[Foundation-l] Google Techtalk

[Erik Moeller]

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:

- - - - -

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.

- - - - -

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