On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 5:42 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: No, i'm not a jury member, and I'm definitely not trying to answer the question. I'm just trying to show that either interpretation should be acceptable, because being accessible by Europeans and North Americans is an important point to be concerned with. Exactly what the jury meant by that statement, I do not know. --Andrew Whitworth

On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 5:56 PM, Patricia Rodrigues <snooze210904(a)yahoo.se> wrote: I'm sorry that my last email upset you, that certainly wasn't the intention. I was just saying that accessibility to North Americans and Europeans should be a concern for the jury, one of many concerns. Accessibility to South Americans is another valid and large concern. For that matter, accessibility for people from all countries and continents is something that must be taken into account by the jury. I assume that they do not intend to disenfranchise any group of people. A Buenos Aires wikimania is going to be a huge boon for the es. and pt. projects (not just wikipedias, but wikinews, wikibooks, etc). It may also help to spur activity in existing South America chapters, and groups which are going to mobilize because of Wikimania to form new chapters. It might be, but if we had a Wikimania in [insert place here that displeases south americans, or asians, or africans], I would certainly expect those people to start a thread about it. Every wikimania that we have is going to displease at least one group of people, and the worst thing we can do is to ignore the potential criticisms and be silent about it. --Andrew Whitworth

That carries with it the implied statement that strong bids from such places would have been unwelcome from the very start for 2009's Wikimania, which is troubling. If that's not the case, please let me know. I'm certainly not saying that BA had a weak bid; from what I've seen of it, I don't think it was too bad. Were the jury to have addressed the concerns regarding the high relative weight that location has compared to it's actual level of importance when compared to other factors, and still chosen BA on its merits, I'd be OK with that; I just feel that those concerns were not addressed. -Dan On Mar 30, 2008, at 10:35 PM, phoebe ayers wrote:

It was not a troll, and I very much do believe that it could have been implied in the statement. As well, the question was not actually directed at you, even though (I think) you are on the jury. -Dan On Mar 30, 2008, at 10:51 PM, Austin Hair wrote:

The funny thing in this whole debate is that people call Alexandria far from Europe ..... it is closer to Europe than say Boston ..... and the visa situation to Egypt is better for Europeans then to the US. I was told by a US Embassy friend of mine that I would probably be turned around at US border because I have lived in Thailand so long ..... even though I am Dutch. This wouldn't happen in Egypt. Face it we are a diverse community. Wikimania will be a succes on every continent it goes to. And there will always be big groups of people who will not be able to attend because of monetary reasons. Waerth

David Gerard wrote: To be clear, Austin used the verb "troll", not the noun. Ec

That was most definitely not my implication -- all the bids were quite welcome and were carefully considered. Rather: a) there were four bids this year; b) the jury chose what they felt was the best one, according to the list of criteria on meta (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2009/Judging_criteria, which lists cost of travel for attendees and rotation as two points to consider out of a total of fourteen) and the reasons listed in the announcement letter; c) since the bid that was chosen was from South America, bids from other locations are most welcome for the next conference. Nothing more, nothing less. Since according to the ground rules of our bidding system, places that do not bid are not considered, this last point is after all rather obvious. -- phoebe On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 7:45 PM, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 1:46 PM, Judson Dunn <cohesion(a)sleepyhead.org> wrote: The fact is, * at most confs we have held, at least 25% or more attendees were not from our user base. And the ratio of non user participants were so highest in Boston that some complaints it had been no complete user convention. * every wikimania seems to connect increase of outreach consequently. At least it was true in Frankfurt and Taipei. Numerous coverage, and pretty good imo. While outreach is not our primary criteria, it is true to have a Wikimania in a region helps the local Wikimedians to collaborate with the other same mind orgs, increase reader awareness. good occasion for zhwikimedians to reunite (they had a large meetup during the conf). Frankfrut was another good occasion for European Wikimedians. Same had and will happen at every conf (except Boston, unfortunately, where the organization team was criticized to let the outsider overhelm the conf). As said, it was considered. But Buenos Aires surpassed Toronto almost in every criteria. And if US people want to have a conf, they can organize it themselves, like Italian, Dutch or Hong Kong Wikimedians did in the past. -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 12:46 AM, Judson Dunn <cohesion(a)sleepyhead.org> wrote: I agree with this sentiment, especially when you couple it with the common defense of the Alexandria Wikimania that conference goers are "safe" because they tend to stick to themselves and do not interact with the local populace too much. In fact, this kind of isolationism is one of the biggest reassurances that we've received thus far about safety in Alexandria. No safety concerns have been raised yet about Buenos Aires (and I personally don't expect many), however if such concerns were raised you could bet that people would say "you'll be safe if you just stick with the group and don't go wandering out into the city". If anything, having a Wikimania in your area is going to spur interest, among wikimedians, in the local chapter. That is, wikimedians who live in Argentina will be more likely to participate in activities of the Argentina chapter. However, given the stance of isolationism by conference attendees (both preached as a security measure, and given in anecdotes from previous wikimanias), it's unreasonable to expect that having Wikimania in Buenos Aires is going to have a positive impact in attracting non-wikimedians to our cause. This brings up another question that I have, how are recipients selected for these scholarships? If I knew that I was going to be traveling to the selected destination fro free, I might be inclined to pick a place without consideration for travel budget at all. Or, worse yet, I might be inclined to pick a location that I wanted to visit personally, but was outside my typical travel budget. I'm not making any allegations about corruption among jury members here, just saying that money is a big deal for people. It may be time, that we seriously start to consider the concept of having multiple Wikimania events, more then one per year and spread out around the globe. Our organization is very large, and I think we could fill multiple such conferences with willing attendees. We would have the ability to get more people involved in these events, and people wouldn't have to wait several years until the jury selection rotated back to their home continent. I'm not offering this as some kind of knee-jerk replacement for Buenos Aires, but maybe it's the route we need to take starting in 2010? --Andrew Whitworth

On 31/03/2008, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: Does this boil down to "nowhere else should bother until 2011"? - d.

On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 7:54 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: I don't speak for the committee, however, Wikipedia's page view stats ( stats.grok.se) suggest that es.wikipedia has about 40% of the traffic of de.wikipedia. It similarly has about half the number of articles and active editors as de. In fact, from browsing the different Wikipedia page view stats it appears that Spanish is the fourth largest reader community behind only English, German, and Japanese. Whatever else you might care about, Spanish is one of the most significant languages for Wikimedia projects. For that matter, it certainly beats out Arabic or any other Egypt-centric languages. (Of course if we were doing things on a purely traffic proportional basis, we'd have somewhat more than one English-centric conference for each conference in any foriegn language locale.) -Robert Rohde

Correct. I think until we really define what the "community" is, we will never be able to fully do something with the "community" in mind. How can you do something for someone if you don't know who they are? -Chad On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 10:54 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: