It was always my opinion that for under-privileged communities, like Egypt
and Palestine and any third-world country, Wikimania serves a double
purpose, the first is for wikipedians to meet and exchange ideas etc. The
other is to increase awareness about the role Wikipedia plays in making
knowledge accessible to everyone. People with internet access in those areas
are not necessarily tech-savvy enough to find that out on their own. A lot
of students in Egypt only use the internet for very basic functions because
they were never trained for more or they have a language barrier. That's
why, for WM Alexandria, we tried as much as possible to reach this audience
ourselves, by advertising, pre-conference introductory sessions in colleges,
posters, etc. The result was good in terms of attendance and in terms of
users who joined after WM.
It was my hope that the same would be possible for Palestine. In our
previous conversations, I tried to search for someone willing to cooperate,
and I gave you guys the name of a dean of a university in the WB that my
contacts said would be interested, did you guys ever contact that guy? If so
what was the outcome?
I guess what I am trying to say is that to answer the question 'Why wouldn't
there be any Palestinian in WM Haifa?' the answer 'Because no one wanted to
come and was turned away' lacks the whole aspect of promoting WM actively in
under-served communities. No one knows what WM is in most of those
communities to be interested in coming, isn't that one of the reasons we
hold WM in a different part of the world every year?
On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 8:35 AM, Harel Cain <harel.cain(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Wikimania has been advertised in so many different
ways till now, and for
so long, that I find it a little weird to actively pursue any group of
Wikipedians in person to attend the conference. Any reasonably active
Wikipedian will have known by now that it's taking place in August in Haifa.
The conference site and the registration form all have full Arab versions,
and we posted on the ar.wp village pump (I think more than once). What more
can be done within reason?
It has to be said that If Palestinians don't want to attend (it doesn't
have necessarily to be for political reasons, it can be for a multitude of
other cultural, economic and sociological reasons), nobody can force them to
do so.
Again, in previous Wikimanias the representation from the Arab world was
low to very low (in relation to the size of the Arab world), as others
already noted on this thread. There are many underrepresented demographic
groups in our movement.
Harel Cain
Wikimania 2011 local team
On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 17:40, Kim Bruning <kim(a)bruning.xs4all.nl> wrote:
Following up on ...:
On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 11:14:06AM +0300, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
2011/6/29 John Vandenberg
<jayvdb(a)gmail.com>om>:
Yes, some of them, but i'll try a few more. Thanks for poking.
Any Luck? Need any help? :)
read you soon,
Kim Bruning
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