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Philippe's is reknowned for their delicious $4.70 French dip sandwiches, but soon to be more famous for hosting LA's first Wiki Meetup!
L.A.'s first Wiki meetup was on Monday, July 25, 2005 at 7:30pm, at Philippe's restaurant. Philippe's is located at the corner of Alameda St. and Ord St., in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles.
Everyone interested in attending was welcome to come. There was no cost to attend (but buying at least a beverage or something from the establishment was considered to be polite.) The venue was very cooperative, and we had a room to ourselves upstairs. Parking was available in the restaurant's lot across the street.
For this meeting, there was no speaking schedule or agenda, and it got off to a slightly slow start as attendees had to wait in line for Sandwiches, Pie, Beer, Wine, and Lemonade. Ultimately it was a varied, loose, and often tangential discussion of articles and events. The presence of unexpected free wireless coverage allowed for consultation of the Wikipedia as needed.
There was a discussion about Sealand, a self-proclaimed sovereign "nation" that occupies a small platform atop a sunken barge. It had an intriguing history of a very "real" international warfare as its residents attempted to claim their right to operate by their own laws.
Brief discussion of travels that Wikipedians had gone upon, and Texas was specifically mentioned. The question of whether there were identifiable beef-molecules in the air in Texas due to barbecue came up. Though it sounds like an urban legend, sources on the web indicate this might be more than that [1].
Eric brought up whether musical genres are built more from stereotypes about the artist's race and background (as opposed to the sound itself). He felt that some miscategorizations of artists as making Country music had given the genre a bad name, after his visit to the Country Music Hall of Fame exposed him to "true country". By analogy, it could be questioned whether African American artists are automatically classified as R&B even if what they play does not fit that musical style.
metaeducation discussed his experiences trying to steer people away from creating infinite amounts of Homestar Runner character pages on the Wikipedia, and instead keep those articles on the much more comprehensive fan wiki [2]. This is analogous to the problems arising with every single Pokemon character having its own page, breaking down its numeric attributes in tabular form. Others defended Inclusionists, and Eric pointed out his own efforts to buck the "No Pages About Your High School" trend with Whitney High.
Troubles in handling sensitive pages came up, e.g. Race and intelligence (per Jokestress). When dealing with the Votes for Deletion community, it's easier to sway people into the idea that an article is of "encyclopedic" value by writing the article first (instead just a stub). Drummond cited the relevancy of this when he introduced the article for Intelligence and public policy — a lot of headaches can be avoided by first completing a controversial article in one's user space and then move it to the main Wikipedia.
Many sites (for instance, those which document the details of happy hours in various cities) absolutely require frequent updating to be of use. metaeducation expressed the general desire to see "static" websites to surrender their content (and its maintenance) to Wikis. If the social climate were right, and enough people knew it were *possible*, they could pressure webmasters to do this. A big question is how to combat the desires of those who would rather control content and advertising streams.
