In other news: A chinese wikipedia-style site was forced to shut down. (Sidenote: the chinese wikipedians I encountered at Wikimania were endearingly thrilled to be there. There has to be a way for an uncensored wikipedia to coexist with the PRC governmnet.)

I'm posting from Bedford-Stuyvesant (which I only recently learned how to pronounce.

The Wikimania archives are mostly complete by now -- audio and video from the sessions.

What's Happening to Knowledge? was great, but I walked in the the middle so I won't summarize.

I'm at Can Visualization help?, probably the session I was looking forward to the most. It's headed by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, who've done some brilliant and badly needed work on Wikipedia visualizations, and Ben Shneiderman, expert in the field.

Fernanda Viégas: Live demo of history flow! Revert wars look like zigzags.

There's a new version that lets you zoom. And they're going to make it possible to use history flow with new wikipedia data (which hasn't been possible for awhile).

Martin Wattenberg: How can you get a picture of what a wikipedian works on? His visualization looks at all the edits of a particular user. These are beautiful snapshots of personalities, a little like poking through someone's bedroom. (For that reason, there are questions about whether tools like these should be released publicly. I hope they are, because they're utterly awesome.)

Ben Shneiderman's talk is about the field of visualization in general (and is targetted at businesspeople who aren't as computer-savvy as this audience -- one gets the feeling it's a presentation he's given before). Anticlimatic after Viégas and Wattenberg. But his intro is good: Using vision to think. "Visual bandwidth is enormous: Once you train your eye and your mind you begin to see it there quite naturally."

Viegas, relatedly: "People felt like they actually got it after they saw these visualizations. People who had never looked at wikipedia before could pick up on those patterns as well...From experience, the impact of showing this to people is just amazing."

The state of the Wikimedia Union

I'm at the Foundation Board panel. Big auditorium, sea of laptops (mine among them).

Summary

For creating content, Wikimedia has a decentralized model -- but maybe Wikimedia should be governed under a centralzied model (or maybe not -- the board should decide).

Wikipedia is blocked in China. Jimmy's going to the Chinese wikimedia conference to meet people and try to start solving things.

Jimmy: Choose your board members wisely! Although they won't get involved in community issues, they're responsible for the organization's strategic and legal future. They make the trains run on time.

Wikipedia in africa:
Jimmy: In the old days, the fundraising was about a desperate need to buy more servers so the site wouldn't break. But our fundraising has gotten more successful. What can we do to fulfil our organizational mission of providing knowledge to everyone in the world? We need to move conservatively, talk to people on the ground there, find out what they need and how we can help.

Questioner: Are we going to pay board members? For example, the next world social forum; it costs money to travel this much, give up this much of your time.)

Angela (who is (somewhat infamously) quitting the board): the foundation's decision-making process has become flawed. We now vote on a wiki instead of having discussions.

(Combination of direct quote and paraphrase from another board member.) "The world looks to this organization as a flagbearer of this century. This kind of thing has never been done before."

Wales: The conflict between accuracy and openness is an illusion. For example, stable versions will almost eliminate semiprotection. The details of finding the best path will be left up to the individual communities. Some things do make sense globally; those practices will spread, but it's not the board's duty to micromanage.

Wales: NPOV is potentially flexible: it is a term of art that is endowed with meaning by the community.

Questioner: Money is the most powerful force in the world. Will social sharing ever become more powerful than money? Board: No, people are the most powerful force.

Financial situation is good. For the first time, over the past six months, we've gotten steady donations every day. We have a buffer now. Wikimania will spend the money, at first, on additional hardware. The public is using our service; for every person in this auditorium, there are thousands of other interested people around the world.

In the future, there will be more donations from foundations and corporations, so we might get away from the pass-the-hat model. We'd always been just barely be able to keep up with traffic -- but now we can ask, what could we do if we had more money?

"I think what disturbs me is that it is reasonable to believe that in about five to ten years, I’ll be in the “new inside”. As I’m walking around at wikimania, I’m seeing new power structures form, and if one is not careful, new power structures develop the pathologies of the old power structures."

Part of twofish's opinionated and insightful coverage.

NPR interview with Lih about Wikimania.

Recordings of sessions. (Boingboing summarizes Jimmy's plenary. In the outside world: Cogent summary of the Colbert thing.)

Too tired to go to the Web 1.0 party (and it was at MIT, too. hmph.). I will say this about Cambridge: good street musicians during the day, terrible ones at night. It seems like a city that loves and understands acoustic folk, but is interested in other styles mostly as academic curiosities. (Or maybe I'm being an asshole for judging a city on the kids trying to make an easy saturday buck. I remember russian clubbers in detroit for whom anything with a melody, or chords, or filters, or slower than 160 bpm, is crap.)

(Dr. Thompsen's Wikimania 2006 Journal. Detailed.)

Preemptive critique of the times story: it's possible that one angle that might pop up is "wikipedia takes a relative approach to truth: wikiality: truth is whatever the mob says."

But NPOV and concensus (and a hands-off approach toward differing cultural norms) are not academic philosophies of knowledge, they're practical approaches to the process of collaborative writing, imperfect but workable solutions that allow wikipedia to (dare I say) thrive.

Wikimania feature in tomorrow's NYTimes week in review the NYTimes at some point

(Update: Here it is.)

I'm at Language and cultural barriers and challenges to Wikipedia. Upstairs, small room. All the cool foreign kids.
There's a New York Times reporter here who says he's writing about us for Week in Review. (I got out of there fast after he unmasked himself (well, and after the session ended). I'm waaay too sleep-deprived to be anywhere near a times reporter.)

Update: I misread that exchange -- the reporter was saying he had an article not about Wikimania, but about language. The wikimania article is yet to be written.

The session

Should we aim for an ur-wikipedia that every language version feeds into, with every perspective? (Well, no.) How independent should each language version be? (The question becomes more complex when you look at areas in which multilinguism is common -- see africa segment below.) ("If you attempt to combine languages, some of the knowledge actually disappears." But there's not necessarily a conflict here: multimodal translation directions, etc.)

(In other news, I think I said "dutch" when I meant to say "danish". I blame the public schools.)

The Swahili wikipedia is exapanding: >1000 articles. The guy next to me, from Tanzania, is talking about using social networks and students to help it grow.* "If you want to convince people in the developing world to do something like this, that's new, you have to be very persistent. Extremely persistent." (Swahili is not an african lingua franca, contrary to stereotype. However, it doesn't belong to any particular ethnic group, so it carries less baggage. There is tension because ethnic languages are being lost as Swahili becomes more common.)

How big is the overlap between wikipedias? How many polish-language articles don't exist in the english version?

What about nations in which the cultural makeup of the bilingual crowd is different from that of those who only speak the native language. What about bilingual people who choose to write in english because they can reach a wider audience? See also.

*He's also working on a project to rewrite Tanzania's constitution using wikis.

I almost forgot:

The group is forming a new mailing list to continue the discussion and make recommendations to the board.

Man, I was tired (up all night 'till the late afternoon). Archived media -- though the videos aren't up yet.

Jimbo: Wikiwyg yet to come.

Unsurprisingly, Lawrence Lessig gives a fucking great presentation. video feed

We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code. --Clark

Update: Clicknoise has some interesting commentary.

I'm at Identity, Anonymity and the Wiki. (Video feed (rm))

Update: Great question about articles for deletion, and ensuring consistency: should there be case studies, like in law? Would people refer to the 2006 GNAA precident for reference? Could these be automatically generated, as in google news? (It seems like that last would be difficult.)

As I type this, I'm in Cambridge, listening to Jimmy Wales talk about talking to Jimmy Carter. (here's a live video feed

There's a generalized Wikimania blog (not by me).

I'm one of the judges for the Wikimania awards -- I'm judging on-wiki, though, so you can follow along as I pick through cool photos.

Update: CNet's picted it up.