The Wikimedia Foundation is thrilled to announce the sponsorship of 77 full scholarship recipients and 52 partial scholarship recipients for the 2011 Wikimania!  Wikimania – an entirely community driven conference since 2005 – is an important annual event for the Wikimedia movement, bringing together Wikimedia advocates from all around the globe for four days. We are proud to be able to facilitate the attendance of representatives from different countries, chapters, languages and/or projects at this international conference.

Scholars were selected based on their (a) activity on Wikimedia projects, (b) activity in compatible projects outside of Wikimedia, and (c) future goals for participation in the Wikimedia movement. A group of nine volunteers formed the scholarship review committee, which pored over the more than 1100 applications in order to select a diverse pool of candidates, with the following goals in mind:

• Make Wikimania 2011 a successful and productive international conference
• Support the Wikimedia projects by encouraging participation
• Enrich the conference with attendance by a diverse group of participants in the Wikimedia movement

This year’s group of full scholars represents the most diverse we have ever had! Female scholarship recipients are up to 18% of the total full scholarships, and 53% of full scholarship recipients hail from the Global South (representing 62% of the funding). Moreover, recipients are coming from all regions of the world.

Of course, the selection of these individuals has been made possible only thanks to the dedicated scholarship review committee as well as the generosity of Wikimedia Germany, which donated directly to the funds. In addition, a variety of other chapters has generously provided self-administered scholarships, opening the opportunities for participation even more.

We are delighted to sponsor such a passionate and diverse group of individuals who not only have demonstrated commitment to our projects in the past, but who also are committed to the future of the Wikimedia movement. We anticipate great things from the conference!

As most of the readers of this blog are aware the Wikimedia foundation board of trustees  ”manages the foundation and supervises disposition and solicitation of donation.” The community elects three members to the board of trustees. The rest of the seats on the board are shared between community members appointed by chapters, community founder and trustees with specific expertise appointed by the board.  If you are interested in finding out more about the structure of the board of trustees, please check out this diagram here. 

The elections to the board of trustees have been held annually since 2004. You can find out more details about the elections here.

But according to the Editor Survey, April 2011, only a small minority of editors has voted in the board elections. Thirteen percent of editors in the survey pointed out that they had voted in WMF board of trustee elections.  Among those who had not voted in the election, the number one reason for not voting in the election was they (45%) had never heard of the elections.  Thirty-four percent said that they were not interested in participating in board elections. We also asked the editors who stated that they had never heard of the elections if they would vote in the future since they now know about the board of trustee elections A majority (54%) of them said that they would be interested in voting in the future. In addition, 9% of editors pointed out that they had run or would like to run in the board of trustee elections, and the rest said they were not interested (84%) or were not eligible to run for elections (8%).

We would like to take this opportunity to call upon all our community members to have their voice heard and participate in large numbers in the next board of trustee elections. The data also shows that there is a need to raise awareness about the board elections. We welcome your ideas about how we can do this. Please share your ideas through comments to this blog post.

Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research

(This is the eighth in series of blog posts where we will share insights from the April 2011 Editors Survey. Later in August we will be providing raw data from the survey and a final report to the community. )

In July 2006, Andy Carvin, host of the PBS blog learning.now, examined the attitude of teachers toward using Wikipedia in the classroom. [1] He asked: “Are educators hostile to Wikipedia?”. The answers ranged from one high school teacher who told Andy “Most colleagues had never seen Wikipedia, never intended to go there, and some had already warned their students that they were not to use Wikipedia for class projects” to another teacher who objected “I use Wikipedia all the time as a quick way to get a first pass on a subject I’m not familiar with, and I don’t see any reason why students shouldn’t be taught to use it the same way.” Most of the participants were arguing about whether their students should use Wikipedia as a source of information, not whether the students should contribute to it.

Carvin had already pointed out in 2005 that asking students to actively contribute to Wikipedia might be a model worth exploring [2]. Now, he stated: “It may be just a matter of time before we see highly organized educational activities, with teams of students from around the world working together to improve the quality of content on Wikipedia.” [1]

The past year

The past year has shown that those educational activities that Andy Carvin was envisioning in 2005 can be an effective means of improving Wikipedia’s quality. Building on the experiences of teachers like Jon Beasley-Murray (Was introducing Wikipedia to the classroom an act of madness leading only to mayhem if not murder?) and others, the Wikimedia Foundation started an experimental pilot project (the Public Policy Initiative) to explore the challenges and opportunities of student-based Wikipedia-editing on a larger scale. More than 800 students from 22 U.S. universities contributed about 5,600 pages of high quality content to the English Wikipedia. Articles written by those students improved by an average of 140 percent. Moreover, our pilot project sparked a high level of interest from media and teachers around the world.

Over the initial 12 months of the pilot project, we have built a strong knowledge base about running a class-based program as well as the tools needed to implement it (training handbooks, brochures on how to start editing, how-to videos, sample syllabi, etc.) We have also recruited and trained Wikipedia Ambassadors, whose role is to teach students about the basics of Wikipedia and to support them with their first edits. We are now at a point to make these investments pay off.

The Global Education Program and the year ahead

Beginning in 2011, we will expand Wikipedia editing in university classrooms to institutions around the world. That’s what we call the “Global Education Program”. It will support the Wikimedia Foundation’s strategic goal to grow, strengthen, and increase the Wikipedia editor community. It will also improve Wikipedia’s quality and increase Wikipedia’s credibility within academia.

Our priorities for expansion in year one will be India and Brazil, and we will also start activities in a couple of other countries. Whereas the Public Policy Initiative had a narrow topical focus, the new Global Education Program will encourage teachers from all disciplines to engage their students in Wikipedia editing.

What are the big challenges we are going to tackle in year one?

• Scalability. Based on the current growth, we are planning to have more than 10,000 students enrolled in our program by 2013. That means that we will need a much larger number of Wikipedia Campus and Online Ambassadors to support teachers and students. Therefore, we are planning to move the Ambassador training online and explore new models of letting volunteers take ownership of the program.

• Standards and guidelines. For a global volunteer-driven program like ours, it will be important that all participants have a shared understanding of what the goals are and how we are planning to achieve these goals. That’s where standards and guidelines come into play. The education systems and the culture of education varies from country to country, and we aim at being as flexible as possible in the implementation of our model. At the same time, we need to make sure that the quality of our support for teachers and students meets the same standards globally.

• Communication. At the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit last month, we have seen how powerful it can be when participants of our program share their experiences and learnings with each other. Our goal for the next year will be to give volunteers a stronger voice in storytelling and also to develop tools that enable participants to share their materials and best practices more effectively.

For me, the year ahead is the next step toward the vision that Andy Carvin outlined in 2005. Wikipedia belongs in Higher Education. And it’s not a matter of time anymore that students from around the world will work together to improve the quality of content on Wikipedia. The future of Wikipedia in Education is now.

Frank Schulenburg
Global Education Program Director

[1] http://www.pbs.org/teachers/learning.now/2006/07/wikipedia_in_the_classroom_con.html
[2] http://www.andycarvin.com/?p=738

(This is the third installment in a series of updates from the WikiHistories summer research fellows, who will be studying the virtual community history of different Wikipedia editing communities)

I started working with the Turkish language Wikipedia community (tr.wikipedia.org) as part of the Wikimedia digital community history fellowship in June 2011. During the second week of my research I had a chance to attend a meeting organized by Wikipedians in Istanbul. The meeting was highly helpful in identifying the major issues that Turkish Wikipedia (Vikipedi) has been dealing with. Although the meeting had a significant lack in terms of female participation, the opposite is the case for the actual contributions to the online encyclopedia. This point was also confirmed by one of the female editors of Vikipedi as she mentioned several other female editors who have been significant contributors.

One of the major issues that the community faces is the low retention rate of the new users. In several occasions this is explained by uncompromised application of community policies against vandalism.  However some users have suggested that this attitude needs to change in order to provide a more flexible environment for the new users who are more likely to make policy mistakes in editing articles.

Turkish language community seems to have close ties with the Azeri language community (az.wikipedia.org) both in terms of collaboration and competition. The close similarity of these two languages must be a big factor for this close interaction, however the application of policies in certain issues seems to have a wide gap. Turkish Wikipedia is the 20^th language community in the number of articles below Hungarian and above Indonesian. There has been projects to increase the number of articles in Vikipedi. Utilizing bots for starting new articles has been the subject of a long debate which recently been resolved by the acceptance of a new set of criteria. This change has had a significant boost in the number of articles.

Vikipedi community has been recently energized with the introduction of a new project that focuses on the description of small cities, villages and provinces. This project attracted new group of people who are primarily interested in promoting their hometowns by contributing to the related Vikipedi articles.

During the meeting there were also interesting discussions about the way the new users are welcomed. Particularly, welcoming new users with impersonal greeting templates were criticized and alternatives were discussed. While, novel Vikipedians emphasized the need for more visual tools such as videos and interactive applications for introductions, editors have pointed out the immense workload required for preparation of these materials.

Vikipedi currently ranks 17^th among the most visited Turkish websites. It is frequently cited as a reliable source in Turkish media and praised for its contribution to the digital content production in Turkish language. However the alternative sites have also emerged mostly created by people who left Wikipedia due to various conflicts such as Ansiklopedika.org, that announces its motto as “protect the knowledge”. Another site Eksisozluk, has been a cultural phenomenon since 1999 as it enables the users to voice opinions in the form of a dictionary entry but with a satirical manner on a wide range of topics including current events, celebrities, politicians or mundane details of daily life in Turkey. This stark contrast between the factual information and subjective perspective might be the key to understanding the kinds of people (or virtual personas) Wikipedia and Eksisozluk might attract.

I have continued my interaction with the individual users of Wikipedia, mostly focusing on their personal histories and how their view has evolved about the collaborative culture of Wikipedia. These accounts often mention large scale changes in the community after crises typically involving a controversial topic, person or an event, as reference points. I will continue to work with the Turkish community combining these individual accounts with the large scale changes on the background that have been shaping their journey with Vikipedi.

 

Ayhan Aytes

PhD Candidate

Communication and Cognitive Science

University of California San Diego

Joseph Lapka was unsure what to expect when he signed up for Professor Sheldon Gen’s Environmental Policy course at San Francisco State University. The course description indicated that Joseph, who is a graduate of the University of Michigan’s civil and environmental engineering program and who is currently in the master of public administration program at SF State, would be writing a Wikipedia article as part of his coursework. Joseph is also working full time as an environmental engineer, so he is familiar with policy briefs, but he wasn’t quite sure how Wikipedia would fit in the classroom.

“A lot of the policy work I do professionally involves applying existing policies to new or unique situations and that is in some ways different than the encyclopedic type of writing that is appropriate for Wikipedia,” Joseph says. “Having completed the course, I think the overall experience was a good one. The Wikipedia project fit well with the structure and content of the course and I think that contributed to the positive experience.”

Another positive part of Joseph’s experience was the presence of his Wikipedia Ambassadors. The face time with his Campus Ambassadors, Derrick Coetzee and Max Klein, made them his first point of contact whenever he had a question.

“My Campus Ambassadors regularly visited my class to guide us through the technical aspects of preparing and posting our articles,” Joseph explains. “Both of the ambassadors were very knowledgeable and eager to help with what was a new experience for many of us. I think our Campus Ambassadors are another aspect of this project that made the experience a positive one.”

Joseph chose to write his article on the regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. It’s a topic of considerable current public policy debate, and Wikipedia’s coverage was limited. Joseph says he saw the assignment as a chance to use his knowledge as an environmental engineer to make Wikipedia better.

“I always give all of my assignments my best effort,” he says. “However, knowing that my article would be posted online for others to read gave me an even greater incentive to seek out differing points of view, be more critical of my sources of information, and document those sources more thoroughly.”

Joseph says this is the first course assignment that hasn’t ended with the end of term. Instead, other Wikipedia editors are making contributions to the article, and Joseph is watching to see what changes get made. He says he’s very interested in seeing how the article evolves over time.

“With a traditional assignment, your only audience is often your professor, or at most your professor and your classmates,” Joseph says. “I really liked the fact that this assignment gave me an opportunity to write for a broader audience and make a valuable contribution to a resource that I often use myself.”

–
LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate – Public Policy Initiative

I just passed my first anniversary since I joined the Wikimedia Foundation and we created the Global Development team. Below, I have summarized some highlights from our past work, and the opportunities and challenges we face in achieving our goals – please visit Meta for a more detailed version of this report.

Why we exist

At the heart, the Global Development team’s role is to help the community to grow and thrive in places where we have not yet achieved our movement’s potential. At a time when Wikimedia’s editor community (dominated by Global North editors) is ebbing and readership on the personal computer is plateauing, we need to be proactive in working to create strong communities in the Global South, where more than half of Internet users live today and an overwhelming share of future Internet users will come aboard. The foundation has set clear goals in our strategic plan to reach 1 billion readers by 2015 and to increase the number of active editors to 200,000 with 37% from the Global South.

The Past Year for the Global Development team

Building a diverse team:

A year ago, we were a team of four with a range of foundation-wide responsibilities. Since then, we have built a diverse (and I’d say very talented) team – a mix of experienced Wikipedians and folks who bring valuable new capabilities. Though we will continue to grow a bit in 2011/12, most positions will be filled in India and Brazil.

Executing effectively:

While we were building the plane, we were flying it too! We had important accomplishments, all of which happily involved close partnership with our community around the world. Some of the highlights included:

• Wikipedia’s 10th Anniversary celebration was a great success with events in over 200 locations, many of which received special edition T-shirts and buttons that helped to bond our world-wide community. We also garnered incredible media coverage.
• We launched our India catalyst initiative with efforts to help build the community via visits by Jimmy and myself, along with support for community work on outreach. Media coverage of our (community and WMF) activities added momentum to our work. In June, we launched our first program – the India Education Program.
• Our grants program more than doubled, implementing initiatives large and small. In addition, we continue to provide support for Wikimania and will enable a large contingent of Wikimedians from over 20 countries to attend Wikimania in August.
• In close partnership with community developers, we invested to improve the tools available for offline projects with the integration of OpenZIM and a usability upgrade for the Kiwix reader.
• We conducted our first systematic survey of the global editor community, translated by volunteers into 22 languages and completed by over 5,000 editors. We also embarked on a research effort to understand the needs of mobile users in India and Brazil.
• We worked closely with chapters involved in fundraising both improve the fundraising agreement and resolve some difficult issues regarding international funds transfers.
• We also managed to improve our joint compliance regarding chapter agreements, which places the relationship between chapters and WMF on a stronger footing.

Not a bad year for our little team, though there have been bumps in the road. Two areas where I would say we didn’t get the job done:

• We did not make as much progress on our mobile work. I take responsibility for this and have been acting aggressively to get us off to a fast start in 2011/12 – through additions to the team, greater focus and attention from Kul and me, efforts to accelerate discussions with partners, and close work with our Mobile Engineering team to quickly strengthen our mobile portfolio.
• Despite amazing progress, we didn’t get our new online store launched. We expect to launch in July, and I’m excited to see what the community thinks.

The year ahead

Our team has signed up to tackle two critical foundation-wide goals for 2011/12: Reverse the editor decline, and dramatically increase mobile. We aim to contribute significantly to the goal of returning our active editors per month to 95,000 and to increase mobile page views to 2 billion, both by June 2012.

Global Development’s efforts to reverse the editor decline revolve around our work with the community in the Global South and the scaling of the Public Policy Initiative into the Global Education program. In the next few months, we will expand the India Education Program, launch additional programs in India, start work in Brazil, support the launch of education programs in new geographies, and make grants to chapters and like-minded groups while focusing on editor community health and growth. Our communications team will support this effort with media and communications work that highlights “contribution,” which will start in India with an [Edit] India campaign. Our research team will capture insights from the editor survey and will begin to generate insights from our own data to help identify opportunities and challenges.

On the mobile end, we are beginning to approach mobile operators and handset makers to improve the prominence of Wikipedia in their offerings. We would like to secure deals through which mobile operators offer Wikipedia access for free (no data charges). In partnership with the Mobile Engineering team, we plan to invest  both in creating applications for the major operating systems and in developing features that enrich the experience and create ways to contribute.

In addition, you will see other important work happening on the Global Development team:

• We have doubled our grants budget again to $600,000 and will work to develop grant programs that achieve the goals laid out in our strategic plan. Specifically, we plan to start tracking the change in active editors in the geographies where we make grants over the next year.
• We will continue to build on our initial work on offline projects. By the end of 2011/12, we aim to double the number of deployments of offline Wikipedia around the world.
• We will support Wikimania in Haifa with a $100,000 grant, as well as contribute $130,000 from our own budget to support scholarships for over 70 attendees. We will also provide support for Wikimania 2012 in Washington, DC.

The Year Ahead for me

My first year was a great learning experience, and I feel I’ve a clearer sense of both the opportunities and challenges ahead. My greatest challenge this past year was the sheer breadth of the Global Development portfolio. My goal for 2011/12 is to focus more of my time on the top priority areas of growing the editor base in India and Brazil, and implementing our mobile strategy.

For me, success in 2011/12 will mean:

• Mobile partnerships that reduce the cost of accessing Wikipedia to zero (or close to zero) and marketing Wikipedia on the mobile in key countries in the Global South that cover over 500 million mobile users.
• Wikimedia’s mobile services expanding, including quality apps on Android, Windows, iPhone and Blackberry.
• An initial set of contribution tools integrated into the mobile offering; our mobile site works well on a wide range of phones.
• Strong  growth in the India editor community with clear results in terms of editor growth from WMF’s India program activities.
• A shift in the Brazilian editor community toward healthy indicators, returning to growth in the editor community, and successfully launching WMF’s Brazil team in the second half of the year.
• The Global Development team functions cohesively as a group and partners well with the community, other WMF teams, chapters and our partners.
• The staff on the Global Development team continues to grow professionally and maximize the impact of their work.

We move forward into the coming year with a clear purpose of meeting our goals and learning along the way, while also collaborating with a wide range of groups and individuals in the movement. Onwards!

Barry Newstead, Chief Global Development Officer

As you may know, the WMF strategic plan released last March set ambitious goals for our movement’s next five years. At the top of the agenda for the forthcoming fiscal year is to increase mobile page views of Wikipedia to two billion by the end of June, 2012 – a substantial increase from the current count of 726 million in March, 2011. To meet this goal, the engineering, strategy and global development teams are redesigning our mobile site to provide an enhanced reading experience and to introduce mobile-specific editing capabilities. Our current mobile website (m.wikipedia.org) does not support editing, though our survey found that a small minority of editors (7%) edit desktop Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) on their mobile phone. The redesign of our mobile site is also strategically important for us to meet our goal of increasing reach in the global south, as majority of that population will be accessing Internet through mobile devices in the near future, completely bypassing the desktop web.

We have had interesting, wide-reaching discussions within our volunteer community in an effort to understand what new functionalities can be in-built into the mobile site to meet the needs of our editors. Our Editors Survey, April 2011 also asked editors which editing features they were more likely to use if they were in-built into the mobile website.

Despite the common perception (not including the SMS generation) that mobile phones are not well suited for entering text, 28% of editors in the survey said they were extremely/very likely to use a feature that allows paragraph and sentence editing, and 22% expressed support for a ‘creation of new article’ feature on mobile phones. We were surprised that editors pointed to a feature that would help upload pictures to Wikimedia Commons as the least likely to be used (only 21% provided strong support), although uploading a photo requires fewer clicks than writing text. Some editors (22%) also expressed support for anti-vandalism tools, such as Huggle, on the mobile phone.

We have also conducted user experience research of mobile readers of Wikipedia in India and Brazil to understand how we can enhance the mobile reading experience. In our interviews, we found that one high-ranking feature on the wish list of mobile readers is the ability to save an article and read it later offline. Even among editors, 38% said they were extremely/very likely to use a feature that would allow them to save articles for offline reading or editing.

We are confident that with the help of our community (editors and programmers) we will meet our goal of delivering a phone-based Wikipedia to more people globally. We have several initiatives underway, including a new mobile survey and a call for testers of the mobile gateway, that require both participation and feedback to maximize efficacy.

Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research

(This is the seventh in series of blog posts where we will share insights from the April 2011 Editors Survey)

MediaWiki’s Google Summer of Code students have been busy! We’re more than halfway through the summer, so here’s what they’re up to:

• Akshay Agarwal’s “Account Creation, Login Screens and AJAX-ification of everything” (mentor: Brandon Harris). Code, project status.
  The last task I accomplished: “Added source tracking functionality in the account creation API that I am building.”
  Something I’ve learned: “True learning can happen only in an open environment & with a highly supportive community.”
• Kevin Brown’s “Working Archival for Web References/Citations,” “to facilitate the archival of external links used as references in the English Wikipedia” (mentor: Neil Kandalgaonkar). Code, project notes.
  The last task I accomplished: “Adding support for wget local archival, currently working on feed for external archival services.”
  Something I’ve learned: “Where do I start? A lot. I think the biggest thing is probably managing a large project and time management, which I still have a lot to learn on.”
• Devayon Das’s “Improving Semantic Search/Semantic Query usability issues in SMW” (mentor: Markus Krötzsch). Code, project notes.
  The last task I accomplished: “Added RSS links to the results generated by the Query Creator interface I’m building.”
  Something I’ve learned: “A 30 second chat with a community member can save you 30 minutes of scratching your head in frustration.”
• Ankit Garg’s “Semantic Schemas extension” (mentor: Yaron Koren). Code.
  The last task I accomplished: “I finished adding the inheritance support to the PageSchema XML structure.”
  Something I’ve learned: “I have a learned a great deal of PHP; also how to manage a huge project.”
• 

  "A 30 second chat with a community member can save you 30 minutes of scratching your head in frustration."

  
  Salvatore Ingala’s “AMICUS: Awesome Monolithic Infrastructure for Customization of User Scripts” (mentors: Max Semenik and Brion Vibber). Code, project notes.
  The last task I accomplished: “I made a prototypal user interface for editing preferences of an existing gadget, HotCat.”
  Something I’ve learned: “Unit testing is boooooring, but ends up saving you a lot of time!”
• Yuvi Panda’s “Making Offline Wikipedia Article Selection Easier with Mediawiki Extensions” (mentor: Arthur Richards). Code, project.
  The last task I accomplished: “Filter articles based on name, quality and importance.”
  Something I’ve learned: “That spending time talking to everyone involved in the process from start to finish (devs, community maintainers, etc.) saves a truckload of time later on.”
• Zhenya Vlasyenko’s “MediaWiki Extension: SocialProfile – UserStatus feature” (mentor: Jack Phoenix). Code.
  The last task I accomplished: “Internalization of the UserStatus feature with the help of the MakeGlobalVariablesScript hook.”
  Something I’ve learned: “I’ve found out for myself a new ways of data interaction between PHP and Javascript… Convinced that knowing some tricks and hooks can greatly save time.”

Aigerim Karabekova, who was working on extension release management, ran into several delays (including medical issues) and the project has been dropped. We’re glad she made the attempt and wish her the best.

Continued best wishes to Zhenya, Yuvi, Salvatore, Ankit, Devayon, Kevin, and Akshay as they work to make MediaWiki, and the Wikimedia experience, better.  We’re glad to be helping young developers learn how to contribute to our community.

Sumana Harihareswara
Wikimedia Foundation, Volunteer Development Coordinator

The open science movement is fighting to make scientific research – especially publicly funded research – more transparent, freely accessible and reusable. The goals of open science are closely aligned with our mission, yet for years there has been little institutional contact between our movement and initiatives such as Open Access and Open Data. Joining forces with individuals and organizations who are working to promote a culture of openness in the scientific community should be high on our agenda.

How can we achieve this goal? The Wikimedia Foundation is currently working on a set of policies to enforce the release of its research data and research output in the open and to incentivize researchers who seek our support or collaboration to do the same. More importantly, today we are thrilled to announce that our community is in a stronger position to bridge the gap with the open science movement. Daniel Mietchen – a biophysicist based in Germany, outspoken open data and open access advocate, and active member of the Wikimedia Research Committee – is the recipient of a grant from the Open Society Foundations and will become the first Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science with a focus on Open Access (OA).

The WiR program has been an immense success in the context of other initiatives such as GLAM. But what exactly is the mission of a Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science? In Daniel’s words, “a Wikimedian in Residence is someone trusted by and in good contact with both the Wikimedia and the partner communities who can guide article development on the target topics and help to keep in focus the common goals, in our case: improving Open Access coverage and reuse
in WMF projects”.

As Daniel reports in his programmatic blog post, content from Open Access publishers is already widely used on Wikimedia projects, yet traditional publishers still receive way more citations from Wikipedia articles than their open counterparts. There are lots of one-time image and media donations to Wikimedia but ongoing donations from reusably licensed OA sources have not received adequate attention yet. Likewise, contents from suitably licensed text sources are systematically being used in WMF projects, but OA sources much less so.

Daniel’s mission is to facilitate the reuse of materials from Open Access articles in WMF projects, to improve coverage of topics related to Open Access in the English Wikipedia, to support the implementation of the WMF’s Open Access policy and to explore the potential for the WMF community to collaborate with Open Access, Open Science and Open Knowledge initiatives in general. In the long run, the project is designed to extend beyond Open Access and into Open Science proper, as well as into other languages and possibly other collaborative projects. The directions this project ultimately aims to explore, and how to go about the exploration, will be determined in part on the basis of community feedback received during the pilot phase. The host of the project is the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, which will also act as a content partner and as a contact point for external expertise on matters of Open Knowledge, especially Open Data.

How can you help support this initiative?

• submit requests for illustrations of articles on scientific topics, to help identify suitable images from OA sources
• share your views on the Open Access and Open Data policy draft
• help us understand how to coordinate OA activities across languages and projects
• check out OA journals as a potential source for articles and media and for Picture of the day/month/year
• help connect this project with other GLAM and outreach projects

You can follow the development of the OA movement via the OA Tracking Project and Daniel’s work via his dedicated blog, the WiR-OS page on Meta and Twitter: @EvoMRI

Daniel Mietchen, Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science
Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst

In preparation for enabling HTTPS on Wikimedia Foundation sites, we’ve recently enabled protocol relative URLs on test.wikipedia.org. Protocol relative URLs are needed to make the site work properly in both HTTP and HTTPS modes.

What are protocol relative URLs?

Normal URLs look like: http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page or https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. Both of these URLs define the protocol that will be used. Protocol relative URLs look like this: //test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. Dropping the protocol from the URL allows the browser to assign the current protocol to the URL. So, if you are visiting the site in HTTPS mode, links will point to HTTPS, and if you are visiting the site in HTTP mode, links will point to HTTP.

Why are protocol relative URLs needed?

We need to use protocol relative URLs for a couple reasons:

1. All requests are served by our caching layer (squid or varnish). If you are browsing the site in HTTPS mode, and another user is browsing the same pages in HTTP mode, two versions of those pages will be stored in our cache, as the links are different between the two modes. This splits our cache, which makes it less efficient and more expensive to operate.
2. When browsing in HTTPS mode, we want to ensure links point to the correct protocol. When pages are parsed, things like interwiki links are created by the parser. If we do not use protocol relative URLs, then links will point to either HTTPS or HTTP, which will cause users to switch modes randomly.

How does this affect me?

It shouldn’t. Things should continue to work as before. We are currently testing this out on some internal wikis, and have enabled it on test.wikipedia.org so that the entire community will have a couple weeks to test it out before we enable it on all projects.

API users, especially, should test thoroughly. The API, in most cases, will not output protocol-relative URLs, but will continue to output http:// URLs no matter whether you call it over HTTP or HTTPS. This is because we don’t expect API clients to be able to resolve protocol relative URLs correctly, and that the context of these URLs (which is needed to resolve them) will frequently get lost along the way.

The exceptions to this are:

• HTML produced by the parser will have protocol-relative URLs in <a href=”…”> tags etc.
• prop=extlinks and list=exturlusage will output URLs verbatim as they appear in the article, which means they may output protocol-relative URLs

If you are getting protocol-relative URLs in some other place in the API, that’s likely a bug.

If you notice any issues related to protocol relative URLs, in the API or not, please let us know.

Note: we’ve also enabled HTTPS on test.wikipedia.org; so, please do test protocol relative URLs in HTTP and HTTPS modes. There is at least one known bug with regards to HTTPS mode and redirects, which will be fixed soon. More to come on this in a later post.

Ryan Lane