[Foundation-l] Taipei chosen to host Wikimania 2007

[Mathias Schindler]

On 9/25/06, Arne Klempert <klempert at gmail.com> wrote:

> We really have to find a way to avoid such inevitable (and probably
> huge) frustration among teams and sponsors. Perhaps a list of
> preferred continents could help, or a much earlier involvement of the
> jury, whatever. Please don't encourage Wikipedians all over the world
> to waste their time (and the good will of sponsors) again.

Arne is perfectly right in the description of the problem. On the
other hand, we are not the first organisation to discover it. Other
events (please ignore differences in size by orders of magnitude) such
as the Olympic Games do have a candidate city evaluation as well. If
one city is chosen, the effort put into 20 other proposals is void.

There is of couse a good reason for the procedure we are currently
doing: How do we know which effort is worth before doing it? How do we
find the best location that fits our needs? In the long run, you end
up having more or less the same system, only by different names.

And there is another issue: How to we keep people working for
Wikimania even if "their city" is not chosen this time. It is not
wasting the goodwill of companies (especially multinational
corporations) to ask if their offer for sponsorship still applies to
the chosen location. In 2006, Chinese Wikipedians had a (from what I
can see) very successful regional (using the term "regional" for an
area with 1.4 billion people is strange, I know) conference. I think
it could be worth checking if the conference parameters would still
fit for a Italian/Alps/European event.

It is great that we have chosen Taipei, Taiwan ROC as the location for
Wikimania 2007 and it would love it to be able to make it there.

Mathias