Tim proposed to me on Saturday night in a romantic setting outside the Sydney Opera House overlooking the Harbour Bridge.
We’re planning to get married in NSW this year, around the time of our three year anniversary.
Here’s a picture of the ring. It’s white gold with three Moissanite stones. I wanted an alternative to diamonds to avoid mining, cartels, conflicts, and marketing. Photographed sitting on the red roses Tim bought me.
And the picture below shows the location of the proposal. (Photo by Diliff, cc-by-sa)
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Thinking of writing a blog post about the Wikimedia Commons picture of the year contest reminded me I had an unpublished draft post about 2007. Like my end of 2006 post, here’s a summary of what happened last year.
January
I celebrated New Year at my sister’s house in England, with my family and Tim.
Essjay joined Wikia’s community team on January 7th. Tim and I went to a London Wikipedia meetup on the 9th.
February
I went to San Mateo for the first Wikia staff meeting in the new office. It was my first time in San Francisco. The number of people there was amazing - 36 compared to 6 the previous February. Of everything that happened there, the thing that sticks most in my mind is the “party bus” - something I just can’t sum up on my blog. Quite incredible. Drunk staff, getting more drunk while on a bus that has a disco ball. Cigars on the no-smoking bus, people climbing out of the sunroof, wheelchairs, weird people in the bar, falling off a giant chair… and there’s another one of these coming up in March!
I got back to England and took Tim to Birmingham for valentine’s day. Perhaps not the most romantic city in the world, but I have fond memories of it since I went to uni there.
Wikia was listed as one of CNN’s 25 startups to watch.
A cute article in The Age mentions that Tim and I met through Wikipedia.
March
Wikia and Wikipedia had more press attention than usual this month.
The Times had an interview with me, claiming my “world has certainly been changed by Wikipedia.” Very true. I also spoke on a radio station in Melbourne on TV in a BBC World interview later in month. A lot of the press was sadly about Essjay, who resigned from Wikia on March 4th.
Datrio, then a board member of Wikimedia Poland, moved from Wikia’s tech staff to community staff, and provided a vital connection between the two. Catherine Munro, who joined Wikipedia a week before I did, joined Wikia on March 15th, at least in part to replace Essjay.
April
In April, I took part in a panel at the British Association for American Studies conference in Leicester.
I attended a Wiki Wednesday and spoke at a Girl Geek dinner in London.
May
I went to Canada for the first time in May for the RecentChangesCamp in Montreal, en route to New York for Wikia’s product summit.
Shun Fukuzawa joined Wikia’s as our first representative in Japan. Jabber founder Jeremie Miller joined Wikia to work on Wikia Search.
June
In June I visited Wikia’s Polish office for the first time.
July
I attended another Wiki Wednesday in London and then went to Taipei for Wikimania.
August
I celebrated my 30th birthday in Taipei. I have vague memories of Wikia staff dancing on tables.
September
A quick visit to the Wikia offices in Poland and San Mateo and then finally back in Australia.
I saw wild kangaroos for the first time. There were around 100 of them in the Morisset Hospital grounds!
I spoke at Web Directions South in Sydney and attended Webjam.
October
In October, Tim went to Florida and I went to Melbourne. I spoke at a Digital Culture Forum at ACMI.
I packed up our old flat in Melbourne so we could finally move to Sydney; something we’d been planning to do since July 2006. We moved to Hornsby Heights. There are fast trains from Hornsby into the center of Sydney, and it’s far enough out of the city that we can afford to rent a two-bedroom house rather than a flat. There is an amazing variety of wildlife here as you can see from the photos on my wiki.
November
Back in Sydney, I spoke at the International Association of Business Communicators.
I’ve not blogged much this year, but my wiki is slightly more active. In November, I added the ‘Wikis you can’t edit‘ page (it’s not what you think) and started to collect photos of things I see in the yard. So far the page includes wallabies, snakes, spiders, kookaburras, parrots, cuckoos, skinks, blue-tongued lizards, peahens, cockatoos, leeches, crickets, and other insects. They’re not great photos but an interesting reminder of what I’ve seen since moving to Sydney.
December
I spoke at the Online Social Networking & Business Collaboration World in Sydney.
Tim and I flew to Queensland to spend Christmas with his family. It’s the first time I’ve been away without my laptop. I had to amuse myself by watching the carpet python on the rafters outside instead!
After Christmas, we went to the Woodford Folk Festival. It rained constantly and was extremely muddy. In the 20 minutes the sun came out, I managed to get sunburnt and bitten by a green ant. Despite that, it was very enjoyable, and a much needed break, since it was the first time since Wikia started that I’ve actually taken an entire week off!
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Happy Easter!
Here are a few Easter Wikia pages I found testing out Wikia’s new cross-wiki search tool.
Find out about Easter on the Christianity wiki, religion wiki, or the Churches of Rome wiki. The calendars wiki describes the controversies around the date of Easter. Easter in literature and fiction can be found on the Muppet wiki or on the Harry Turtledove’s Literature wiki. Wikiality and Uncyclopedia have Easter parodies. Easter Bunnies can be found in many of Wikia’s gaming and comics sites, including Penny Arcade, Creatures, Runescape, and Gaia Online. Find out about Easter eggs in Star Wars or discover a different type of Easter egg on the Easter eggs wiki.
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If you’re in either London or Palo Alto on April 4, be sure to attend Wiki Wednesday. The London event is starting at 6.30pm at Microsoft House, 10 Great Pulteney Street. The Palo Alto one is from 6pm at 665 High Street following on from Socialtext’s Wikthon the same day.
The Wiki Wednesday Wiki decribes the event as one where “people get together to chat, learn about wikis, find jobs, talk deals and generally cavort.”
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Wikimania released its call for participation today. Wikimania, the most popular wiki conference, is an annual global event devoted to the Wikimedia projects. This year’s conference will be held from August 3-5 in Taipei, Taiwan.
Wikimania is set around three themes this year: Wikimedia Communities, Free Content, and Technical infrastructure. Papers, panels, workshops, and discussions around any of these topics are welcome. I’m leading the Wikimedia Communities presentations section, so if you’d like to help with reviewing these submissions, please contact me.
Wikia is sponsoring the event and also offering scholarships to Wikia editors who would like to attend. See Wikia’s page on Wikimania for details of how to apply for funding.
See also WikiSym’s call for papers.
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The WikiSym 2007 Call for Papers was released today.
Anyone who is involved in using, researching, or developing wikis is invited to WikiSym 2007!
WikiSym is the International Symposium on Wikis. The tagline this year is “Wikis at Work in the World: Open, Organic, Participatory Media for the 21st Century.” WikiSym is a peer reviewed conference supported by ACM and will be held in Montreal, Canada, in October.
We are seeking submissions for research papers, workshops, panels, posters, demonstrations. I’m chairing the posters and demos part of the program. If you have any questions about these, please contact me.
Expect the same from Wikimania very soon.
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I’m not sure I want 2006 to end. It’s been a great year.
Here’s what happened:
January
I spent New Year with my family in England after spending my first Christmas away, with Tim in NSW. At the start of January, I visited Florida for the first time and spent a couple of weeks at the office Wikia and Wikimedia were sharing in St. Petersburg. This was when Wikia got its first round of investment. The news was leaked in February and announced in March (blog post). Tim and Kate temporarily joined Wikia’s technical team.
February
The $4m from Wikia’s first investment round allowed me to hire the first two Wikia Community Team members, sannse and Mindspillage, in February.
March
In March, I visited Austria for the Content for Competitiveness conference in Vienna. Back in Australia, I visited Perth for the first time and met Mark Ryan from Wikipedia and Tim’s sister. Wikicities rebranded as “Wikia” and finally announced the first round of investment.
April
I made another trip to the US in April for the very interesting Forum on Digital Transition in Santa Barbara. That was followed by the smallest Wikipedia meetup I’ve been to since only one other person (Antandrus) showed up! I was back in Australia for Easter and Tim’s birthday. KaurJmeb joined Wikia’s community team and John Q Smith joined Wikia’s technical team to lead ops, support, and development.
May
Tim visited England for the first in May. We stopped off for a two day trip to Hong Kong on the way.
My first nephew, Alex, was born in May whilst I was in England. The book I part-authored, Wikis: Tools for Information Work And Collaboration, was published in May. Back in Australia, we attempted to find a new place to live but never got round to moving. Emil Podlaszewski, Wikia’s new head of product development in Poland, was introduced to Wikia but didn’t actually start until later in the year. The Polish team has been expanding every month since.
June
I attended the iX conference in Singapore and appeared on TV for the first time, doing three televised interviews about Wikipedia whilst I was in Asia. Gil Penchina officially became Wikia’s CEO this month and Rieke and Solensean joined Wikia’s community team. I resigned from the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation after a bad decision by the rest of the Board. WikiZine made my resignation public in July and it took effect in September when Erik Möller was elected to replace me.
July
I went to the Brisbane for the first time for the Students of Sustainability conference. Splarka joined Wikia’s community team as an intern. Bill Kaufman joined Wikia as head of verticals. Wikia had a lot of press regarding Jimmy’s launch of the Campaigns Wikia.
August
My third trip to the US this year was for Wikimania (blog post), Wikimedia’s second annual conference, which was held at Harvard. Tim and I stopped in New York for a few days before it and I rushed back after it for the X|Media|Lab event in Melbourne - it was last year’s event in November which led to me staying in Australia so it was great to be there again. I fitted in a second trip to Brisbane this month, for an Open Innovation Round Table discussion. Next in August, I made a very long trip to Denmark for WikiSym where I gave a keynote on how and why Wikipedia works. Then it was back to Melbourne to talk about Future Directions for Free Content at the Churchill Club (blog post). Mindspillage and Solensean left Wikia this month and Splarka joined as a permanent staff member.
September
Juan David joined Wikia’s community team. Tim was ill for most of September and needed surgery so it was an otherwise quiet month.
October
I made few plans for the rest of the year since Tim and I weren’t sure when we’d be going to England, but events nearby kept me busy. I visited Brisbane for the third time, this time to talk about Copyright Challenges and User Generated Technologies. I went to Canberra the next day to take part in the Digital Culture series of talks at the National Library of Australia and then attended James Dellow’s Rebooting the Enterprise talk before returning to Melbourne.
November
We’d hoped to leave for England before November but it was too soon after Tim’s operation for him to fly so far, though we did fly to NSW for Tim’s mother’s birthday. The English Wikipedia reached 1.5 million articles.
December
Wikia’s first big announcement this month was the acquisition of ArmchairGM. Robert Lefkowitz, Aaron Wright, Dan Lewis and David Pean joined Wikia as part of the acquititsion and began work on OpenServing (blog post). Wikia announced its second round of investment - all of it from Amazon - on December 8th (blog post). We had two big hits in the press shortly after this - firstly with OpenServing which is still in testing, and will be more widely available very soon, and secondly with “Wikiasari“, which didn’t really exist before the press made it up, but may well exist at some point next year. 
I started WikiChix, a new community for women involved with wikis, in response to concerns that women were not comfortable posting to Wikipedia’s mailing lists. Anthere invited me to chair Wikimedia’s new Advisory Board. After attending the fun Stirr Sydney event, I packed up and left Australia, at least temporarily. We spent a day and a half in London before going to see my parents. Tim spent his first Christmas away from home, with my family, and we’ll be spending new year’s at my sister’s.
2007
My New Year’s resolution is to make no plans. I don’t know if or when I’ll be back in Australia and I have no idea where Wikia will be in a year from now. I wouldn’t have predicted a year ago that we’d now have 40 staff, two rounds of investment, 60000 registered users, and more than 400000 articles, so I’m not attempting to predict next year. I just hope it’s as amazing as this year was.
Happy New Year!
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The first STIRR Sydney event (see previous post) was well worth attending, especially to hear more about the stealthy startups 3eep and Tangler, both of which have exciting plans for communities. Just as I was leaving the party, Amazon’s investment in Wikia was announced online. The hotel I was staying at had DNS issues so I’d had no Internet access all afternoon and didn’t realise the announcement was quite so imminent else I might have been able to chat about it in Sydney. Not that our ArmchairGM acquisition and our new OpenServing project weren’t enough to talk about. :)
I’m really pleased about the investment since it makes the future of Wikia not only more
stable, but also more exciting because it allows us to meet the dreams of our community members as we’ll have more resources to carry out their feature requests.
Here are two great quotes from the press release:
“We want to support the continued growth of sites like Wikia, which has cracked the code for user-generated content.” –Jeff Bezos, Amazon.
“Amazon is a leader in offering customer generated content, and we are delighted to have them as a strategic investor in Wikia. With Amazon’s support, Wikia will be able to expand and serve new communities around the globe on an even greater range of topics.” –Jimmy Wales, Wikia
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The Web 2.0 Summit held in San Francisco over the last couple of days led to a lot of exciting announcements and launches, but very little in the wiki space. (At least according to blog reports of the event - I wasn’t actually there).
Intel announced the launch of SuiteTwo, “a rich set of interconnected services that combine to improve productivity and enable high-engagement marketing”, or, more simply, a useful combination of wikis and blogs from Socialtext and Six Apart. See the related posts from Anil Dash and Ross Mayfield.
Answers.com announced that they had acquired FAQFarm for $2m. FAQFarm is a heavily adapted MediaWiki site where a wiki community can ask and answer questions.
Some of the non-wiki stuff:
- Beta launch of Skype 3.
- Riva launched Like.com, a visual search engine for products that you can buy at Amazon and elsewhere. It makes so much sense. It’s a far more realistic way to shop online.
- CNET launched a new Blog at Webware.com which aims to document “cool web apps for everyone”.
- CNET claims that Ning launched at the conference, though in reality, they’ve been around for at least a year. Ning, founded by Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreessen (a Wikia investor), is a Java platform where users create their own social applications.
- Mercora, the user-contributed and user-programmed digital radio network, launched the second generation of its “Radio 2.0″ platform.
- Stikkit launched their post-it note/to do list/calendar/tagging/bookmarking tool. I’ve given up trying to use things like that though and am now trying a physical whiteboard instead, with the idea that if I can’t close the tab, I might pay more attention to what’s on my to do list. :)
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Much too soon after Wikimania, I’m off to the other wiki conference - WikiSym in Odense, Denmark. I’ll be giving the opening keynote on Monday about How and Why Wikipedia Works - the same topic that Dirk Riehle, the organiser of WikiSym interviewed me, Elian, and Aphaia about last month. I’m dreading the journey, which is 34 hours with a whole bunch of pointless restrictions on what I’m allowed to take on the plane.
Let me know in the comments below or on my wiki if you have any ideas about how and why Wikipedia works (or doesn’t!). I’d be interested in other thoughts on this.
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