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!

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!

Tim, on the other hand, has been following the developments of this since the first blocks occured in mid-2004, so I was very happy to hand over my interview requests to him this week. He gave a great interview for ABC’s Connect Asia. You can download the MP3 to listen to it. It lasts 3 minutes and starts about 3 minutes into the recording of the 2nd half of the show.

Here’s a rough transcript…

Zulfikar Abbany: It’s been described as the great firewall of China. It’s the Chinese government’s attempts to stop people accessing certain content online and it’s meant that a number of foreign websites keen to get a stake in the Chinese market have allegedly allowed their output to be censored. The search engines Yahoo! and Google are just two who are said to have done that. The popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which was blocked in china, has now come out saying it’s freely available. Technology correspondent Peter Marks spoke with Wikipedia’s Tim Starling.

Tim Starling: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It’s an open website. It’s free for anyone to use and at the moment we’ve got about 1.4 million articles in the English Wikipedia and quite a bit more than that if you add all the other languages together.

Peter Marks: Now, because anyone can edit a page on Wikipedia, I imagine that there are politic hot topics in there that have polarised views of what the story should be. How does Wikipedia resolve these sorts of tensions?

Tim Starling: We have a policy that we call the “Neutral Point of View”. What that basically says is our articles should be unbiased and we should present all points of view so we do that basically by a consensus of editors. So, one statement of the Neutral Point of View policy is that an article should be such that even your worst enemy will agree with it.

Peter Marks: Some governments are very sensitive about certain issues and China is obviously well known for blocking sites than mention Falun Gong or the Tiananmen Square massacre. Does Wikipedia ever censor or hide pages to appease certain governments?

Tim Starling: No, we don’t, and certainly there’s absolutely nothing like that going on on the foundation level. It’s possible that some of the Chinese Wikipedians themselves engaged in some self-censorship to try to reduce the amount of blocking by the Chinese government, but there’s certainly nothing on an official level. I think the Chinese people themselves are a bit more relaxed about that sort of thing that we in the west might be.

Peter Marks: Other sites though, notably Google and Yahoo!, have agreed to censor search results, but Wikipedia hasn’t needed to do that?

Tim Starling: With Wikipedia, it would be very hard for us to do any sort of censorship like that because Wikipedia isn’t just a content delivery site, there’s also discussion and we have also have this instant publishing aspect, so it’s very hard for us to censor what the users want to say. The Chinese government, for a while, just blocked sensitive articles in Wikipedia. They can actually block particular articles and leave most of the site intact, but since last year they decided to block the entire site – a blanket ban – and I think that’s probably more to do with that open discussion and instant publishing than because of any particular article content.

Peter Marks: Do you have any idea why it might have been unblocked at the moment?

Tim Starling: The Chinese language version is still blocked apparently so it’s a small step really. They’ve unblocked all the other languages. And really, who can say why they did that? Maybe it was a compromise within the party somewhere. The processes of the bureaucracy are complex.

1. How would describe the power and spirit of wikis to someone who is unfamiliar with them?
2. What led you to become so deeply involved in Wikipedia, i.e., what was the initial inspiration?
3. What do you see as the driving forces of Wikipedia’s success to date, and what are your biggest concerns for the future?
4. What is your take on my suggestion that each Wikipedian contribution is a form of “microinnovation” that builds and sustains the huge global, game-changing innovation that is Wikipedia?
5. What advice would you give to non-profit membership association leaders who are uncertain where to begin with social media in their organizations?
6. How do you see social media/Web 2.0 evolving the next few years? What should we expect?

See my answers at Principled Innovation, or answer them yourself in the comments section below.