 So, this is the talk I gave last year in Vienna and so I'm going to recycle it and hopefully y'all will find it useful. And I keep in mind the talk in Vienna was, I was talking with Wikimedia developers, so it was focused on them and telling them why people outside the foundation, why they would want to use MediaWiki and why they find it so useful. So, without too much more, let's see if, no, no, no, what has focus right now? Linux, there we go. What are others, others? You all are others. Who are others? You. Non-MediaWiki, third party government agencies, corporations, NGOs and individuals. I think that covers everyone here. Does anyone not feel like they've been covered in that? Okay, fine, association. So, you know, if I'm Wikimedia board member, I'm saying, why do I care about these people using MediaWiki outside of the foundation? Why would anyone want to do that? We have this, our vision is the sum of all knowledge, freely sharing the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. So why would we want, so why not use Wikimedia? So, yeah, maybe, yeah, your baby pictures don't belong on Wikimedia. If you put your baby pictures on Commons, I can 99% guarantee you they will be deleted. Maybe not. So, again, not everything is suitable for Wikimedia. There's game Wikis and stuff like Bulbapedia and NASA's Wiki. You could set up a Wiki, for example, about tightlining. Who knows what tightlining is? No, that's what I thought too. Tightlining is some sort of makeup thing, you know, I don't know, tightlining. My daughter told me, I'm trying to be cool. Yeah, okay. So, yeah, and the other thing, there are various interpretations of knowledge, you know, the same piece of knowledge. The thing, and you don't want the people who have these drastically different interpretations of knowledge necessarily on the same Wiki, for example, if I'm a Mormon, a devout Mormon, and I have a Wiki about the Book of Mormon or Joseph Smith, I'm probably not going to be very friendly to contributors who are completely academic, you know. Go get your own Wiki. So, that's what Media Wiki allows you to do. Go get your own Wiki, because it's open source. So, the foundation has released, perhaps without really thinking through the whole thing, they've released Media Wiki, and it's open source now, so everyone can use it. It's out there, it's GPL, you know. And even if they went, even if they stopped today and took everything away, what is out there is out there. So, anyway, oh, I still talk about this. So, why do people use it? Because they're familiar with it. Everyone knows Wikipedia. You mention Wikipedia, and they say, oh, yeah. And you mention you have your own Wiki, and they, you know, they connected Wikipedia. Reliability. So, there can be some improvement here. But it is, Wikipedia is a fairly reliable distributor of software. They have security updates. They have regular six-month releases. They give you access to the code that's running on live Wikipedia, you know. So, as far as from a corporate standpoint, there's a pretty good stream of updates there. What's this thing? Findability. So, oh, yeah, that's why you want to set up your own Wiki. Sorry. I'm reading these over again. Maybe on your Wiki, you have about tightlining. You want to have this one tightlining technique. And it would be hard to find that on Wikipedia, because it's a sum of all knowledge. You don't want the sum of all knowledge. You want the sum of everything about tightlining. I hope I didn't screw that example up. Shareability. So, yeah, MediaWiki is made for sharing knowledge. Chris, you use the example of one-to-many. When you talk about it, I don't think it's one-to-many. I think it's many-to-many, because there are many people contributing to the software. And so, they're contributing to the Wiki. And a lot of people come and they read the Wiki. So, yeah, that's another reason to use MediaWiki. And look, I'm not done yet. Agility. MediaWiki, as we all know, is very flexible and adaptable to the needs of everyone. Or various people. Not everyone. I should not go that far. Transparency is awesome. There's this whole audit trail that's built into MediaWiki. A lot of people, they don't understand this. They say, oh, a Wiki, anyone can edit that. But then, what they don't realize is, yes, editing is more open, but there's this transparency and accountability. And I think that helps when you're looking at the classification of knowledge that goes on there. Again, I don't work with ITAR in this stuff. But I think the transparency and accountability helps you deal with some of this classification thing. I see Darren kind of smiling. He's like, he doesn't know what he's talking about. He's right. I don't. Oh, yeah, that's the other reason. There's a significant community as hard as it is for us to find each other. I mean, I'm looking here and there's less than 40 people here, I think. But there's still a community of people. Oh, look, we have another slide. Why do third parties use MediaWiki? Like I said, the value of MediaWiki is apparent to everyone or a lot of people. I shouldn't say everyone. Everyone uses Wikipedia. It's a huge brand. And so when you put up a Wiki and you say, this is like Wikipedia, they almost immediately know what you're talking about. Some of you guys have demonstrated a real passion for what you're doing in MediaWiki. And that's been pretty impressive as I've watched this over the past few days here. Oh, yeah, we were talking about top-down versus bottom-up sort of things the other day or earlier. And so MediaWiki is personal and autonomous. You have control over what you put in the Wiki or your individual users do. I was just telling Evita that she can do a lot more things on the Wiki than she realizes. And it gives her more power. What she has out of the box does not depend on me. I mean, sometimes it does. Sometimes I have to go and install an extension. But there is a lot that you can do out of the box. So yeah, it's knowledge sharing. So, okay, I have a couple of examples I'm going to give you here. This kind of goes with Conway's Law, which someone... Who gave me Conway's Law? I forget. Someone at the Vienna Conference gave me Conway's Law. Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. So Wikimedians have created software that captures their communication structure. So when you install MediaWiki, you're getting not only the way to share information, but basically it's encoded. The whole culture is captured in code. And that's what you're getting. So okay, some examples from... I believe this is last year's MWCon. The South Dakota Legends for Excellence Wiki. I met the woman who designed this. It's kind of fascinating. She's been working with computers since 1983. She has... Which, you know, I'm like, yeah, that's kind of... When I started, I had a Commodore 64. But anyway, I didn't have one. I played with one. So yeah, it's... She has minimal experience with MediaWiki, but she's been using computers for a long time, personal computers. And yet she's managed to create this with her minimal knowledge. She's managed to create this Hall of Fame. That's what HOFers. Hall of Fame Wiki. The families of people who have been recognized by South Dakota... I bet you didn't know that South Dakota had Legends of Excellence. Now you do. Anyway. So these are people that often have passed away or died. And their families come along and want to update the Wiki entry for the person that they care about. And they can do that through forms on the page that she has set up. So it's built around... The fascinating thing about this is because it's a Wiki and not a web application, although Wiki is a web application, because it's a Wiki, it's built around the content and not necessarily... Oh, look at this GWiz JavaScript DoHickey I can do. Yeah, this is another one. Let me hang up. So this is called a WikiX because I didn't have permission to actually use the name of the Wiki. But they use MediaWiki and they point out how the use of MediaWiki gets people to stop hoarding information. There's some discussion about this as well. Wikis allow information to grow and it frees your time because people aren't going to that one person who knows something and saying, hey, can you help me out? And so it saves time. That's a time saving right there. I bet there's a metric for that somewhere. You all should think about that when you're doing your metrics. Oh, yeah, the people who are the creators of knowledge, again, it empowers the endpoint of knowledge rather than the gatekeeper of the knowledge, the manager, whoever. It empowers the individuals. So yeah, in the example that they gave was an editor since his organization is spread over a large area. They have to organize meetings by time zone and all that. That was trouble. So someone, an individual, how an individual exercised the power that they had to create a template that would show the local time of the user viewing the Wiki when they went to that page. You could just go to the page and instead of using a web app, like what time is it, or I forget the media app that I was using. Instead of doing that, they just used a template that's built into the Wiki to show the local time. Mitre Corporation, I think we've heard a lot about them. I'm not going to add any more. Plus, I'm at half of my time here, so. And like I said, you know, people before me went over, so I'm cutting mine short, so. Anyway. So yeah, these are just some quotes that I got from people who had been, I met at EMWCon last year. Other types of Wikis don't have the same focus. This is huge. This first thing is huge because if you use Confluence, or you use SharePoint Wiki, or these other things, the whole ethos is completely different. And it's not because they couldn't build it that way. It's because they didn't have the community of Wikipedia shaping the software and showing them, you know, this is how we want this software to work. So now you all benefit from that community that built that software. And instead of a manager saying, I want the software to be able to do X, it has to have these controls. It's not built on control from the start, which can be a problem. But it's also an advantage because it's user-focused from the start. It's a result. It's an emergent property there. I got to use my word. So, yeah, again, I believe this was the woman from South Dakota Wiki. She said, a lot of what I've done is insulate people from technical details. I'm a technological guy. I like the technical details. And I appreciate when my users can ask me, you know, questions and say, can you do X for me? But at the same time, the Wiki gives those users the ability to hide, as this person has done, hide all this power and all the moving parts from the people who are using the Wiki. So, someone said about semantic media Wiki and forms. They said, what Yaron has done? Yaron and Yaron. Yaron didow and Yaron Korn have done borders on magic. So we have magicians in our midst, in case you didn't know. Oh, yeah, and it's so easy. People couldn't do it themselves. There might be a little learning curve to learning WikiJax, but even that has been gone away. I was thinking about this. Who was I talking with on the way home last night? Yeah, you. I'm sorry, I'm horrible with names, and here I just demonstrated in front of a huge crowd of 40 people. I'm so embarrassed. Yeah, so it's so easy. People couldn't do it themselves. Okay, so what I'm thinking of here is the visual editor. The Wikimedia Foundation created the visual editor because they thought it would reduce barrier to entry. But then my understanding, what I got from all their postmortems and all this was it didn't change the editor retention in the way that they thought it would, initially going into it. And I think it was because they focused on making the Wiki easy to use, and the people who were already using it didn't care. Whereas if they wanted to capture new users, they should have gone out and met and completely, or at least done a lot more, a lot better job of imitating Microsoft's word toolbar or whatever you call it. And then people would click on edit, but it's Microsoft Word. I know exactly what to do. Instead they get this black and white ribbon, which, you know, it looks vaguely familiar, but they're like, what do I do? There's no cursor. Anyway, anyway. Conclusion. Media Wiki is an opinionated software. Wikipedia's way of sharing knowledge has been codified. And I have 10 minutes left to lather on, or I can go sit down and you can get another cup of coffee, or you can ask me questions, or you tell me why I'm wrong. Okay, yay.