Boston, MA - July 22, 2006
Wikimedia, the foundation behind the online encylopedia Wikipedia,
is proud to announce the 2006 Wikimania Awards competition. Nominations
will be accepted until August 1, 2006. The Wikimania Awards were created
to promote the creation of excellent free content around the world. The
authors of such content have made millions of ad-hoc collages, designs,
and art exhibits possible.
The Awards are being held in conjunction with Wikimania 2006
(August 4-6, at Harvard University), the second annual international
conference celebrating Wikimedia's projects and the use of wikis to
organize knowledge.
In the last few decades, copyright laws have become more restrictive and
automatic than ever, and more and more of our culture is now inaccessible.
The goal of the Wikimania awards is to raise awareness for and celebrate the
great art and writing generously released under licenses that allow their
free reuse by other artists or projects like Wikipedia. The contest has 9
categories of media open for submission right now, including artwork, maps
and diagrams, photography, audio, video, and animation. A final category
exists for media created on the way to or at the actual conference, and will
not be open until August 2nd. Any piece of media created after August 8th of
last year is eligible, as long as it has been released under a sufficiently
free license (or into the public domain). The final winners will be picked by an
international panel of judges familiar with free content, including Xeni Jardin
of BoingBoing.net and members of the Creative Commons and Participatory Culture
Foundation teams.
In addition to the contest, the conference will also include presentations
from Jimmy Wales, Lawrence Lessig, Brewster Kahle, and some of the most
active contributors to the project. The conference will be a chance for
those most interested and invested in Wikimedia to discuss the present and
future of the projects (including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikisource, and
more); the unique social dynamic created by them; technical updates; and
debate on how to improve the verification of information.
Please visit
http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_Awards for details about
the rules and categories.
About Wikimedia
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., is a non-profit corporation based in
Florida, USA. It was founded in 2003 to maintain and develop free-content
projects like Wikipedia, and to provide the full contents of those projects
to the public free of charge. It is supported primarily by small donations
from its broad userbase, and currently has national chapters in Germany and
France.
Contact
For questions and further information, please contact the Wikimania team:
Email: wikimania-press@wikimedia.org
Phone: (North America) +1-778-386-1059
Fax: (North America) +1-727-823-8961
