[Ilugc] [Event] Wikicamp India 2007 in Chennai - Feb 25
- From: vamlists@xxxxxxxxx (Vamsee Kanakala)
- Date: Wed Feb 28 16:50:36 2007
Binand Sethumadhavan wrote:
Anyone who attended this event care to share the experience?
I attended - it was good to hear about Wikipedia from the horses' mouth,
so to speak - and not much beyond that. Many foss enthusiasts' dream
seems to be coming true - he spoke of a new open-source search engine
whose algorithms are open, as he disliked the fact that something as
crucial as web search is in the hands of a single company, and he thinks
it wields too much power in the web today. More info at
search.wikia.com. But I guess Google has nothing to fear in the
near-term, as the project seems to be in a nascent stage right now.
Wikia.com is the for-profit company started by him, and it seems to be
growing rapidly (Wikipedia is different from Wikia in that the latter
will have more in-depth treatment of a particular topic, and will have
ads). He discussed the policy of not accepting ads in Wikipedia, why he
supports it, and also that it's not set in stone, and might change in
the future given good enough reasons.
The local press seemed to have a field day though, with reporters
crawling all over the place. Jimbo himself seemed to relish the fact
that he's the object of press' interest - perhaps justified, but it felt
a bit jarring to me. There were talks on contributing to Wikipedia by
the Indian contributors, etc., which I have to admit, wasn't too
interesting a topic for me, so I left :).
Perhaps more enthusiastic Wikipedans can give a better review :)
V.
Other related posts:
