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Submissions/11 years of Wikipedia, or the Wikimedia history crash course you can edit

From Wikimania 2012 • Washington, D.C., USA

This is an accepted submission for Wikimania 2012.


Talk materials

  • Wikimedia history — The project's research and coordination page, with links to sources of information and timelines for each subtopic.
  • wikipedia-infographic on github — The repository containing the actual SVG timeline and its associated files.

Submission

Submission no.

2

Preview of the 2011 version of the infographic (in French)
Title of the submission
11 years of Wikipedia, or the Wikimedia history crash course you can edit
Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation)
Dual submission: Presentation + Poster
Author of the submission
Guillaume Paumier
E-mail address
gpaumier@wikimedia.org
Username
User:guillom
Country of origin
France
Affiliation
Wikimedia Foundation
Personal homepage
http://www.gpaumier.org
Abstract
Do you remember the Monobook skin? The Essjay controversy? How about the first Wikimania in Frankfurt? MediaWiki without categories and templates? The groundbreaking announce that Wikipedia was getting a second server? The time when speedy-deleting a page on the English Wikipedia didn't sound like playing Battleship?
In the course of eleven years, Wikipedia has gone from an obscure corner of the web, containing a few dozen encyclopedia articles exclusively in English, to one of the ten most visited websites in the world, offering more than 20 million articles in more than 260 languages, created and improved by hundreds of thousands of participants.
This evolution was accompanied by social, technological and organizational changes. The communities of editors have created dozens of rules, guidelines and processes. The software has been entirely rewritten at least twice. The technical infrastructure has gone from a single server, to two data centers and hundreds of servers. Several dozens local chapters now exist all over the world, supporting editors, organizing events and collaborating with cultural institutions.
And yet, Wikipedia is still a nonprofit endeavor, exclusively supported by donations and a paid staff of less than a hundred.
These changes have not gone without growing pains. On the largest Wikipedias, the number of participants has started to decline. If Wikipedia's quality is now relatively established, Wikipedians, on the other hand, have grown a reputation of "Guardians of the temple", discouraging new contributors. The complexity of the software and the lack of a standard visual editor are other barriers that new editors have to overcome.
This talk will aim to take stock of eleven years of Wikipedia history, highlight the main stages of its life, and briefly discuss the challenges and opportunities ahead.
The content of the talk will also be printed on a poster where Wikimania participants will be invited to correct or expand its content throughout the conference.
Track
WikiCulture and Community
Length of presentation/talk
70 minutes
Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?
yes
Further information
  • The presentation consists of a large SVG infographic animated with JavaScript, and embedding images and videos. If the computer used for the presentation is provided by the Wikimania team, it will need to come with a recent version of Firefox and/or Chrome with acceptable performance. Testing prior to the presentation will be required.
  • A first version of this talk was presented at Capitole du Libre in November 2011, in French. A video recording of the talk is available online (WebM format, 55 min, 169 MB). The talk was highly praised (more than I expected), which is why I decided to submit an updated version to Wikimania.
  • The talk cannot be compressed into 25 minutes; there is a lot of information to be conveyed, and rushing it would make it pointless and useless to most participants. 70 minutes gives enough time to present interesting information and include some interaction with the audience to avoid fatigue.
  • If accepted, this talk will be accompanied by a poster where the whole infographic will be printed. The poster itself will come with a separate "edit poster" where Wikimania attendees will be invited to post corrections or missing information, to be included into the next version of the infographic. The edit poster will need to be able to sustain writing by participants (i.e. it shouldn't be mounted on a clunky hanging grid).
Special request as to time of presentations
  • Historical knowledge of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement is uneven among Wikimania attendees. One of the goals of this presentation is to raise the shared level of Wikimedia knowledge among participants, to facilitate understanding and interaction during the rest of the conference; this "crash course" would be most useful at the beginning of the event.
  • Another goal is to invite Wikimania attendees to correct or add information to the document, through the poster; this will work better if the presentation is offered early in the event's schedule. Some time during the first morning would probably be ideal.

Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with four tildes. (~~~~).

  1. Great - help strengthen our shared history. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:21, 28 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Absolutely fascinating. Can't wait to attend!--Saintfevrier 12:25, 29 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  3. "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it" --NaBUru38 15:36, 5 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Sounds interesting! odder 10:58, 6 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Yeah, the good old retro days! ;) --OrsolyaVirág 20:36, 6 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  6. Krinkle 16:45, 12 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  7. Adam Wight 07:03, 14 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  8. CT Cooper 20:26, 14 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  9. Resident Mario 00:06, 16 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  10. This is a stupendously nifty idea. Sumanah 22:25, 16 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  11. Lodewijk (talk) 13:41, 24 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  12. May not be attending Wikimania, but this would be an very interesting one to watch on the videos later. :) Thehelpfulone (talk) 22:35, 2 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  13. Nikerabbit (talk) 13:49, 5 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  14. HstryQT (talk) 16:14, 8 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  15. Lvova (talk) 20:09, 8 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  16. Haxpett (talk) 23:09, 10 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  17. Houshuang (talk) 00:52, 11 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  18. Khalid Mahmood (talk) 19:17, 11 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  19. the wub "?!" 22:29, 18 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  20. Amir E. Aharoni (talk)
  21. Catrope (talk)
  22. Brest (talk) 00:32, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  23. Zellfaze (talk) 14:40, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  24. So good, I want to watch it on videos before Wikimania too. Sj (talk) 07:07, 20 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  25. SarahStierch (talk) 16:19, 21 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  26. Eloquence (talk) 00:17, 22 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  27. Graham87 (talk) 12:03, 31 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  28. Polimerek (talk) 11:41, 20 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  29. Shujenchang (talk) 04:29, 22 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  30. Your name here!
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