Wikimania-Blog

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14:32, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

MediaWiki users make new stabs at blogging via wiki. Blog and media reactions to the past week continue, and discussions about Wikimania 2006 have begun.

9 August The remaining things of the conference (including our new sun server) were packed in Akl's and Delphine's small cars (please note that this beautiful french little car is female - "Die Auto") and we said goodbye to the people of the Haus der Jugend who had been so nice and helpful during all the conference. --Elian 12:34, 9 August 2005 (UTC) [reply ]

They got the sign that hung out front of the HdJ all week, signed by those who remained; also a thank-you card and a couple of Wikipedia DVDs.

8 Aug. 2005 - 13.30

The French, German and Italian chapters just had their first live meeting, including Foundation board members and officers who were in Frankfurt, to discuss possible cooperative European actions. A fruitful meeting animated and moderated by our beloved grants coordinator, Danny.

Are there any notes from the meeting online?

Thomas Wanhoff a Journalist with Frankfurter Neue Presse has been covering Wikimania. You can listen to his podcasts here: Sciencecast.net--PaulY 11:55, 7 August 2005 (UTC) [reply ]

11.30, 7 August 2005

Speakers seem to be very "laid back". A speaker did not show up so Jan-Bart de Vreede (Kennisnet) gave his speech twice. RMS was also taking it easy, as he was still breakfasting at the time his keynote should have started, sometime around 11:00 ;-) -- Nichtich 09:37, 7 August 2005 (UTC) [reply ]

Maybe Stallman was badly briefed: he spend his time travelling giving talks, and may have been jet lagged... and maybe that speaker was ill? I will ask him for y'all! LoopZilla 13:44, 8 August 2005 (UTC) [reply ]

°All has been cleared up. Stallman hadn't slept for many many hours; and SM was kept away from Frankfurt against his will.

04:36 Really time to sleep!

Just uploaded some more pictures to my album, where you can have a look and make comments. Sorry, it's not a wiki, but this was even quicker than uploading pictures individually. --Epic

Quite nice - and what's the license? --Elian 12:38, 9 August 2005 (UTC) [reply ]

1:40 - time to sleep

Tonight was the Wikimania party. Most of the attendees to Wikimania went to the Brotfabrik to have a party. The whole night the dance floor was crowded by the Dutch people! The 'others' stayed downstairs to have a chat, very dull, they don't know how to party :P .

20:11, 6 August 2005

Wikimania was featured on the two biggest private TV channels in Germany, PRO7 and RTL who both showed some information about it in their primetime news format.

Also the german ZDF reports. [1]

And arte also. [2]

14:10, 6 August 2005

The conference was featured on the dutch television news. The item about Wikimania starts at 13m56s in this stream.

10:45 am, 6 August 2005

As much as we love the Commons, it's not the easiest to post photos there. So make sure to see the Flickr photos using the Wikimania tag.

12 noon, 5 August 2005

Jimmy Wales gave an opening presentation based on the "10 things that will be free" theme he has been following as a guest blogger for Larry Lessig; followed by an extensive Q&A session which almost ran over into the start of lunch.

In the audience of almost 300 people, there was a 5:1 ratio of men to women; 230 men and 42 women when I counted at 11:50. +sj+

Ross Mayfield's blog post

10:44am, 5 August 2005 (local time)

And so the conference begins! For the last few days, developers and die hard Wikipedians have casually gathered in small groups and ad hoc meetings, but today the official program kicked in. The main session in Grosser Saal started right on time. Unfortunately the developer session in E11 was completely oversubscribed with folks spilling out into the atrium. The room will be reconfigured during lunch to make this a nicer experience.

The Kleiner Saal had Erik Zachte showing his Timeline of Human History project and Sam Klein talking about the History of the Reference Work, vintage style, sans Powerpoint. Room E10 saw the presentation of the Chinese Wikipedia's newly developed approach to simplified and traditional characters automatically mapped to one another, with Ward Cunningham attending.

After days of frenzy, Wikipedia organizers suddenly have a sense of calm now that everything has started. "We're in the eye of the storm," commented staffer JamesF.

21:40, 4 August 2005 (local time)

A lot of people arrived this afternoon at 'Haus der Jugend'. The organizers are running around while the rest is discussing and eating. People studied the WikiReader about Frankfurt and commented the white-spaces.

10:39, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

The staff is working hard to get preparations done before things start tomorrow evening.

More people arrived at Wikimania, including the father of wiki software Ward Cunningham. The developers looked like they were going to have an uncharacteristically healthy outdoor hacking session, until they realized the sun was too bright to read their LCD screens, and they retreated indoors.

Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado) is performing video interviews with a wide range of visiting Wikipedians to create a visual montage of international voices. He's already talked to Brazilian, Chilean, Venezuelan, Italian and UK Wikipedians. He'll interview French and African folks tomorrow. Please find him if he hasn't tracked you down.

23:02, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

The bulk of the hacking days attendees went out for a quick bite to eat tonight; the German eatery we picked had enormous long tables with almost enough seats for the 17 of us, and served three vegetarian dishes, at least one of which contained no meat at all. Introductions all around the table; at least one person present didn't yet know who Jimbo was. A good time all around.

18:59, 2 August (UTC)

What happens when the Wi-fi connection won't reach the far side of the youth hostel? If you're JeLuF, Austin and James F., you set up a guerilla wireless repeater network, with spit and tape. Masking tape to be specific. Spotted in the hallway of Haus der Jugend...

15:36, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

With around 60 press passes handed out, and a dozen press teams showing up or calling in the first two days of the pre-conference, the media attention given to Wikimania continues to grow. Kurt Jansson and Arne Klempert were among the popular interview subjects; Jimmy Wales was of course the all-time interview champion, fielding spontaneous phone and film interviews without missing a beat.

12:51, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

It was decided to make a GPG Signing Party. We would like to ask everyone who has a GPG Key (or will create one on Wikimania) to join us and put his key on our GPG Signing Party List, Saturday, 9:30 am, so we can gather all keys together.

12:51, 2 August 2005 (UTC)'

Many Mediawiki and wiki hackers arrived at the Haus der Jugend yesterday and had their first hacking session in the lovely courty yard outside. The internet connection is already working. Registration is now closed for the main conference, but tickets will be available at the venue. Due to the considerable number of pre-registration though, those tickets will be scarce. Be here early!

14:21, 2 August 2005

TV crews, radio and news magazine reporters showing up here at the venue. We've started a press mirror to track reporting. If you find pieces about Wikimania on the web, please add to it!

06:04, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

Freematrix is providing hosting for our two live audio streams. There will also be links to complete sound files for downloading, by the end of the day each session is held.

05:41, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

The Sun machine is already being put to use, hosting ongoing development work on metadata and an internal wiki. So even when other sites are down (like last night, when the bin logs filled up on -- Samuel, was it?), the local wiki will still be available and snappy. If you are onsite, go to "Zedler" or "zedler.wikimania" to see the locally-hosted content.

01:21, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

See Wikimania 2005 Impressions for some early images (right now just three images from a programme planning session before the conference). Please file all new images into one of the galleries in Category:Wikimania 2005 and don't forget to make them fully copyright compliant, state author, source and tag with a proper licence, a good description is also desired :-)

01:07, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

An old discussion of adding WYSIWYG editing as a MediaWiki option, including Ward C's comments in an interview for the Wikimedia Quarto last fall, made it to the blogosphere this week, following a discussion with Sj and Eugene Kim.

Remark: I discussed this issue about one hour with Ward explaining him, that I have my live EnotifWiki version 3.45 = MediaWiki1.5beta3 Mid July 2005 running and including the FCKeditor (WYSIWYG editor). It is ready to install out-of-the box when downloading the full code from sourceforge (one file), see http://www.enotifwiki.org for documentation links to Meta and link to my Sourceforge file release repository and CVS.

Just to repeat: on http://www.enotifwiki.org you need to write __use_editor__ onto a page to enable the WYSIWYG editing. This token can be removed at any time. Check out and try the sandbox page there. --Wikinaut [13:30, 9 August 2005 (UTC) [reply ]

00:15, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

55 members of news organizations have been accredited so far to come report on Wikimania during the coming week. Another double-handful of accreditation requests has been rejected. None of these requests has come from a Wikinews reporter... community members trying to explain this lapse are stumped.

On a global scale - which is what Wikinews operates on - Wikimania isn't exactly a top priority. However, we do actually have someone there. Dan100

23:15, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

The Wikimania Hacking Days began today, with by the end of the day 20 people from Germany, Venezuela, Chile, Israel, Brasil, the UK, the USA, Australia, the Netherlands, Denmark and Lithuania... the outcome of the day was many enjuyable first meetings, discussions of the Mediawiki infrastructure, and a first hacked version of proper article metadata for different article types.