Macau is elected the Host City of theII Chinese Wikimedia Conference

After a month’s voting in the Chinese Wikimedia community (Wikipedians thereafter), Macau is honored to be the host city of the II Chinese Wikimedia Conference, which is set to be held in late December. The Macau Wikimedia Community wishes to express its thanks to its supporters, Quanzhou, another candidate city, and its supporters.Wikimedia Macau, the hosting organization, is cooperating with Wikimedia Hong Kong on this matter. It is looking forward to providing a platform for the Chinese Wikipedians to exchange experience, promoting the ideas of copyright, copyleft and popularizing the concept of academic life in Macau, and promoting Macau’s international status.Wikipedia is a multilingual online encyclopedia project based on the Wiki technology, whose aim is to provide a free encyclopedia for the humanity; an active, freely accessible and editable global knowledge body written by the languages the editors choose.Established on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia is supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. There are more than 2.7 million articles in the leading English version in February 2009, while over 12 million entries are distributed in all 295 versions. Since 2005, the Wikimedians have been holding international Wikimedians to provide an opportunity for editors and users to meet, and discuss the technological and cultural aspects of the projects and wiki technology, the practice, progress and outlook of the free content and culture movement with the academics, the wiki developers, the media and the public.Established on October 24, 2002, the Chinese Wikipedia has over 240 thousand registered users and over 230000 articles in February 2009. There are other Chinese versions such as Cantonese, Hokkien (Min-nan), and Classical Chinese.The Chinese Wikimedia Conference is a Wikimedia conference hosted by Chinese Wikiepdians, the first of which was held on August 26-27, 2006 in Chinese University of Hong Kong. The goal of the Conference is to allow Chinese Wikimedians all over the world to meet, and discuss relevant issues, solve problems in the Chinese context through group power, to strengthen the Wikipedians’ understanding of editing environment and related laws, and the enthusiasm in participating in maintenance of the projects, to promote Chinese Wikipedia and to encourage the Chinese-using population to participate in the knowledge-sharing and open content.In October 2007, Macau’s Wikimedians held their first meeting, and there are at present a dozen of active participants, the majority of whom are executives, professionals, teachers, college students and high school students. Among the 93 administrators in the Chinese Wikipedia, four of them are from Macau. There is one feature article, four good articles, six feature images, and 95 “Did you know” articles which are based on Macau.The establishment of Wikimedia Macau, the formal organization of Wikimedians in Macau, has arrived at its final steps. It will be the third in the Greater China, following Taiwan and Hong Kong, and the twentieth globally. Our future activities include: workshops, visits to libraries and archives, and field studies, to share the joy using Wikimedia, and the ethos of respect to copyrights and knowledge sharing, to the public of Macau, in particular the youth.All Macau residents, including contributors in other languages than Chinese, are welcome to be our members, while non-residents are welcome to “Friends of Wikimedia Macau”. For the Conference and the activities, we are asking for the assistance from the Macau community. Should there be any question or offer, please send emails to Wikimedia Macau (wikimediamacau@ymail.com) or the II Chinese Wikimedian Conference Macau Organization Committee (wikimac-cwc@yahoo.com)