Wikipedia:Meetup/Sydney/November 2005

Wikipedians in Sydney had the first of two Meetups in Sydney on Sunday 20 November 2005.

The meetups
We met at the Sydney Town Hall and had snacks at the Art Gallery of New South Wales before walking through the Royal Botanical Gardens towards Circular Quay and the Sydney Opera House. We has drinks at The Rocks and then walked over the Sydney Harbour Bridge before having a coffee at Kirribilli.

The meetup was attended by Angela, Ianblair23, Ta bu shi da yu, Newhoggy, Andjam, Wm, Jasabella and a non-wikipedian guest.

The second meetup was held on Monday 21 November 2005. We met at the steps of Sydney Town Hall before making our way down to Chinatown where we had some delicious Thai food followed by dessert and coffee.

In addition to the eight who present on Sunday, the meetup was attended by M.e, CJLL Wright and Zigger.


 * Angela, so nice to meet you and all the other Wikipedians that attended today. As regards shopping in the city I will add these handy hints: If you come out of Town Hall station and look around, you will see a large Victorian stone building with a statue of Queen Victoria out the front. This building houses three stories of boutiques. Next, go to the corner of Market and Pitt Streets. Here looking toward Hyde Park, you will find David Jones dept. store on the right, one block before the park. Standing again on that corner looking north you will see a pedestrian mall which has many shops. On the right of that corner on the mall is a shopping centre called "Centrepoint". On the the left is another dept. store "Myer". Underneath Myer are more boutique style shops and a large food fair for cheap eats. There are more options of course, but email or phone if you have questions, or maybe others have some ideas. Hope you have a great stay, let me know if you would like to visit Chinatown later or I might come later in the evening tommorrow. --Wm 07:52, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Everyone, I had heaps of fun! Nowhere else can I talk so freely about Wikipedia :-) You guys and girls rock! - Ta bu shi da yu 12:07, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Discussions topics during the two meetups
Just in case wikipedians at the meetup wanted to follow up on some of the items discussed during the meetup, I have a list of topics we discussed that I managed to remember or jot down:

Sydney related
 * The Sydney WikiProject
 * Local government area ideas
 * list of Sydney suburbs
 * Establishment of a Sydney/NSW local landmarks image galley
 * Commissioning and construction of the Sydney Opera House
 * Mrs Macquarie's Chair
 * Gowings, which is about to be "gone to Gowings" itself. Quick, photos!

Australia related
 * Establishment of a local chapter in Australia
 * Press contact for Australia
 * Cooperation with SLUG
 * Australian laws affecting Wikipedia
 * Australia at the Commonwealth Games, Australia at the Winter Olympics
 * Indigenous Australians - Ta bu shi da yu didn't think we were up to scratch, now thinks otherwise (though it needs references, something he can provide).
 * Different types of Coffee.

Important, favourite and interesting Wikipedia articles and topics
 * Jesus
 * MDAC
 * CUPS
 * GNAA came up very briefly. Subject dropped just as quickly :-)
 * List of Lamest edit wars ever
 * Fossil fuel for reciprocating piston engines equipped with spark plugs
 * Edit conflicts
 * List of unusual articles
 * Toilet-related injury
 * Exploding whale
 * Exploding donkey, which did not have an article at the time.
 * F**k
 * BJAODN
 * Baby food
 * etc
 * Whether schools are noteable
 * The use of BC and AD versus BCE and CE
 * Censorship and warnings on certain articles and images
 * Harlequin type ichthyosis
 * Nudity in images (I'm dubious about Commons:User:Sabine40 in particular)
 * China's block against wikipedia
 * Picture of an obese wikipedian
 * Some sort of wikipedia article about child sex
 * Edit conflicts, vandalism
 * References and notes
 * A link from the Tutorial (Talk pages) page to zoophilia.

User involvement in Wikipedia
 * How we encountered Wikipedia for the first time
 * Why we contribute to Wikipedia
 * Wikipedian admin experience
 * Wikipedian's experience of elections
 * Tension between deletionists and preservationists

Technical aspects of Wikipedia
 * Baselining high quality pages
 * Propose One wiki, multiple websites support in MediaWiki
 * Installing Mediawiki to determine how it works
 * Branch stacking, which was compared to wikipedia "meat puppets"
 * MediaWiki software
 * Decentralisation of Wikipedia
 * Backups of Wikipedia
 * Proposal of a better "What links here" implementation
 * Wikicities, single sign on

Wikipedia in General
 * Copyright - this was discussed in great detail on Monday
 * Licensing
 * Publishing
 * Liability, libel and insurance
 * Angela's awesome shirt and Wikipedia merchandise.
 * Wikispecies

Feel free to expand.

Bad Timing on my part
I've been meaning to checkup on meetups for a while, but when do I finally get around to doing it? 10pm on November 21st, pretty much when the Sydney meetup will all be over. -- Danny Yee 10:53, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
 * Sorry you missed it too Danny. I remember you from some public speaking you did on Internet free speech issues --Wm 12:26, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Awww how come no one told me about it! :( Enochlau 02:53, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
 * Maybe try adding:


 * to your homepage, and make sure that your preferences include your email address. I got an mass-email about this meetup from Tim Starling (from one of those two categories, I think), but unfortunately I was moving furniture that Sunday (I started telling my girlfriend I mightn't be available to move our new sofa into the living room due to the Wikipedia meetup, and she gave me a look that could kill a small child). Hopefully there will be another one soon though, now that we've got over the inertia threshold of having the first one, and seeing as the first one sounds like it went well. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 01:03, 29 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Cool. That's odd... I'm in Category:Wikipedians in Sydney, which is a sub-category of those two you mentioned, and I have my email addy listed - maybe it got rejected as spam, or he didn't check the sub-categories. Perhaps next time, use a bot to drop a note on talk pages? And yeh, girlfriends and Wikipedia probably don't quite mix. Enochlau 12:56, 29 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Yep. I was on my way to the Sunday dinner when the female pantswearer instructed me that it wasn't going to happen. So, next time. ;) --K. AKA Konrad West TALK 22:12, 29 November 2005 (UTC)