Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-07-12/News and notes
News and notes
Board changes
...
Wikimania
From July 9 to July 11, the sixth annual Wikimania conference took part at the Baltic Philharmonic in Gdańsk, Poland.
According to the organizers the event was attended by over 400 participants. As announced by the Program Chair, Jacek Jankowski, the Call for Participation had yielded 170 submissions, of which 129 were accepted, resulting in a busy schedule of presentations mostly running in four parallel tracks, posters, etc. (see also last week's preview).
Sessions were streamed live from all conference rooms, and the recordings will be made available online (see this week's Technology Report).
The presentation by Erik Möller, the deputy director of the Wikimedia foundation, was titled Beyond the Encyclopedia: The frontiers of free knowledge (a follow-up on Ten things that will be free, Jimmy Wales' keynote speech at Wikimania 2005 that had in turn be inspired by Hilbert's problems). Möller gave an overview of free knowledge projects other than Wikipedia, both those run by the Wikimedia and the most promising ones outside the Foundation, such as OpenStreetMap and Thingiverse. He assessed the opportunities and difficulties for each of Wikipedia's sister projects. He was most concerned about Wikiversity, which he suffers from the lack of a clear mission statement and had "serious governance issues" (see also Signpost coverage: ...).
...
Truth In Numbers screening ...
The tagline featured on the conference T-shirts - "Free Knowledge in the City of Freedom" - tied Wikimedia values to the history of Gdańsk, a notion that had already present in the organizers' bid (see 2008 interview by Wikinews). Saturday's conference party took place in a location on the shipyard area where workers led by Lech Wałęsa had defied communist rulers in a 1980 strike leading to the Solidarność movemement, and at the closing ceremony a local representative relayed greetings from Wałęsa, noting that he was a frequent user of Wikipedia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/business/media/12link.html
Public Policy Initiative starts assessing articles
LiAnna Davis, the communications associate for the Wikimedia Foundation's new Public Policy Initiative (a project collaborating with U.S. educational institutions to improve Wikipedia coverage on public policy topics, see Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-06-28/Public Policy Initiative) invited Wikipedians to join in an article assessment drive that started last week:
We're finalizing our list of professors who will be participating in the Initiative for the fall, so stay tuned for more information about that but at the moment, we're in the middle of an article assessment drive, and we encourage everyone to join us. Our on-Wikipedia home is the WikiProject United States Public Policy, and we've started a challenge to tag and assess as many articles relevant to our project as you can."
— LiAnna Davis, Update on the Public Policy Initiative
The Initiative is also looking for experienced Wikipedians to act as "Campus Ambassadors" and "Online Ambassadors", helping students to learn editing Wikipedia.
Discuss this story
The slides for Möller's talk are now available at [1].
It should perhaps have been noted that the film's exact title is "Truth in Numbers?", but I wanted to link to the Wikipedia article about it (deleted in December 2009, see deletion discussion), which had the title without question mark. Ragesoss has more information about the screening on his blog [2].
Regards, HaeB (talk) 14:19, 16 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]