[Foundation-l] [Wikimania-l] Wikimania 2008 will happen in Alexandria, Egypt

[Brianna Laugher]

On 10/10/2007, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > "Actually useful"? I don't see how the location changes the usefulness
> > of the conference...
>
> ... You don't?
> So you don't think that if we held the next one in Antarctica that it
> would be less useful?   .... This should be a question of degree.

Cohesion said:
> It would be cool to have an actually useful conference. Since so many
> people that work on Wikipedia, Commons etc are English speaking when
> the conference is in places like Taipei and Alexandria it seems like
> it's more for fun than anything worthwhile for me, being primarily
> interested in enwiki.

To me this sounds like he thinks the content of the conference changes
depending on where it is held, which is what I was questioning.
Perhaps his implication was: hold in English speaking nation => most
talks are about English language projects => more "worthwhile" for
him. It's not like Taipei had an abundance of talks only about Chinese
language projects, so I don't think this holds.

> Obviously a conference that lots of people can't go to is less useful
> ... I think there is something wrong when we're holding conferences
> and directly involved people are nearly a minority at them.

What does "directly involved" mean? Don't articles in English only
account for 1/4 of the total articles in all Wikipedias, or something
like that?

> > As someone else suggested, hosting local Wikimanias is a good option.
> > Why not get behind Atlanta (I assume you live in the US as you agree
> > with Greg's comments) and organise a US Wikimania maybe a couple of
> > weeks before or after the official one.
>
> Honestly, if we fork the conference with a US version (and potentially
> an offset European version) there is a substantial risk that the
> popularity of these events will endanger the success of Wikimania
> proper.

I would have thought a local one would attract those who couldn't
afford to travel overseas -- separate audiences. Atlanta has done all
this organising, why not put it to use if you really feel that the
international Wikipedia is too far away. They could make it a
"cut-down" event if they really feel there is that much danger (how
can we really know until we try?).

cheers,
Brianna

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