Wikimania 2018 Cape Town - My First Wikimania

Wikimania 2018 is an annual conference that gathers volunteers, trustees and decision makers of Wikipedia and its sister projects. It was the very first Wikimania I'd ever attended. Every year Wikimedians, developers, scholars, open-source and free knowledge advocates from around the globe get together to share presentations, discussions, and workshops to tackle the problems they are facing and provide updates from both a technical and non-technical perspective.

I have been involved in editing Wikipedia (mostly newiki) and active on several other Wikimedia projects since 2010 and enjoyed participating in other Wikimedia events organized by Wikimedians of Nepal, but I’d never had the opportunity to become a participant in any version of Wikimania. Attending Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town was an eye-opening experience for me because it helped me to gain a deeper insight into this great community.

In my experience, it is an opportunity to deliver our voice with the global community, and even more than that, I found Wikimania as a place of taking over responsibility to forward Wikimedia revolution on the path of progress. It is not only an opportunity and responsibility, Wikimania has become a special platform for me to share and exchange knowledge with the Wikimedians from around the world.

Apart from sharing and exchanging knowledge, I found Wikimania as a platform to resolve the different obstacles which we faced during organizing in-wiki and off-wiki events. Assembling all those opportunities, responsibilities, sharing and exchanging knowledge and achieving skills in minimizing the barriers, Wikimania has become a milestone for me to start a new and strategic journey on the Wiki-path.

My conversations with Wikimedians from different countries definitely broadened my perspective of the international Wikimedia community. I think it is important for all of us to work together to face our common challenges. The growth of the movement with its rich pool of editors, developers, and scholars working collaboratively on several projects in different languages is truly inspiring to me. Thank you, Wikimedia Foundation for providing me the scholarship to attend Wikimania.