Dear all,
Last week, Wikimedia Deutschland announced the second Wikipedia Academy to be held in Mainz on August 24th and 25th, 2007. This year the conference will focus on the humanities in Wikipedia, aiming for a dialogue between researchers and Wikipedians. Wikimedia Deutschland organizes the conference in cooperation with the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature, one of the seven great German Academies of Sciences.
For the first time, the Wikipedia Academy will be sponsored by the German Ministry for Education and Research. Wikimedia Deutschland was chosen as an official partner of the "Year of the Humanities", an annual event organized by the ministry that started in 2000 and focuses on a different discipline each year. The conference will be opened by Doris Ahnen, Minister of Education, Research, Youth und Culture in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, and Elke Lütjen-Drecoll, President of the Academy of Sciences and Literature.
One of the conference highlights will be the award ceremony for the "Johann Heinrich Zedler Medal". Wikimedia Deutschland and the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature award this prize for an outstanding encyclopedia article in the area of the humanities. The Zedler Medal comes with 3,000 Euro and is sponsored by the German scientific journal "Gehirn&Geist". The selection jury consists of seven renowned scientists (among them Johannes Fried, former president of the Association of German Historians, and Michael Stolleis, former president of the Max-Planck-Institute of European Legal History), a journalist of "Gehirn&Geist" and a German Wikipedian. The award ceremony starts with a lecture by Professor Ulrich Johannes Schneider, director of the Leipzig University Library, on "Johann Heinrich Zedler's Universal-Lexicon and the premature attempt to start Wikipedia in the 18th century".
On Saturday, August 25th, the conference will end with a panel discussion on "Perspectives to communicate sciences for a large audience in the New Media".
More information about the second Wikipedia Academy: http://www.wikipedia-academy.de (official website) http://www.wikimedia.de/2007/07/wikipedia-trifft-geisteswissenschaftler/ (in German)
More information about the Zedler Medal: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Zedler-Medaille (with photo) http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Heinrich_Zedler (featured article about Zedler)
Regards,
Frank Schulenburg Wikimedia Deutschland e. V.