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Wikimania 2008 - Alexandria

Wikimania is a conference held yearly for users of the Wikimedia Foundation projects, including Wikipedia, Wikinews, etc. The first conference was held in Frankfurt, Germany, on August 4-8, 2005. The second conference was held in Boston, USA, on August 4-6, 2006 and the third one was held in Taipei, Taiwan, on August 3-5, 2007. Lately, Alexandria, Egypt has held a very successful 2008 meeting and Wikimania 2009 will be held in Buenos Aires.

But what is the Wikimedia Foundation?

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge.

The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the 10 most visited websites in the world.

Wiki Projects at a glance

Wikipedia	An encyclopedia containing more than 3 million articles in over 100 languages.
Wikimedia Commons	A repository of images, sounds, videos and, generally media, common to all Wikimedia projects, containing more than 1,000,000 files.
Wikibooks	A collection of free educational textbooks and learning materials.
Wiktionary	A dictionary cataloging meanings, synonyms, etymologies and translations.
Wikinews	A news source containing reporting by citizen journalists from many countries.
Wikisource	A project to provide and translate free source documents, such as public domain books.
Wikiquote	A collection of quotations structured in numerous ways.
Wikispecies	A directory of species data on animalia, plantae, fungi, bacteria, archaea, protista and all other forms of life.
Wikiversity	A free learning environment for the study of human knowledge.

This year, Egypt is the proud host of Wikimania 2008. In fact, the famous Bibliotheca Alexandrina was the venue of this 3 days event taking place between the 17th and the 19th of July 2008.

Through its under-development EMSA Club “Medical Informatics”, EMSA has actively actively shared in this major event. In addition, through the special offers and agreements made between the 2 NGOs, EMSA is able to actively share in the biggest information platform ever created.

Ahmad Belal, the Leader of the under-devepment EMSA Medical Informatics Club, had a keynote presentation on the Club's upcoming plan and was quoted in the New York Times' review on the event. Check this out by clicking here.