Here's what happened at London Wiki Wednesday 5 December 2007

The event was be hosted by NYK Shipping at their Moorgate premises (thanks to Alek Lotoczko) and SocialText bought in the beer, wine and pizzas (thanks to Ross Mayfield and Ross Hargreaves).

The talks

David Terrar briefly gave an update on developments at blogtronix

Alison Wheeler (alisonwheeler.com), gave a talk about wikipedia, wikimedia, and the activities of Wikimedia UK. She spoke of some of the legal/licensing issues faced by wikipedia, and the need to raise funds.

Jon Husband, over from Vancouver, spoke about wirearchy.com and the idea of "an emergent organizing principle based on interactivity and listening to the voices of people connected by online capabilities and social media"

Sue Gardner executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation (See her wikimedia user page) arrived. She was over from the U.S. and spoke to us about the current state of play with the wikimedia foundation; the relocation to San Francisco, and the plans to cautiously upscale, which will allow wikimedia to better handle fund-raising opportunities.

Sean McClowry gave us a quick update on the www.openmethodology.org project at baring point, and a brief mention of some MediaWiki extensions which they have contributed back to the mediawiki community.

Alek Lotoczko gave a speech and took a number of questions regarding enterprise wiki use and hints & tips for growing wiki usage.

Jure Cuhalev showed us zemanta.com's blogging tool which performed semantic text matching to automatically bring in related imagery and links to wikipedia articles, given only the text of a blog post. The demonstration was impressive, even summoning a round of applause! The service will be accessible within various blogging tools via plugins which call their web API. He was keen to work with wikimedia people, to ensure the tools wont hit their servers too badly.

Francis Wan (User:Computor on wikipedia) got up and spoke about issues facing the development of the chinese wikipedia, in particular "The great firewall of china" and the politics surrounding this censorship.

The pub

After a spot of chit-chat and table re-assembling, Gordon Joly did his duty as pub coordinator, leading a fairly large bunch of us off to The Globe for more social networking (v1.0)

Keep an eye on the "London" page for details of our upcoming London Wiki Wednesday events.