Cape Town in bid to host Wikimania 2008

Next year's event will be the fourth, with previous conferences held in Frankfurt (2005), Boston (2006) and Taipei (2007). At the conference, researchers and speakers present studies and experiments on Wikipedia and other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, on wiki culture and technology. It generally attracts around 400 delegates.

Bid coordinator Ian Gilfillan comments, "Cape Town is an ideal venue, as it has a vibrant Free Software and Free Content community. We hope that by hosting the event here the ties between these related communities can be strengthened, and that we'll start to see active Wikipedias, as well as other projects, in all the official languages."

Currently the Afrikaans version of Wikipedia has just over 8000 articles, while the Wikipedias in the nine official local languages are still very small.

"We have a strong bid; a beautiful city, a great venue in the Convention Centre, and a vibrant community. We are working hard at securing more sponsorship so as to convince the jury that the event here will be viable, and a success"

Cape Town will also be hosting a Wikipedia Academy early in the new year. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and iCommons executive director Heather Ford will be involved in workshops to teach people how to edit articles in Wikipedia at SA universities.

The host city will be chosen on Saturday 6 October by a Wikimedia Foundation jury, and the event will take place in July or August 2008.

For more information about the bid, contact Ian Gilfillan at .

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