Today I went to Valencia to attend esLibre 2024, arguably the most popular event in Spain for those interested in free software, free hardware and free culture (free as in free speech, not free beer). The 2024 edition was organized by GNU/Linux València and was held at Las Naves, the city’s center for social and urban innovation. The esLibre schedule usually has several devrooms (parallel tracks), one of them organized by Wikimedia España. In fact, I participated in their devroom of the 2021 edition for a panel on strategies for fighting disinformation with Anna Torres (Wikimedia Argentina), Virginia Díez (Wikimedia España), Rocío Aravena (Wikimedia Chile), Pepe Flores (Wikimedia Mexico), and Rubén Ojeda (Wikimedia España). Wikimedia España’s devroom of this edition aimed to showcase tools and resources that contribute to the development of free knowledge, in order to enhance skills in the field and attract new profiles to the Wikimedia community. The sessions of the devroom were as follows:
- Research at the service of Wikimedia developers – Pablo Aragón (Wikimedia Foundation)
- Tools for translating Wikipedia – Pau Giner (Wikimedia Foundation)
- Use and development of graphic galleries – Modesto Escobar and Ángel F. Zazo Rodríguez (Universidad de Salamanca)
- Mini-hackathon
This was an excellent opportunity to explain how the Wikimedia Foundation’s Research team serves Wikimedia volunteer developers by providing pieces of technology (datasets, libraries, machine learning models) and insights they need to develop the next generation of technologies for the Wikimedia projects.
Pablo Aragón 