Hi,
I'll be in California from Monday to Friday. I'll be giving a so-called "TechTalk" at Google's HQ in MountainView. TechTalks are regular presentations by outside speakers. I approached Google in February with the goal to give them an idea of the current state of the Wikimedia projects, and this is what we finally agreed to. From the abstract:
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Wikipedia currently contains 2 million articles in 100 languages. With more than 600,000 articles, the English edition exceeds all previously existing encyclopedias in size. The Wikipedia website is ranked by Alexa.com as one of the 100 largest world-wide, and the Wikimedia servers respond to up to 1,300 requests per second.
This massive growth raises several questions: * Due to the nature of open editing which is characteristic of wiki technology, what methods are there to guarantee the validity of an article a reader is looking at? * What does it take to successfully apply the wiki principles to other problem areas the Wikimedia Foundation is tackling, such as the creation of a media repository or a news site? * In what other ways could wikis be extended in their reach? Can the entire web incorporate wiki-like mechanisms?
This presentation will describe the current state of thinking and research on these questions within the Wikimedia community and introduce specific technical solutions, such as the article validation system that is key to Wikimedia's plans for a print edition.
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My primary goal is to get Google's engineers intersted in Wikimedia's software needs. The presentation is unrelated to any discussion about Google hosting, and will likely not go into hardware/hosting related issues. It's more a "Future Talk" similar to what I'm going to do at Wikimania.
The talk will be on Wednesday, if there's some information or ideas that you want to relay that might be on interest to them, please send it to me by email ASAP, to this address. Sorry for the short notice.
Best,
Erik
On 7/17/05, Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
I'll be in California from Monday to Friday. I'll be giving a so-called "TechTalk" at Google's HQ in MountainView. TechTalks are regular presentations by outside speakers.
Quick question, is this tech-talk thing a five day thing, with many talks and all, a bit like our Wikimania? If yes, is there a program somewhere?
Cheers,
Delphine
Delphine Ménard:
Quick question, is this tech-talk thing a five day thing, with many talks and all, a bit like our Wikimania? If yes, is there a program somewhere?
No, these are one-hour talks on specific subjects by outside speakers which happen every few weeks, as I understand it. Every tech talk = one talk.
Best,
Erik
Erik Moeller:
Hi,
I'll be in California from Monday to Friday.
So much for that idea - turns out I didn't have the machine readable passport required by the United States and couldn't board my flight. I do now, and we're trying to reschedule. I'll post an update if and when something does happen.
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
Erik Moeller:
Hi,
I'll be in California from Monday to Friday.
So much for that idea - turns out I didn't have the machine readable passport required by the United States and couldn't board my flight. I do now, and we're trying to reschedule. I'll post an update if and when something does happen.
Erik
I apologize on behalf of most ordinary Americans that you have to deal with an incredibly paranoid government that is currently in power. I'll leave the rest of the politics where it lays right now. I hope that your experience when you get here is better once you get away from the DMZ that most airports have become.
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