[Foundation-l] On Wikimania locations

[Gregory Maxwell]

Wikimania 2011 has come, yet again another location in the middle-east.

It seems to me that every major populated geographic region has a
multitude of sites which could create viable wikimania candidacies—
and this has certainly been supported by the past applications.

A leading application takes an enormous amount of work, expenditure of
political energy, etc. on the part of the proposing team— work that
could perhaps be applied to advancing the Wikimedia mission in other
ways for candidacies which are ultimately fruitless.

I believe that if you were to take the best candidate from each region
and compare among them you'd find them all to be excellent options and
ultimately end up choosing based little details and preferences, often
ones mostly outside of the control of the applicants.

Accordingly I believe it would be better if we pre-announced a
preferred geography for the candidacies each year.

Effort could then be conserved for producing really excellent
proposals in those years when a candidacy is most likely to be
successful. This could also be expected to result in better
applications.