Photos from wikimania

To browse almost all photos, check 'wikimania2006' tag at Flickr and Category:Wikimania2006 on Commons. Here are some of the photos with yours truly:

From the left: Andrea (member of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees), Jimbo Wales and myself. Photo byMidom.

Others and me :) (2nd from the right). Also by Midom (tnx).


TTags: Wikipedia, Wikimania2006

Citizen Journalism

After Wikimania ended, there are still some aftershocks, the most important of those likely being the Citizen Journalism Unconference. The theme is citizen journalism, we have notes added on conference wiki, and you can see other content with 'citmedia06' tag (technocrati, flickr, etc.).

TTags: Citmedia06

Vanity

I was blogged about in the The Chronicle of Higher Education blog: Dispatches From Wikimania.

It's nice, but they missed few key points:
* sure, Wikipedia would benefit from the articles, but is is a minor issue. The major one is that the entire world would benefit from their contributions, and students themselves would realize that their work is useful instead of gathering dust on some shelves somewhere;
* one of the major advantages of having students learn how to contribute to Wikipedia is having them realize that writing papers does not have to be a boring assignment, but instead it's somehting millions of people do for fun;
* Wikipedia (and wikis in general) which were designed from bottom-up as the ultimate collaborative tools allow teachers to raise any collaborative learning activities to a new height;

I plan to have my PP slides downloadable soon - it seems like the promised download at Wikimania site has some delays.

TTags: Wikipedia, Wikimania2006

Wikimania Day 3 Report

Day 3 of Wikimania conference begun with the meeting of those interested in studying the 'great social experiment' that Wikipedia has, accidentaly, become. The Wikimedia Research Network got (hopefully) a much needed boost in members, as did one of the most important projects out there, the General User Survey. The GUS project is designed to fill in the giant missing gaps in our knowledge of Wikipedians: while we know their general numbers and can say a little about their productivity or some other editing patterns, many basic questions like the age, education, gender, or what do they (we...) think of MediaWiki interface can be answered with little more then some educated guesses. So GUS project is extremly important for those interested in 'who' keeps the Wikipedia project running.

While the big annoucements seemed to have ended with the revelations of the first two days, lot's of tiny useful things where discussed, from the new ultimate 3-D modelling tool, Sketch Up (which may not be very wiki related but it's free and so intuitive that it promises a new revolution in grapic design), through WikiPhone promising a better collaboration between Wiki users, the Great Firewall of China, the single login idea and the goodies of MediaWiki 2.0.

PS. Later in the day I got my picture taken with Jimbo :) All in all, it was another great day, and the biggest flow of the conference seems to have been its ending too soon.

PS2. As usual, I recommend browsing through Technocrati 'wikimania2006' tag for more relations!

TTags: Wikipedia, Wikimania2006

Wikimania Day 2 Report

I spent the entire day at the 'teaching' track. Among the most interesting things is the new partially ready software that will give the MediaWiki sotftware (the wiki software run by Wikipedia and many other wikis) functionality of the course management system. Everbody was also excited with the news about the upcoming WYSIWYG editor I mentioned yesterday.

And that's honestly the notable part of my day. Lot's of other issues, but nothing of general interest. Still, general impression: a great, great place. Try to catch some of the live casts from the tommorow's last day, or search for podcasts and videocasts using the 'wikimania2006' tags: there is lots of stuff, see technocrati, flickr, del.icio.us and likely other stuff I am not aware of :)

Trivia: Wiki-blog of Wikimania

TTags: Wikipedia, Wikimania2006

Wikimania Day 1 Report

So it all started with Jimbo Wales welcome and introduction (available as podcast). Andy Carvin has already blogged a good summary so just go read it there if you like :) (there is also some stuff here.

Among the highlights and my personal favourites is Wales annoucement of WYSIWIG editor coming to Wikipedie in some unspecified future (with the help of great folks from SocialText), the potential of SemanticWiki and the great (as expected) speach by Lawrence Lessig (and his control of PowerPoint?? was just amazing, I have never seen anything like this... plus he showed two AMVs :D). Listen to Lessig's mp3 and read Andy's notes again, or hopefully we will have some video published soon...


TTags: Wikipedia, Wikimania2006