Jan Ainali – funderingar från mig

My Wikimania 2026

Posted on August 12, 2026 by Jan Ainali

This year, Paris was the host city for Wikimania and just a direct train away, I was able to participate in person.

Overview

As usual, I used the learning pattern Documenting your event experience, continuously documenting what I was doing, and who I spoke with, along with notes of thoughts that I got (if you want all the details and not this me-centric overview, check out that last link; I have comments on almost every session). There were many side events and some not in the schedule, but it is safe to say that I partook in more than 20 sessions and was listed as a speaker for two others. During the main days, I spent all my time at the venue when there were sessions on the program and didn’t go on any tours. I have later watched another 26 sessions (but am still catching up on sessions that I missed), so I feel that I have really indulged in the conference. I will delve deeper into the different aspects of my Wikimania experience below.

Podcast

I managed to get hold of one of the organizers for the online parts and recorded a pre-conference interview. Per Wikipediapodden tradition, we did record one episode leading up to Wikimania and one episode summarizing it. These two are, as usual, only available in Swedish.

My sessions

Tabular data vs. structured data – How do we get to a win-win solution?

Early session in the main hall, but it got quite full anyway. Tiny struggle with tech before we got started, but then the panel really took off. Lots of good questions from the audience, both online and in person. I hope we managed to raise the conundrum and plant a few seeds for solutions and that this was a good revival of the discussion.

Putting CommonsDB into use

This was part of my consulting with Wikimedia Sverige and a workshop that got even more productive than I anticipated. I also blogged about the experience, so you can read even more details over at: CommonsDB gaining insights at Wikimania.

Govdirectory – collaborating for impact

A follow-up from the poster last year, this time trying to incorporate even more of the collaborative aspects of the WikiProject. Unfortunately, my poster was one of the ones farthest away from where people were passing by, but since they were up the entire conference, I think many people got a chance to see it. What was good this year was that they had made it easy to unmount and bring along home, so now I can still enjoy it.

Virtual room – lunch session

The organizers did some live streams where they invited speakers for a kind of after-match commentary/interview. It was quite fun, and I was also scheduled for a morning session, but that failed due to technical problems.

Wikimedians for Sustainable Development

While the user group Wikimedians for Sustainable Development didn’t organize any official user group sessions, many members were presenting, and even more people in the community had sessions related to the sustainable development goals. So once again, I created a subpage where I roughly categorized them by SDG goal and type of session. By a bit of a chance, I also managed to squeeze back in a lunch meetup (that had first been rejected due to limited space) that we called Climate change, environmental issues & sustainable development lunch. It was well attended, and I got positive energy from seeing so many in the movement working in the same topic space.

Overall impressions

This was my 18th Wikimania and I must say it was quite a solid one. The venue was good, the scheduling worked nicely, and the hallway track opportunities were perhaps the best so far. I still think there is more potential in connecting the online participants into the conference. Not everyone can go; this year it was attenuated by it selling out super quickly, so a huge part of the community is not there in person. The only big fail was the catering, as the labeling and knowledge by the staff made this, in my opinion, the second worst Wikimania food-wise.

P.S. Videos are still being uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, and after that all Eventyay content will be migrated to the Wikimania wiki, so expect a few link changes on this post (and possible glitches when there is work in progress).

Resolutions for 2026

Posted on January 2, 2026 by Jan Ainali

Like many previous years, I have some sort of resolutions for 2026. Learning from my over ambition last year, I will do it very differently on some parts this year. But let’s start with something I will not change, I will keep everything about the health the same. These goals have been both motivating for me and achievable, and they are likely objectively good for me too so I’ll keep sticking to them. Now for the new ideas.

Non-digital activities

I’ll start with the fun goal. This is kind of a reaction of being too much in front of my own computer, all the AI generated content slopping around and my 2017 resolution of one new thing every day. My goal is to make one intentional non-digital activity every day. I keep it very vague intentionally to give my creativity space to explore. To not let myself off too easy, I will not count are things I already do. That means my regular running or normal cooking won’t fit even though they are very non-digital. But a day hike or cooking or baking something new by recipe will definitely fit as they are out of my ordinary routines and also very away from the screen. My aim is to get back to drawing, crafting, building, tinkering and being out and about.

Digital sovereignty

This is almost related to one of my themes in 2024, about the Fediverse. But it is wider than social media and is triggered by the current geopolitic situation in the world. I want to become less dependent on big tech services in general and in specific those based in the US.

Documentation

I haven’t figure out exactly how to document any of this yet, but I would like to share my progress somehow to also inspire more people to do similar things. As before, I will do continuous updates on Codeberg but unlike before I won’t do quarterly updates here.

EDIT: I am documenting both resolutions continuously on aina.li/2026.

Reflections on the 2025 resolutions

Posted on January 1, 2026 by Jan Ainali

I just published the last quarter follow up of the year, and together with the Q1, Q2 and Q3 it’s time to reflect on the entire year as a whole. When the year started I was really inspired by the idea of writing down my goals like this and perhaps even got a bit carried away in my planning. However, as the year passed it got more and more obvious to me that this felt like a great way to organize work, but not a pleasant way to feel inspired on my spare time.

Getting myself the physical overview gave me a bit of renewed energy level, but it wasn’t enough.

This should have been obvious to me since I already know myself to be really lust driven in my creative projects. Usually it is more about seizing the opportunity and ride along with the the flow than forcing myself along a path. So this gives my some ideas for how to go about 2026. But before we go there, let’s try to make an overview.

	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
Sustainability
Wikimedians for sustainable development	🟢	🔴	🔴	🟡
Office of Carbon Omission	🟡	🔴	🟡	🔴
Openness advocacy
Open By Default	🟢	🟢	🟢	🟢
Govdirectory	🟢	🟡	🔴	🔴
Wikipediapodden	🟢	🟢	🟡	🟡
Book project	🟡	🟡	🟡	🔴
Learning
German	🔴	🟢	🔴	🟡
Climate change	🟢	🔴	–	–
AI	–	🔴	–	🟢
Health
Running and hiking	🟢	🟢	🟢	🟢
Eating	🟢	🟢	🟢	🟢

The table shows it more clearly that the first half of the year went slightly better, and that some goals were better suited for me than others. For more details, see each quarterly review, linked above. My two main takeaways are these:

I need fewer goals to make it easier for myself, and
I need less detailed goals to make it possible to find inspiration within a theme rather than having a huge to-do list hanging over me.

When it comes to what I had in my goals, I am rather pleased with my themes even though I had such variation in my successes. All of the things above are things that I somehow feel are important, even though I must say that the more I learned about AI this year, and especially how it is being deployed, the more I felt it important to learn about from a defensive/advocacy perspective rather than using it as a tool.

So even if I care deeply about them, the sheer number made it more of a burden than something joyful to strive for. I don’t think I will give up on anything of the themes as such, but I will more carefully think about how I approach them. These are my overarching thoughts going into 2026, which is coming up next.

Fourth quarterly review of 2025 goals

Posted on January 1, 2026 by Jan Ainali

Time to review my progress again, and this has been about as a productive quarter as Q3 (which is much less than Q1 and Q2). This quarter was less travel but higher intensity in work which gave kept spare time fairly low. There were also some fun events happening, like the mini hackathon and WikiConNL but that also didn’t make progress on my goals.

The purpose of this review is to give more room for reflections on the themes I chose for 2025. For ease of reference, I have added this quarter’s goal for each theme. I will make an additional blog post for the entire year and reflect on how the system has worked as a whole there. (EDIT: it’s here.)

Sustainability

Wikimedians for Sustainable Development 🟡

Goal: Follow up on all other annual goals and nudge them towards completion.

I did do some nudging on the goals, and even some sprinting on the goals I had advocated for, but there was few people joining in and thus they are mostly far from completion. The collaboration with Klimatkollen on getting emissions data onto Wikidata and Wikipedia made the news, although I am only mentioned in the press release.

Office of Carbon Omission 🔴

Goal: Publish an op-ed on the theme of OCO.

With the misses from last month, not having a clear introduction video nor a social media account, I wasn’t inspired to work on this.

Openness advocacy

Open By Default 🟢

Goal: Learn about and deploy (locally) an open source AI model.

I did quite some research to find something open source that I could run locally. It wasn’t easy, and I am not 100 % sure I succeeded either. In the end, I installed Ollama as a framework, and so far so good. The more challenging part was to find a model that both complies with the OSI AI definition and could be run on Ollama. From what I can figure out, SmolLM v3 does comply even though the training data seems a bit obscure to me. I would have loved to find a model using the CommonCrawl data sets but I couldn’t find a framework / model combination that I could run.

Govdirectory 🔴

Goal: Refine funding ask.

While I managed to give Govdirectory a lot of time and attention this quarter, I didn’t manage to direct it to the funding ask. However, on the good side, the community is slowly growing and the community call has almost often had guests popping in, some are even new regulars. On Wikidata there has also been increased activity, with some real spikes on certain focus weeks. To top it all out, Govdirectory was presented with the Award for Projects of Social Benefit by FSF.

Wikipediapodden 🟡

Goal: 14 episodes published.

This got fairly close with 11 episodes published, considering we had to take a pause while clearing up the trademark with Wikimedia Foundation.

Book project 🔴

Goal: Book proposal done.

Unfortunately I couldn’t focus anything at all on the book this quarter. I will be giving some talks somewhat related to the general topic next year which at least will keep my research flowing.

Learning

German 🟡

Goal: Reach B1 level in the CERF scale.

I kept using the Nachrichtenleicht which I find really useful. I feel like can follow along really well and would like to find more similar resources. However, I still think I am weak in my grammar and haven’t looked for an actual test yet.

Climate change

Goal: –

While I didn’t have any goals, I kept the article 2025 in climate change on Swedish Wikipedia mostly in sync with the English version, which at least kept me up-to-date on current events and science.

Artificial intelligence 🟢

Goal: Learn about and deploy (locally) an open source AI model.

See Open By Default above.

Health

Running and hiking 🟢

Goal: 912.5 km (averaging 5 km/day)

This quarter went well overall, but in December I did feel some pain in my left leg. A quick pause and keeping it light I think saved me from getting any serious injury. Overall this has been astonishing, and it is the longest distance I have logged running in a year (but I suspect I have some years in my youth when I didn’t keep track that were surpassing this). (Total: 1,365 km (October: 131 km, November: 147 km, December: 134 km))

Eating 🟢

Goal: Average 19 in the Daily Dozen app

As I was mostly home this quarter , this was mostly easy and I feel that this is getting into good habits, and the app still helps me stay motivated and reminded. (October: 22.10, November: 22.37, December: 21.71)

Contributing to WikiconNL 2025

Posted on November 29, 2025 by Jan Ainali

Last week WikiconNL 2025 was held in Leiden. I joined and made two contributions besides enjoying being there; a lightning talk and a podcast.

Lightning talk about charts

Program-wise, I gave a lightning talk about the new Charts extension. I recorded it myself with a camera placed on the table just in front of me.

For a video with subtitles, see the version at Wikimedia Commons.

The slides for the talk are available on Swedish Wikipedia and includes some useful links.

Podcast about organizing events

I had also brought my audio equipment, and when there were only talks in Dutch, I took the opportunity to interview some people still roaming around in the hallways. It turned out to be a theme about organizing events, and what events mean to us in the movement.

The full podcast is available at: WikiconNL 2025 – #334.

Wikidata 13 presents

Posted on October 29, 2025 by Jan Ainali

Today, Wikidata turns 13! 🎉 I am bringing a few small gifts. Two of them were already described in the Hackathon blog post I made earlier this week, but I’ll mention them again.

First, it was the sparql-minimizer tool, that can make your queries smaller and easier to use in other tools.

Second it was the animated Wikidata logo as a background on a wiki page. Those were also the more technical presents and the others are more creative.

One day in the grocery store, I found candy strings that came in almost red, green and blue and the way they were packaged got me associating to how we sometimes need to disentangle (detangle?) items on Wikidata. A photo shoot and some cleanup editing, and these images were made.

The last present just came in an inspiration, perhaps because I recently saw an old video of Sean Locke improvising a limerick. Anyway, here is mine.

A man from Q350.
Had statements that looked a bit shifty.
So without any force
he added a source.
With Citoid, oh wow, that was nifty.

2025 Dutch mini hackathon

Posted on October 27, 2025 by Jan Ainali

Last Saturday, there was a one-day mini hackathon at the Wikimedia Nederland office in Utrecht. Just like the last time I went to one of these, I wanted to summarize the things I hacked on. As before, the atmosphere was great: relaxed and inspiring. The event space they have is working great, and in true Dutch style, the logistics worked great. I basically completed four tasks of various sizes and starting points. Completed may also be generous, that nothing is thoroughly tested and there is likely bugs to fix as soon as they get used. Thanks to User:TheDJ who helped me several times when I felt I was stuck.

Migrating to Codeberg

Last year I made a small animation for the Wikidata 12th birthday. As this have small and simple repository, I felt like a good starting task of the day was to migrate it to Codeberg. This was straightforward and just needed some minor adjustments in the README. The new thing for me was to learn how the concept of hosted “pages” works on Codeberg, and I got it working after just a few struggles. Feeling good from getting some administrative tasks that is a part of some overarching goals for me, I went on to a slightly more challenging task.

Adapting the animation for MediaWiki

A static HTML is nice, but what if I could get the animation onto a wiki? I lately learned about TemplateStyles, so this was a way to test my skills. After some struggle with changing ContentModels of a page on the wiki and sanitizing the CSS, my templatestyle showed up nicely on a test page.

Making and showing slides onwiki

This was my big goal for the day. I have enjoyed the reveal.js project and the way one can make very simple but still beautiful slides. What if I could do something similar, even if it is a lot simpler in turns of functionality, using user scripts and template styles to make it possible to create the slides onwiki and then show them in-place. No need for other presentation software or “uploading” slides. Easy to share and in a true wiki spirit also possible to collaborate or improve upon.

This turned out to be more difficult, mostly because I am not great at Javascript, but after some headbutting and repeated trial and error testing to see what was working or not I got something that has the basic functionality. With this I was positively surprised, because I wasn’t convinced that it would be possible at all when the day started (or when I failed to make progress in the middle too).

With a userscript, a templatestyle and some special html elements in the wiki page syntax it can be used. Just press the Play slideshow button and navigate with left and right arrow keys. I also spent too much time to get the previous animation to show up on a slide. It’s not a great solution but I think it fits a hackathon (see slide 6) and it is not really the part of the framework I will start using in the future so see that as a fun bonus.

Making SPARQL queries smaller

This project was almost done when I arrived and my original plan was just to get it deployed on toolforge. My initial driver to start this was just to make a tool to convert a query to a one-line query, as some other tools are requiring it and fixing them manually (even with good find and replace tools) were getting tedious. Once started, it was impossible to unsee other things that could also be cleaned up. So there I was with a tool working fairly good locally. And I am pretty sure I was this far when Albin shared a similar tool that he already had deployed, so I stopped working on it. But with some time over at the hackathon, and unable to find his tool at the moment, I added a few more options to my tool and then got it deployed at sparql-minimizer.toolforge.org.

Third quarterly review of 2025 goals

Posted on October 3, 2025 by Jan Ainali

Time to review my progress again, and this has been a less productive quarter than Q1 and Q2. While I have been able to update my goals continuously, it hasn’t been weekly, but on the other hand, I am very happy to have migrated them from GitHub to Codeberg! This quarter has also had some travel, and more work than anticipated which reflects in my progress. Something I should have done earlier was to create a paper version to always have just a glance away. I think I have that to thank for the progress I have been making.

The purpose of this review is to give more room for reflections on the themes I chose for 2025. For ease of reference, I have added this quarter’s goal for each theme.

Sustainability

Wikimedians for Sustainable Development 🔴

Goal: Make podcast about charts and SVG efforts

No podcast has been made yet. I have tried to get in contact with the developers, but no reply so far. On the other hand, my suggestion for a lightning talk about charts at WikiCon NL has been accepted.

Office of Carbon Omission 🟡

Goal: Marketing: set up social media account(s), podcast, video introduction.

I have only started with a script for the video, but I haven’t figured out how to visualize it yet. For social media, I will setup a new Mastodon instance, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. When I wrote the goals, I had the idea of talking about this on somebody else’s podcast, but I don’t know which yet. Ideas are welcome.