Last week we had a London Wiki Wednesdays event, and this time I was involved helping to organise and promote it. You can read what happened here (including lots more pics) The event was hosted by NYK line thanks to Alek Lotoczko.

Alek along with me, Gordon, and Andrew managed to prod David Terrar enough times to get things moving in advance and get the event off the ground. I did some facebook messages and also created a twitter account, @LondonWikiWed, and went on a mass-following mission. All standard web2.0-social-media-promotion tactics. Sadly we’re still failing on a web1.0 level with google still sending people to a stale site which David Terrar is in charge of, and needs to sort out. The biggest thing we need to do for next time though, is sort out hosting and sponsorship in advance. As well as being the backup option for hosting, Alek very kindly forked out for some beers on the day, but we should try to find different sponsors next time. I set up some Sponsoring London Wiki Wednesdays information. A good promotion opportunity for someone I think.

The event itself was great! Lots of interesting talks. I was particularly interested to learn a bit about Pfizer using semantic MediaWiki for a patent database (but I’m still not convinced that the added complexity is a good idea as part of a normal wiki).

I gave a quick talk about crisis commons wiki, and about the kinds wiki mess which have built up there. I pointed to out-of-date information, duplicated information, and other structural and cosmetic problems. This was as a kind of case study in wikis going wrong, but I wanted to stress that these problems are solvable through clean-up work. I showed my initial efforts to do so, but this wiki is open for anyone to help with the clean-up effort, so this was an invitation for people to join in. I also put in a plug for Crisis Camp London (Something I’ve been along to a few times. When I get round to it, I’ll blog about that too)

(photo Benjamin Ellis CCBYSANC)

Slides on slideshare