Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Amsterdam for Wikimania 2010 ..

At this time several countries, cities are preparing their bid for Wikimania 2010. There are already 14 cities from four continents competing. Amsterdam is one of them.

As you can imagine, I have been talking with some people about this. It is easy to come up with reasons why Amsterdam will be able to host a great Wikimania experience;
  • There is an active chapter
  • Many WCN conferences have been organised over the years
  • A dynamic wikimedia crowd
  • The number of Wikipedia articles per head of the population is REALLY high
  • The Dutch invariably speak English
  • Five languages spoken in the Netherlands have their own Wikipedia
Typically I am in favour of having a Wikimania in a place where having a Wikimania will make a difference. When I look at the competion, Hong Kong is Chinese, Melbourne maybe if they do something for their Aboriginal languages, Seoul maybe but Korea has a well functioning project already, Rio de Janeiro we have just been to South America, North America, first get yourself a chapter, rest of Europe ... Stockholm seems to be the most serious competitor.. 
Thanks,
      GerardM

3 comments:

Liam said...

I think you might be overlooking Oxford. Their bid is already shaping up nicely alongside Amsterdam and Stockholm.

I agree there is great potential for "outreach" by placing wikimania where there is little existing free-culture/wikimedia community - by way of stimulus. This is hopefully what has been achieved by Alexandria.

But we do have to take care of the existing community as well by having Wikimania coming to them (rather than the other way around).

Anonymous said...

"Typically I am in favour of having a Wikimania in a place where having a Wikimania will make a difference
"

Do you think having it in Alexandria has made a difference? I've seen no evidence that it has, but I'd love to be proved wrong.

Anonymous said...

Well, at the same time of Wikimania in Egypt, the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia has been started (approved but not yet created). So maybe Wikimania did make a difference there;

I think it'd be better if Wikimania was held at places where the Wikipedia(s) are still small, instead of the Netherlands because the Dutch Wikipedia is one of largest.