[WikiX-l] But America slept through it....

[Sage Ross]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 8:58 PM, Rob Schnautz <schnautzr at gmail.com> wrote:

> There were no more than 40 states which attempted to hold events. These
> amassed to around 50 events, but most of them (from what I could tell)
> were merely callouts to see if anyone was interested in doing something,
> usually with no more than five respondents if even that many. The only
> ones that appeared successful at all were very large metro cities.
> Taking these facts into consideration, most American Wikipedians would
> have needed to travel several hours to get to an event that was most
> likely no more than a small group get-together, and much further to get
> to an actual large celebration.
>

The Pittsburgh party was pretty successful; although only a small
number of people signed up for it on either ten.wikipedia.org or the
Pittsburgh meetup page on Wikipedia, many more signed up on Facebook.
It was held at a sports bar during a Pittsburgh Steelers (American)
football game, which wasn't scheduled until after we had picked the
time and place for the party.  There was actually a 15-minute wait to
get in at some points.  Nonetheless, dozens of Wikipedians and
Wikipedia supporters showed up over the course of the evening.  We
only gave shirts to those who had registered (either on Facebook or a
wiki) and we gave out all but (I believe) 4 shirts out of the 50 in
the box.

Some people did, in fact, drive hours to get there... and are planning
to do so for some regular meetups now!

Here are some pictures and a bit about how the party was, for those
interested: http://ragesoss.com/blog/2011/01/17/wikimedians-are-awesome-and-wp10-pittsburgh/

But we do, definitely, need better tools for gathering people
together... the US, in general, doesn't have nearly as many meetups as
it ought to.

-Sage