Andrew Gray wrote:
On 11/10/2007, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
True, but some places are less expensive for a greater number of people than others are. If we were to order cities by some vague criterion of "number of people who can get there for under US$500, plus number of people who can get there for under US$1000, weighted by some unspecified amount", my guess based on consolidator spot-checking is that, from least to most expensive, the four Wikimania cities would be ordered: Frankfurt, Boston, Taipei, Alexandria. I.e., we're picking somewhere less accessible every year!
I'm surprised at the latter two - my gut instinct is that the accessibility from Europe for Alexandria should outweigh the accessibility bonus for the Far Eastern users going to Taiwan. Was it close?
(This is probably me systematically underestimating our usership figures, again...)
I guess it's probably close, and it might be fair to say Alexandria and Taipei are about equally accessible/inaccessible depending on what you care about. Both are clearly much less accessible than the two previous locations, though. It also partly depends on whether you weight by typical attendees, or by the possibility of attracting new attendees (e.g. the Japanese Wikipedia is a top-5 by size, but underrepresented at our events).
For cheap (under US$500): -- Frankfurt: Nearly all of Europe, much of North Africa, some of the Middle East -- Boston: Nearly all of the U.S., much of Canada, most of the Carribbean, much of Central America -- Taipei: Hong Kong, maybe some other nearby places if you're lucky (Malaysia, Japan, etc.) -- Alexandria: North Africa and the Middle East
For semi-cheap (US$500-1000): -- Frankfurt: Much of the rest of Africa and the Middle East, parts of the U.S. east coast if you're lucky -- Boston: Most of the rest of North, Central, and South America, and a few European cities if you're lucky -- Taipei: Most of the rest of eastern Asia, a few U.S. west coast cities if you're lucky (e.g. Los Angeles) -- Alexandria: Most of Europe, a handful of African cities if you're lucky (e.g. Nairobi)
A major problem with Alexandria's accessibility seems to be that, due to the way airline markets are structured, it's actually *less* accessible from most of Africa than Europe is, despite being on the African continent.
But of course Phoebe has a point that this isn't really the selection committee's fault. Europe seems to have the best overall accessibility, but we can't pick a European city if no European cities submit bids. =]
-Mark