And another six

But this time spread over four days. So six Bullingdon's, one tube & walk (including a long change at Oxford Circus between Victoria northbound and Central eastbound), one walk & drain (this last very quick and convenient), three visits to the Barbican and with one diversion to London Bridge accounting for two of the eight legs. One penalty fare on account of the time taken out to view Ubsopolis (see 10th August). In sum, three visits to the four days of Wikimania.

Waiting for the off on Thursday evening, there was entertainment from a piano trio (piano, violin and cello). Rather good, and rather good music for this sort of occasion. Unluckily for them, they were not well placed in the sprawl of the ground floor of the Barbican Centre and I was pretty much the audience apart from a wiki type making a video of the proceedings - but they can take consolation in the fact the performing to a very thin audience is all grist to the mill of learning to be a performer.

They was a lot of food and drink available and one could easily have had a good feed and a good guzzle although I did not notice anyone doing either. I wonder what happened to all the left overs? Did the large number of staff knocking about get their noses in the trough when they knocked off - which would have been a lot better than down the chute to the pig swill, assuming that is that places like this can still do that. Perhaps it actually goes off to some ecobiodiograder to generate methane these days as you can't call your pig woodland reared organic if you feed it on such stuff.

Near 2,000 people there, mostly young men, say 20-30. Mostly rather casually dressed - the sort of thing you might see at a real ale festival - with the exception of a small party of Japanese girls in full war paint. I didn't get to meet them but I did get to meet the delegation from the Philipines from whom I learned that their official language is English, which surprised me. It seems that the US had more impact in their 50 years of occupation than the Spaniards had in their 500.

Interesting talk from the boss of Amnesty International who, inter alia, drew an interesting parallel between the two organisations, both of which were multi-national, if Anglophone in origin, used lots of volunteers, had grown very rapidly and both of which had to contend with the tensions between the salaried staff and the volunteers. The National Trust has this last one too. The boss of Wikipedia was good on his feet too, if a little irritated that his important announcement about transparency (https://transparency.wikimedia.org/) had been rather put in the shade by a lot of nonsense about the copyright - if any - of a picture taken by a monkey. (In the course of getting the link just included, I also came across an article alleging that the UK government indulges is various kinds of jiggery-pokery in the social media space, including altering wikipedia articles it does not care for or finds inconvenient. See http://rt.com/uk/178652-internet-censorship-police-uk/ and http://rt.com/. No idea who these people are or whether they are respectable).

A variety of interesting talks, some a little marred by sloppy presentation. So I learn that the wiki people are climbing on board the methods way of building computer systems, a way which has been knocking around the rest of the IT world for thirty years. That you can get early warnings of flu epidemics by counting the wikipedia requests for information about flu (more reliable than the same sort of thing from Google). That there are lots of academics deeply into the sociology, ethnology and oligies in general of the wikipedia movement. That something called the essjay controversy had resulted in a consensus that while wikipedia editors hiding behind pseudonyms was OK, puffing your fake identity with fake credentials was not. All of which seemed fair enough.

I continued to ponder about the way the wiki endeavour is growing to include all manner of good things. Is it going into hubris and overreach? I continued to ponder about the great weight being put on the article, the building brick for more or less everything. The article with its associated talk page, with its read, edit, new section and view history tabs. The article which is open to all comers. I associate to the great weight that the once so fashionable product Lotus Notes put on its note. Is it prudent to put so many eggs in the one basket?

Pleased to find that the sub-tropical conservatory was open. Full of all kinds of exotic plants and well equipped with chairs to sit and enjoy them from.

Amused to pass the same extravagantly bearded Sikh guarding the entrance to a building site in Carthusian Street on each of the three times that I passed.

All in all excellent value for money - but I doubt whether I will be in Mexico City for the next one!