A speculative piece found in the Los Angeles Times, July 11, 2008.

Danny Wool and Gregory Kohs in the Comments zone!

(Fun for everyone.)

Not to defend the Egyptian state or anything but the premise of the article seems to be that Alexandria isn't good enough for Wikipedia? I think that given the intolerance and bigotry "The Wikipedia Community" showed Muslims in relation to the petition concerning images of Muhammad that the article might have completely misjudged the nature of the miscalculation that the site selection represents.

I think it has very little to do with boycotting, and pretty much everything to do with finances. I agree with the concerns though, but I doubt there are a lot people staying home that would have gone if it was being held in like France or Spain, for example, for the same price.

That's true, but there are large French and Spanish contingents at es and fr. ar Only has 64,000 articles. Holding Wikimania in a place with few Wikipedians doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ta...the_internet.3F

Maybe they are having Wikimania in Egypt due to some pyramid scheme?

Very good. And in a way true, I think. The scheme is to see the damn things at company expense, instead of traveling to a Wikimania with scenery that sucks, like Lincoln, Nebraska.

As for the state of civil and individual rights in Egypt, and respect for learning there, forget it. Wikipedia couldn't care less.

Next time I suggest the Netherlands. It's politically free, safe to visit, and has great vending machines. Most of the crew can smoke really good grass to their hearts' content, and there are plenty of legal brothels for Jimmy. What more can you ask?

Mirrors the general tenor of the place. Did you know Israel publishes 10 times the number of books per year as Egypt, yet has only 10% the population? WP isn't going to help a systemic problem like THAT. That's a from-the-ground-up attitude problem, as suggested by other posts in this thread.

For all my complaining about the Israeli bias on en:WP, a lot of it is bound to be totally systemic, and not due to some nefarious CAMERA project. You've got a people who speak English and love books and learning. That's bound to have a huge effect on a project like en:Wikipedia, even if there wasn't a biased bastard among them. As for the ar. Arabic Wikipeida, well, those guys are just going to have to get their noses out of the Quran and get with the program of the world. If China can do it (they now have more English speakers than the US does), then Egypt can, too.

Don't they have Islamic fundamentalists who shoot anti-Muslim politicians?


And probably more university-educated women.

Yeah, but remember Egypt has Islamic fundamentalists who shoot Muslim politicians! (Sadat)

You know The Pyramid Scheme Conference is over, right? Nothing worse than a couple of cab drivers receiving insufficient gratuities occurred. Can we stop with the bigotry now?

Egypt's relatively better for women's rights than some others in the neighborhood.

Lots of women working in the private sector and government. Powerful ones too.




Yes. I much prefer countries where there's more people happy to shoot you for your wallet.