Re: what is the purpose of wikimania? I think the central purpose of Wikimania is to bring wikimedians together and thereby enable things to happen.
We are a decentralised movement with a thousand Wikis, hundreds of languages and a global community. There are huge opportunities for wikimedians to share experiences across those thousand different wikis, and Wikimania is one opportunity to create links across languages and projects. In a nearly fifteen year old organisation that in many ways is very decentralised there is a big risk that different parts of the movement will drift ever further apart and the organisation could fragment. Wikimania is an investment in preventing that, and in getting links that cut across the gaps between projects. It isn't the only thing we can or should do to build links across projects. But in my view we should be doing more to build links across our barriers of language and culture. For example have we done an audit of the larger wiki communities against the wikimania attendees to see which communities of any size have not had anyone attend wikimania? ~~~~ On 11 November 2015 at 13:50, Chris Keating <[email protected]> wrote: > uuh - i am not sure if one should open that can of worms. what is the >>> purpose of wikimania? is it to raise money? for sure not. there are >>> more intelligent ways to do that. is wikimania a business, i.e. the >>> organizer want to get as much money out of the conference as possible? >>> for sure not. there are other conference topics which are more >>> promising. >> >> >> If there is interest by participants to chip in on scholarships for >> others to attend, I'm not sure providing an outlet for that interest means >> opening any cans, full of worms or other critters. It's an efficient >> matching of donor interest to funding needed. >> > > Quite! I can certainly see there being people (probably some Wikimedians) > who would be interested in making a donation to help others (certainly > Wikimedians) to get to Wikimania. Much more interested than they are in > giving to WMF's general funds to pay for cups of coffee for developers. Of > course, this might result in very few donations and not be worth the > effort, but you don't know until you've tried it. > > By contrast I'd guess that very few banner-campaign donors are interested > in Wikimania at all. > > Chris > > >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimania-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l > >
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