2006:Wikimania/Publicity

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia created by international volunteers who contribute, update, and revise articles in a collaborative process. It is the world's fastest-growing, most current, and largest encyclopedia, with more than 1.5 million articles under active development in over 150 languages. The English-language edition alone has more than 800,000 articles, and incorporates 25,000 edits each day.

Wikimania is an international Wikimedia conference, where Wikipedians can meet and talk with people at the forefront of the Wikimedia communities and wiki software development. The program includes a range of presentations, workshops, and tutorials, to give newcomers and oldtimers alike an overview of the current state of research on wikis and free knowledge projects. "Hacking Days" gather developers to work on code and discuss the technical aspects of Wikimedia.

The first Wikimania was held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany from 4 August 2005 to 8 August 2005. A primary goal was to help the various Wikimedia projects improve their understanding of one another. The objective was achieved; 380 participants from over 50 countries attended the conference. The majority of sessions and conversations were in English, although material from the conference is being translated into multiple languages. Keynote speakers included Jimmy Wales, Ross Mayfield, Ward Cunningham and Richard Stallman; event sponsors included Answers.com, SocialText, Sun Microsystems, DocCheck, and Logos Group.

Wikimania 2006 will be held at the Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in July or August, 2006.

Good entry points for learning more about Wikipedia

Good entry points for learning more about Wikimania

(For an article in April/May) Number of articles in English will pass 1,000,000 mark, a big-number milestone in the "Wikipedia is big" story. "Wikipedia offers 500,000 articles in English - compared with Britannica 's 80,000 and Encarta 's 4,500 - fashioned by more than 16,000 contributors. Tack on the editions in 75 other languages, including Esperanto and Kurdish, and the total Wikipedia article count tops 1.3 million." Reference: Pink, Daniel. "The Book Stops Here". Wired. March 2, 2005. Pages: Cover - "Wikipedia: the self-organizing library of the future", 007, 124-129, 136, 139. [3] Betsy's note, the number of articles in English is growing by 100,000 every 68 days, so we'll probably hit 1,000,000 sometime in early May. Betsythedevine 20:02, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
Other numbers to watch: articles in all languages, number of languages, number of unique users, number of edits per day....

Wikimedia_News
w:Wikipedia:Announcements has an RSS feed you can subscribe to: [feed://jeays.net/wikipedia/announcements-rss-2.0.xml]
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Wikipedia has critics who claim that its "organizing principle appears to be that twenty jackasses make an expert. ...the actual situation is worse - the output produced by twenty jackasses plus one expert is indistinguishable from what would be produced by twenty-one jackasses." [4] Would Wikipedians agree? Will Wikimania create a better Wikipedia?

See international and multilingual collaboration in action at Wikimania 2006.