Abu-bakrUK

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Hello, Abu-bakrUK, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! Beeblebrox (talk) 22:04, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your warm welcome, very much appreciated. I have had bit of practice improving articles and fixing the odd bits of grammar etc, however it's nice to know someone is there to guide :)

You saw my question on the location of Wikimania, obviously I know the question is not going to get answered in the way that I want it to probably anywhere on Wikipedia however I feel frustrated that there wasn't a more transparent and open discussion on the location. There must be a process to this but it seems very quick and prone to misjudgement. I see next years will be in Washington, I hope I am able to come as I am very much a fan of Wikimedia however Israel would not have even allow me to enter! I know this because many of my associates (very highly respected public/academic figures) have been banned simply for wanting to go work with NGO's working in Palestine. And also because I 'look' like an Arab! (I'm not Arab though)

A big error of judgement I feel, I hope you can point me in the right direction perhaps? Also how do you personally feel about this issue?

Abu-bakrUK (talk) 22:49, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

• Actually, the process is quite transparent, as you can see here [1] it just doesn't take place on this site. The reason for that is simple: There are now dozens of Wikipedias in various languages, as well as other projects like Commons that are international. The English Wikipedia is no more or less important than any of the others, the decision on where to have Wikimania is decided over a year in advance by an international jury, similar to the way bids are taken for the Olympics. Past Wikimania conferences have been in the USA, Germany, Egypt, Poland, Argentina, and Taiwan. I'm sure there are groups of people who participate in Wikimedia projects who would have a reason to object to each one of those. No country on earth has perfectly clean hands and never makes mistakes, and there are certainly worse places than Israel, i.e North Korea. Since you asked, my personal belief is that Wikimania is not about politics or social causes, it is about why we do this, why these projects are important, and nothing more.

By the way, it is generally considered a very bad idea to publicly post your email address on any page on Wikipedia. I have therefore redacted it for you. Beeblebrox (talk) 00:27, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

Very bad in terms of policy or spam etc?
Thanks for the links you have provided, I will look at these a little later (at work now).
I agree, north Korea would also be a very bad place to host a conference such as this. While I don't doubt that people will have issues with almost every country to host such a conference, there is a very big difference or caveat here. North Korea and Israel are in a completely different category of badness so much so that the ideal you mentioned of Wikimania being just about Wikimedia projects and nothing more, unfortunately when the conference takes place in a place as bad as Israel or North Korea it foregoes this ideal because it starts to be seen by the many and not the few as taking sides in a divisive Political issue and therefore Wikimedia by default does not remain neutral but quite far from it. It makes it appear that Israel is a normal law abiding country of the world when this is far from the case.

I mean these are not small points of contention here, I would urge you to please read in to what is going on in Palestine so that you may learn from it and inform others. Even countries such as the US or the UK which will be lobbied against for having been the starters of wars do not come close to what the rogue state of Israel does - Land appropriation and ethnic cleansing.
I hope you can at least see from my explanation how Wikimania 2011 in Israel cannot be an apolitical event. Abu-bakrUK (talk) 11:38, 29 July 2011 (UTC)