User:Fuzheado/Wikimania2005 thoughts

Ten things I learned at Wikimania:


 * 1) People didn't know how to pronounce my name. Fuzheado was a college nickname because of my fuzzy haircut. I never realized until meeting so many international Wikipedians, that they had struggled with how to pronounce it. Some thought it might be Chinese - like "fu zhe a do". Maybe like "Ta bu shi da yu". I found it quite amusing.
 * 2) Japanese Wikipedians truly are elusive. For the fourth (formerly third) largest Wikipedia, there was little to no representation. For the first few days we had only one Japanese Wikipedian, Takashi, and he admitted he doesn't even have a username and only edits as an anonymous IP! A second Japanese attendee showed up, but had never edited Wikipedia, and was there from NTT just to check things out.
 * 3) Wikipedia is elitist, and in a good way. Take that Larry Sanger. Much of the research and statistics shows that indeed, there is a highly nonlinear curve, and that an elite corp of folks make the bulk of contributions. The difference is that this "elite" self identifies, and is fostered through continuous peer review. So to Larry Sanger, there is indeed an elite but it is not selected by committee or
 * 4) Developers travel in packs.
 * 5) Richard Stallman hates jargon.
 * 6) Germans are incredible organizers.