Wikipedia Meetup

An hour after landing in Boston (after a quick Skype home) Sam and I were on our way to a Wikipedia meetup, suggested by Aaron Swartz, fresh from his recent Reddit success. We met at Boloco, a burrito bar near Harvard, but we were too late to eat (and too full – how many free meals did we get from Virgin?). The group was small but friendly. We met sj who is pretty active across the wikipedia world and Nicole who is involved in the wikihow project. She’s also a library science graduate so we had a couple of interesting discussions on the nature of the library, wikipedia and the ethics behind deleting wikihow’s “how-to build a nuclear bomb” article. We all ended up at an ice cream bar which was housed in a former bank. We sat in the bank’s old vault which still had the original foot-thick steel door. For some bizarre reason the rooom was painted like an aquarium but things became even more bizarre when we tried to get a drink. They only served hot chocolate, which tasted suspiciously like hot, melted chocolate ice cream. Yummy, but altogether rather strange.