On 8/17/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
And yet all those US people whose involvement in en.wikipedia.org is significant and who should be allowed to come to a conference, if they are interested.
The foundation has competing interests with the conference: one predominantly huge-sized project, and the whole of everything including the much smaller ones and the global picture.
If the interests of the two collide to some degree, there are solutions: split the conference into World and US conferences, dual-track the conference, etc.
I am not sure I understand you correctly, but I seem to read that you are hinting at the fact that the English Wikipedia is predominantely US contributors. If that is the case, and although I am not a contributor there myself, I believe this is forgetting the diversity of our biggest project. My take is there are enough international contributors who contribute to the English Wikipedia to never fall into a US/rest of the world kind of split, which at any rate, would seem to be an ultimate failure of Wikimedia ever pretending to any kind of international scope.
Rather than artificially constraining the size of Wikimania, structural solutions and a review of the goals of the conference and foundation are in order.
I believe this is what I have proposed.
Delphine PS. It might be that I have not exactly understood what you meant, being an Englis as Foreign language pkind of person and all. In which case, I thank you for making sure I get your point.