Day 3 of Wikimania in Nairobi, Kenya

I’m brimful of new ideas and it’s mostly because of two talks I attended – and of course the conversations I had.

The one very inspiring talk I want to highlight was “A Model of Peer-Produced Knowledge Commons Lifecycles and Governance” by Benjamin Mako Hill. His talk was about a phenomenon that can be observed on all Wikipedias: After a steep growth, the number of contributors is in decline.

Drawing inspiration from the work of Yochai Benkler and his idea of commons-based peer production as well as Elinor Ostrom’s “Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action” he proposed the idea that as communities give themselves rules that are necessary to govern themselves and keep the commons unharmed, newcomers are excluded. We have seen this as a bad thing, but maybe it is a natural part of the lifecycle.

The second talk I saw was an introduction/workshop on Wikifunctions by James Forrester. I think James did an excellent job to explain Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia to the audience. A German wikipedian sitting next to me kept whispering “This is the future! This is the future!”

Right now there’s an ongoing effort to build little sentences that could be the start of a Wikipedia article such as “Nairobi is a city” by pulling in data from Wikidata and connecting them with functional programming. My proud contribution was to add an Esperanto function to the list of languages.