I agree with Guillaume, it's more than time to be thinking about the
next edition of Wikimania.
I have put together a set of guidelines around the bidding process
that I have been thinking about for quite a time.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2008/Guidelines
Please comment, edit etc.
Thank you,
Delphine
--
~notafish
NB. This address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to
this address will probably get lost.
Hi there,
I am not sure which would be the preferred mailing list for this kind
of a suggestion (wikitech, comcom, internal, this one) so I flipped
two coins.
As far as I know, we are constantly blocking people when they are
live-mirroring Wikipedia (instead of downloading the dump or
negotiating a data feed). Apart from that, there is no consequence for
the people running a live mirror. I remember at least one instance in
which the person running the mirror tried to change IP addresses
faster than they were blocked.
I can imagine that this is a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating
effort. My suggestion would be not to block these IP addresses any
more but to deliver slightly modified content to them, basically the
same Wikipedia text plus a ad banner or Google Adsense box right above
the text or next to it. That way, it would at least be of some sort of
reward for the foundation running the servers...
What do you think about it?
Mathias
FAVOR RESPONDER EN ESPAÑOL
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I have read the numerous comments on the fact that we should be
planning Wikimania well in advance, and I fully agree that choosing
the city for Wikimania 2008 sometime at the end of 2006 or beginning
of 2007 makes perfect sense, and we have started working on it.
Just for the record though, Wikimania 2006 was only the second
edition, and I wish people would remember that when planning 2006, we
did not even know whether it was going to happen at all. So please
keep that in perspective. There is room for improvement, and I believe
Wikimedia has done a good job in trying to keep everyting into
consideration for the next editions.
On the subject of size. I am personally not in favour of an
*international Wikimedia conference* (keywords international and
Wikimedia) that will hold more than 500 people, ever. The reason for
this were clear last year, but even clearer this year, ie. opening the
conference to 1000 people makes it, in my opinion, lose the
"Wikimedia" touch, by bringing many people in who have in the end
nothing to do with Wikimedia. Mind you, I find the interaction with
other organisations and people with different web, collaborative,
knowledge experiences very fruitful and interesting, but this year
showed a trend that I wish we did not facilitate too much. There were
many many local (as in US) people who had but a far fetched interest
in our projects, and thus did not pertain to the "Wikimedia Community"
or had no intention of ever pertaining to it.
My dream is that Wikimedia got their hands on enough money in due time
to provide scholarships to far away contributors wherever they may be
and make sure that the core attendance of the conference is filled
with Wikimedians.
Basically the real question is what do we want Wikimania to be? Is it
the ultimate wiki conference? Is it the Wikimedia conference? Is it a
free knowledge or access to knowledge conference? Is it an open source
conference? Is it all of that? Some of that?
In my opinion, and in an ideal world, Wikimania would probably almost
be booked solid before registration even happens, because we have
managed to bring in all the people that count in the Wikimedia
community.
I would hate to see Wikimania be taken away from the Wikimedians. I
would hate for it to be so big that you would not have a clue who this
or that person is, or worse, that some people would come to Wikimania
and ask "what is Wikipedia?".
I believe we have shown the world that we can put together interesting
programs and that we should use this opportunity to make sure we
provide different events, aiming at different publics. I would love to
see a Wikimedia Academic Conference, or a Wikimedia Wiki Practices
Conference. I would also love to see more regional Wikimedia
conferences, such as the Chinese and Dutch edition this year who would
bring together people who did not make it to the international
conference or who need to concentrate in a language or on specific
projects.
In short, I do not think that Wikimania would benefit from becoming a
huge thing that everyone would attend because they happened to be in
the neighborhood.
Delphine
--
~notafish
Hi all,
there will be a meeting to discuss audio/visual streaming/recording
during Wikimania, including about remote participation for those
unable to attend the conference - this meeting will be in irc.freenode
#wikimania @ 23:00 UTC Wednesday (which is Thursday, 7am, Taiwan
time).
Details at: http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Audio/Video_Streams/Meeting
- please add ideas or suggestions - especially if you will not be able
to make the meeting. (Also, if the #wikimania IRC channel is
inconvenient, please suggest another.)
Cheers,
Cormac
"Funded by the Kingdom of Bahrain, the US$50,000 Prize is divided between
two winners. The deadline for submissions is 31 July 2007.
Launched in 2005, the prize aims to reward the projects and best practices
of individuals, institutions and NGOs in using information and communication
technologies (ICT) to enhance learning, teaching and overall educational
performance.
Winners will be celebrated at an award ceremony to be held on 19 December
2007 at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris.
Candidatures must be presented by the government of a Member State of UNESCO
or an international non-governmental organization, maintaining formal
consultative relations with UNESCO and active in the relevant fields covered
by the Prize. Each government or international non-governmental organization
is entitled to nominate only two candidates per year. A self-nomination
cannot be considered."
http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/ev.php-URL_ID=53369&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&U…
--
Pierre Beaudouin
www.wikimedia.fr
Hi all,
I went to Copenhagen last week, to the 9th edition of Reboot. [1]
Reboot is a community conference about all technology and the world we
live in. It gathers geeks (and not so geeks) from around the world to
reflect on social networks, new social order, education,
participation, values, new technologies and many other subjects. My
impression was that of a big think tank with all the inertia and
boiling intensity of ideas that I put behind the word.
This year's theme was "Human?". Importance being the question mark.
I held a "conversation" [2] about Wikipedia/Wikimedia and their
workings as a new model of governance. The idea of a conversation
would have been to actually engage people to exchange ideas and views
but the setting of the room was not exactly what was needed for that
(I was standing in front of the whole room with a microphone and they
had just one microphone for all of them...) so it ended up being more
of a Questions-and-answers session. The interesting part was that few
people actually know exactly what Wikimedia is all about, whether the
Foundation or the chapter. I believe this bit of explaining actually
helped people understand how Wikimedia is structured.
Questions revolved around the following topics:
* What is the decision making process within the organisation
* Role of Jimmy Wales as head of a constitutional monarchy rather than
a "benevolent dictator" (both in the projects and the organisation)
* Are we afraid of Wikia and the fact that it might be taking over Wikimedia?
* How long do we think that this model of openness (in Wikipedia) will
balance itself and how long can we stay "open"
* and other questions I cannot remember
I talked much longer than I intended to and not really so much about
what I intended to but we did manage to stay centered on the
organisation, its inner workings, its challenges and interests.
Other very interesting talks, (for different reasons) included the following:
* While We Wait for the Babel Fish (Stephanie Booth)
(http://www.reboot.dk/artefact-773-en.html)
About multilingualism on the internet, its drawbacks, its advantages
and how we can make it better
* Social (Ross Mayfield) (http://www.reboot.dk/artefact-2407-en.html)
A very interesting take on collaboration, collective intelligence and
participation, with Wikipedia as a core model.
* What humans can learn from Cats and Dogs (Ted Rheingold)
(http://www.reboot.dk/artefact-1890-en.html)
An amazing down-to-earth yet passionate account of how if you actually
give people the tools to express their passion, it just works.
* Flow (Stowe Boyd) (http://www.reboot.dk/artefact-862-en.html)
An interesting view on ... well, flow.
* Citizens of the future (Ewan McIntosh)
(http://www.reboot.dk/artefact-2621-en.html)
That was probably the most inspiring of all the talks I have been to.
Ewan presented the work of Learning and Teaching Scotland, a
completely new way to look at education for young people between 5 and
16. A good summary of his presentation can be found on his blog (here:
http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2007/06/reboot9_citizen.html) and his
blog altogether is a good way to look at the amazing ideas that are
deployed on the lerning front in Scotland. I sincerely hope Wikimedia
UK can connect with him to find a way to partner, because I believe
Wikimedia has much to learn and much to bring on this front.
On a format thing, I simply loved the micro presentations
(http://www.reboot.dk/artefact-466-en.html) which are fantastic to
give an overview of a longer presentation. They should be used at the
start of every conference to give a good idea of what is happening,
how good or interesting the speakers are and how good they master
their subject. An idea to steal for Wikimania.
That's it for a summary. All and all a very interesting human
experience, as the nice weather did do more for social networking
outside on the grass than inside in sessions. Good contacts made and
good ideas seeded.
Cheers,
Delphine
[1] http://www.reboot.dk/
[2] http://www.reboot.dk/artefact-2484-en.html
--
~notafish
NB. This address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to
this address will probably get lost.
The issue:
http://wikisource.org is supposed to be a portal, a portal with links to
the different versions of the project. just like all the other projects,
the main domain a portal..the sub-domains contains the different
versions..except for the multilingual projects (commons + meta) which
don't have any sub-domains and have their main pages in English as
default and main pages in many other languages. so commons.wikimedia.org
or meta.wikimedia.org are considered to be the 'portals' or better..they
don't have portals (all content on one wiki) or there are no
metawiki.org or commonswiki.org so they don't have a portal and that is
of course made intentionally (they don't need that ball surrounded by
languages)..
When we look at Wikisource, we find it somehow disorganized..first..the
new languages are created inside wikisource.org wiki (which as I know
was once an oldwikisource) until they accumulate some unknown number of
pages then they move to their own sub-domain.. isn't that the exact
purpose of the incubator? develop the language to some extent to test
its potential?
Other ideas say that Wikisource project is special somehow that some of
the languages will never be big enough (text collections, contributors
etc...) to deserve its own domain or there will never be enough
community for it..and because of that they are better placed in one
place (I don't really see the objection of making new sub-domains or
wikis, does it cost?) ..so, following the conventions, as Wikisource
does contain sub-domains, the address http://wikisource.org should be
made only a portal..not a Wiki! and the Multilingual collections (that
didn't get a sub-domain and probably will never in the near future) be
placed on a sub-domain of wikisource.org, perhaps
multi.wikisource.org..not the current mix..having both the portal and
the multilingual wiki on the same place.. that is a solution..other
solution would be to move all the content on the wiki that shouldn't
exist on wikisource.org to the incubator and remove that wiki and just
add the portal like the other projects..but I seriously doubt if the
languages will get out of the incubator...in any solution, these
languages and cultures should be featured, the ignorance of myself to
certain language doesn't make it less or bad..
Now I feel that I wrote much to describe ;)
Gerard, I think you may be confusing an entirely new Wikimedia language
with a new project (WIkiversity, Wikisource) in an existing language.
I was talking about the latter (e.g. a new Wikiversity in Arabic).
Actually, the confusion may have been my fault, because I mistakenly gave
Wikipedia as an example in my previous post.
So to be absolutely clear, my suggestion had nothing to do with the process of sanctioning entirely new languages, but rather to host new test-projects for
existing languages at project-specific incubator wikis (like Wikiversity and
Wikisource).
Dovi Jacobs
>> Everybody assumes that Wikipedia is to be the first project to introduce a new language. This is however not a given. When a new language is introduced for Wikisource, the requirements for a new language still apply. Particularly the language is to be approved to conform to what is considered to be that language.
>>Consequently, when a new language is to be started first in Wikisource, the
requirements are not waived. What can be discussed is to host it in
Wikisource... However it would NOT be an approved language nor an approved
project until it meets the requirements as specified by the language
committee. This is not something that can be voted on.
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