Official Wikipedia Conference is in Haifa!

If you’re a fan of Wikipedia (or any of their many other projects) then you’ll be interested to know that this year’s official Wikimedia conference, dubbed “Wikimania“, is being held in Haifa, Israel right around the corner from the Baha’i gardens! From their website:

Wikimania is the annual international conference of the Wikimedia community. It’s organized by a different local team each year – in 2011 the conference is taking place in Haifa, Israel. Wikimania allows the community and the general public to learn about and share their experiences with free knowledge initiatives all over the world.

You can even see the Shrine of the Bab in their little logo/silhouette of Haifa. Pretty neat!

Wikipedia is such a world-affirming example of what people can achieve together. Back in the 1950s the world famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote the Foundation series of books. The premise of the books was that a whole planet was dedicated to creating an encyclopedia of all human knowledge and that it was a project that would take centuries and centuries. Reading it today of course you can’t help think that we seem to be well on our way to such an outcome!

Of course if you are into wikis and are a Baha’i then you should stop in and support Bahaikipedia an initiative to create ‘a free, multilingual, open-content collaborative encyclopedia on the Bahá’í Faith.’ Bahaikipedia has over 2000 articles and has had 50,000 edits to date, so it’s a good resource and a worthy project to contribute to!

In the meantime if you head to Wikimania in August, be sure to stop in at the Baha’i Gardens and say some prayers for us all!