Wikimania 2021

Wikimania 2021, the sixteenth Wikimedia conference, will be a virtual event to be organized by a diverse group of global volunteers. site

I've been offered five minutes to speak to the plenary assembly by video. For this I make these notes.

Welcome to Wikimania, hello to Bangkok, we wish we were there. I thank the organizers for this chance to speak.

History has seen 25 years of wiki, 20 years of Wikipedia, 16 years of Wikimania. I spoke back then of federating a wiki, not this wiki, but a place that might have special properties.

History has seen 10 years of federated wiki. Now is a good time for me to report back here as to how it is going.

Like the blogosphere with a different reader.

Less a newsroom, more like a retreat.

A place to go to be yourself. Like a cottage at the beach or in the mountains.

A place to make thing and keep the things you've made. An artist's retreat.

Your federated wiki cottages exist in clusters with a courtyards shared with neighbors.

We call the courtyard the lineup. The cottages are narrow so you see many at once. We compare the goings on and draw on them as a commons. The creative courtyard.

It is good to have a couple of cottages that suit your changing moods.

If your not digging the party vibe in one courtyard then find another or host one you do like.

I've been in a few VR meetups that were looking for this same atmosphere. Some new skills required for each.

Wikipedia too has some required skills and the community is to be commended to reaching out. Give yourselves a hand.

I'll close with some stats and a couple of examples.

We've been indexing the visible federation for 6 years.

We've seen 2500 sites since, 1500 at any given time.

We've seen 50,000 unique pages, omitting duplicates.

Sites edited this week represent 15,000 pages.

I'll close with two cottage projects of note.

Thompson Morrison approached me maybe three years ago wanting to share the success they found in rural Oregon middle and high school.

A half dozen creative cottages have captured the systemic nature of reimagining that has taken place now on four continents with one producing a report, printed from wiki, the Dayton Experiment, available on Amazon with two more on their way.

Closer to home, the pandemic has ruined many lives but in my case, I've turned my bicycle commute into neighborhood wandering spotting informal trails that criss-cross the network of creeks that have shaped my quarter of Portland, Oregon.

I started just posting pictures of places I had found but this has grown in complexity month by month. My artistry is in computer programming so with each new geographical question I launch a new workflow that collects and organizes now 18 months of exploration.

I have 300 pages with 600 images organized exactly the way I want to think about them this week. The pandemic has been hard for us and gruesome for many. I am intentionally programming my memory with pleasant discoveries which is how I will remember these many month.

We shot outdoors where the evening light had been better in our test the day before. I was holding up dinner and had promised to just record another test. enlarge

The laptop is on a pedestal that we saw a reporter using early in the pandemic. It has been in daily zoom service since.