Jimmy Wales wrote:

Finally, I think there is the matter of the "language compactness". And this to me is most persuasive. For the most part, non-English languages are more "compact" than English. For an extreme example, consider Dutch: virtually all Dutch speakers can make it to anywhere in Holland within 2-3 hours by train. This means that when a meetup happens, everyone who is anyone is likely to be there.

Fun fact: the geographical catchment area for even the "local" SF Bay Area meetups is not much smaller than the entire Netherlands. So logistically, organizing even a local meetup in the hypothetical case of people all working on SF-specific subjects is about on the same level of difficulty as organizing a Netherlands-wide meetup. Never mind even organizing a meeting of something as geographically gigantic, yet content-wise still pretty specific, as Wikiproject California...

[Numbers: People come to SF meetups from about an 80-mile radius in all directions, vaguely delimited by Sacramento in the northeast and Monterey/Hollister in the south, forming a half-circle of about 10,000 sq miles---the Netherlands is about 16,000 sq miles, and has a lot more trains within that area.]

So, yeah, I think that's a big part of it. If I think of the top 20 people I've interacted with on the English Wikipedia and wouldn't mind meeting with in person, they're on three different continents, and even the ones in North America range from Los Angeles to Montreal. So I tend to treat local meetups as just a social opportunity only marginally connected with what I "really" do on the wikis.

-Mark