For those who couldn’t attend Wikimania, the annual international Wikimedia conference, this panel of top contributors to the wiki community reviews some of the latest developments, lessons learned, and what to expect from Wikimedia in the future.
Adina Levin of SocialText leads a panel that includes Wikimedia executives and other noted wiki experts as they share highlights from Wikimania 2009. The panelists discuss a project that would allow Wikimedia to be more usable for contributers, opportunities to help Wikimedia move forward, and the latest wiki trends.
Yahoo!'s Micah Alpern describes the culture of Wikimania. Sue Gardner, Wikimedia's executive director, covers the foundations priorities and projects. Ed Chi of PARC summarizes his much-discussed research on the slowing growth of Wikipedia, with data, models, and possible explanations. Naoko Komura shows off the achievements of Wikimedia's Usability Project and describes its future plans. Jack Herrick of wikiHow describes his company's efforts to increase contributions to wikis.
The broad wiki community is strong, productive, and inventive, and our panelists are a few of the people who help make it a success. Whether you use wikis for reference, contribute to wikis at work, use other kinds of user-contributed media, or participate in open-source communities, you'll learn a lot from these experts.
Adina Levin is vice president of products and co-founder of SocialText. She has over thirteen years of experience in strategic marketing and product planning in a variety of emerging high-tech markets.
Micah Alpern is director of User Experience for Open Search at Yahoo!. Prior to his work on SearchMonkey and BOSS, he was the design lead for Yahoo! Answers, where he helped nurture a community which answers hundreds of millions of questions.
Sue Gardner is executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco. She previously directed the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's web site and on-line news outlets. Huffington Post named her one of ten "media game changers" of 2009 for the impact on new media of her work for Wikimedia.
Ed Chi is the area manager and a senior research scientist at Palo Alto Research Center's Augmented Social Cognition Group. He leads the group in understanding how Web 2.0 and Social Computing systems help groups of people to remember, think, and reason.
Naoko Komura is program manager for Wikimedia's Stanton Foundation Usability Project. Before joining the Wikimedia Foundation, Naoko was a senior program manager and project manager for Yahoo! Mail, Postini (now a Google company), Cygnus Solutions, and GolfWeb. She has a MA in International Development Policy from Stanford University, an MS in Economics from Kobe University, and a BA in Cultural Studies from Osaka University.
Jack Herrick is the founder of wikiHow, an on-line wiki about various how-to topics. Herrick was also one of co-owners of eHow from 2004 to 2006.
Resources
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