Wikimania 2005

Here’s what I plan to attend after reading through the program.

I’ll be arriving at Frankfurt am Main on Friday at 9:53am according to the timetable.

Other people coming: MoinMoin:WikiMania2005.

MoinMoin:WikiMania2005

The program lists the stuff I thought interesting, followed by my decision – unfortunately I can’t go to all the sessions I’m interested in!

Friday 9:30 - 11:00

Theodoranian, Chinese conversion the wiki way – The program links to it as “Chinese i18n/l10n”, but the article talks about automatice conversion between the various Chinese variants, not about the one issue I have grappled with: Indexing chinese pages by words.
John Breslin, An ontology for describing and exchanging articles – uses RDF (yuck), but at least it’s a proposal for an interchange format. It doesn’t solve the text formatting rules problem, however. *Action:* I will need to chat with John and see whether he intends to solve this problem, and how. Note MurrayAltheim’s suggestion of a WikiInterchangeFormat.
> Plan: Grosser Saal, if I can make it, and talk to John.
> Report: I missed these talks and talked to John during the break. Basically he is more interested in the semantic web aspect; he did not know about the InterWiki mailing list, he did not know of the WikiMarkupStandard page, and he did not know about wiki extensions to RSS (ModWiki, WikiModule).

Chinese conversion the wiki way

An ontology for describing and exchanging articles

Keynote by Jimbo Wales

Nice speech. I bet it is up already somewhere.

speech

Friday 14:30 - 16:30

Achal Prabhala: An overview of the access to learning materials situation in Southern Africa – arguing for legal reform regarding copyright law. More power to him! Only the initial motivation for his work depends on the economic situation of South Africa. Everything else is just as true for Switzerland. Our institutions could “do a better job with less money, thus releasing funds to other areas in need of development such as infrastructure – instead of pumping it into rents on intellectual property.”
Kasper Souren: Thoughts on the Bambara Wikipedia – talk about the economics of starting a wiki in a an area where most people cannot afford to buy time online, and where those well off cannot be bothered to write wiki articles. Interesting outline. I really liked the picture posted.
Domas Mituzas, Wikidown, wikiup and wikifuture: running the hyper wiki – not quite a distributed wiki, but a single site running on distributed hardware. I’d like to know more about the challenges involved in that.
Janne Jalkanen, DavWiki - the next step of WikiRPCInterfaces? – I think this is the next major extension I will have to do for Oddmuse.
> Plan: Tough choice! I’m unsure what to do. For the moment I think I will do Kleiner Saal and listen to Domas (maybe something about DistributedWiki) and specially Janne – Oddmuse and WebDAV! I already talked to Janne aka. Ecyrd on #jspwiki.)
> Report: Domas had nothing new. Janne was more or less interesting – it seems he had similar but different problems with existing WebDAV clients like I had. See Oddmuse and WebDAV. In order to solve the wiki page interchange problem he suggests to just switch to XHTML – forget about text formatting rules and just use XHTML.

An overview of the access to learning materials situation in Southern Africa

Thoughts on the Bambara Wikipedia

Wikidown, wikiup and wikifuture: running the hyper wiki

DavWiki - the next step of WikiRPCInterfaces?

Oddmuse and WebDAV

In my case, this is not too interesting, because Emacs users don’t want to deal in XHTML I assume.

Janne suggested the following:

; http://example.com/wiki/dav/FooBar: html including headers and footers ; http://example.com/wiki/dav/raw/FooBar: raw text ; http://example.com/wiki/dav/html/FooBar.html: html without headers and footers

http://example.com/wiki/dav/FooBar

http://example.com/wiki/dav/raw/FooBar

http://example.com/wiki/dav/html/FooBar.html

I’m not sure, I’d have to check it with Janne.

Friday 17:00 - 18:30

Chee Siang Ang, Wiki-mediated Collaborative/Distributed Narrative Construction of Game Communities, announced as “Language learning via wikis” – HCI design stuff? That sounds cool. The paper is about using a wiki to coordinate a Sims 2 video project in order to practice a language – English. We’ve talked about WikiAsWeLearn and HeatherJames has been into using wikis in schools. I think I’m interested, even though this is not about people like me trying to learn Japanese or Arabic starting from zero. 😄
Salvor Gissurardottir, Brainstorming with Wikis, announced as “Education with wikis” – the presentation linked is in Icelandic; even though I was born in Reykjavík, I can’t read the language. 😄
Michael Anobile, On translation and localization: case studies, lessons for Wikimedia – There’s no info available, yet! Is this PHP/Wikipedia specific?
Workshop with Thomas Gries, Getlets: extending the Interwiki concept beyond any limits, announced as “Interwiki” – I’m not sure I’m really interested in it. Is this anything other than InterWiki links? Does it feature some sort of caching? What’s the purpose?
> I am unsure what to do...
> Report: I ended up listening to both Savlor and Roland Burger (on sustainable development). It was very disappointing. Salvor ran out of time before she even touched upon the subject of wikis, and Roland gave us a very traditional “technology may save us all” hymn. It reminded me a lot of the criticism the NGO’s aimed at the original WSIS summit proposed by the ITU. Where was this guy!? He had an invited guest from Nigeria involved in Microloan and Microfinance schemes, which was at least interesting, but he, too, ran out of time before he got anywhere. What a shame!

Wiki-mediated Collaborative/Distributed Narrative Construction of Game Communities

Brainstorming with Wikis

On translation and localization: case studies, lessons for Wikimedia

Getlets: extending the Interwiki concept beyond any limits

WSIS

Saturday 9:30 - 11:00

Workshop with Jakob Voss and Erik Zachte, Analysing and visualizing Wikipedia – Analyzing wikis. I’ve dabbled in this and I’m still interested.
Robert Bonato, Network Analysis for Wikipedia – This one seems very interesting: “HITS is based on the notions of hub and authority: a good hub is a page that points to several good authorities; a good authority is a page that is pointed at by several good hubs. HITS exclusively relies on the hyperlink relations existing among the pages, to define the two mutually reinforcing measures of hub and authority.”
Workshop with Thomas Thaler, Workshop - Freeing the Fruits of Creativity, announced as “Strategies for free content” – The intro starts with “A brainstorming on strategies how to boost the generation of free content”; I’m interested in what other people say. I think it has to do with MutualInspiration. I’m a bit sceptical about the goal: “The goal would be, to start a “free content activist’s database on campaign ideas and interaction-opportunities”.”
Douwe Osinga, Getting paid to write free content – they want to sponsor people writing for their travel wiki, World66.
> Eventhough I’m more interested in open content, I think that the stuff about analysis and visualization has more substance, as far as I can tell from the pages. Therefore I’ll go to the SRE11.
> Report: The part about visualizing was partly interesting because we’re all curious. The statistics were not used as part of a scientific investigation, however. No proving of hypothesis, no particular problems to be solved. It was more of a curiosity driven playful approach. Nothing wrong with that, but I don’t care much for that sort of thing.

Analysing and visualizing Wikipedia

Network Analysis for Wikipedia

Workshop - Freeing the Fruits of Creativity

Getting paid to write free content

Keynote by Ross Mayfield

RossMayfield’s talk on Wikis in enterprises was ok, but nothing new for me. The only interesting part was that SocialText is now developping new features for the OpenSource version of Kwiki *first*, before integrating it into their commercial product. That’s interesting news and I should ask them about the details of this decision. Less risk/more testing? Less porting issues? More goodwill?

Saturday 14:30 - 16:00

Eugene Kim, A look at modern collaboration – but no info, yet.
> Too bad there’s so little info on this talk. But I think I’m even less interested in UltimateWiktionary, WikiMedia, WikiPedia, and MediaWiki... 😄
> Report: EugeneEricKim of BlueOxen had an interesting talk on patterns of collaboration. It sounds like just the thing we want for CommunityWiki! I definitely want to read his presentation.

A look at modern collaboration

EugeneEricKim

Sunday

SunirShah, Controversy and stability: How wikis have productive conflict, announced as “Wiki communities” – see ProductiveControversy.
> Grosser Saal and listen to Sunir

SunirShah

Controversy and stability: How wikis have productive conflict

Sunday 12:30 - 14:30

Hossein Derakhshan: Wiki and reform in Iran, announced as “Wiki use in Iran” – I’m still interested in Iran... 😄
Isam Bayazidi: Technology in schools and Open-Content Awareness in Arab Countries – what I’m most interested in is “a review of reasons of poor Arabic content on the Internet.”
Lamber Heller, Wikis for scientific publishing – reminds me of the discussion on MeatballWiki: OpenAcademics, WhatIsScience, SocialConstructionOfScience.
> Grosser Saal and listen to the Globalized Voices panel as well as to some perspectices from the Arab speaking world. Too bad I can’t listen to the science stuff. 🙁

Hossein Derakhshan

Wiki and reform in Iran

Iran

Technology in schools and Open-Content Awareness in Arab Countries

Wikis for scientific publishing

Friday _ Sunday Train_

Hi Alex, I managed to book the same train (range Karlsruhe .. FFM) as you. Reserving a seat near yours didn’t work, so we have to look. My seat is 9/54 for KA→FFM and 2/27 for FFM→KA. – MoinMoin:ThomasWaldmann