Yesterday we discovered that WikiHow, a wiki neighbor of ours that provides user-generated ‘how-to’ info has hit the admirable 50,000 article milestone.

WikiHow provides their content freely in a creative commons license, they publish in multiple languages, and they run MediaWiki, the same open-source software that powers Wikipedia and thousands of other wikis around the world.  They’ve also been a hugely generous financial sponsor of previous Wikimania conferences.

Congrats to WikiHow and their dedicated volunteers.  Here’s to 50K more how-to articles!

Jay Walsh, Communications<

I’m delighted to tell you that John Broughton’s book “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual” has been made available for free on the English language Wikipedia. O’Reilly Media announced this the other day. This is terrific news and will not only enable Wikipedia users around the world to read John’s book but also to edit it.

John first contributed to Wikipedia in August 2005 and his biggest accomplishment so far was the writing of the Editor’s index to Wikipedia, a comprehensive list of reference pages and links to useful information and tools for Wikipedia editors.

“Wikipedia: The Missing Manual” teaches new users how to contribute to Wikipedia and gives practical advice on how to collaborate with others to improve the free encyclopedia’s content. The book has first been published at O’Reilly’s in January 2008 and can now be found on Wikipedia’s help pages.

Please join me in thanking John for this great gift!

Frank Schulenburg
Head of Public Outreach

Today the USA Network announced that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been chosen for their debut recognition award, Character Approved.  Jimmy is one of seven recipients – all of which are recognized figures in the arts, philanthropy, food, architecture, and technology.  The USA Network (a US-based cable TV operation) will run the spots featuring Jimmy and the other recipients over the next few weeks.  Jimmy’s videos can also be found on the award’s web portal.

And even more excellent, the recognition comes with a $10,000USD gift for a charity of the recipients choice.  Jimmy has chosen to share this gift with the non-profit project that started it all.  A big thanks to Jimmy.

Jay Walsh, Communications<

A printed book ordered through PediaPress.com

A few weeks ago, we rolled out a feature to allow users to generate PDF files, OpenDocument word processor files, and on-demand printed books in one of our smaller sister projects, Wikibooks. This same technology has now also been experimentally enabled on the German Wikipedia (thanks to Frank Schulenburg for creating a beautiful help page). Essentially, you can compile a wiki-book from any number of Wikipedia articles, download a PDF or OpenDocument version, or order a printed version from our technology partner, PediaPress. And if you like your book remixes, you can save them for others to use and share.

If you want to take your favorite Wikipedia articles with you on the go, or if you want to have a nicely formatted PDF version, or you want to edit them further in a word processor, this technology is for you. The reason this is being tested on the German Wikipedia, in case you were wondering, is that PediaPress is a German company, and they will be able to respond quickly to feedback directly from the German Wikipedia community. With more than 1.4 billion pageviews a month, the German Wikipedia is also the second most viewed language edition, right after English with 5.2 billion pageviews. We’ve dedicated some hardware to this feature, and testing it on the German Wikipedia will give us a good idea how it behaves under high traffic characteristics.

It should go without saying that all the code developed through this partnership is open source. In other words, if you want to set up your own wiki with PDF support, OpenDocument support, or connectivity to the PediaPress on-demand printing service, you can install the Collection Extension and enable it on your wiki. When we say free, we mean it.

If all goes well, this feature will become available in all Wikimedia projects where it makes sense. This technology has been developed with the generous support of the Commonwealth of Learning and the Open Society Institute.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

PS: In unrelated tech news, our CTO Brion Vibber has blogged about the AbuseFilter extension, an important tool whose development we’re supporting, which will help Wikipedians to deal more effectively with spam, vandalism, and other destructive user behavior. And if you haven’t seen it, also note his recent post about the Drafts feature that’s being tested, and which should help against accidental loss of edits.

Mozilla has awarded a grant of $100,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation to help coordinate improvements to the development of Ogg Theora and related open video technologies. Mozilla and Wikimedia share a strong commitment to open standards. Version 3.1 of the Mozilla Firefox web browser will include built-in support to play audio and video in the open source Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora formats. All audio and video in Wikipedia is stored in these formats. Mike Shaver, VP of Engineering at Mozilla has blogged about this great news, as has Chris Blizzard, Director of Evangelism for Mozilla.

Open standards for audio and video are important because they can be used by anyone for any purpose without royalties, and can be inspected and improved by an open community. Today, video and audio on the web are dominated by proprietary technologies, most frequently patent-encumbered codecs wrapped into closed-source player widgets. Wikimedia and Mozilla want to help to build a web where video and audio are first class citizens: easy to use and manipulate by anyone, without compulsory royalty schemes or other barriers to participation.

The $100,000 grant will be used to support the work of long-time contributors to the Ogg Theora/Vorbis codebase and related tools, such as libraries for network seeking. The improvements will be made over a 6 month period.

Erik Möller,
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

I hope you all had started the year 2009 with a positive note. I have a lot to be hopeful for 2009, but the most exciting thing for me is to launch the long-waited the Wikipedia Usability Initiative. This initiative became reality by the grant from the late Frank Stanton (the president of CBS between 1946 and 1971) through the Stanton Foundation.

The purpose of this initiative is to reduce the barriers for new users in editing Wikipedia and boost the participation in editing Wikipedia. I am currently focusing on bringing in talented minds.  On the space front, we had outgrown our current space in the South of Market area of San Francisco, and we were in search of space specifically for this project. I am happy to announce that Wikia has agreed to sublease two of their conference rooms to the Wikimedia Foundation for the project duration (Jan’09-Mar’10). Daniel collected a dozen bids for the space in SOMA, and Wikia matched the best offer. Wikia is only two blocks away from the office of the Wikimedia Foundation, so having a satellite office so close by works great for us.

Wikia has been doing intensive work on the usability front and making the code available to public, so I look forward to collaborating with the Wikia technical and product teams to exchange ideas and learn from their work. The Wikpedia Usability Initiative page where we can exchange ideas and share the status is up. I look forward to your ideas there.

May the force be with us,

Naoko Komura

Program Manager<

So you want to run a top-10 web site? Now’s your chance…

We’re now hiring for a full-time system administrator to help monitor, maintain, and document the 400+ Linux/Unix servers that operate Wikipedia and its sister projects. This position will be based at our San Francisco headquarters, but will work closely with our remote staff and volunteers.

Currently, system administration tasks are spread over our other tech staff and volunteers, who have to split their time with software development, data center management, and network planning. A full-time system administrator will let us be more responsive to site issues when they happen, and more importantly be more proactive about planning for and averting problems before they affect the folks back home.

We’ve got operating systems to upgrade, configurations to document, software installations to automate, and a lot of service data that needs to be monitored and digested… if you think you’ve got the chops for it, send us your CV by the end of January!

Brion Vibber
CTO, Wikimedia Foundation

Eight years ago today Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia.  It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. Wikipedia has become one of the senior sites on the web, growing from a top 1000 site shortly after its creation to the fourth most visited site on the web in the last few months.

And on its eighth birthday Wikipedia exists in 265 languages and well over 10million articles – with thousands and thousands of active editors.

This morning Jimmy conducted an interview on CBC Radio’s “Q” – a national morning show broadcast across Canada and on Sirius satellite radio.  The interview will be ported to podcast a bit later today.  Take a listen to hear the founder recount the history of one of the greatest projects on the web.

Congratulations to all the volunteers who have built Wikipedia from a grand idea to a truly grand project.  Here’s to many more years!

Jay Walsh, Communications

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Earlier today the Foundation announced in a press release that Roger McNamee, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Elevation Partners (and a professional musician!) has joined the Wikimedia Advisory Board.  Roger’s been working with the Foundation since before our move to the bay area, both as an active supporter of Wikipedia and the Foundation’s project, and helping to introduce us to many new stakeholders and like-minded organizations.

Welcome, Roger!

Jay Walsh, Communications<

Wow.

It’s been a nice few weeks in fundraising for Wikimedia Foundation.  Our users have demonstrated overwhelming support for our projects and our mission.

We’ve more than passed our initial fundraising goal of $6 million (though you are still encouraged to make a donation…bolstering our reserves in preparation for the years ahead is always welcome) with over 130,000 people making a statement for open and free information.

I love being able to say that.  Thank our donors again for their support.

That said, we’ll be taking down the site notices/banners today at 4pm PST.  We’ll be sending out some news next week (approaching the 8th anniversary of Wikipedia) with some new geographic breakdown data about giving.

-Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving<