It was always my opinion that for under-privileged communities, like Egypt and Palestine and any third-world country, Wikimania serves a double purpose, the first is for wikipedians to meet and exchange ideas etc. The other is to increase awareness about the role Wikipedia plays in making knowledge accessible to everyone. People with internet access in those areas are not necessarily tech-savvy enough to find that out on their own. A lot of students in Egypt only use the internet for very basic functions because they were never trained for more or they have a language barrier. That's why, for WM Alexandria, we tried as much as possible to reach this audience ourselves, by advertising, pre-conference introductory sessions in colleges, posters, etc. The result was good in terms of attendance and in terms of users who joined after WM.
It was my hope that the same would be possible for Palestine. In our previous conversations, I tried to search for someone willing to cooperate, and I gave you guys the name of a dean of a university in the WB that my contacts said would be interested, did you guys ever contact that guy? If so what was the outcome? I guess what I am trying to say is that to answer the question 'Why wouldn't there be any Palestinian in WM Haifa?' the answer 'Because no one wanted to come and was turned away' lacks the whole aspect of promoting WM actively in under-served communities. No one knows what WM is in most of those communities to be interested in coming, isn't that one of the reasons we hold WM in a different part of the world every year? On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 8:35 AM, Harel Cain <[email protected]> wrote: > Wikimania has been advertised in so many different ways till now, and for > so long, that I find it a little weird to actively pursue any group of > Wikipedians in person to attend the conference. Any reasonably active > Wikipedian will have known by now that it's taking place in August in Haifa. > The conference site and the registration form all have full Arab versions, > and we posted on the ar.wp village pump (I think more than once). What more > can be done within reason? > > It has to be said that If Palestinians don't want to attend (it doesn't > have necessarily to be for political reasons, it can be for a multitude of > other cultural, economic and sociological reasons), nobody can force them to > do so. > > Again, in previous Wikimanias the representation from the Arab world was > low to very low (in relation to the size of the Arab world), as others > already noted on this thread. There are many underrepresented demographic > groups in our movement. > > > Harel Cain > Wikimania 2011 local team > > On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 17:40, Kim Bruning <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Following up on ...: >> >> On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 11:14:06AM +0300, Amir E. Aharoni wrote: >> > 2011/6/29 John Vandenberg <[email protected]>: >> > > >> > > Have you try reaching the people in >> > > >> > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedians_in_Palestine >> > > >> > > ? >> > >> > Yes, some of them, but i'll try a few more. Thanks for poking. >> >> Any Luck? Need any help? :) >> >> read you soon, >> Kim Bruning >> >> >> -- >> [Non-pgp mail clients may show pgp-signature as attachment] >> gpg (www.gnupg.org) Fingerprint for key FEF9DD72 >> 5ED6 E215 73EE AD84 E03A 01C5 94AC 7B0E FEF9 DD72 >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Wikimania-l mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l >> > > > > -- > Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur. > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimania-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l > > -- Best Regards, Muhammad Yahia
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