On 10/10/2007, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
"Actually useful"? I don't see how the location changes the usefulness of the conference...
... You don't? So you don't think that if we held the next one in Antarctica that it would be less useful? .... This should be a question of degree.
Cohesion said:
It would be cool to have an actually useful conference. Since so many people that work on Wikipedia, Commons etc are English speaking when the conference is in places like Taipei and Alexandria it seems like it's more for fun than anything worthwhile for me, being primarily interested in enwiki.
To me this sounds like he thinks the content of the conference changes depending on where it is held, which is what I was questioning. Perhaps his implication was: hold in English speaking nation => most talks are about English language projects => more "worthwhile" for him. It's not like Taipei had an abundance of talks only about Chinese language projects, so I don't think this holds.
Obviously a conference that lots of people can't go to is less useful ... I think there is something wrong when we're holding conferences and directly involved people are nearly a minority at them.
What does "directly involved" mean? Don't articles in English only account for 1/4 of the total articles in all Wikipedias, or something like that?
As someone else suggested, hosting local Wikimanias is a good option. Why not get behind Atlanta (I assume you live in the US as you agree with Greg's comments) and organise a US Wikimania maybe a couple of weeks before or after the official one.
Honestly, if we fork the conference with a US version (and potentially an offset European version) there is a substantial risk that the popularity of these events will endanger the success of Wikimania proper.
I would have thought a local one would attract those who couldn't afford to travel overseas -- separate audiences. Atlanta has done all this organising, why not put it to use if you really feel that the international Wikipedia is too far away. They could make it a "cut-down" event if they really feel there is that much danger (how can we really know until we try?).
cheers, Brianna