Wikimania! Head to Wikipedia’s first ever London festival
It’s time to get techy! Wikipedia’s bringing its annual conference ‘Wikimania’ to London for the first time EVER this weekend. Open to the public, the five-day extravaganza of internet fun has been running for ten years and was last held in Hong Kong.
Wikimania 2014 (yep, we just like saying the name) kicks off at the Barbican Centre today with a two-day ‘Hackathon’ before the official conference begins on Friday.
The three-day lecture series is open to the public, with weekend tickets costing £50 and day tickets priced at £30. Two thousand people are expected to attend the event and the San Fran Wiki team has already jetted in for the launch.
There will be 200 talks from experts held at the Barbican over the course of the event, covering a whole host of juicy web topics. They ask questions like ‘how can online communities unlock humanity’s potential?’, ‘now that Wikipedia’s done everyone’s homework, what’s left to teach?’ and ‘what happens when the cutting edge of human knowledge is available to all?’ Deep stuff.
There’s also going to be an actual opening ceremony as well as a whole series of fringe events, including meet-ups and a line-up of music and comedy sets. Highlights include the ‘intellectual cabaret night’ Geek-Off Chaotic where clever people talk about the things they love and WikiGeeks , a ‘geek-based comedy show’.
Still not sold? Wikipedia describes Wikimania as a ‘conference, unconference, festival, meetup, workshop, hackathon, and party’. Tech-tastic.
Wanna go? Book tickets for the event at wikimania2014.wikimedia.org.
