Calling all educators, researchers, programmers and free culture movement participates –anyone with a focused interest in Wikimedia projects: we want you to share!

Wikimania, the annual global event devoted to all Wikimedia projects, is now open for program submissions. This year’s conference is open to the public and will be held July 9-11, 2010 in Gdańsk, Poland. Conference organizers are accepting submissions for presentations, workshops, tutorials and panels related to Wikimedia projects. Submissions should address one of three conference tracks:

• People and Community
• Knowledge and Collaboration
• Infrastructure

To participate, please send submissions no later than May 20; acceptance notifications will be sent by May 25 for workshops and May 31 for panels, tutorials and presentations.  For more information see Call for Participation or visit the the official Wikimania 2010 site.

If you’re interested in the future of Wikimedia projects or have important insights to share with the rest of the community, please submit proposals now.  Registration for general attendees will be available soon.

See you in Gdańsk!

Moka Pantages

Communications

Today Fox News published a story that irresponsibly smeared the Wikimedia projects and a member of the Wikimedia Foundation’s staff, Erik Moeller. The story repeats serious falsehoods and offers information taken grossly out of context, resulting in what amounts to a deliberate misrepresentation of reality.

Wikipedia is highly visible, and not uncontroversial. The Wikimedia Foundation wants to provide an environment in which staff and editors can do their work free of harassment and slander. The Wikimedia Foundation is appalled and angry that Erik’s employment with us has resulted in him becoming a target, and we believe that recklessly maligning him is indefensible. Erik is a principled and valued employee: we are proud to support him.

On the topic of allegedly illegal materials on Wikipedia and our projects: The Wikimedia Foundation obeys the law. In the weeks since Sanger’s published allegations, the Wikimedia Foundation has not been contacted by the FBI or any other law-enforcement agency with regard to allegedly illegal content on any Wikimedia projects. Our community of volunteer editors takes action to remove illegal material when such material is brought to its attention. The Wikimedia Foundation is proud of the Wikimedia editors who zealously work to keep the projects free of illegal material. If and when we are informed by law enforcement agencies of illegal content that has not already been removed through self-policing, we will take quick action to delete it.

(UPDATE) Erik Moeller has posted a detailed response in his personal blog as well.

Once again in 2010, Wikimedia Foundation is participating in Google Summer of Code.  I’m happy to announce that we’ve selected six students to participate this summer:

• Extension management platform
  Student: Jeroen De Dauw
  Mentor: Brion Vibber
  Goal: Creating an awesome extension management platform for MediaWiki, facilitating the installation, updating, removal and configuration of extensions. (student application)
• Improve metadata support
  Student: Brian Wolff
  Mentor: Chad Horohoe
  Goal: Improve metadata support for uploaded media in mediawiki by displaying embedded IPTC and XMP metadata (student application)
• General RDF export/import in Semantic MediaWiki
  Student: Samuel Lampa
  Mentor: Denny Vrandecic
  Goal: Extend the import/export functionality of Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) to allow also full, general RDF import. (student application)
• Javascript overhaul of Semantic MediaWiki
  Student: Sanyam Goyal
  Mentor: Yaron Koren
  Goal: Improve and extend the Javascript for Semantic MediaWiki and some of its spinoff extensions, most notably Semantic Forms – this would include transferring over much of the Javascript to use the jQuery library, which is now becoming a MediaWiki standard. (student application)
• Wikisource Legal Tool
  Student: Stephen LaPorte
  Mentor: Ariel Glenn
  Goal: Creating a tool to format judicial decisions, legal scholarship, and statutes for Wikisource. (student application)
• Reasonably efficient interwiki template transclusion
  Student: Peter Potrowl
  Mentor: Roan Kattouw
  Goal: The aim is to allow MediaWiki users to insert (transclude) templates from a wiki to another on WikiMedia Foundation (WMF) wikis (Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, etc.). (student application)

We had an exceptional set of really great proposals this year, and an engaged mentor group helping with the selection process. It was both wonderful to have so many choices, and really sad that we couldn’t pick them all, but in the end, we had to narrow the list down. Our six slots represent 100% growth from previous years’ Summer of Code engagements and that’s a pretty exciting stretch.

To the students that weren’t selected: do know that we were inspired by the quality level of all of the proposals, and we had to turn down some really exceptional proposals. Please don’t be discouraged, and do consider us next year!

To the students selected: congratulations! Welcome aboard! We really look forward to working with you to make sure you are successful and have a great time in the process.

To everyone volunteering as a mentor who helped with the selection process: thank you for your effort and dedication! There was a lot to sort through, but I think we can all feel great that we have a group of very capable students on the case this year thanks to your work.

More detailed info available here.

Towards the Fun!

We’re currently looking for a Head of Office Administration.

The Wikimedia Foundation has experienced, and will continue to experience, growth and organizational change over the next several years.  The Head of Office Administration will be a senior administrative position based at our headquarters in San Francisco and will play a key role during this exciting period of change.  This position will be responsible for managing, planning, and coordinating various administrative business operations geared toward achieving internal operational excellence in support of the organization’s staff allowing them in return to focus on the success of our projects.

This is your chance to play a central role in the success of one of the most important knowledge projects in history.

Please visit the job openings page to read more about this opportunity and learn what it takes to be considered!

Daniel Phelps, Human Resources

Here’s a quick update on how users of Wikimedia Commons (the image repository for Wikipedia and our other projects) responded to the usability improvements and user interface changes which took place earlier this month on April 5.

The new interface was introduced to anonymous users and users whose skin setting was set to default (MonoBook, the style that’s still visible on Wikipedia) at the time of the switch. About 10,600 users had been logged in sometime between when the switch happened on April 5th and April 14 th, a little over a one week period. We observed about 1,000 users switched back to the previous default skin, MonoBook, which represents about 9% of logged in users for the same time period. These numbers are still preliminary as we need to monitor for at least for a month to compare with the editor activity statistics for Commons.

We are processing the feedback and plan to publish it soon, but here are a few of the most frequently expressed feedback.

Q: Where did the watch/unwatch tab go?

A: The Watch/Unwatch tab is now the tab with the star as seen in the image below. Watch/Unwatch was once in the drop-down menu, but since the early beta feedback indicated that it is frequently used task, it was moved up to the top tab navigation. The star is used to minimize the tab width. For languages such as German and Greek, whose words tend to be long, the screen real-estate for tabs is limited. And using the star is one way to provide an universal solution.

Q: Why don’t my tools and scripts work any more?

A: Although the user experience team had reached out to the script writers and gadget writers in advance through blogs and messages via Village Pump, it takes a while for all scripts to be compatible with the new skin, Vector. We’re working on many of these features now.

Q: MonoBook was working fine for me, why change?
Multiple usability studies revealed that new editors with little or no experience in editing Wikimedia projects have a hard time navigating to get to the article and apply a simple formatting edit. The new usability improvements bring a simplified approach in navigation, the expandable toolbar depending on your edit tasks, built-in help systems, easy-to-find special characters, and wizards to add links and and tables. By making the editing experience easy, the hurdles to join Wikimedia projects will be lowered. By inviting more editors to Wikimedia projects, it will increase the potential quality the articles. Thus our ecosystem gets healthier.

Q: How do I switch back?

A: Follow the “New!” link, and go to “Take me back” section. You can also change your settings under appearance and editing in your user preferences.

Lastly, ArséniureDeGallium created a new Userbox template called “User Vector skin” for users who like Vector. Steven Walling ported it to English Wikipedia. The exact schedule of the switch for English Wikipedia is still to be determined, but it is likely sometime in May. We will send out update as the plan finalizes.

(UPDATE The survey feedback as of April 21 is available here.)

Thank you for your interest,
Naoko Komura,
Head of User Experience Programs, Wikimedia Foundation

Based on several usability studies, the usability user experience team has identified that template text and syntax is a major hindrance to new users, making them feel less comfortable editing pages.

As such, one approach that we’ve been experimenting with is collapsing templates into expandable “capsules”. This improves the readability of the wikitext.^[1]

The full wikitext of the template is available with the expansion arrow. Additionally, a more user-friendly template editing form is available by clicking on the template name or the ‘pop-out’ symbol to the right of the name.

Since this is an experimental feature that is largely proof-of-concept, it does have a few limitations:

• Currently only works on Firefox with the editing iframe enabled
• Pasting content into the expanded template (or inserting a newline in Linux) can break the template, depending on the source of the content.
• The implementation is relatively slow, so slower and older computers can appear to hang, especially on pages with large templates
• Templates are not converted into capsules as you type; only templates that were there on initial page load are wrapped

We’re still working on these, but in the meantime, test it out on our sandbox^[2] and let us know what you think!

^[1]We’re working on making the displayed name more customizable on a per-template basis so the collapsed version more accurately summarizes what it’s collapsing, ie displaying the title of an infobox rather than the word “infobox”.

^[2]This is currently prepopulated with some articles about large US cities. For some good examples, check out:
New York City, Boston, or Chicago

An update from the user experience team …

Wikimedia Commons, the multimedia repository with over six million assets, has a brand new user interface and navigation today. This is the first roll out of the usability improvements to Wikimedia projects after English Wikinews and Wikimedia Strategic Planning adopted the usability beta as default interface during its early beta phase.

The highlight of improvements are:

• We are changing our default look to a new theme we call “Vector” which makes essential functions easier to find.
• Editing pages will be easier, thanks to a new editing toolbar that makes it simpler to insert links and tables, and a built-in “cheatsheet” to access help for the most commonly used functions.
• All users will also see that the site layout has changed noticeably. We’ve simplified the site navigation, relocated the search box to satisfy user expectations and to follow other web standards, reduced some of the clutter, and made sure that the new features work with different resolutions, browser formats, and window sizings.

(The multimedia user experience team is currently working to simplify the upload process and the new upload process will be available later this year.)

The details of the improvements can be found at our blog post from March 25.

We hope you find the new interface intuitive and easy to navigate.[1] If the new interface does not work out for you and if you prefer to stick to the classic look and feel, follow the “New!” link on the top of the page and go to the “Take me back!” section.

Our next roll-out is English Wikipedia. We are planning to introduce the new interface and navigation design to English Wikipedia towards the end of April.

Thank you for your interest,

Naoko Komura and the Wikimedia Foundation User Experience team

[1] The new toolbar is currently not supported in Internet explorer 8.

Today we’ve shared some exciting news about the newest member of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees, Bishakha Datta. The Wikimedia Board of Trustees is the governing body that oversees the Wikimedia Foundation, the US-based non-profit that operates Wikipedia.

Bishakha is the first Board member to join us who lives and works in India.  She brings a wealth of experience about outreach and empowerment among rural populations around the world, and as a journalist and filmmaker she also brings a deep awareness of media and communication to the Board.  And like so many of our supporters she’s got some big views on Wikipedia:

“Wikipedia is groundbreaking in so many ways. It’s an encyclopedia collaboratively created by hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world, and has become a primary point of reference. It’s a free knowledge resource, not just in English, but in so many of the languages that we speak everyday, and it’s a hybrid editing model where we both produce and consume reliable, authoritative and credible information.”

With Bishakha’s appointment we now have a full Board membership of ten.

Welcome aboard, Bishakha!

Jay Walsh, Communications

In November 2008, the Collaborative Creativity Group at UNU-Merit, in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation, launched the most comprehensive survey of Wikipedia readers and contributors ever conducted. The survey was translated into 20 languages and received more than 170,000 responses. In April 2009, we shared preliminary results of the survey, and in August 2009, a member of the UNU-Merit team presented the survey at Wikimania (slides are available online).

How can we recruit even more people to make Wikipedia a richer, deeper learning resource? For one thing, by making it easier to contribute (see our previous announcement). But, we also have to make our readers aware that their help is welcome, and ease them into taking the first steps to improving or creating an article. So, we’re funding the development of a slate of outreach resources such as brochures and videos that help people to get started, some of which target specific audiences like teachers and students.

Our partners are 27 regional Wikimedia chapter organizations, and anyone else who wants to help. Here are two recent examples.

Wikimedia Italia has funded the production of a 7 minute introductory video, “La Wikiguida di Wikipedia”. You can watch it on YouTube (with subtitles) below, or view or download the video in Ogg Theora format. It’s now linked to on every page of the Italian Wikipedia. The video was produced by Christian Biasco, and more videos are planned to be produced later this year.

If you don’t speak Italian, you may be interested in Howcast’s lovely introduction to creating a Wikipedia article, embedded below:

Produced with guidance from Swedish Wikipedia volunteer Lennart Guldbrandsson, it’s a fun and comprehensive intro, and uses Howcast’s powerful “how-to player” to guide viewers through the instructions. Howcast San Francisco, by the way, now resides in the offices previously used by the Wikimedia Foundation, so perhaps they were inspired by forgotten wiki paraphernalia. ;-)

The Wikimedia Foundation didn’t plan or commission these videos, but we’re very happy and grateful that they were made – we believe instructional video resources will be essential as we scale our efforts to recruit new editors. A big thank you to Wikimedia Italia and Howcast for leading by example. Moving forward, we are seeking opportunities to assist and encourage our chapters and individual volunteers in creating these types of outreach resources.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation