Wikimania is the main annual conference of the Wikimedia movement, with which OpenRefine has strong ties. This year it will happen in Katowice, Poland, 7-10th August.
I thought we could try to coordinate OpenRefine's presence there here. Who plans to attend? Does anyone plan to organize any workshop, talk, meetup or anything else related to OpenRefine? Maybe there are opportunities to team up on such efforts, too.
I will attend and would happily participate in an OpenRefine activity (or several). If nothing else, we should do an informal meetup in some of the evenings. Some years there is also an opportunity for booths/tables. If they offer it this year, do we want to organize one for both PR and as a quick helpdesk?
I should be there.
I'll be happy to participate in any activities, in particular a meetup and I could help at a booth (and during the hackathon ?).
Maybe a poster could be a good idea too (what is OpenRefine, where it's going, etc.).
I just realized that the call for proposals is only open for a few more days! The deadline is on April 10, 12:00 UTC.
They offer the following session types:
Workshop (85 minutes) – interactive format to work out a solution or provide learning experiences
Demonstration (40 minutes) – live demonstration of e.g. a tool, possibly with interactive elements
Lecture (25 minutes)
Panel (55 minutes) – a discussion with a few contributors and an audience
Roundtable (40 minutes) – a discussion where everyone has equal right to participate
Lightning talk (5/10 minutes) – a quick presentation of a concept or story
Poster (time duration not applicable–will be part of shared poster session) – posters will need to be submitted as files once accepted
Other. Please specify in Notes section (25 minutes) – anything that does not fit into any of the above format
Is anyone submitting anything? I think the format that I am the most interested in is @Ainali 's suggestion of a booth/table for PR and as a helpdesk, which doesn't fit in any of the categories above, really. I have asked if they plan to offer that separately but haven't heard back. I'm tempted to just submit something in the "Other" category, hoping that they can do something with it. I'm not so tempted by the poster format (because I am too lazy to make a poster and the poster session will maybe not be the best way to offer a helpdesk).
@antonin_d Will you or someone have our/your webcam for the OpenRefine meetup in the room this evening? This 1 hour -> Wikimania-Live (eventyay.com) Because I'd love to join and listen in. Maybe just use Jit.si ?
Here is a summary of my impressions from the conference
The training by Asaf was well attended (the room was packed) and well received, with Asaf doing a great job at demonstrating the Wikidata integration on a local dataset (population figures in Poland). Some problems were encountered in the process (I have opened issues about them).
I have met many OpenRefine users who shared their problems or wishes for the tool. The most salient needs were, in my opinion:
using OpenRefine with Wikibase.Cloud instances. This is a topic that multiple attendees brought up. The current situation of having to deploy the old reconciliation service manually is a big hurdle for many. This is an issue that we are well aware of. With @Gnoeee we sat down to have a look at his struggles in this regard (running the reconciliation service on his Windows laptop). The service was running but he had issues with type filtering, caused by some misconfiguration in config.py. The fork at github.com/judaicadh/wikibaseopenrefine and the accompanying tutorial were helpful in fixing this configuration bug (if I recall correctly). The new reconciliation service by @abbe98 is a helpful initiative but is designed for a quite specific use case (intentionally without support for type hierarchies or data extension, not compatible (yet) with the Wikibase integration in OpenRefine) so in my opinion it still makes sense (and is even quite urgent) to get a fully-fledged reconciliation service implemented in Wikibase as an extension. Unfortunately no-one from the Wikibase.cloud team attended Wikimania (as far as I could tell) but I will follow up with them separately to check what their plans are regarding this.
Lexeme support in OpenRefine was requested by many during the meet-up. As @abbe98summarized in the corresponding issue, one helpful first step would be to be able to edit lexemes just like items (without support for forms / senses), just editing the statements on them.
Better support for fetching and editing qualifiers was also a popular request at the meetup, alongside other improvements such as support for custom ranks on statements. Some designs have been drafted, I'll try to summarize them in digital format soon. This reminded me of the request to improve the support for "no value" / "some value" which is considered for the improvements targeting Wikimedia Commons integration.
Getting further funding to work on such improvements seems doable if we can identify the most urgent needs in a clear fashion. Perhaps our ongoing user survey will help towards that.
Overall, I had the impression that OpenRefine is perceived as a quite essential tool by the community, and is viewed as rather stable and sustainable (in comparison to other Wikimedia tools, generally from a single volunteer author). People are counting on OpenRefine to remain a central data import tool for data-savvy people who want to contribute to Wikimedia projects.
I also had a good chat with @abbe98 about all sorts of OpenRefine topics (given that it was the first time we met in person), including about the tensions regarding governance and transparency. I wouldn't say we resolved everything, but I think I got a much better understanding of his needs and positions, which I hope will be helpful in finding concrete solutions to the existing frustrations.
I also sat down with @Andre_Costa and @Sebastian from WMSE to check in on the ongoing effort to polish and improve the Wikimedia Commons integration. The coming weeks should be rather quiet on this front because of summer holidays but work will resume after that, to tackle further improvements beyond the support for large uploads which has been completed. The idea to continue this relationship between WMSE and OpenRefine can still be considered, depending on funding and on capacity on WMSE's side.
That's all for now, I hope I have represented the positions of the people mentioned here accurately and didn't forget anything too important.
Working with Dates, was brought up again in 1 of the GLAM sessions. Basically support for a few common patterns that domain often has to deal with such as shown in Extract from Crazy Dates!
(and yes, the various issues with the current Wikidata Reconciling Service)
I'm also anxious to see the results eventually of the Survey. @Martin are we going to wait longer this time on collecting Survey input and continuing to promote it over the next 2 months, or will you be able to see how many respondents and if/when that increases past the respondent count from the last survey?
This is a really helpful summary, @antonin_d . Thank you for the updates. I have heard a desire for the reconciliation service to work with Wikibase.Cloud through the Telegram chat, also.
