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August 06, 2006

Wikimania

The three days of Wikimania are now done. I attended quite a few of the sessions and it was an eye-opener for me. There's an awful lot more to Wikipedia and family than a bunch of web pages. A lot of interesting people are doing a lot of fascinating things to organize data. The WiktionaryZ project and the Wikidata technology underneath it, for instance. The idea of a dictionary itself is impressive, but what they are trying to do is a combined reference for all languages, linked together by meaning and defining every word in every language in that language and in every other language. Even attempting to do this is impressive. I was not surprised to be impressed by the work of Martin Wattenberg whom I once had the pleasure to work with briefly on an art project (he took a barely useable Java applet I wrote and turned it into a marvel of user interface. But the presentation he gave with two other top researchers in visualization was stunning. Seeing words pictured in this way was unbelievable. Unfortunately some of what was shown is apparently not even captured anywhere on the web now, so I can't link to it. A lot more could be written about but frankly I'm too tired to do it right now. But I'll say that the intro to the closing talk by David Weinberger was, if you saw the excellent talk by Lawrence Lessig (video) on Friday, one of the funniest things I've ever seen. I can't explain it; maybe when the videos are both there you can see for yourself.

Posted by markj at August 6, 2006 08:17 PM

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