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