Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle1

Date: Saturday, 6 November 2004 which is to say it's already happened!

Location: Seattle Central Library (meet at the tables by the coffee cart) At 3:30 pm, we've headed for the east side of the 10th floor.


 * Address: 1000 Fourth Avenue, Seattle, Washington 98104. Occupies the block between Spring and Madison streets and Fourth and Fifth avenues. The coffee cart is located on the 3rd floor of the library, near the Fifth Avenue entrance.



Time: 3:00 pm PST. We'll stick around by the coffee cart for a little while to give latecomers a chance, but that area isn't terribly large, so we may want to adjourn to a more convenient location once everyone arrives.

For those who may be driving: There is underground parking available at the library itself (the entrance is on Spring Street), but they only validate for up to two hours and validation only gets you a 50% discount. The library doesn't appear to change its rates on weekends, so you may be able to get better rates by using a nearby parking garage.

There is some (but not much) free, all-day on-street parking a few blocks east of the library on the other side of I-5. Once one gets away from the center of town there is a great deal of free on-street parking and the vast majority of in-city Metro bus routes have stops within a few blocks of the central library.

Also, for anyone who may be interested, the library offers tours that you can sign up for at the welcome desk on the 3rd floor. On Saturdays they have general tours at 10:30, 12:30, 2:30, and 4:30, plus architectural tours at 1:30 and 3:30.

People
If you plan to attend, you can list yourself below. If you would like to attend but aren't sure whether the proposal is convenient for you, please let us know what alternatives would be more convenient.


 * 1) Definitely will attend. --Michael Snow 22:45, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
 * 2) Barring calamity. -- Jmabel 22:59, Sep 30, 2004 (UTC)
 * 3) I'm pretty sure I can make it. --Lukobe 23:36, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
 * 4) Hell and high water are the only possible obstacles I envision. -- Jwrosenzweig 23:54, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
 * 5) It looks like it will work for me. Eclecticology 10:51, 2004 Oct 1 (UTC)
 * 6) Probably; will likely bring a couple friends -- Bryce 21:03, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * 7) I have my wife's permission, so I plan on being there to match faces & voices to names. Any plans for lunch? -- llywrch 00:00, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * 8) I may be out of town that weekend, but if not I plan to attend. Won't be able to make it, unfortunately.  Hopefully there'll be a next time.--Jkiang 04:35, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * 9) I'd love to be there. --DanKeshet
 * 10) I'll be there if I remember. Call me up, 206.427.2545, if you want to remind me the day before. --LionKimbro
 * 11) I'll try and attend. My birthday is the next week, so it depends on when My Lady wants to celebrate it.  (39 + 2 yrs seniority for the curious.)  Why so late in the day? Elde 07:42, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * 12) If I have the gas money, I'll be there --kees 17:22, 2004 Oct 10 (UTC)
 * 13) Planning on it. RadicalSubversiv E 19:03, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * 14) I'll probably show up -- RobLa 06:25, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * 15) Yes. -- Decumanus 17:59, 2004 Nov 5 (UTC)

Report
Thought I'd write up a little report of the fantastic day and throw in my photos.If you'd like, please identify yourself in photo captions,(I learned your names, I think, but I'll let you decide if you want to place your name with your image).--Decumanus 07:43, 2004 Nov 7 (UTC)



We met as scheduled at 3:00 p.m, gathering around a table behind the coffee cart on the 5th Avenue level of the Seattle Public Library. The table was soon crowded, and after introductions, at User:Jmabel's suggestion, we adjourned to a bigger space on the 10th floor of the library, leaving behind a note on the coffee cart with the Space Needle-Wikipedia graphic that Michael Snow had designed for the event. Upstairs, under the slanted roof designed by Rem Koolhaas, we took over all the chairs and gathered them into a circle, including the strange cross-like ones. Pretty much everyone had a seat. llywrch brilliantly had brought along nametags for the group.



User:Jmabel took the plunge and initiated the discussion for the afternoon, bringing up his concern about how to get librarians to understand Wikipedia so they might consider it worthy of being an authoritative source. (Within days after the meeting, this led to a pretty good start on a document at Researching with Wikipedia.) We talked about licensing issues, possible software changes that might allow POV-type overlays, and swapped lots of war stories about POV warriors, trolls, and other things only a fellow Wikipedia would really understand. BryceHarrington regaled us with tales of the wild and wooly early days of GNUPedia and Nupedia, and how he made the leap to Wikipedia. We came to a quasi-agreement, mostly through a nodding of heads, that a system of committees that might judge the worthiness of questionable content (rather than just violation of Wikipedia rules per se), might save everyone lots of pain and heartache. User:Jwrosenzweig earned our sympathy with his stories about being on the arbitration committee, a thankless task for which none of us seemed to envy him.



The three hours in the library went quickly. Towards the end, with the library staff announcing the impending closure of the building, Michael Snow handed out a Wikipedia quiz (see below). Among other things, you could earn points by knowing that the Irish language Wikipedia had fewer entries than the Welsh one, that Anthere calls herself "SweetFluffyThing", and that there is no entry (yet) for the catchphrase Boxers or briefs? but there is one for It depends what the definition of is is....



At six o'clock most of us adjourned to have dinner in Seattle's International District, at a Chinese restaurant Hing Loon, where we sat around a large circular table. At Jmabel's suggestion, we ordered green onion pancakes for an appetizer and selected from among the many specials on white paper on the wall. We ate sea bass, salmon, various vegetables, and sea cucumber with mushrooms, polished off with fortune cookies and sesame seed balls (&#40635;&#31984; ma-tuan), the last of which were very tasty but probably don't merit a Wikipedia article. It came about sixteen bucks per person with the tip. Dinner lasted to about 8 p.m. We all trickled back home, glad for the great day. The Portland contigent set off on the three-hour drive back to Oregon. Everyone was glad they'd come.

Oh, and we talked about doing something like this again early in 2005.

The quiz
You can find the quiz at Meetup/Seattle quiz. Everyone tallied their own scores and there were no prizes at stake, it was purely for fun. After all, Wikipedia is too large for anyone to master all the trivia available here.