Toronto WikiClub members visit Toronto Island!

Article written by Legowerewolf, member of the Toronto WikiClub

We held our event on 27 April, as scheduled. 5 attendees out of a registered 7 showed up. Four of them were returning attendees: Legowerewolf, Scriptor1900, OhanaUnited and Silver Dovelet. We had one first-time attendee: K6ka.

We met at the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal and took the 11:00am ferry to Centre Island, where we began with a group photo.

We then walked through the Centreville Amusement Park to Olympic Island, which was missing a photo. Olympic Island was used as a vantage point to capture pictures of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club’s island, and South Island.

We walked south to the main island and captured a quick photo of the Long Pond along the way.

We continued east to St. Andrew’s by the Lake Church, which only had a low-resolution external picture. We captured a new higher-resolution external picture, and were invited inside for a brief talk about the church’s history and an internal picture.

From there, we continued northeast, collecting new and replacement photos from the following waypoints on our way to the Ward Island ferry:
– Sunfish Cut and its view of the city skyline
– Algonquin Island Park
– Toronto Fire Station 335
– The main harbour channel

On our return ferry, we ran into Mayor Olivia Chow, and had a brief conversation.

Contributions for this event were tracked with an outreach dashboard. There were some contributions that are not visible there; these were mainly fixing Wikidata entries and updating the Toronto Islands page on Wikivoyage.

New registration platform experiment

For this meetup, we tried using a new, off-wiki event platform, Simpli Events. They’re a Canadian alternative to something like EventBrite. Creating an event is free; Simpli collects platform fees from paid ticket categories. The advantages Simpli provides, as opposed to the on-wiki event registration tools, are that:
– Event organizers can add arbitrary questions; we used this to ask if this was their first time, and if they wanted to sign up to the mailing list.
– Check-in is fast; organizers can scan QR codes on participants’ tickets to check them in, or search for their name, and (on a different page) attendees can be added manually if they can’t access the registration page on their phone to register day-of.
– Check-in can be delegated, if necessary, either by adding another Simpli user as an event organizer or by sharing a secret link.

A notable disadvantage for Wikimedia Canada events is the lack of localization support. Simpli is, at least for now, English-only. The event description field and question labels are long enough to support dual English-French text, but it’s not a neat solution. For primarily-English groups like the Toronto WikiClub this might not be much of a problem, but for primarily-French groups or events with attendees from across Canada (or the world) this would definitely be a problem.

Ferry ticket payments

This event was hosted on the Toronto Islands, which, unless you’re paddling out there yourself, you need to pay to get to. The organizers chose to reimburse attendees who contributed for their ferry tickets instead of pre-paying for tickets in an attempt to prevent freeloading and purchasing tickets for registrants who don’t show up.

This created a bit of an organizational mess, as receipts for ferry tickets needed to be collected from all attendees. If we’d had a larger number of attendees, this would have been awful to deal with.

At least in the case of ferry tickets: pre-purchasing is the way to go. We had a 100% contribution rate (although most attendees were also organizers), the tickets were cheap anyway, and unused tickets can be saved for later in the same year.

Photo credit: Legowerewolf CC BY-SA 4.0