Wikimedia Quarto/2/Berlin
The 21st Chaos Communication Congress (21C3) was held in Berlin at the end of December, 2004, and provided a chance for many Wikimedians and MediaWiki developers to meet up. For many of the developers, it was their first chance to have face to face discussions about the future direction of the software.
The conference included the themes of hacking, science, community, society, and culture, and included two Wikimedia related talks and two workshops. Tim Starling and Brion Vibber made a presentation entitled "Edit This Page Scaling the Wiki Beyond 1 million" as well as moderating the MediaWiki Developer Workshop which discussed both the current software, and ideas for future features of MediaWiki. Their presentation discussed both hardware and the software issues, with information on the implementation of compression algorithms. Jimmy Wales spoke about "Wikipedia Sociographics: What the wikipedia community doesn't know about itself" where he explained different roles within the community, and explained how Wikipedia is not created by a million people adding one line, but by a community of users who trusted each other working together. Elisabeth Bauer, Angela Beesley, and Jimmy Wales moderated a Wikimedia Collaboration Workshop. Topics discussed included the role of the Foundation, International cooperation, and the Wikimania conference.
The Wikipedia area on the ground floor, with sofas and a mattress, was a meeting point for Wikipedians and gave the opportunity to sell Wikireaders and Wikipedia CDs and to promote Wikipedia to other conference attendees.
The time in Berlin was also used for a meeting about the Wikimania event, and plans for speakers and other aspects of the event were able to be discussed offline.