Wikimania: How to Delight a Global Community

Organizing a three-day conference can be quite challenging, but a whole new set of challenges emerge when the event attracts attendees from 80 different countries.

That’s why Wikimedia chose Eventbrite as its registration solution at Wikimania, the organization’s wildly popular annual conference.

Wikimania is a conference for Wikipedians and Wikimedians, which are members of the Wikipedia Foundation's almost entirely volunteer community. All of the event’s content and programming is created and driven by the Wikimedian community, including meaty topics like the Future of Education and How Online Communities can Unlock Humanity's Potential. These topics brought crowds from multiple continents that spoke multiple languages.

But language wasn't the only barrier. In the spirit of open access and bringing communities together, Wikimedia offers a scholarship program that covers the costs and manages the logistics around transportation, registration, and accommodations. After considering their complex needs, Wikimedia decided it needed a registration platform that provided:

• A simple and intuitive registration process that would be clear for registrants from different cultures and countries.
• The ability to capture extensive information related to travel needs so as to help scholarship recipients coordinate travel.
• The technology to track multiple groups, including local chapters, speakers, volunteers, and various types of community members.

Flexibility that Drives Delight


Wikimedia chose Eventbrite as its registration solution because of its intuitive purchase process, flexibility, and powerful reporting tools.



After switching to Eventbrite, guests from around the world were able to navigate the registration system easily and quickly. As a global platform, Eventbrite was already set up to capture accents and umlauts to deliver a positive sign-up experience. Wikipedia was also able to leverage promotional codes to service numerous group types and even created custom questions to collect necessary information about each type of attendee, including travel details.



"The complaints went down to practically zero about the registration process," said Ellie Young, Wikimedia's conference coordinator. "A lot of our attendees don't speak English as their first language, and they found the format to be simple, logically laid out, and clear."