This post is available in 2 languages:

На русском языке  • English

In English:

On May 18th, 2013, we gathered for a big WikiParty in Moscow, Russia. It was dedicated to three important events: the millionth article in Russian Wikipedia, the twelfth anniversary of Russian Wikipedia, and the traditional WikiAwards for achievements of Russian Wikipedia’s contributors during 2012.

Russian University of Economics was the main venue, however the event began in the Sokol district with a tour by Wikipedian Andreykor, who wrote good and featured articles about this area. In addition to the celebration, Wikipedians Vladimir Soloviev and Sergei Vladimirov held workshops and the university held an Open Day. The university’s event organizers even enriched the celebration with a master class in carving lemons, a pun and symbol of the million articles.

The day of the celebration happened to also be the countrywide Russian day of planting forests. On this day, people planted 27 million new trees in the area of 8700 hectares during various events, setting a record in Russia. Among these trees were Alley of Free Knowledge oaks, planted by Wikipedians from the Russian Economic University, and Wikipedia Avenue pines, which will become a part of a forest destroyed by fires few years ago near the town of Roshal, in the Moscow region.

In addition to these celebrations, on May 22 we celebrated the fifth anniversary of the Sakha Wikipedia at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in St. Petersburg. Sakha Wikipedia is a project in one of the many languages spoken in Russia.

The celebrations took place amid increased public attention to the government’s attempts to blacklist several Wikipedia pages about drugs and suicide. Earlier, the Russian Wikipedia went on strike against the legislation that enables such decisions; however, what’s more important is Wikipedia’s achivements and the possibility to hold such diverse celebrations.

Anastasia Lvova, Wikimedia Russia

Read the rest of this entry »

This post is available in 3 languages:

English  • Polski • Español

English

Wikiexpedtion logo

A Polish national railways class EU07

Wikimedia Polska, the Polish Wikimedia Chapter, is about to organize a Railways Expedition in collaboration with the Polish Railways Company. The photography expedition is devoted to train infrastructure in Poland and will give participants unprecedented access to sites they wouldn’t otherwise see so closely.

Polish Railways has offered the opportunity to teach Wikipedians to navigate the railway premises, after which they will receive ID cards entitling them to enter and photograph objects normally inaccessible to the public. Polish Railways will provide us with free monthly railway tickets for all participants and special passes to legally enter and photograph rail tracks, workshops, rail yards, cargo railway stations and museums belonging to Polish Railways. Wikimedia Polska will cover the costs of accommodation and food (travel to Poland is not covered).

We are looking for people interested in this form of Wikiexpedition. We want to form 2-3 person teams, with Polish-speaking leaders and participants from other countries. We’d like to underscore the fact that you will not need to speak Polish to participate; we’re happy to help you navigate the language. Teams would be moving independently, both in terms of time and location. We think it would be useful to organize several teams that could work in different areas of Poland. The Wikiexpedtion will take place this summer, sometime between June and September, 2013.

If you want to join the railways expedition, just add yourself to the list on the Wikimedia Polska wiki. Basically, the only requirements are that you a) have an obsession with trains and railways and b) that you are excited to spend around a week (or more) traveling in slow trains that stop at all manner of tiny stations around Poland.

Tomas Ganicz, Wikimedia Polska

Read the rest of this entry »

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team recently completed their latest development sprint, with a special focus on preparing for the upcoming deployment of the Universal Language Selector (ULS) extension on multiple wikis. The team also hosted a ULS-specific office hour on May 8, 2013 (logs).

ULS deployment prep

The Language Engineering team is working on refining several important features of the Universal Language Selector. This extension will provide an umbrella of services including selection of UI language, input tools and fonts. ULS will superannuate Narayam and Webfonts to provide a unified solution for configuring language settings for MediaWiki. During this development sprint, critical bugs related to positioning of ULS’ activation area and its “cog icon” label were fixed. These affected multiple MediaWiki skins and interlanguage wiki pages. The improved version will be deployed over several phases. More information about the upcoming deployment can be found in the deployment schedule.

ULS testing

ULS features are to be verified based on the test scenarios identified. These scenarios, based on the Cucumber framework, can be adapted for automatic as well as manual testing. The scenarios cover core features of ULS: triggers, language settings panel, display settings, font selection and input tools selection. These have been written in a simple “Given-When-Then” format and provide the steps for easy walkthroughs. The testing instance hosts all the latest updates that are being made. The team is looking for volunteers who can help us with testing and reporting bugs. Let us know if you would like to join and help (write to runa at wikimedia dot org or ping us on #mediawiki-i18n) .

What’s next

The team will be completing all feature changes and testing them by end of the current sprint to be ready for kicking-off the roll-out of phase 1 of ULS. Roll-out will be coordinated by Niklas Laxström with administrators of all scheduled wikis. The team will also be hosting a bug triage session on May 29, 2013 on freenode.net IRC on the #mediawiki-i18n channel.

ULS is live on Commons!

Meanwhile, based on consensus reached by the Commons community, Universal Language Selector and the Translate extensions have been enabled on Commons.

For more details about the Language Engineering projects and ways to participate, please write to me [runa at wikimedia dot org] or ping us on #mediawiki-i18n.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

Today we launch our search for the next Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

About six weeks ago, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Executive Director Sue Gardner told us she will be stepping down from her role. Happily, she is staying on until we find her successor, and we are now launching that search.

It will be a challenge to find someone who is able to fill Sue’s shoes, but I am glad to say that the Board of Trustees, Sue and the senior staff of the Wikimedia Foundation are aligned in our quest for a successor who will build on Sue’s considerable accomplishments, and steer the Wikimedia Foundation toward even greater success in the future.

The Wikimedia Foundation is the internationally-active San Francisco-based non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It supports a global community of tens of thousands of volunteers in collecting, developing, and making the sum of all the world’s knowledge freely available. Over half a billion people use Wikipedia and its sister projects every month. We are the fifth most popular website in the world, and the only donor-supported site in the top 100. We’re widely recognized as the most influential and important organization in the free knowledge movement.

Our Executive Director reports to the Board of Trustees and acts in partnership with the global volunteer community, providing the leadership and setting the strategy for the Wikimedia Foundation, while managing its day-to-day operations and activities. The Executive Director is responsible for modernizing the user experience and nurturing, growing and diversifying the community of people who write our projects. He or she also ensures our grantmaking supports innovation across the Wikimedia movement and enables contributor growth in underrepresented demographics and geographies.

Our Executive Director needs to understand and advance the Wikimedia movement’s core values. They need to have proven management skills in technology and product development in order to effectively lead a high-traffic website, and have experience designing and implementing planning processes with a high built-in assumption of fast and iterative change. He or she will need to have exceptional communication skills, and possess both a drive to achieve transformative results and a deep respect for collaborative processes. The Executive Director’s ability to effect change in partnership with Wikimedia’s community will be decisive not just to their success, but to Wikimedia’s lasting impact.

It’s impossible to know where our next Executive Director will come from: there is no career path that makes running the Wikimedia Foundation somebody’s obvious next step. The right person might or might not currently work at a big web site. They might or might not be in the non-profit sector. They could have a background in education, or product development, or media, or community development, or something entirely different. They may live in the United States, or outside it. In this search, we want to cast a wide net for candidates, so that we can find the person with the rare mix of skills, experiences and values needed for this important role.

If you’re reading this post you know how much the work of the Wikimedia Foundation matters. I’m asking you for your help in spreading the news of this unique opportunity. Please share this post widely in your networks.

For more information, to suggest potential candidates or to put yourself forward, please write to info@moppenheim.com.

Some details on the recruitment:

• We have retained the search firm m/Oppenheim Associates to assist in finding and screening candidates. We’ve worked successfully with m/Oppenheim in the past to fill senior roles at the Foundation. They know us well, and we trust they’ll do a great job with this hire.
• The full position description is available on the Wikimedia Foundation site,  hosted at jobs.wikimedia.org.
• The hiring process will unfold over the next three to six months; we hope to have a new Executive Director in place by October. That said, we’re going to take the time we need to find the best possible candidate. We are glad to restate that our current Executive Director, Sue Gardner, will stay with us throughout the recruitment process until we have a new Executive Director in place.
• Following initial screening of the candidates a short-list of applicants will be interviewed by Board members and members of the senior staff, and we will encourage them to get involved with the Wikimedia community (if they aren’t already) to learn more about our movement. (We would also encourage anyone interested in the role to take a look at our guiding principles, or to pick up one of the books documenting and describing the Wikimedia movement.)
• We’ve set up some pages on meta wiki, the central collaboration wiki, where Wikimedia community members can find more information and also get involved in a public discussion about the role and the recruitment process.

Thanks in advance for helping spread the word about this rare and important opportunity.

Kat Walsh
Chair, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation

MediaWiki, the software that powers most of the Wikimedia movement, is an amazing piece of technology. It brings the power of a wiki-world to millions of people. Not only those who are amongst the 500 million who visit a Wikimedia movement site each month, but also those who participate on one of the countless other wikis it powers.

MediaWiki is being used in all kinds of environments, from internal and private corporate wikis to other Free Culture wikis. That is, of course, the great benefit behind Free and Open Source Software; the software can be modified and used in new situations the original authors didn’t necessarily expect.

Because the Wikimedia Foundation wants the MediaWiki project to be as healthy as possible, and also address the needs of as many different constituencies as possible, the Foundation invests a lot of time and effort into ensuring the entire MediaWiki community feels empowered, not just those that happen to have an @wikimedia.org email address. You can see this effort most notably from the Engineering Community Team and the efforts especially around volunteer coordination and outreach.

To encourage further outside investment in MediaWiki, we are opening a Request for Proposals (RFP) (PDF) for the release management of MediaWiki. The long-term goal of this effort is to jump-start these activities as community-supported functions, thus encouraging widespread leadership in the future of MediaWiki.

The process for this RFP is a community-involved one. There is a three-week period for organizations to prepare and submit their proposals, after which the community can comment on and ask questions of the proposers. The Wikimedia Foundation will take all of this feedback into account when making the final decision for who will lead the release management of MediaWiki for the next year.

With this, the future of MediaWiki looks bright, and we’re excited to see where this will lead us!

Greg Grossmeier, Release Manager
Rob Lanphier, Director of Platform Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation

The fantastic lobster statue Gamba de Mariscal can be viewed in Barcelona, Spain. The image was also highlighted on Barcelona’s website for a few weeks!

Sometimes it’s hard to know what is art and what is not. Then the structured lists that we have prepared will surely help! The Parkbank (Eng: Park bench) can be found in the Museumspark in Linz, Austria.

Artwork comes in all sizes. Some artwork, such as Ohel (Eng: The Tent) in Ramat-Gan, is really large…

…While other artwork, such as a Japanese netsuke, is very small. This one can be found in the collections of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, Sweden.

Finland has many works of art, but only a few can be photographed, as Finland sadly lacks Freedom of Panorama for artwork. The beautiful Keisarinnankiviä in Helsinki is however one of the pieces that can be photographed because of its age!

This May, organizers in several countries have inaugurated an international photo event called Wiki Loves Public Art, a short contest that focuses on the great public works of art around us. The contest has been organized in Austria, Finland, Israel, Spain (Barcelona) and Sweden by the Wikimedia movement in cooperation with Europeana, and with great support from many local organizations, institutions and our fantastic volunteers.

Art plays a central role in all societies and cultures and is an integral part of what makes us human. To better understand art is to better understand ourselves; through this contest the Wikimedia movement has invited everyone to take pictures of the public works of art that are part of our lives!

Some people have wondered why we initiated a new contest instead of simply making works of art a part of the great Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) contest. It is indeed a relevant question, and something we thought long and hard about. However, we believe that through this contest we can reach a new group of volunteers, consisting of art lovers and photographers, and also associated organizations and GLAMs. Making these new and more focused contacts would be harder had we simply added even more objects to an already giant contest.

We also believe that there is room for more than one Wikimedia photo contest per year and we tried to put a reasonable amount of time between the two (taking many factors into consideration, such as: holidays, the weather and the time between the end and start of the WLM contest, so that volunteers and staff can recover a bit). More importantly we have also tried to make it as easy as possible for volunteers to participate by following the structure and technical framework used during WLM. This also enabled us to reuse many of the tools developed for WLM.

Wiki Loves Public Art uses the same approach as WLM, with each of the national contests being separate, but able to submit ten of their best pictures for the international contest. These pictures are then judged by the international jury, which will award prizes to the best of the best. The winner of the international contest will win a traveler’s cheque worth 500 euros, with the runner-up receiving 300 euros and the second runner-up 200 euros. Europeana will also award the winners with a high-quality print of their beautiful image.

Due to a lack of national databases of artwork in most countries (Israel being the exception), the organizing teams have had to work hard on retrieving data to build these lists. As a result, this first year the focus has been on organizing the contest in a few pilot cities in each country. The response so far has been fantastic, with many lists flooded by new pictures, especially the lists for Barcelona and Vienna!

Encouraged by this, we hope to expand to more locations next year. Perhaps your city or country has some great artwork that could be photographed? Either outdoors, or if you lack Freedom of Panorama in your country, perhaps public domain art in museums?

In Sweden, Wikimedia Sverige, with financial backing from Vinnova, has pioneered the development of an open database of public art for the entire country, and with a public API. This database, and the experiences gained from this project, could be used by other Wikimedia chapters and organizations wishing to gather data about public artwork from cities and municipalities in their countries.

This year, however, the focus in Sweden is on artwork in museums, and this has helped us establish new collaborations with nine art museums. By the end of the contest we will have had five special events at these museums, where our volunteers also get free entrance.

Currently, at the halfway point of the contest, we have had approximately 5,000 uploads of 1,400 different works of art. With 10 more days to go, we are very excited about the outcome of the contest in its first year. We hope to be able to arrange Wiki Loves Public Art again in coming years, of course with even more countries participating! So do contact your local city or municipality and ask if they have a database and would like the world to experience their works of art online.

John Andersson
International coordinator for Wiki Loves Public Art
Wikimedia Sverige

This post is available in 2 languages:

Español  • English

English

Flow is a planned improvement to discussion and collaboration in the MediaWiki software. The project is currently in the design phase and the Wikimedia Foundation is actively seeking feedback and suggestions about how to make the best possible product for you, our community of contributors.

There are many reasons for us to revamp our discussion and collaboration system, but for now we’re going to focus on three primary use cases:

• Users expect and deserve a modern and intuitive discussion interface: Talk pages—as a discussion technology—are antiquated and user-hostile. Experienced editors lose a lot of valuable time dealing with people who can’t figure out how to reply to messages or who need assistance with things like signing their posts.
• Users are surprised by the cultural norms of the community: Many things about the culture that has grown up around talk pages (such as “talkback” templates or being able to change other people’s comments) are confusing or inefficient.
• We believe that a modern user-to-user discussion system will improve the projects: Better methods for collaboration will improve collaboration, which will help good editors be more productive.

We have set up three “portals” where people can go to get more information and to leave feedback. At these portals, you will find links to detailed user tests, use cases and other kinds of research, as well as visions about what Flow can become.

The portals are:

• On Meta Wiki
• On the English Wikipedia
• On MediaWiki.org

In order to help you get a feel for how Flow might work, we’ve built an interactive prototype. Please note that this is only a demo and is not reflective of the final product, which may look and behave entirely different. Nothing will be saved on the prototype and you can’t really break it so have fun!

Please read more about the Flow prototype, what it can do, what is planned and known issues with it at one of these locations:

• On Meta Wiki
• On the English Wikipedia
• On MediaWiki.org

How can I help?

I’m glad you asked.

We are actively seeking feedback of all kinds from our user community. This is not restricted to our editors — readers are welcome to comment, too! There are many, many use cases and scenarios that we want to account for and we need to know what those are. We’re interested in hearing about anything that is important to you. Your concerns, your enthusiasm, your ideas for features.

It is very important for us that you be involved in helping to design this bold step, so please go to the portal of your choice and get involved in the conversation.

Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
Read the rest of this entry »

This post is available in 2 languages:

Español  • English

Español

Wikipedia en español supera el millón de artículos

Este 16 de mayo de 2013, la comunidad de Wikipedia en español anunció un nuevo récord de edición, cuando «La enciclopedia libre» superó la barrera del millón de artículos.

Wikipedia es la enciclopedia más grande, más actualizada y de más rápido crecimiento en todo el mundo, caracterizada por ser libre, multilingüe y escrita únicamente por voluntarios de todo el mundo, que trabajan en forma colaborativa. Actualmente cuenta con más de 25 millones de artículos en 271 idiomas. Solo Wikipedia en español recibe cerca de 2 millones de visitas por hora, y es la segunda versión de la enciclopedia con más usuarios: hoy cuenta con 16 590 usuarios activos. Es uno de los sitios más visitados de Internet, con lectores que van desde estudiantes y docentes, hasta periodistas, políticos, científicos, artistas y gente de la comunidad civil.

La tecnología wiki es lo que permite que sus artículos puedan ser modificados por cualquier persona mediante un navegador web. Sus contenidos están bajo la licencia libre Creative Commons Atribución-CompartirIgual 3.0, que posibilita a los usuarios copiar y modificar el trabajo de terceros, basándose en un principio conocido como copyleft. La base de datos, además, puede ser descargada gratuitamente. Pero el proyecto no se trata solamente de tomar la información necesaria. La enciclopedia funciona gracias a que millones de colaboradores dedican incontables horas de su tiempo libre a mejorar el contenido disponible en la web, desde corregir errores tipográficos, gramaticales y ortográficos, hasta extender artículos y crear nuevas entradas sobre personajes, lugares e hitos históricos desconocidos.

Es en este espíritu de colaboración que, a pocos días de cumplir 12 años, Wikipedia en español ha superado el hito del millón de artículos. No se trata solo de un millón de entradas diferentes, sino del trabajo conjunto de cientos de miles de personas en todo el mundo de habla hispana que, con su contribución individual, aportan a la creación de un proyecto colectivo que está en permanente actualización. Los editores provienen de diversos puntos del globo, de las más variadas profesiones, edades y culturas. Muchos de ellos ya no editan más, otros permanecen como colaboradores pero, invariablemente, todos dejan un poco de sí mismos como legado para la humanidad.

Wikipedia es fiel reflejo del dinamismo del saber y del mundo moderno, uno de los mayores logros de la sociedad del conocimiento. Es una enciclopedia viva.

Millars, Wikimedia España

Read the rest of this entry »

This post is available in 2 languages:

На русском языке  • English

English

Muscovite Aliona Bogdanova’s path to editing Wikipedia came circuitously through her vegetarian diet, a diet, she said, that was at odds with the way most Russians view nutrition.

“When I was a child, I found out that where meat comes from. I decided that it’s not fair to kill animals to get meat,” she said. Her decision was not viewed favorably. “My family, they wouldn’t let me not eat meat because in Russia, people generally believe that it’s impossible not to eat meat and if you stop eating meat, you die!”

Aliona Bogdonova and her son

When she was 20, Bogdanova researched online how to create a proper vegetarian diet and became a vegetarian. She has, however, met resistance along the way, especially when she started her family.

“When I got pregnant, lots of people asked me questions, how can you possibly carry a child and not eat meat because you’re pregnant and you must eat meat?” said Bogdanova. “So I had a breastfeeding consultant who advised me to eat a little piece of meat at least once a week. I didn’t do it because I would, you know, poison myself.”

Bogdanova said she was able to find useful information in Russian about vegetarianism and animal rights on sites like Wikipedia, but, “there’s in general very little information about breastfeeding in Russia, and that has to do with the Soviet school stopping with how people have thought about this.”

Bogdanova has taken passionately to sharing what she’s learned about health and parenting with people seeking information on Russian Wikipedia.

“I wrote several articles about food, about vegetarianism. I edited some articles about parenting, natural parenting,” she said. “But I remember, my first big article is about marzipan because I’m a fan of marzipan. There was only a few words about it and maybe no article at all, and I just knew what I should write.”

To fill the time while at home during her pregnancy, Bogdanova took up soap making as a hobby. Before long it turned into a business. “When you make soap, eventually you end up making too much and eventually comes a point where…you can’t possibly use so much and you can’t find enough friends who you could give it as a gift,” she said. “I use Wikipedia as a research tool (it has so many useful links) and I share things that I learn from my business on Wikipedia, so that everyone can learn.”

Bogdanova is also translating a book about homeschooling, the Teenage Liberation Handbook, into Russian. It’s her first serious translation effort.

Natural curiosity and research drew her to Wikipedia years ago and she credits her upbringing with keeping her in the community of contributors.

“I can’t, you know, pass by something that I can improve,” she said. “Because I grew up in the family of teachers, I was raised on the idea that talking like an encyclopedia is an important scholarly work, and so when I wrote in Wikipedia, I had the sense that I had contributed to this.”

She added, “Once in a while, I find out that somebody has come across this article that I have created about homeschooling, for example, and then I am really proud.”

Profile by Donna Peterson, Communications Volunteer, Wikimedia Foundation

Read the rest of this entry »

This post is available in 2 languages:

Español  • English

English

The Spring 2013 semester was a busy one for Wikipedia projects at ITESM-Campus Ciudad de México in Mexico, building on the success of prior work and starting new activities.

Medical English class

Two classes of Medical English, an advanced-level English as a foreign language course for medical professionals, worked with Wikipedia in Spanish and English as well as Wikimedia Commons. The Commons project was first, with students uploading more than 60 photos related to their future professions, including photographs of hospitals, campus classrooms, and laboratory activities for their other courses. The next project was to translate medicine related articles from the English Wikipedia to the Spanish Wikipedia. Not only is this process a good way to introduce Wikipedia writing style, formatting and technological requirements, but it is also helpful to the Spanish Wikipedia, which has fewer medicine-related articles than the English version. Twenty four articles were translated including Artificial pancreas, Amaurosis Fugax, Binge drinking and Abdominal pregnancy. The final project was to create a new article or augment an existing article in English Wikipedia, preferably one with a topic related to Mexico. This effort resulted in 29 articles created or expanded including Dorsal nexus, Embryology of the heart, Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Médicas y Nutrición Salvador Zubirán, the Mexican Red Cross, and the History of smallpox in Mexico.

International Baccalaureate CAS

Students from the International Baccalaureate program at the high school level have now been working with Wikipedia for three semesters to fulfill hours needed for the CAS (Creativity, Action and Service) hours, working on various projects. Participating students for the this semester were Xibsuarz, MichiKiske17, Salcedo95, Piskysama4, Aerozt, and EdmundoGuadarrama.

They have continued to work on articles related to the ongoing project with the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, translating articles on artists such as Álvaro Zardoni as well as creating articles in English. Following their own interests, other articles were translated from English to Spanish, such as Incidente de la colina Flagstaff, Antojito (expanded), Cheonggyecheon, Laima, Abrahadabra (Thelema), Aeon (Thelema), Tsundere, and Fujiko F. Fujio. In addition to creating content on their own, students assisted with the judging of the Holy Week in Mexico photo contest and the descriptions and uploading of the donation of 2,100 images from ITESM campus archives into Wikimedia Commons (both detailed below).

Read the rest of this entry »