It absolutely makes sense to have a named week/end each year where everyone tries to get together.
I don't know if it needs to have a primary physical venue, certainly there are already thousands of people who are only able to participate online, and find ways to do so, including a few satellite events. There are also definitely ways to have a global gathering and concordance of efforts that don't have a primary venue - OpenCon this year did quite a fine job of that. SJ On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 3:16 PM, James Heilman <jmh...@gmail.com> wrote: > The best way to measure the value of Wikimania IMO is through stories. So > here are a few of mine: > > 1) In Washington, DC a group of us meet regarding a new sister site. Partly > from this, two editing communities working on travel content were brought > back together and Wikivoyage was reborn as a WMF site. > > A gentleman from the World Health Organization flew in to meet with some > medical editors. A six month Wikipedian in Residence at WHO followed, I was > invited to speak in Geneva, and the Bulletin of the World Health > Organization is now under a CC BY SA license with work for them to more > fully adopt an open license. > > 2) In Hong Kong I meet with the gentleman who runs Healthphone > http://www.healthphone.org/ He has subsequently agree to release some > amazing pubic health videos under an open license one of which you can see > here on Hindi Wikipedia > > https://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B8%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%AA%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A8 > Discussions are ongoing to have WP's medical content included on 2 million > SD cards being shipped to healthcare workers in India. > > 3) In London I was introduced to volunteer programmer through a friend of a > friend. We had an idea for a copy and paste detection bot and we just > needed someone who knew how to code. Eran did the coding during the > conference. The bot is now live on all of En WP with other languages in the > works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EranBot/Copyright/rc > > 4) In Mexico we continued to improve the copyright bot and pulling in a few > more programmers. Our community liaison for the project got to meet > community members face to face for the first time. We also solved some > issues regarding maps that had the potential to go sideways. > > I am certain many other have similar stories. I have personally found > Wikimania invaluable. Attempting to bring us together once a year is not > too much. > -- > James Heilman > MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian > > The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine > www.opentextbookofmedicine.com > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> -- Samuel Klein @metasj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
