I’m doing some part-time work for the Wikimedia Foundation now, on the usability project; you can see the first fruits of my labor here - a proposal for template-based forms on Wikipedia (this, I should note carefully, would not be using Semantic Forms). And you can see the spirited, if mostly tangential, discussion about it on the Wikipedia developers mailing list here.
This email summarizes all the technical/Semantic MediaWiki parts of Wikimania 2009, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Other highlights:
- getting to see Buenos Aires (and historic Colonia, Uruguay, just a ferry ride away). Buenos Aires is a beautiful city, with a nice-looking bridge; it looks quite a bit like a European city, but with much more political graffiti.
- seeing a keynote speech by Richard Stallman, the open-source pioneer, in which he both generic viagra generic cialis viagra levitra buy cialis viagra professional alienated and entertained the audience with his petulant attitude. Among other complaints, he was upset that Wikipedia doesn’t refer to Linux as “GNU/Linux”. See here for more than you’d care to really know about the whole issue.
- seeing all the talks getting translated into Spanish or English by in-person headset translators, which was pretty amazing; it felt like being at the UN.
- on that note, listening to some talks in Spanish, and being pleased to see that I could understand them without the headset translation. Although it helped that I knew the subject matter intimately ahead of time; I still can’t follow the telenovelas on Univision to save my life.
- the post-Wikimania party. There are some good dancers among the greater MediaWiki development community! I’m not naming any names, though.