will most likely benefit from each other, instead of competing.

Lydia Pintscher talks about Wikidata at the Wikimedia Conference The Netherlands, November 9 2012Sebastiaan ter Burg

Keynote Jimmy Wales: Impact of Wikipedia

The face and founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, gave a fun and engaging keynote on the impact of Wikipedia and Internet on education and culture. He stressed the importance of free access to knowledge and content, and that free does not (just) mean free of charge, but that free licenses are also crucial in order to make these open reuse conditions clear.

Jimmy Wales at the Wikimedia Conference The Netherlands, November 10 2012Sebastiaan ter Burg

Jimmy went on to first highlight the success of Wikipedia, which now has 490 million unique visitors per month. However, he was also candid about the existing 'inequality' in Wikipedia: 87% of editors are male, and although there are Wikipedias in 270 languages, some are very much smaller than others. The Zulu Wikipedia just has 568 articles, most of which haven't changed in years. Projects like Wikidata and CoSyne (which researches multilingual wiki synchronization) will help aid this language gap. This is especially important, since there is a massive change in Africa with regards to access to smart phones, internet and increased bandwidth. Getting Wikipedia knowledge more accessible in Africa, on different devices and in various languages will be a great democratiser, said Wales.

R&D @ Wikimedia Conferentie: CoSyne en Open Cultuur Data

Amit Bronner and Lotte Baltussen represented the R&D department at the conference. Amit talked about CoSyne, and Lotte about Open Culture Data.

Wikimedia Conferentie Nederland 2012Sebastiaan ter Burg

Lotte highlighted the success of Open Culture Data in opening up collections and information about them of cultural institutions all around the Netherlands. To date, there are 34 available datasets, which everyone can freely re-use and remix. Some of these datasets are already on the Wikimedia Commons and used in many Wikipedia articles in various language versions. Recently, Europeana and Wikimedia started the development of the GLAMwiki toolset, software that will make it much easier to get content from Galleries, Libraries Archives and Museum on the Wikimedia Commons, and to re-use it.

Open cultuur data - Wikimedia Conferentie Nederland 2012Presentation of Open Culture Data at the 2012 Wikimedia Conferentie Nederland #wcn12.

Amit addressed the issue of multilingual diversity: Wikipedia's content is governed by three principal core policies. The first principle states that all Wikipedia articles must be written from a neutral point of view, representing significant views fairly, proportionately and without bias. Users within each language community are forced to discuss their points of view in order to reach a consensus on each single article. This policy is not enforced across different language versions of Wikipedia. As a result, Wikipedia articles about the same topic in different languages may be quite diverse and may be biased towards the consensus of one language community.

@xirzon @siebrand Regarding article translation: Presented this weekend at #WCN12 CoSyne: http://cosyne.eu/index.php/Main_Page http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wWG6Pcc-Z4Derk-Jan Hartman

Amit presented CoSyne, a content synchronization system for multilingual wikis. CoSyne helps users to bridge the gap of multilingual diversity by identifying content overlap between different language versions of the same article. Users may explore differences between language versions and collaboratively create views of non-overlapping content. Cosyne also identifies factual edits in document revision histories, allowing users to track recent changes and import them into other language versions. CoSyne uses state-of-the-art machine translation and natural language processing techniques. User corrections are stored by the system as training data for improving its own models. The system’s prototype is being built at Beeld & Geluid together with other European partners. Amit demonstrated the latest version of the system.

Bridging the Gap of Multilingual DiversityCoSyne: content synchronization system for multilingual wikis

The day ended with a celebration: the prize ceremony of the Wiki Loves Monuments Netherlands winners. WLM is an international photo competition with monuments as a theme. This year, 360,000 photos were contributed worldwide, by over 15,000 participants. All photos are available under a free license.

All in all, it was a great and interesting conference, and we look forward to working with the Wiki community for many years to come.

I like the fact that Wikimedians are really picky about copyright status of a six-word description :) #wcn12Hay Kranen

An overview of all the cool and great things that were done at the Wikimedia Nederland hackathon today http://bit.ly/TlY7t1 #WCN12Lotte Belice

Time to wrap up AND clean up after the @wmnl hackathon. Thanks heaps to @Kennisland for hosting. Great day all! #WCN12Lotte Belice

This photo of @brightbyte sums it all up #WCN12 http://www.flickr.com/photos/ter-burg/8169470639/in/set-721576319679354…

Wikimedia Conferentie Nederland 2012Sebastiaan ter Burg

#wcn12 gemist? Hier is een videoimpressie van de conferentie in 1 minuutje. Fraai werk van @ter_burg! http://vimeo.com/53280918Wikimedia Nederland

Quick edit of the Wikimedia Conference 2012Sebastiaan ter Burg