A World of Collaboration--Taipei Wikimania

On August 3, more than 400 people from around the globe gathered outside the Chientan Overseas Youth Activity Center in Taipei, waiting for the third annual Wikimania conference to open. Most of them are "Wikipedians."

Operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization with seven salaried employees, Wikipedia has in six short years gathered 8 million volunteer-written articles in 253 languages and beat Encyclopedia Britannica for the title of the world's largest encyclopedia. This could be said to be the greatest achievement in knowledge gathering in the Web 2.0 era.

Wikipedia's founder, 41-year old Jimmy Wales, is a hero of the Internet age. In 2001, he and Larry Sanger took the idea of an encyclopedia and made it open to collaboration and editing by anyone by putting it on easily editable "wiki" software (from the Hawaian phrase "wiki wiki," meaning "quick"). They made it international, with multiple language support. Its founders hoped that with its users' participation it would become the world's first online collaborative encyclopedia.

Jimmy Wales' creation led him to be selected as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2006, and this year he was ranked at number 12 in Forbes Magazine's list of 25 "Web Celebs."

Wikipedia has become an essential website, but it is actually only one of the Wikimedia Foundation's nine major projects. In addition to it, there is the multimedia repository Wikimedia Commons, the source text library Wikisource, the free content book collection Wikibooks, the open dictionary Wiktionary, the collaborative news source Wikinews, the reference resource Wikiquote, the biological species directory Wikispecies, the free learning materials collection Wikiversity, and Meta-wiki, which is used to coordinate them all. There are now also hundreds of other open, wiki-based projects run by other organizations, such as Wikitravel and wikiHow. Wikimedia is now planning on entering the search engine market alongside Google and Yahoo.

The first and second Wikimania conferences were held in Frankfurt and Boston. It was decided that the third should be held in Asia to demonstrate Wikipedia's commitment to equality.

Cities competed to host Wikimania in a manner similar to how they compete to hold the Olympics: they had to show they had adequate facilities, could handle food, lodging and other logistics, and could get a favorable response online. With strong support from Chunghwa Telecom, Taipei beat out Hong Kong, Singapore, Turin, Alexandria, and London, to become the first Asian city to hold the event. Wikimedia also hopes that this year's event will give it a chance to better understand Asia.

Taiwanese Wikipedians were the organizers of this year's conference. Though they only formally started Wikimedia Taiwan in February, by July they were recognized by Wikimedia as the tenth such official organization with legal authority to represent the foundation locally. The 37 founding members had, however, been working together for some time previously, organizing an event on the campus of National Taiwan University and publishing the Chinese Wikipedia on CD-ROM to raise money. Most importantly, they won the right to host this year's Wikimania.

The keynote speakers for the three-day international conference were Wikimedia founder Jimmy Wales and board chair Florence Nibart-Devouard. Also in attendance were wiki technology inventor Ward Cunningham; Isaac Mao, founder of the Chinese blog network CNBlog; Japanese Internet activist Joi Ito; and Jack Herrick, CTO and founder of wikiHow. Discussions were held on the future of wiki technology, closing the digital divide through free content, and business models using Creative Commons material.

The revolutionary collaborative culture of Wikipedia has torn down the walls that separated the experts from the masses. It has also brought about mass collaboration strategies by which companies open up channels of communication rather than depending on top-down models, freely giving out information on their products and working together with outside developers. All around us, a new Wikified world is coming into being.