Wikimania is an annual conference put together by a team of local volunteers for Wikimedians around the globe.  The original conference, hosted in Frankfurt in August 2005, was put together as an opportunity for members of the growing communities to meet and talk with each other and those involved in wiki software development.

This year’s Wikimania is being held in Alexandria, Egypt, in the prestigious Bibliotheca Alexandrina.  The venue chosen was built both as a tribute to the Library of Alexandria of antiquity and as a center of knowledge and learning, which nicely compliments the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation.   The event, featuring a variety of presentations, panels, and workshops from wide ranging topics of interest to Wikimedians, educators, the free-culture community at large, tech geeks, and the public at large, runs from Thursday, July 17 and continues to Saturday, July 19, 2008.

I am looking forward to seeing everyone there.

Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator

Wikimedia Commons is the multimedia repository used by all Wikimedia Foundation projects (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource, and so on). With more than 2.8 million freely licensed photographs, sounds, and videos it is a treasure trove of rich media. The global Wikimedia community goes to great lengths to find high quality multimedia content and to release it freely: Wikimedians organize trips to foreign countries to take photos, they attend events to shoot celebrities, they spend hours restoring historical pictures. A new project, the “Valued Images” selection, seeks to identify the most valuable image contributions to the project. In doing so, it recognizes that taking a reasonable photo of an elusive celebrity can be just as much work as producing a fantastic panorama.

When browsing Wikipedia, we may often take for granted that so many articles include photographs and high quality illustrations. But just like the text, much of the multimedia in our projects is the result of the passionate dedication of our contributors. Identifying the most valued images in Wikimedia Commons is a good way to honor these contributions.

Erik Möller, Deputy Director

Greetings from Palo Alto, California!

Some folks from Wikimedia have joined the ranks of numerous wiki enthusiasts at this year’s Recent Changes Camp.  Big questions and conversations circulate…

• who wikis?
• how can we wiki better?
• what will wikipedia look like in 20 years?
• how to retain and grow users and volunteers

Among dozens of great discussions and presentations, Ed Chi of PARC talked about some of their recent research on the users of Wikipedia, how they edit, and what that looks like - including the WikiDashboard.

Lots of photos on the Wikimedia Commons.

The camp continues tomorrow!  Still time to drop by. Thanks to Socialtext, Wikihow, Aboutus, WIkia, SolSeed.net, and Atlassian - and to all the volunteers who are making it happen.

J. Walsh, Head of Communications

Greetings from Maker Faire 2008 here in San Mateo, California! This busy event is attracting hordes of people from all over the Bay Area and beyond. The Wikimedia booth, manned by volunteers and staff alike, is getting a constant barrage of persons interested in all of the Wikimedia sites.

A number of people are shocked when they find out they can edit themselves, and for a few, their first experience in editing is taking place today, right here at the Wikimedia booth.

I’ve included a few photographs to demonstrate a bit of what took place. More photos are available at the Maker Faire gallery on Wikimedia Commons.

Cary Bass, Volunteer Coordinator.

Many, many people know that the software the powers Wikipedia is called MediaWiki, and it is in fact an open-source software that anyone can use. What is not known however, is that the Wikimedia Foundation is now also using open-source software for our telephone system. This last weekend, we rolled out our Asterisk 1.4 installation. Asterisk is an open-source software managed by Digium. By utilizing open-source software to power our telephone system, the Foundation is taking another step in the direction of free and open software use.

Rob Halsell, IT Manager & Systems Administrator

An international team of volunteers has translated the MediaWiki software used by Wikipedia into more than 100 languages. This is a critical precondition to enable participation in Wikimedia projects from all parts of the world. Today, the work of translating the wiki software is done through a wiki: BetaWiki , which is not operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Free Culture Spotlight, a new blog feature that will focus on free culture and open source efforts external to the Wikimedia projects, takes a look at this extraordinary effort and the people behind it.

Wikipedias exist in more than 250 languages. From the very early beginnings of Wikipedia, the project was conceived to be multilingual. In March 2001, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced the first non-English Wikipedias. In his announcement, Jimmy wrote:

One problem is going to be technical support of these languages, since if there
are “fancy letter” problems, I will not know much how to deal with them. Japanese
is pretty much all “fancy letters”, but I assume that Linux/Apache/Perl will just
magically support it? Or will they be forced to use non-fancy ASCII urls?

Indeed, supporting content in other languages well is a very hard problem. Fortunately, increased standardization and awareness of internationalization problems has made it a little easier to at least deliver content to the end user. Try loading the Hebrew, Russian, Japanese or Hindi Wikipedia: On most modern systems, you should see the correct character sets. Note that it’s not just the content of the encyclopedia that is in a different language: The entire user interface is localized, and in right-to-left languages like Hebrew, even the navigation is optimized.
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I received an email recently inviting me to RecentChangesCamp 2008, which is, from what I have seen a gathering of people into all things wiki.  After one of my wiki-sprites (thanks Alex) did some research, I was able to find information on a previous RCC at RecentChangesCamp 2007 — Portland, Oregon.

Its description is as follows:

RecentChangesCamp was born from the intersection of wiki and OpenSpace - a very wiki-like way of organizing gatherings. A lot of cool people into wiki, community and collaboration will be there - what do you want to talk with them about? Every participant is invited to lead their own sessions; the guideline is to take responsibility for what you love. In addition to general and technical conversations about - and actual coding on - wikis and other software, session topics from past RCCs have covered subjects from art to social organizing to philanthropy, playing a creative conversation game, and individual & group coding practices. See the past conference wikis for more complete lists and session notes.

Anyone and everyone is invited to attend. You will especially enjoy Recent Changes Camp, if you happen to be any of the the following:

* Member of any open wiki community or someone who uses wikis at work, school or in any other context
* Interested in community, action, collaboration, creativity or any other activity in which the self-organizing power of wiki might be helpful
* Interested in the OpenCulture and/or OpenTechnology movements
* Interested in knowledge creation and sharing knowledge
* A generally curious and inquisitive person

It’s scheduled to take place in Palo Alto, California, on May 9-11, 2008. More information can be gathered from their site,
http://rcc2008.blueoxen.net/.

RecentChangesCamp is open to the public. Everyone can attend.

If you’d like us to post your wiki or free culture related event, by all means, send us an email or leave a comment on this post!

Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator