The first day of Wikimania 2006 yesterday was fantastic. Jimmy Wales opened up with a great discussion of the achievements of Wikimedia in the last 12 months -- as well as the tough issues like the John Siegenthaler, Sr. problems last winter.
I also caught Mako's discussion of his and Erik Möller's new Free Content Definition effort. Mako and Erik are both extremely smart, extremely passionate people and I think they've made a big step in getting this definition off the ground.
It was great to hear Ward talk about his experience with the PPR and with Wikipedia. Lawrence Lessig's discussion of Free Culture was, as I've heard before, totally awe-inspiring. We chatted a bit after the talk, and he promised to add some info to Wikitravel's Costa Rica page.
tags: lawrence lessig wikimania jimmy wales wikimedia mako eloquence ward cunningham lawrence lessig
All you do to me is talk talk
So, I finally got around to giving my presentation on Wiki and Open Content travel guides: past, present and future yesterday. It was kind of nerve-wracking (good to know that Dave Weinberger was having problem with his speech, too, though), and I was revising slides up until a few hours before the talk.
Jack Herrick of wikiHow and I kept planning to sit down together and go over our slides, but we kept missing each other... or, we'd have time, and neither one of us felt ready to show the other how far we'd gotten. I saw Jack about 5 minutes before our talk, and asked how he felt, and he said, "I've only got a few more slides to finish..."
His talk was great. The work he's done on wikiHow over the last few years -- expanding the idea of eHow into the wiki environment -- is awe-inspiring. The community there is great. I also liked that he talked about some of the mistakes he made with wikiHow -- kind of a brave thing to do.
My talk went pretty OK, I think. The group that was watching was really receptive to the ideas of wiki and Open Content, so I could really concentrate on the importance of applying the ideas to travel guides. I had that great feeling of conveying my ideas and having them understood -- always a fine thing for a speaker.
Chris Bronk from the State Department finished up with a discussion on Diplopedia, which I thought was pretty neat, too. It's an internal project of the State Dept to apply wiki-based knowledge management to the diplomatic corps. It's just launching and I hope it works out.
The Q&A session went well -- one woman in particular grilled me about ideas on how to build personal opinion, reviews and ratings into the objective wiki platform. When I left the room at the end, one of her colleagues caught up with me. "I'm from the arch-enemy," he said, and pulled out his card from TripAdvisor. They started a wiki recently, although it's not Open Content, and they're here at Wikimania, too.
tags: wikimania wikitravel presentation jack herrick open content wiki wikihow
Par-tay
We also had our Wikitravel:10K Party last night at Tommy Doyle's Irish Pub right off of Harvard Square. The food was good, and the beers were excellent, and all the bartenders had Irish accents, which made the whole experience worthwhile. It was great to have both Wikitravellers (those few of us who are at Wikimania) and non-WTers at the party.
Amita June loved the venue because it was below street-level, and she could walk up the stairs and down the stairs (holding Mama or Papa's hands), up and down, up and down... She also enjoyed the pub food (quesadillas, stuffed mushrooms, potato skins, etc.) a little more than is probably healthy for a 1-year-old.
I got to hang out with a lot of wiki people who are doing interesting things. Paul Youlton at Yellowikis.org was fun to talk to -- the business listings he's doing are fascinating. His site just got served notice by Yell, owner of the "Yellow Pages" trademark in the UK, for "passing off" as a Yellow Pages site. "Passing off" is a weaker charge than "trademark infringement", but it has the advantage for Yell that it doesn't put their trademark in jeopardy. (The "Yellow Pages" trademark in the US passed into the public domain at the breakup of AT&T.)
The part was a good time, but it made me miss a lot of the great people who work on Wikitravel. I'd like to make a plan for a Wikitravel Getaway -- just a group trip to some cool part of the world with as many other Wikitravellers as can make it. It could be a lot of fun
tags: wikitravel 10K party yellowikis
Wikimania bloggers
One cool thing about being at Wikimania is that I'm finding all of the really active Wikimedia-related bloggers out there. Andrew Lih, better known as "Fuzheado", keeps a good blog on wiki and Wikipedia-related items. Angela Beesley, Wikimedia Foundation board member and exec at Wikia, also has a good blog about wiki-related items.
tags: wikimania wikimedia wiki blogs andrew lih angela beesley
Busted!
Dan Bricklin came up today and thanked me for my blog entry about meeting him (see Journal/15 Thermidor CCXIV. D'oh! Totally busted.
But we had a lot of good talk about spreadsheets as a form of presentation, the parsability of MediaWiki wikitext, and SocialText's great work with the rest of the wiki community. Nice person with a lot of interesting things to say... I need to stop being intimidated by software and Internet superstars, I guess.