Wikimania

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Wikimania is a conference for users of the wiki projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. The first conference was held in Frankfurt, Germany, August 4-8, 2005. Researchers and speakers presented studies and experiments on Wikipedia and other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, on wiki culture and technology, and on the world of free knowledge. The program included presentations, workshops, and tutorials to give an overview of the current state of research on wikis and free knowledge projects.

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2005

Wikimedians

The first Wikimania conference was held in the Haus der Jugend at Frankfurt, Germany, August 4-8, 2005.

The week of the conference included four "Hacking Days", from August 1-4, when some 25 developers gathered to work on code and discuss the technical aspects of MediaWiki and of running the Wikimedia projects. The main days of the conference, despite its billing as being "August 4-8", were Friday to Sunday of that week, August 5-7. Presentation sessions were scheduled all day during those three days.

Keynote speakers included Jimmy Wales, Ross Mayfield, Ward Cunningham and Richard Stallman (who spoke on "Copyright and community in the age of computer networks"). The majority of sessions and conversations were in English, although a few were in German.

Sponsors of the event included Answers.com, SocialText, Sun Microsystems, DocCheck, and Logos Group.

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2006

Global Voices Panel at the 2005 conference. Shown are Hossein Derakhstan, Ting Chen, Isam Bayazidi, and Milton Ainehuranga.

Wikimania 2006 is currently in the planning stages. It was decided on October 22, 2005, that it will be held in Boston in the United States. Three other teams submitted hosting bids, for the cities of London, Milan, and Toronto; only Toronto and Boston were passed to the second round of consideration by Wikimania organizers. Toronto would have hosted the event in the University of Toronto's Bahen Centre, while Wikimania in Boston will be held at the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

See: Wikimania 2006 on meta.