My utterly biased personal log of Wikimania 2007 (Friday)
I’m in Taipei this weekend attending Wikimania 2007, the annual wiki conference hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation1. The following is my utterly biased personal log which strives to be anything but neutral, will include original research but mostly stays away from personal attacks, except for, of course, when it doesn’t.
- 10:21 am: China Airlines2 flight 61 arrives at Taipei International Airport with about 15 minutes delay.
- 10:45 am: After getting through customs and retrieving my luggage, I find myself slightly lost in the departure hall of terminal 1. Before going on this trip, I failed/forgotten/
to get a map or print out any of the conference pages that would have told me how to get anywhere from the airport. This would make me quite the fearless adventurer, if only it had been intentional… So I’m roaming the terminal until a friendly Chinese man approaches asking me if I needed to get to a hotel. After showing my hotel reservation information, he said he could have me taken there for the modest price of NT$1,400 (roughly €32/$43) which I agreed to mostly because I didn’t really know what else to do. At a later time I found out that the bus would have taken me into the city for NT$125 (about €2.80/$3.80). - 11:25 pm: I arrive at the hotel which had advertised itself as located in the city center. This is technically correct since it really is in the center of the city, only it’s the city of Chung Ho (Zhonghe), Taipei County. As I would later find out, it’s about 40 minutes from the conference facilities. Fearless adventurer, right? The hotel itself turns out very nice. Even though the hotel is rated as three stars, the rooms would easily qualify for four in Europe and cost a fortune in London, where I had been just before going to Taipei.
- 1:15 pm: I’ve made my way to the actual conference. Taipei has an excellent rapid transport system called the MRT which is fast, very clean and, above all, air-conditioned. August is one of the hottest and most humid months (today’s high is 36°C/97°F) in Taiwan so any access to air conditioning is a true blessing. Getting to the conference from the MRT station turned out very easy because of the excellent visual guide provided by the Wikimania organizers.
- 1:45 pm: I’m attending a presenation on Hindu and Malaysian/Indonesian Wikipedias. The talk covered some of the unique requirements and challenges those communities face due to the cultural, political and linguistic differences of their regions.
- 2:45 pm: The second presentation I attend is given by Guillaume Paumier on the visual identity of the Wikimedia projects. His talk went into user interface, logo and other visual style issues related to how Wikimedia and its projects are identified as entities.
- 4:20 pm: Jim Wales, found of Wikipedia, is speaking on Wikia and his latest endeavour to create a free community-driven search engine. While Jimmy is his usual enthusiastic and optimistic self, I don’t leave the presentation convinced that this idea will actually work. On the other hand, that’s probably what I would have said to a free community-driven online encyclopedia in 2001…
- 6:12 pm: We’re leaving the center for Taipei Main Station where there’s a electronics mall with, from what we’re told, very decently priced computer equipment, laptops and, to Guillaume’s delight, cameras. It mostly turned out true too, although one has to look very closely to avoid, for example, being sold knock-off Ipods. Dinner was a pretty good curry place in the train station where I promptly managed to cump half my food into my lap. Thanks to the good and long conversation with Dror, Effeietsanders and others, most of the spots had dried out and disappeared before we left.
Just having been in London for most of this week, one thing that I found very noticeable was the ubiquity of bold colors used in advertising here. The pink decoration of a local women’s shoes store wasn’t just pink, it was PINK. I wonder what studies have been done on cultural differences in the use of color, specifically as regards selection, intensity and combination. If anyone reading this has read something on this subject or has some links, let me know.
1For those new to wikis and the craziness behind it, the Wikimedia Foundation is the organization behind a range of wiki-based online projects, the most popular and well known of which is Wikipedia. The conference is an annual gathering of wiki…well…maniacs which was held for the first time two years ago in Frankfurt, Germany. Last year, the conference was held on the Harvard Law School campus in Boston, Massachusetts. For this year, of all the cities that applied to host the conference, Taipei, Taiwan won, so that’s where I am now.
2China as in Republic of China, not People’s Republic of China.
