[Foundation-l] A question for the Wikimania jury

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 5:56 PM, Patricia Rodrigues
<snooze210904 at yahoo.se> wrote:
>   pt.wikipedia and es.wikipedia are two of the biggest Wikimedia projects. en.wikipedia is edited by people from all over the world, predictably also by people from South America. Guess what: South America is Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking (respectively Brazil and *the rest of the whole continent*). According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_American there's more than 370 million people living in the continent.
>
>   Can we stop being Euro- and North American-centric in what concerns Wikimanias and actually realize that there is a big probability that Wikimania will *eventually* visit all continents and we all get to go there?

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.

>   Is this going to be another thread about "how bad it is that people from Europe and North America can't easily access [insert place here that displeases europeans and north americans]"?

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