Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-07-10/Wikimania series

This week, the Signpost discusses a few of the panels planned for Wikimania.

Reference work publishing -- have you ever wondered how reference works such as encyclopedias or dictionaries are produced at the top 'traditional' publishing houses? How do editors find contributors, verify the information that comes to them, and decide what content to leave in or out? In this panel, Karen Christensen, of Berkshire Publishing (a speciality encyclopedia publisher), Paul Kobasa of World Book, and Erin McKean of Oxford University Press dictionaries, will discuss their work as reference work editors and answer questions. These panelists would explicitly like questions beforehand about the work of professional encyclopedia editors; please leave questions on the discussion page.

A Question-and-answer session with the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee -- members of the Arbcom, including Mark Pellegrini, James Forrester, Kat Walsh and former arbitrator Kelly Martin will be available to answer questions about the work of the Arbitration Committee. The intended audience is (1) members of the English Wikipedia community who are interested in the dispute resolution process and functioning of the Arbitration process; (2) users on other-language Wikipedias who are interested in setting up Arbitration Committees on their projects; and (3) Members of the press interested in how dispute resolution on Wikipedia occurs.

Organizational uses of wiki technology -- This panel, run by Harvard Professor Karim Lakhani, will discuss the use of wikis inside organizations, and associated challenges and opportunities with IT departments, work flow integration, and cultural challenges. Panelists will include representatives from various companies that use wikis for knowledge sharing and organizational coordination, including Socialtext, MathWorks, Harvard Business School and McKinsey & Company.

Wikis: Enabling library knowledgebases -- This panel, featuring Meredith Farkas, Ellyssa Kroski and Mary Carmen Chimato, will deal with the uses of wikis in library settings particularly, and how they might be used to create a knowledge repository to benefit a community, whether that community is an individual library or the whole profession. Case studies will include wikis currently used in the panelist's own libraries. Presenters will document development, how they get contributors, and how they document institutional knowledge.

Other panels include a legal review, Section 230: At the Gates between Liability for Harmful Speech and Wikipedia; Wiki uses in learning and teaching -- part of the education track on Saturday, August 5th; a panel on information visualization techniques, Can Visualization Help?; and Wikipedia and the Semantic Web. All these panels may be discussed on their respective discussion pages, and ideas for the conference on the discussions page.

More updates next week. To come: things to do in Cambridge, Boston and the surrounding areas.