Reflections on the WikiSym 2006

The three days of the WikiSym 2006 took place in Odense, Denmark (birth town of Hans Christian Andersen, where you will find dozens of H C Andersen statues and half a dozen H C Andersen street names and even the traffic lights have the shape of H C Andersen) in a hotel named … guess its name? … H C Andersen Hotel.

But we were not there to enjoy the town (although it seems really enjoyable, especially with children), as our timetable was crammed with wikis, wikis, wikis from 9 am till 9 pm. Let us sum up the event in two adjectives: very exciting and exhausting.

• Listening to ideas and enhancing our knowledge (with keynotes and invited talks, panels, research papers and practitioner reports).
• Forming ideas and enhancing the wiki future (with Open Space sessions, workshops and demos).

This was a good mixture of theoretical and practical information in which (unfortunately, but also inevitably) MediaWiki was King and Wikipedia was Queen.

What I liked best were the OpenSpace sessions. Because only with actual communication you are able to build lasting ideas. Unfortunately the OpenSpace sessions did not work out on the second day. While there were too many interesting sessions on the first day (which everyone would have liked best to attend simultaneously), there were too few on the second (which hardly anyone attended). Reasons for that could be that not all people were aware of the sessions lasting two days. Maybe it would have been better to organize the second day sessions along with the first …!?

Interestingly, the WikiSym crowd was very diverse. The people came from so many different backgrounds (using and/or developing wiki engines or wiki communities for so many different reasons). That is why much more interesting aspects and view points could be heard than I initially thought it would. Two main odd occurrences were noticed by many:

• Against popular belief, there were hardly any “geeks” around.
• And the big companies were missing the treat (and the possibility of boosting their power).

Although there were some people considered to be “important” among the wiki community (no, I will not name-drop ), there were no egos being carressed and everyone seemed to be interested in real inspiration.

Hopefully, collaboration! Despite all disagreement (which comes naturally in such a diverse group of people) collaboration was the one tenor. And I am hopeful. Developers, there is no need to reinvent the wheel, when there are so many good solutions out there, scattered into different wiki engines. Users, wikis offer a new way of learning and a chance to change your way of thinking. They already help a lot in everyday life and form a great example of international co-operation on the internet.

Let us get Creole going, learn from HyperScope, heal the sore spots of wikis and be user-friendly as well as expert-friendly (and improve usability and “expertility”? ) …

The most important thing for me was meeting creative people and forming new (and old) ideas! And the main overall message I think we all agreed upon was: Let's collaborate!