Wikimedia Foundation / Wikipedia meetup December 13, 2010

Erik Möller, Danese Cooper, and Alolita Sharma, all senior members of the Wikimedia Foundation (the “NGO” behind Wikipedia) are visiting Pune, and a meeting has been organized for everyone interested in Wikipedia to meet them and talk about the product strategy, especially in reference to India and Indian developers.

What’s Wikimedia? What’s Mediawiki?

The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit charitable organization behind Wikipedia and a bunch of other “crowdsourced” reference websites like: Wiktionary (a dictionary), Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikinews, etc. These are the guys who collect money to keep the Wikipedia and all other projects running, and also pay for the development and maintainence of the software, servers, and other things.

Mediawiki is the software that Wikipedia uses. This is basically an open source “wiki” software written in PHP. It can be freely downloaded by anyone who wishes to host a wiki with features similar to Wikipedia. For example, the PuneTech wiki also runs on Mediawiki software.

Visitors’ details

Erik Möller, Deputy Directory, Wikimedia Foundation, also responsible for product strategy
Danese Cooper, CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation
Alolita Sharma, Engineering Programs Manager, Wikimedia Foundation, manages the features development team
(Maybe) Bishakha Datta, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation might also join them (not yet confirmed)
They are all doing a tour of India (Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore)…

Agenda for the Meeting

The purpose of the meeting is to get in touch with India’s engineering and open source community. The key questions they’re hoping to explore include:

Localization issues concerning Indic languages
Other MediaWiki improvements that would make the sites more useful in India
Improvements to the mobile gateway
Potential partners in developing and deploying offline versions of Wikimedia content.
Logistics

Date: Monday, 13 December, 6:30pm
Venue: SICSR, Model Colony, 7th Floor
Registration: This meeting is free and open for all to attend. No registration is required.