Wikimania 2019 started today! I'm attending the hackathon, which was organized in a very welcoming way.

People who wanted contributors for their projects got to explain what they were about twice, both verbally and creating a poster. This way, I connected with Cyberpower678 to work on his InternetArchiveBot, a bot that adds links to the Internet Archive on Wikipedia pages, when needed. I solved a couple of bugs, helping out with the administrative web frontend. It was really fun!

Additionally, I got to talk face to face with both LA2 and Vesihiisi. We've talked a bit on Wiktionary, but never in person before. Vesihiisi spoke about their efforts to make Wiktionary content reusable through Wikidata. Interesting and frustratingly difficult.

We were a diverse group of people. Swedes and Americans were probably a bit overrepresented, but other than that there were lots of people from all over the world. I'm very glad to have met both a blind man and a man in a wheelchair. Somehow, I wouldn't expect those minorities to be represented in very many conferences. Am I mistaken?

Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net).