Wikimania 2009
Serendipity at it’s best, I went to Wikimania last week. I had no idea it was being held in Buenos Aires this year, but as fortune has it, we’re both in the same city at the same time. Wikipedia is also at a stage of plateaued growth and entering stages of redesign to improve usability & participation, and also strategy development.
As an editor, I’m a Wikipedia novice, I’ve made only a handful of edits in the past few years, and to be honest, I felt like an outsider in an already well established community. However, serendipity working again, I got the chance to meet and talk over lunch and drinks with Philippe Beaudette, newly appointed facilitator of strategic planning at Wikimedia, and I’ve become interested in being more involved in this community, perhaps in areas of strategy, or design, or both.
Something that fascinates me is what appears to be collaboration happening at every level of the organisation. For instance, even in the development of a strategy, participation is open to anyone — anyone that is who can understand the bureaucracy required to be involved. It will be fascinating, hopefully to participate but even as an observer, to see how collaboration works at this level.
The quality of the talks at Wikimania was mixed. There were some great speakers and topics, and some not so great. This is the first international conference I’ve attended, and in New Zealand I’ve only been exposed to a limited number of speakers at local UPA events (which are generally very high quality) and some bigger name speakers like danah boyd and Lou Carbone (both who left lasting impressions) and perhaps I had unrealistic expectations.
Where have all the intellectuals gone?
I’ve been reading Jorge Luis Borges recently, and in a very difficult conversation with Philippe (difficult only because it was the first serious conversation I’d attempted in weeks) I mentioned I was impressed with his brevity, and how he can compress many ideas into a single page of text. Modern culture has us to believe that more is better, and it’s distressing to see our modern thinkers subscribing to this idea.
Some of the talks that I attended felt more like I was having an abstract dictated to me, with the talk ending just when it felt like it should be just starting. Others were great storytellers, and were entertaining, but I didn’t leave feeling like I’d learnt
This isn’t a criticism of Wikimania, but more about how it feels our general intellectual society is moving from seeking enlightenment, to at worst filling up time, to best providing entertainment. I long for a return to the style of Stephen J Gould, Douglas R. Hofstadter, and Borges who may not always be so easy to immediately comprehend, but with some time leave the reader better off.
