Earlier today, English Wikinews adopted the usability beta as a default interface. The usability team is thrilled that en.wikinews community has reached the consensus to be the first adopter of the usability beta as default. We will continue enhancing the interface to simplify and make it easy to navigate and edit.  Our sincere appreciation goes to the entire en.wikinews community for embracing our work. It is a great day for the usability team. We feel blessed.

Naoko Komura, Program Manager, Usability Initiative

It’s not far from the old home, but it’s almost three times as big and can very comfortably hold the 28 (and growing!) local Wikimedia Foundation staff. Our new offices at 149 New Montgomery, just south of Market street in San Francisco have very quickly become the new home base for the small group that keeps the Wikimedia Foundation alive and kicking.

Our new offices span the entire third floor of this grand old office building on the little New Montgomery street, immediately across from the impressive (though currently completely abandoned) Pacific Bell headquarters.  With exposed brick, funky (and practical!) earthquake reinforcement bracing, exposed duct work and miles of ethernet cables, and the biggest, brightest windows you could possible ask for – it now feels like Wikimedia has found a true home – and there’s still some room to expand!

We’ll spend the first few months feeling out the space, moving furniture around and figuring out the best way to arrange work groups.  For now our tech and usability team sits on the west side of the space while fundraising, strategy, legal, communications, and administration rest on the east side. We also have an unusually large rack-space room in the back of the office, which for the time being will host our email and file-servers… but who knows what the future will bring.

The show-stopper in our new space is a custom-built Wikipedia globe sign by our friends at Because We Can, a custom build shop in Oakland, CA.  They’re also building us some economical and high quality rolling white boards that we’ll roll around the space to dry-erase collaborate ourselves into oblivion.  We’ll have more to say about this stunning sign latter on this week, including some secret features.

Right now almost all Wikimedia staff have converged on this location, including our previously displaced usability team.  Several staff still work remotely, but everyone was in town last week for our recent all-staff meeting.

We hope to have some guests come by the office soon, and we’ll look forward to Wikipedians passing through who can sign our guest list and see how things work from the inside out.  For more photos check out the category on the Wikimedia Commons.  If you pass through, be sure to tag and add your own shots.

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

New watch/unwatch and cascading tabs

Thanks for trying out the usability beta. Close to 280,000 people tried out the usability beta and about 220,000 people continue using it. One of the most-frequently reported frustration about the beta was that (1) watch/unwatch was hidden under the drop-down menu and (2) tabs overlaps when the browser is scaled down or the resolution is low. Tab issues were more significant for language communities whose words tend to be long such as German. We are also simplifying the search box to simplify the interface and in order to minimize the overlapping side-effect. Those new features are currently staged on the prototype wikis in English, German, Japanese, Arabic, Serbian, Russian, and Sinhala. You need to log-in in order to see watch/unwatch tabs. The screenshot on the right is the shot when the browser window is scaled down to 640×480. “View History” is moved to drop down menu in order to keep “Read” and “Edit” tabs visible. Let us know your feedback here.

Naoko Komura, Project Manager, Usability Initiative

Update on November 18th: Thank you for your support and feedback. These features are now available in the usability beta across all Wikimedia projects.

The good folks at Google Custom Search, in cooperation with experienced Wikipedian Mathias Schindler, have developed a “Google Custom Search skin” for Wikipedia that can be activated by following these instructions. In addition to using Google to search for Wikipedia articles, it makes it possible to search linked Wikipedia articles, as well as the content of linked external websites, using a simple tabbed interface. See the post at the Google Blog for more information.

This is a community initiative, not an official new feature developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, so we make no guarantees of any kind for its operation. It does show how much bottom-up innovation is possible thanks to Wikimedia’s open APIs and scripting interfaces. We’re very happy that Google has built this alternative new way to search Wikipedia. Please provide feedback below, or to the Google Custom Search team here.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

OpenMoko (Om), a company that previously created an open source smartphone, has just launched The WikiReader, a dedicated reader device with an offline copy of the entire English Wikipedia (without images) stored on a small chip. With two AAA batteries, the WikiReader will run for several months, as it’s been optimized for low power consumption. The device has a simple LCD touchscreen and three buttons for searching, viewing random pages, and looking up previously viewed pages.

Building such a device is possible because, unlike most information on the web, Wikipedia content is freely licensed, allowing anyone to copy, modify, and re-use it for any purpose, including commercial uses. We’ve played with the device and given feedback during the development phase, but it’s not a Wikimedia Foundation product, and we make no guarantees of any kind for its operation.

The device showcases a great opportunity that free educational content creates: information from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects can be packed into self-contained devices, including purpose-built ones like the WikiReader, without requiring any kind of Internet connectivity. In other words, it is very much possible to get a copy of the most comprehensive encyclopedia in human history to every person on the planet who would benefit from it.

While this device is targeted at least initially at users in the developed world, the software running on the WikiReader is open source, so that other projects can re-use it in whole or in part. (Information about that will go up on their website soon.) We welcome it as a creative new distribution method for Wikipedia content. Congratulations to Om for launching this product; we wish them the best of luck in the marketplace.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

We have a lot of cool stuff that got pushed out today. I’m really excited to tell you about it. First of all, Derk-Jan Hartman (github: hartman) has been hard at work bringing us NetFront support. NetFront is the HTML rendering backend to many devices. Here is a list of the devices that Derk’s hard work has given us blessed access to.

• Most SonyEricsson Phones
• Nintendo Wii
• Sony PS3
• Sony PSP

He’s also working on Opera Mini support and has done a lot of awesome refactors on the code. Fixing many an embarrassing lines of code for me. Its great to see other people chipping into the project and I know for me personally, its a big inspiration to see people giving their time to help this project out!

Now, on to a small tweak that we made to the subcategory expansion system. Its a really small change, but should make using the app even easier. If you want to expand a subcategory, clicking on the title of the category gets the job done. No more having to aim your finger at the “Show” button. Obviously, it also hides if you do it when the section is visible. Its these types of changes that are my favourite. Someone might not even notice it, but it should make their usage of the site a litttttle bit easier.

We’ve also done various and sundry internal changes. We got a patch from Jacques Crocker to use Bundler to manage our Gems. Getting the capistrano part right on that was a bit difficult and so we had a little downtime today while I was working out those kinks. But, from now on, it should be much, much easier to get a local copy of Wikimedia Mobile up and running on your system.

We’ve also expanded the number of supported languages recently. All of this is thanks to the tireless work of Niklas Laxström and others from the TranslateWiki project. They were very helpful in building an API for us to import new languages. I wrote a couple rake tasks and Ruby bits to make it all go. So, now all you have to do is type `rake lang:import` and it will download the freshest strings you’ve ever parsed.

Here is an updated list of all of the languages we support: af, ak, ar, az, bg, bn, br, bs, ca, cy, de, dsb, el, en, eo, es, eu, fi, fr, gl, gv, he, hi, hr, hsb, hu, ia, id, is, it, ja, ka, km, kn, ko, ksh, kw, lb, li, lv, mg, mk, mt, nl, no, oc, pl, pms, ps, pt, ro, ru, sah, sh, sk, sl, su, sv, te, th, tr, uk, vec, vi, wo, and xal. I really have no idea what most of those languages are, but I’m also super happy to support them. And, I’d like to welcome the newest member to our class: Akan (ak), comes to us from Ghana! I know, cool right? Technically, its not a language but an Ethnologue. (Must stop myself from reading too much about this on Wikipedia… and finish this post)

Well folks, that’s it for the moment. Now that I’ve completed my move to another continent you should be seeing a lot more updates coming through on the mobile site. I’m really excited about where we are going and I’m also excited to reveal the results of our survey in the next couple weeks. Some really interesting and exciting things in there!

Hampton Catlin, Mobile Development Lead

I would like to announce that some of the new media features are now available in gadget form on Wikimedia Commons and the English Wikipedia. These include a new ogg player, the add media wizard, and firefogg upload support. I hope having these components in gadget form will enable some more testing and feedback :)

Getting Started to enable these components you must turn on the mwEmbed gadget. You can turn it on by visiting your preferences page. Once you enable the gadget you should shift reload to ensure you have a fresh copy of the JavaScript. (note you will need to enable the gadget for each wiki you want to test (ie both for wikimedia commons and Wikipedia). Once enabled you can check out the following features: (more…)

After many a hearty SQL battle, we finally have click tracking deployed on the wikimedia projects!

Data on button usage

What’s being tracked?

Which buttons are clicked on the toolbar during editing

What information is being recorded?

The button clicked, the time of the click, total edit count of the user clicking, and edit count for the last 1, 3, 6 months

What information is NOT being recorded?

Individually identifiable information of any sort (eg who exactly clicked what) and anything that would violate our privacy policy in general

Why?

As we revamp the UI, rather than randomly throwing buttons up there we think are pretty (we think they’re all pretty), we thought we’d put buttons up and features that people actually use. Novel, right?

What about the edit history and stuff?

We figure the way a novice editor uses the toolbar is different form a ‘power’ editor, and that there’s probably some gradation in between. Is there? Well, that’s what we hope to find out…

Nimish Gautam, Research Analyst

Fixed an ugly internal caching bug which could break renamed image redirects on Commons being accesses from other non-English sites. Hopefully that’s most of those solved now. :)

Slides for my talk at SVG Open available for download as PDF or Keynote source. (I can make my test corpus available as well — let me know if interested!)

Brion Vibber, Lead Software Architect