Today, we’re launching a new upload wizard in beta phase to make it easier to contribute multimedia works to Wikimedia Commons. “Commons” is the free, collaborative media repository associated with all Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. Although Commons contains over 7 million images, videos and sounds, uploading a file has long been an arduous path reserved to the most adventurous souls. The new upload wizard aims to make the uploading experience simpler and more pleasant for all users.

The upload wizard allows multiple files to be uploaded at the same time.

The new upload tool consists of a step-by-step wizard guiding the user through the successive stages of the process, rather than presenting a huge complicated form. It allows the user to upload multiple files at once, and grant permission for them in batch.

The wizard integrates our brand new illustrated licensing tutorial to help new participants understand the basics of copyright and free licenses. Since its publication, the tutorial has been translated and localized into about eighteen languages, and more are underway.

This new feature is one of the main outcomes of the Multimedia Usability project, a one-year project funded by the Ford Foundation, aiming to increase multimedia participation on Wikimedia websites. Although the grant is now officially over, the Wikimedia Foundation will fund subsequent development of the wizard to make it more robust and feature-rich.

We unveiled a prototype version of the wizard a few months ago, and we’ve got a lot of useful, constructive feedback from Commons testers. Since then, many bugs have been fixed, and the interface is much cleaner. The other main accomplishment has been the development of a private temporary holding area for files missing mandatory information.

The upload wizard is available in beta version as an additional uploading option. It’s far from perfect, and there are still bugs and missing features. But we do think it will provide a useful alternative to participants who want to use it and help us improve it.

The new wizard will eventually become the default uploading option on Commons, but it won’t replace the regular upload system until it provides a satisfying (and hopefully improved) coverage of the use cases currently supported by the “old” one.

You’re warmly invited to try the new system (you’ll need an account on Commons) and report issues you encounter with it. Please be sure to save your time by checking the Questions & Answers page and the list of open issues first.

If your issue hasn’t been reported yet, you can enter it directly in our tracker, or leave a note on the feedback page.

Since this concludes the Multimedia usability project, we’ll publish a full project report shortly for people interested in the details. In the meantime, you may be interested in two behind-the-scenes articles about the licensing tutorial: one by our illustrator, Michael Bartalos, and one by myself, focusing on the collaboration with the Wikimedia community.

Guillaume Paumier, Product Manager − Multimedia usability

We are currently planning to roll out a new version of the FlaggedRevs extension to all wikis on Tuesday, November 23 starting roughly 3:15pm PST (23:15 UTC). This is used for Pending Changes on en.wikipedia.org and Flagged Revisions on many other wikis (such as de.wikipedia.org and pl.wikipedia.org). The update sports a new reject button, some diff page load optimizations to help complicated diff pages load faster by displaying the diff prior to displaying the old revision, and many under-the-hood code improvements.

We have several test environments in place with FlaggedRevs/Pending Changes configured:

• 1.16wmf4 core + trunk FlaggedRevs extension (this is the closest to what we plan for our production environment):
  • en.wikipedia.org: http://prototype.wikimedia.org/flaggedrevs/
  • de.wikipedia.org: http://prototype.wikimedia.org/flaggedrevsde/
• trunk core + trunk FlaggedRevs extension (this contains several changes that won’t be deployed for a while, in addition to the updated FlaggedRevs extension):
  • de.wikipedia.org: http://prototype.wikimedia.org/de.wikipedia.org/
  • pl.wikipedia.org: http://prototype.wikimedia.org/pl.wikipedia.org/

Please let us know if you have any problems.

Update 2010-11-23: this work is now complete.

This page contains material that is kept because it is considered humorous.

Wikimedia’s contribution campaign for 2010 is a serious endeavor. As Philippe told you yesterday, in a relatively short time period we need to raise the funds that keep Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects available for free to everyone.

Millions of people use Wikipedia every day. It’s clear that more than a few of our readers have noticed yesterday’s launch. Nearly all of the responses we find are constructive for thinking about how to keep Wikipedia free. Some of them are simply hilarious. Too hilarious not to share, in fact.

Here’s our list of the best, or rather the most amusing, tidbits about this year’s fundraiser. We’re glad we’re not the only folks with a healthy sense of humor. We consider this post to be in the tradition of Wikipedia humor, of which a favorite example is Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense.

• Thanks to a link from O’Reilly Radar, Information is Beautiful created a rather stunning infographic about our appeals. Not to be outdone, Flowing Data has their own take.
• The Huffington Post also has a smart rundown on our banner testing strategy, and includes a poll where you can choose which of two banners you prefer.
• Time.com’s Techland blog declared Jimmy’s expression “Don Draper-esque.” We’re unofficially declaring that a win for Wikipedia’s cool factor.
• A blogger from Indiana wrote a satire which expresses another strong but nevertheless funny reaction to the banners.
• New York Magazine’s Daily Intel blog has a short but sweet post that reminds readers of the somewhat surprising list of Wikipedia’s most popular articles.
• The community at social news site Reddit has several hysterical threads about the campaign, including Photoshop jokes and unfortunate coincidences. The same Reddit posts often have practical advice for how to help us improve the donation system.

Of course, Twitter is awash with 140 character analysis of the campaign so far. There’s really too much to link to, but choice examples include:

• Jeff Atwood of stackoverflow.com fame feeling a tad uncomfortable
• Insight into Chuck Norris-related vandalism
• Commentary on the reliability of Wikipedia
• And a gentleman who apparently feels a little guilty about the size of his donation. Hopefully he knows that our average gift isn’t over $30 USD, as you can see at our public donation statistics page.

If you’d like to keep up on similar unofficial news from our contribution campaign, please follow the #keepitfree hashtag on Twitter. For a more official take, follow @Wikipedia and @Wikimedia. Visit donate.wikimedia.org to do your part to sustain the free encyclopedia anyone can edit.

Steven Walling, on behalf of Wikimedia’s Community Department

Today at 20:00 UTC we saw a traffic surge on our load balancing and caching infrastructure, resulting in intermittent outages in Wikipedia service worldwide. This was due to a complex interaction of factors, including issues in our Amsterdam caching center and the Fundraiser launch, which has generated much more than expected interest today. We switched all traffic to Tampa, which experienced service problems due to high traffic and the additional load. Currently service is fully recovered worldwide, and we are continuing to closely monitor all systems.

Danese Cooper
CTO, Wikimedia Foundation

Today, I’m pleased to announce the launch of our 2010 annual fundraising drive, which we are referring to as a ”contribution campaign”. This year marks a major milestone for Wikipedia.  Ten years of revolutionizing access to knowledge.  Ten years of our joint commitment to deliver the sum of human knowledge to every human being on the planet.  For free.

Wikipedia and its sister sites champion a mission of effectively disseminating knowledge, free for use, free of copyright, and free of external advertising. Since its founding in 2001, the site has grown to 17 million articles in over 270 languages, and for many of those languages, Wikipedia is the only encyclopedia ever written. Wikipedia, and all the Wikimedia projects, are always there when we need them; for students, educators, professionals and curious minds worldwide, these projects are simply the most convenient and readily accessible sources of information.

This year’s fundraising goal is an ambitious one – $16 million over two months. Wikimedia sites are the 5^th most visited web properties worldwide (visited by about 400 million people each month), and Wikimedia is the only non-profit organization in the top 10. Since 2007 our readership has doubled, with this past September seeing our highest traffic yet.  With this incredible feat comes an enormous duty: to maintain the infrastructure necessary to keep these sites free, stable, and running smoothly, while also continually improving the systems and architecture behind them.

For more information about where your donations go, see this year’s annual plan.

Since the beginning, our fundraising model has been based on the support of our community of readers and editors – we have received more than 500,000 donations in the lifetime of the Foundation, averaging about $33 each.  Will you join us today by making a donation to financially underwrite Wikipedia and its sister sites?

We have worked with almost a thousand community volunteers to develop this year’s fundraiser as a community driven contribution campaign. These exceptional volunteers have helped to develop messaging, design banners, write appeals, and conduct tests of our ideas.

Since August we have been testing these messages and tweaking our campaign to reflect the data and feedback from our community. Due to the introduction of new technology, we now have the ability to target particular banners and donation pages based upon geographic location, and to optimize the pages donors see.

In addition to new technology, we’re introducing a new perspective;  this year’s contribution campaign is designed to invite not only financial contributions, but to also encourage people to contribute their expertise and knowledge to the projects. We want readers to make their first edit, upload their first photograph to Wikimedia Commons, write their first article, and through this, to become more deeply affiliated with the projects.

For updates throughout the fundraiser continue to check our blog, and follow us on identi.ca and Twitter (as @Wikipedia, or the community-run contribution handle @WikiContribute).  After you’ve made a contribution, please tell the world using the hashtag #keepitfree!

This year marks a significant milestone for us, so I hope you will join me – and the diverse community of volunteers that make up the Wikimedia projects – in celebrating and supporting the mission that has brought us all together.

Stay curious!

Philippe Beaudette,
Community Department

This week our friends over at Pediapress announced that custom-printable books containing Wikipedia articles are now also being offered in attractive hard cover, bound editions – and in color. Previously customers could order softcover editions of books containing a customizable list of Wikipedia articles in any configuration. The new hardcover editions even contain a silk bookmark and stitched bindings.

The Pediapress MediaWiki extension on Wikipedia allows users to collect any number of articles or categories into a single PDF file or OpenOffice text file, which can then be downloaded for off-line viewing or local printing, or through Pediapress’ on-demand printing technologies the document can be turned into a bound book and shipped right to you. To start creating a book, look for the Create a book link under Print/Export on the lefthand Wikipedia menu. Some incredibly unique and inspired Wikipedia books have been created since Pediapress kicked off.

Now is your chance to get your very favorite lists of Wikipedia articles bound in a bookshelf-friendly format. Offline versions of Wikipedia are an important part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission to spread free knowledge to everyone on the planet, so we’re happy to see the options and quality of this format expand.

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Here is the November monthly report from Wikimedia Foundation, reporting on what we’ve been working on and what we’re planning.  This month was pulled together by Alolita, Guillaume, Mark, Tomasz, and myself, with some additions and clarifications from others.  As before, this edition of the update was drafted on mediawiki.org, where you can find the complete history of everyone who contributed.

October featured continued work on the Virginia data center migration, continued work on features such as ResourceLoader, Article Feedback and Upload Wizard, increased focus on code review, new testing infrastructure, many new job postings, and the Hack-A-Ton in Washington DC. More below…

(more…)

Free knowledge is the foundation of all Wikimedia projects: anyone is free to use, modify and redistribute the content for any purpose. But copyright and free licenses are very confusing for new users, especially when they want to contribute pictures and other media files. A new illustrated licensing tutorial will now guide new users through the basics of copyright and free licenses to make their first steps easier.

You may remember that the Wikimedia Foundation unveiled a prototype of upload wizard for Wikimedia Commons (the repository of freely reusable media files used in all of our projects) a few months ago. The prototype was developed as part of the Multimedia usability project, a grant-funded, one-year project aiming to increase multimedia participation on Wikimedia websites.

One of the main issues identified early on is that the current workflow of the upload process attempts to provide an advanced course in worldwide copyright when the user uploads a file. In reality, our research showed (unsurprisingly) that most users either gave up in front of the overwhelming instructions, or simply ignored them.

Our approach was to separate the “educational” part of the upload page from the actual upload form. Copyright has proven to be one of the most unappealing topics to new users, who simply want to share their knowledge and artwork. For that reason, we created an illustrated licensing tutorial in a comic-strip format.

This licensing tutorial was developed with experienced Wikimedians, who had both the expertise on copyright and licenses, and the experience of guiding new users. They collaboratively improved the wording and suggested many changes to the illustrator.

Sample from the tutorial

You will see that the tutorial features a new character, who was developed specifically for this project. We experimented with several others, but the puzzle-piece character was the one that worked the best.

Although developed primarily for Wikimedia Commons, both the tutorial and the character are under a free license; we hope experienced participants will reuse them for similar tutorials and across help pages.

The tutorial was created by Michael Bartalos, a freelance illustrator from San Francisco. Michael did an awesome job at illustrating complex topics without sacrificing readability or accuracy.

I would like to thank him for putting up with our hands-on approach; it surely wasn’t easy to accommodate our requests and all the little details in wording, typography and graphics that Wikimedians are expert at.

The tutorial is now available on Wikimedia Commons as an editable vector graphics file (SVG) to facilitate localization. It will be included in the Upload wizard’s interface when it is released at the end of November.

In the meantime, Wikimedia translators are warmly invited to help translate and localize the tutorial. If you don’t feel comfortable creating the localized tutorials yourself, you can focus on the text. We’ll seek help from the Graphic Lab on Commons to create the localized artwork.

Guillaume Paumier,
Product Manager – Multimedia Usability Project

Students at the University of California at Berkeley's "Politics of Piracy" class are participating in the Public Policy Initiative this fall.

We’ve reached the mid point of the first term of the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative – and we’ve had a lot of excitement and interest so far. Our students are beginning to write their first articles, a handful of which have already been featured in the Did You Know? section of the front page of English Wikipedia. Here’s an update on where we are:

Courses
One thing we’ve already learned is that professors are very enthusiastic about working with us to incorporate editing Wikipedia into their classroom. From our initial course announcement, we’ve added five more schools. We have public schools, private schools; large research universities, small liberal arts schools; small classes, large classes; graduate students and undergraduates – all told, we have a diverse set of classes that are improving Wikipedia articles. You can see the full list on the Courses page of our WikiProject (and see below for more information about opportunities for the spring term).

Articles
Our students are working on more than 100 articles. Some students are just beginning to select their topics. Others have completed significant work on their articles, either in the mainspace or in article sandboxes (temporary spaces for experimenting with new articles). For an example of what our students are doing, take a look at the Food Quality Protection Act article. It had languished as a stub article since its creation in 2007. Since mid-October of this year, however, a Syracuse University student has researched the Act and significantly improved its Wikipedia coverage, expanding the content of the article and adding photos from Wikimedia Commons (see the diff). The article was featured in the Did You Know? section on the English Wikipedia main page.

Ambassador program
One thing you’ll notice if you look through the history of the Food Quality Protection Act article is that several other Wikipedians collaborated with the student during the improvement of the Food Quality Protection Act article. Many of them are part of our Wikipedia Ambassador program. Campus Ambassadors (WP:CAMPUS) work with students in the classrooms on their Wikipedia assignments, including leading in-person sessions that teach students how to edit Wikipedia. The online counterpart to Campus Ambassadors are Online Ambassadors (WP:ONLINE), who serve as online mentors to the students, explaining both the how and the why of Wikipedia-editing. As with everything we’re doing with the Public Policy Initiative, we’re working to make the Ambassador program self-sustaining at the end of our grant, and one of the ways we’re doing that is by making the Ambassador program community-driven. We’ve formed an Ambassador Steering Committee that is thinking through the big questions about the Ambassador program. Committee members include experienced Campus Ambassadors, Online Ambassadors, Wikipedians, and Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Assessment
We’re also hard at work on a qualitative and quantitative assessment of how we’re actually doing. We’ve created a more detailed assessment scheme that translates article scores into traditional article quality ratings (see the Assessment page of our WikiProject for more information). Several Wikipedians and public policy experts are volunteering to use this new assessment to rate articles within the scope of the Public Policy WikiProject, including articles students have worked on. We’re also hosting the pilot of the new Article Feedback Tool, which offers Wikipedia readers the opportunity to rate articles. The initial results of our data analysis will be released in early 2011.

Spring 2011
We’re now in the planning stages for what we want to accomplish in spring 2011. We’ve lined up most of the professors for our spring slots, but we still have the ability to support five more courses that focus on issues related to U.S. public policy. Do you know a professor who teaches a public-policy-related course? Are you interested in being a Wikipedia Ambassador for a local university? Leave a message for our Campus Team Coordinator, Annie Lin, at her Wikipedia talk page.

You’re always welcome to find us in the #wikimedia-outreach IRC channel on freenode as well.

LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate
Public Policy Initiative