Meeting at WikiConvention francophone (WCFR) '24 in November

Community Meetups
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I will be at WikiConvention francophone (WCFR) on November 2 and 3 in Quebec City. Checking the attendees list, I am looking forward to meeting @Nicolas_VIGNERON and @Antoine2711 there!

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Yes, I'll be there and looking forward to it !
À bientôt à Québec :smiley:

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I'll be there as well!

Thanks for the reminder about completing my registration :slight_smile:

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So here is my takeaway from the convention.

First, it was nice to put faces to the usernames and to meet many new users from the Wikimedia community. I also had the opportunity to exchange with @Antoine2711 regarding OpenRefine governance and its future.

The crowd was a nice mix of volunteer contributors and organizations (mostly Canadian GLAM institutions, Wikimedia Canada, Wikimedia France, and the Wikimedia Foundation), allowing me to get different perspectives and build some relationships. It was interesting to see the different approaches to how Wikimedia France and Canada engage with GLAM to publish on Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikipedia (@Andre_Costa, you may want to connect with Wikimedia Canada as they have a similar approach to WMSE).

OpenRefine User Insights

From my conversations, it’s clear that many OpenRefine users from the Wikimedia movement only use OpenRefine a few times per year. Consequently, they often forget how to do certain workflows between uses. Many have developed personal tutorials to remember steps, but this increases the risk of error when publishing to wikidata, for example.

The Wikimedia French-speaking community uses a Discord server, where there’s a dedicated subforum for OpenRefine discussions and support.

User Feedback: Areas for Improvement

Based on discussions with attendees, here are some areas where OpenRefine could improve:

  • When installing a new version of OpenRefine, users currently lose all their extensions, reconciliation services, and personal preferences. This can be particularly disruptive for casual user users or those relying on someone else to set up OpenRefine.
  • When exporting a project archive, users lose any mapping with Wikidata.
  • With the growth of Wikifunctions, lexeme will gain in importance.
  • Having documentation specific to each OpenRefine version on Docusaurus would help navigate new features introduced in the recent version.
  • A plugin manager could enhance the discoverability of existing plugins, making it easier for users to find and install the tools they need (thanks @abbe98 for opening #6975)

Other relevant events

I was also made aware of several events that may be interesting for OpenRefine.

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  • Having documentation specific to each OpenRefine version on Docusaurus would help navigate new features introduced in the recent version.

Regarding documentation per version, we tried that but didn’t like the complexity of setup. I think it’s just much easier to have a section on New Features, where a page per new release version can be made and new features introduced in that version can be documented. Then in other areas of docs, we can update the existing areas. This makes it easy to document as well as link to a single place for new features introduced for trainers, users, extension authors.

What do we think?