Wikimania 2014: Wikipedia is a game
Barbican Centre Car Park
Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS
UK
Wikimania is a 2000+ person conference, festival, meetup, workshop, hackathon, and celebration, spread over five days in August 2014, preceded and followed by fringe events. It’s the official annual event of the Wikimedia movement, where you’ll discover all kinds of projects that people are making with wikis and open content, as well as meet the community that produced the most famous wiki of all, Wikipedia!
The main event itself is held in and around The Barbican Centre in London, UK. All are welcome, whether you’re an expert, enthusiast, beginner or just curious!
Wikipedia is more than a repository of information – it is ‘the largest collaborative project of humankind’[2], a constant global conversation mediated by text, images, data and code. It is a unique mode of activity managed and facilitated by the site’s design, a huge interacting network of users with profiles, messaging, walls and newsfeeds, constantly being adapted and improved by users engaged in the conversation, allowing unprecedented levels of knowledge to be processed and shared. Its growth represents a pivotal moment when web design changed the way that we think about knowledge itself, opening both its consumption and its creation to anybody with an internet connection.
This is the core concept behind the idea of a ‘social machine’. Wikipedia and its sister Wikis have long been a pioneer of supporting purposeful human interaction on the internet, empowering its users to collaborate and mutually resolve issues and problems without resorting to remote ‘experts’ in their own and other organisations. Such is the fascination with and exponential growth of the movement, Sociam.org, a specific website run in conjunction with prominent institutes such as the University of Oxford, Edinburgh and Southampton has evolved with the express aim of analysing and understanding the ‘the theory and practices of social machines’. Sociam.org understandably points to Wikipedia as a forerunner of the social machine movement, reflecting on the incentives for participation as varying from ‘reciprocity to social responsibility to altruism’. Such values have long been echoed in the community of Wikipedians. In particular, the concept of educational altruism ties in splendidly with Wikipedia’s stated aim as ensuring that the sum of all human knowledge is readily accessible to all humankind. Social machines have long been paramount to constructive and reflective debate. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has been a prominent proponent of social machines as a means of debating various systems, allowing us to look at evidence behind claims made as factual statements in politics, democracy and science. Despite this progress, Berners-Lee and other commentators have claimed that today’s interactive applications are very much the early forerunners of social machines owing to their lack of connection. Human communities still remain co-existent on the web and there is a lack of mechanism which works across all domains. This strive for cross-community connection is at the forefront of the thinking of Wikipedia and The Wikimedia Foundation. Ideas such as flow (see below), free culture, open data and Wikidata, all with relevance to social machines will be discussed in detail at Wikimania 2014.
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