On 10/10/2007, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)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
--
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/