Several folks from the Wikimedia Foundation are participating in the two-day NY24 conference in San Jose. Now in its fourth year, the conference brings together non-profits, tech innovators, and potential funding partners to explore new challenges and opportunities in the tech space.  NetSquared is an initiative of TechSoup Global.

This year’s NetSquared is focussed on the ‘mobile challenge,’ highlighting new applications for mobile technology that can have a positive impact on the world.  Wikimedia is particularly interested in the opportunities of mobile donations, social engagement, and how projects like Wikipedia can engage broader audiences through the very rapidly expanding mobile web.

You can follow the conference twitter feed. You can learn about the 15 featured projects and weigh in with your thoughts as well.

A big thanks to TechSoup and the NetSquared team for organizing a great event and bringing together truly like-minded people.  And of course a thank you to the

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Today we announced some fantastic news. The proposal to see Wikimedia’s content adopt a new dual license system has been voted on and approved by the Wikimedia community.  With the full approval of our Board of Trustees, this now means that the Wikimedia Foundation will proceed with the implementation of a CC-BY-SA/GFDL dual license system on all of our project’s content. The new dual license will begin to come into effect in June.

A Q&A about the announcement has been posted on the Foundation wiki.  You can also find considerably more information, discussion, and details about the license change and the work of the license update committee on their meta page.

A huge thanks to the committee, to the folks at Creative Commons (who have also blogged on the topic), to Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, and to thousands of Wikimedia volunteers from around the world who both authored the content and voted to help make the proposal a reality.

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

The Wikipedia Usability Initiative has extended the application deadline for the Software Developer position till May 30th. We are recruiting two candidates for this position. Both local applicants to the San Francisco Bay Area and remote applicants are encouraged to apply. Please help spread the word.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Software_Developer_(project)

Naoko Komura
Wikipedia Usability Initiative

The Wikipedia Usability Initiative has extended the application deadline for the Software Developer position till May 30th. We are recruiting two candidates for this position. Both local applicants to the San Francisco Bay Area and remote applicants are encouraged to apply. Please help spread the word.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Software_Developer_(project)

Naoko Komura
Wikipedia Usability Initiative

As part of the Mozilla development grant Timothy in collaboration with other xiph hackers has been hard at work on improving the theora encoder. I am happy to share an updated report that Monty has put together. I will jump to the zinger:

“Test versions of Thusnelda are pulling *ahead* of h264 in terms of objective quality as bitrate increases”

These objective measurements are based on peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) values which are not always identical to subjective quality measurements. That being said PSNR is pretty standard objective measurement and good for same content comparisons (1)

New Theora encoder 1.5x

Original Theora Encoder 1.5x

Why is this good news for Wikimedia? Wikimedia only supports free file formats. So these improvements mean that every new video uploaded to commons in the near future will be on par with contemporary industry standard high quality proprietary codec. This highly reduces the subjective quality rational for using proprietary codecs.

Why are free codecs important? Wikimedia (and anyone else that wants to switch to free formats) won’t have to pay millions of dollars to in licensing costs to use the h.264 codec and won’t have to sacrifice quality in the process. More importantly it means anyone can encode or decode these files without paying for a license to do so. This means both free and proprietary software can support this format.  Where as previously only controlled free as in beer distributions like adobe flash could support video on the web.   It enables free software projects like firefogg to package the encoder and give it away for free. It helps opens up the video communication platform for distributed two-way communication.

I should also point out the Open video conference is happening mid June for people interested in an open video event.

Firefox 3.5 will be launching this summer (betas available now!) and will include support for downloading and using regular TrueType and OpenType fonts referenced from a style sheet.

This is also supported in Safari 3.1 and later, and apparently by the latest Opera betas as well.

It might be helpful for some language wikis to link in a free font this way, when standard fonts supporting their script are often unavailable. Right now on such sites there tends to be a little English link at the top such as ‘font help’ leading to a page like this telling you how to download and install a suitable font.

Internet Explorer afaik still only supports converted embedded (EOT) font files, which would require that we can either get our hands on an existing .eot version of each free font, or be able to generate one ourselves.

Note there’s an old feature request with an .eot copy of a Tamil font, but we never had authorship info on the font or cross-browser support, since .eot is only supported by IE.

Wikimedia is hiring!  If you enjoy keeping an office full of tech gear and hardworking staff running smoothly, we want to hear from you.  We’re a mostly MacOS and Ubuntu shop with a bit o’ Windows thrown in. We have the standard backup, vpn and phone issues of any smallish office, and we have a satellite space that you’d be supporting as well.

Think this job has your name on it? Then read the full job description and application details here at the WMF site, and get your cover letter and resume in to us by May 11.