From March 14-15 the Cato Institute hosted a Wikipedia meetup. The major outcome of this event was the creation of a WikiProject to develop Wikipedia articles on US Federal Government legislation.
At the same time I was attending the conference of the Consumer Federation of America, so I was only able to attend this after that conference. Pete Forsyth organized it and so far as I know, this was the first Wikipedia collaboration between the community and a think tank. Cato’s goal in hosting this was to develop all Wikipedia articles on federal legislation. They want people who search for legislation through Google to be able to find a simple description of the legislation and summaries of all the commentary and responses to it, along with an index of sources backing all this up. I agree with them that this is an attainable goal and entirely necessary for democracy in the United States. What they want is inevitable and it is nothing short of lightening striking from heaven that as they said that this should be so then it really should be so. They gave a review of what educational materials and databases are already available, and I agree that what exists is insufficient to meet public demand. I also know how popular some of the legislation articles on Wikipedia are, and how quickly they become hubs for development after someone establishes the basic framework to get the articles started. We decided to base this from a wikiproject where people could go for support to develop articles on legislation and also track general interest in doing this kind of thing.
Jake Orlowitz was there and I was glad that he could attend this, because he has such good opinions about how collaboration should work between organizations and the community. Some people from Wikimedia DC attended. Joshua Tauberer, host of GovTrack.us was there. I was surprised that he was just some guy, when I thought that site must have institutional backing or be part of a collective effort. It seems to be the case that it is just his personal project.
I met a gentleman there named Miguel Torres Barrios, user:Mijotoba on Wikipedia. I am always surprised when I meet an experienced and proficient Wikipedian who works in my field of interest but whose path I had not yet crossed. I am sure there must be lots of Wikipedians around who just are not visible and do not even think to connect with others to collaborate, and that seems to have been the case with Miguel. He was entirely Wikipedia proficient, knew the community culture, and lived in DC, but he never previously had tried to connect with anyone in person. Besides his Wikipedia experience, the other things that appealed to me were that he was articulate and seemed like he could do public speaking, he spoke Spanish, and he was passionate about sharing more information with people. There are not enough Wikipedians like him in the movement and when I met him I thought how good it would be if somehow he could be convinced to take a Wikipedian in Residence position somewhere to reach out to the Spanish speaking community or even help develop the US development of Spanish Wikipedia.
This was great meetup. I hope that it sets a precedent.