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Wikimedia Foundation announces Wikimania 2006 conference

Sets Stage for Annual Global Gathering of Wikipedians, Internet Luminaries, Scholars and Industry Personalities

The Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce Wikimania 2006, the second annual international Wikimedia conference. The three-day conference, focusing on Wikipedia, its sister projects, and the use of wikis to organize knowledge, will be held August 4–6 at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Last year’s inaugural Wikimania, held in Frankfurt, Germany, drew 380 people from 50 countries. This year's event will bring together Wikimedia contributors and wiki enthusiasts, Internet visionaries, and academics from a wide range of fields. Registration is available online, with discounted rates for community members; help is available for overseas travelers in need of US visas.

About Wikimania

New tools for collaboration and peer production are changing the way the world develops and organizes information. Wikis are at the forefront of this change, an increasingly prominent part of consumer and corporate computing environments.

Wikimania highlights the latest Wikimedia project developments, wiki research, and practices in peer production, as well as the people behind this work. Community and outside experts will discuss the growth and goals of the Wikimedia projects with analysis and criticism, in workshops, panel discussions and presentations. Speakers will include Lawrence Lessig, free culture advocate and chair of Creative Commons; Brewster Kahle, founder of the Open Content Alliance and co-founder of Alexa Internet; author and lecturer Clay Shirky; Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia; and more than 50 other presenters from the project and research communities.

The Harvard Law School campus is providing generous space for Wikimania activities, with support from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The law school will also provide housing for attendees from around the world. A smaller Hacking Days event for wiki developers will be held prior to the main conference, with support from the MIT Media Lab.

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an international non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. Wikimedia operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects anywhere, including Wikipedia, one of the 20 most visited websites in the world.

The Wikimedia Foundation was created in 2003 to manage the operation of existing projects, and is based in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA. Wikimedia has local chapters in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Serbia and Montenegro, and Poland. Most of the Foundation's operations are funded by reader and contributor donations.

Additional information

For more information about the conference, please contact wikimania-info@wikimedia.org

For other press coverage, see the Foundation press page.