[Fsuk-manchester] Wikipedia day at Madlab

[Mark Reynolds]

* Location: Madlab. (Manchester Digital Laboratory). Upstairs.
* Address: 36-40 Edge Street, Manchester. M4 1HN.
"(Between Thomas St and the Craft Centre, opposite A Bar Called Common)"
http://madlab.org.uk/

As you may know it's Wikipedia's 10th birthday on Saturday.
http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
There are now 4 events in the UK to celebrate this, one was yesterday
in Bristol where Jimmy Wales is giving a talk and another 2 on
Saturday, one in Glasgow and one at the British library in London
where they're having an editathon. Unfortunately I found out about
them too late. I also think it's a bit of a lack lustre response
considering there are so many Wikipedia users in the UK, so I've
arranged one at MadLab for this Sunday from 11am to 5pm.

As I'm sure you all know Wikipedia's very well known and relies on a
lot of free software so it would be nice if we could take advantage of
this to educate people about free software and use Wikipedia as an
example of how it can be used in the real world to cope with the
demands of, in this case, one of the most popular websites on the
Internet as well as introduce people to the open source philosophy
that has helped make it such a success.

I was thinking that as part of it people could do a short 5-10 minute
talk introducing a piece of free software Wikipedia uses, what they
use it for and why it's important. Someone might talk about PHP, then
pass over to someone to talk about MediaWiki, for example. If anyone's
interested in this, please reply to the list otherwise I'll just do a
short talk myself. We'll have the projector so I'll also show some
clips with Jimmy Wales talking about the philosophy behind the project
and obviously people can use it for their talks if they wish.

Mark
-- 
"To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the
highest skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the highest
skill."— Sun-Tzu