Report on Wikimania 2009

The technology report has a Wikimania tech roundup.

Wikimania 2009 was held during 26–28 August 2009, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Videos of Wikimania presentations are available on Wikimedia Commons, including the keynotes, the many scheduled panels, and the lightning talks, and Richard Stallman's speech from Tuesday, before the conference started. The full schedule provides video links to most of the talks and sessions from the first two days of Wikimania, while most of the videos from the third day are not yet linked but can be found on Wikimedia Commons.

Presentations that generated considerable online discussion include:

• Richard Stallman's keynote address (video), in which he argued with audience members and alienated many Spanish Wikipedia editors. The New York Times reported on controversial keynote and some responses by Wikipedians.
• Results and analysis (no video available) of the user survey conducted in 2008
• Discussion of "demographic decline" (video), i.e. the slowing growth and shrinking editor activity on English Wikipedia and other Wikipedias (see previous Signpost coverage).

In addition to a chaotic stream of microblogging on Twitter and identi.ca, much of which carried the hashtag #wikimania, participants produced a number of blog posts and other coverage of Wikimania 2009:

• Wikipedia Weekly released four podcasts over the week: one each from day 0, day 1, and day 2, and an interview with Matt Halprin, a new addition to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees.
• Brianna (User:Pfctdayelise)'s summaries of day 1, day 2, and day 3.
• Developers posted several times to the Wikimedia Technical Blog, providing links to tech slideshows and videos and reporting on the Codeathon that ran throughout the conference.
• GerardM blogged about a number of individual panels and talks.
• Aude took extensive notes on many of the sessions she attended.
• Over 500 photos were posted to the Wikimania 2009 Flickr group.

Less coverage appeared about the final day of Wikimania than for the first two days, perhaps because of the all-night Wikimania party that followed the official end of the conference.

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31 August 2009 (all comments)

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What I want to know is why was Richard Stallman asked to give the keynote? This was a free culture event, not a free software event. It's not surprising Richard didn't know what he was talking about. Kaldari (talk) 19:11, 1 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]