Narrowleaf Cottonwood trees near Crestone, Colorado, USA

“This picture I took is nothing special, it’s just the result of someone who took a moment to notice the beauty all around them,” said William Harader.

Many of the Wikimedia Commons contributors who promoted the image as a Featured Picture, and subsequently the Picture of the Day for 23 June, might respectfully disagree with him, as they’ve deemed the image one of the finest in the freely-licensed database.

While doing conservation work for the Biosphere Coalition, Harader was driving around documenting the loss of wetlands around Baca Grande in Crestone, Colorado, USA, when he noticed the sunlight on the Narrowleaf Cottonwoods (Populus angustifolia). He said that it was “an easy shot to take,” it was one of those situations where he was presented with an exceptional opportunity for good photography and was there at the “right place and at the right time.”

“Every plant and every animal is a work of art in itself, and yet so many people don’t even notice this in their daily lives,” said Harader.

Harader works as a graphic designer and although he considers photography a hobby, he does get paid for some of his work. Initially, he started out taking pictures with a film camera but was unsuccessful in mastering the technique. It wasn’t until he borrowed his parents’ digital camera that he devoted more attention to photography, starting out by capturing macro images and slowly expanding to other types. He especially enjoys capturing “people simply living their lives and acting as they naturally would.”

“It’s actually a rather difficult subject to capture, as most people behave differently when they know they’re being photographed. They become very self-conscious and want to pose for the image, instead of just being themselves,” said Harader.

American hover fly (eupeodes americanus)

Harader began contributing to Wikimedia Commons shortly after he became an editor on English Wikipedia in 2006. He supports the principles of free licensing and believes “that society has more to gain from sharing than from competition.” Interestingly enough, Harader said he has received more offers from people wanting to buy prints of his images because they’ve seen his work on Commons than he has through his personal website.

Among many beautiful photos he has contributed to Commons, several of Harader’s pictures were nominated as Pictures of the Year, including the American Hover fly at left.

(To see more of Harader’s work, visit his user page)

Jordan Hu, Communications Intern

Logo of the Malayalam conference (English version)

Of the 20 Indic language Wikipedia projects, the Malayalam Wikipedia (ml.wikipedia.org) is one of the most vibrant. With about 35 million Malayalam speakers, it is the biggest Indic language community with over 100 Wikipedians. The latest feather in their cap is the recently concluded WikiSangamolsavam conference on April 28-29, 2012. WikiSangamolsavam, a two day event organized in the city of Kollam, was the first Indic language Wikipedia conference ever and witnessed over 100 participants from different parts of the state and country.

A veteran Malayalam Wikipedian, Viswa Prabha, recalls, “Every year, many editors from Malayalam Wikimedia Community attend Wikimania, the annual conference of Wikimedians. Inspired by the activities at Wikimania a few active Malayalam Wikimedians though of planning a similar conference in Kerala.” Many Malayalam Wikimedians also participated in WikiConference, 2011 Mumbai, after which the idea of organizing a conference was put forward in mailing lists, Facebook group, and other discussion forums. Since Wikimedians from Kollam took up the initiative the venue was chosen as Kollam.

Over 30 Malayalee Wikipedians were involved in different stages of organizing the conference like managing the venue, food, accommodation, financial resources, registration etc. What was proposed as an idea in 2009 took 3 years to materialize, but rightfully so into a wonderful experience! “The event celebrated the achievements of the Malayalam community, planned new projects as a community and welcomed more Malayalees to the community. E-malayalam, free and open knowledge, copyright and cyber-freedom were the highlights of the conference this year”, said Kannan Shanmugam, a teacher based in Kollam.

Takeaways from the conference? As Netha Hussain, a medical student and Wikipedian points out, “The high point for me was the parallel Wiki Vidyarthi Sagaman (Wiki students’ meet) where school students were taught to edit Wikipedia. Among the 100+ participants of the conference, a few new editors got valuable insights about Wikiprojects from the paper presentations and discussions during the conference. The existing editors got to meet their friends/fellow Wikimedians whom they had only known online. The paper presentations and discussions brought up new ideas that could be worked upon in the future to enrich ml-Wikipedia’s content. At a larger level, partnerships were explored with IT@School (a government initiative) and Wiki activities were highlighted in the local as well as national media.”

Barry Newstead, Chief Global development officer at the Wikimedia Foundation who also attended the conference, wrote in his blog post, “What was encouraging about my visit was that I saw that this isn’t some naive dream…The Malayalam community served as a real inspiration. Over the past 4 years, they have built a passionate community that has expanded their Wikipedia from 5,700 to 23,000 articles.”

The journey hardly rests at the conference. In the week immediately after the conference, there were meet-ups in 3 different towns – Thrissur, Palakkad and Thiruvananthapuram.  Also, community members have been working on initiatives around GLAM and education – and have collaboratively developed proposals for both. Preliminary meetings have already started with a number of museums and a proposal has been submitted to the Keralam – Museum of History and Heritage. Discussions have been initiated with the IT@Schools department of the Kerala government and a formal proposal to introduce Wikipedia as a teaching and learning tool in the 7th – 8th standard will be submitted shortly.

As Shiju Alex, Indic language consultant for Wikimedia Foundation articulates, “These are people who contribute to Wikipedia to share free knowledge but also to keep traditions alive and preserve the language they love. This movement requires young and old, teachers, doctors, engineers, linguists, researchers, writers, bloggers, lawyers, photographers and students. I hope what has started with the conference infuses new enthusiasm in the community and takes it to new heights!”

Noopur Raval, Consultant (Communications), India Program, Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikipedia Education Program is taking off in Brazil! As we’re entering the final month of the semester, I had the opportunity to visit the different professors of the courses, and work with the Wikimedia Foundation’s Brazilian team to see how we can close the semester well and prepare well for the upcoming semester of classes. I obviously already knew we had a great team on the ground – Oona and Tom – but this time I had the opportunity to meet with even more of the enthusiastic volunteers who are involved.

Take Mariana Jo. She is a campus ambassador in São Paulo who decided, after hearing Kul Wadhwa speak at Campus Party, that she wanted to be more involved with the Wikimedia movement and spreading free knowledge. As the first member of her family to go to a public university (typically they are top universities in Brazil), she has a passion for creating broadly available resources and teaching her peers about the importance of sharing their information. She is starting off her involvement by helping with a Physics course at the University of São Paulo as a student in the department herself, where she trains other students how to contribute their course assignments to Wikipedia.

Or take Professor Pablo Ortellado, also at the University of São Paulo. His students are spending the whole semester working on encyclopedic articles about Brazilian cultural policy, which do not yet exist on the Portuguese Wikipedia. The semester-long class brings in experts in the field to discuss different aspects of cultural policy and provide information for references for the student groups. He is already known across Brazil for his passion for open access, and he is excited to expose his students to these concepts in conjunction with the course topics of cultural policy.

All the courses are just getting into the full swing of editing, so we are excited to watch the continuing contributions of additional knowledge to the Portuguese Wikipedia!

Jessie Wild, Special Projects Manager, Global Development

Today, the Wikimedia Foundation launched a new prototype “visual editor” for Wikimedia. The visual editor is a new editing environment that won’t require everyone to learn our special markup language in order to contribute to our projects.

Right now, if you try to edit the English Wikipedia’s article about the Wikimedia Foundation, or the Latin Wiktionary’s entry for “futūrus” (about to be), you get a lot of confusing characters interspersed amongst the recognisable text. Though it’s possible to learn what these mean and use them powerfully, many of our editors, and especially new editors, want to contribute content, not learn technical formatting.

We identified the difficulty in learning wikitext as a key inhibitor to growing our editor community in the Wikimedia movement’s strategic plan. We want the process of learning how to edit to be trivial, so our volunteers, both new and experienced, can devote themselves to what they edit. That’s why we’re building the visual editor, so that contributing to a wiki is as easy and natural as other modern editing systems, and new editors are not dissuaded from making their changes.

You may remember a similar announcement in December 2011, when we revealed a developer prototype of our “visual editor,” but after a great deal of feedback, we’ve reworked it so that it’s more useful to our community of users.

We learned a lot from building our first prototype. It was great how many of you helped with feedback, bug reports and comments about how we were doing. In the months since then, based on your feedback and technical issues we encountered, we’ve overhauled the entire editor. We changed the technical design and how it works, rewriting its components so that we can better support more editors. We’ve also integrated it into the MediaWiki platform, so now it can load and edit wiki articles, and not just sit separately.

A screenshot of the new visual editor

To build this iteration of our open-source visual editor, we have been working with some of the team from Wikia, a collaborative publisher that operates the largest network of video game, entertainment and lifestyle wikis in the world. We both believe that this kind of tool should be built not just for the Wikimedia wiki projects, but for everyone using MediaWiki software, and when it’s done we look forward to including the visual editor “out of the box” for anyone setting up a wiki with our software.

Thanks to all this, our new prototype is now live on mediawiki.org. This is just a demonstration, and very far from a finished product — for example, we haven’t yet added image or table handling. It’s currently locked down to only work on a self-contained area of the wiki, so that it doesn’t encounter any unsupported content or break anything else. We intend to work on small pieces of the overall story, releasing a new version every two weeks or so, and adding features one-by-one until the editor is good enough to deploy for everyone (and release in MediaWiki’s core).

Over the next few weeks and months, we will be working with the community — you — to find bugs, to focus on what our priorities should be, and most importantly, to make sure that what we’re building is right for you and that it supports your “workflow.”

So please, try out the prototype, see our frequently-asked questions and tell us what you think.

– The Visual Editor Team: Trevor Parscal, Inez Korczyński, James Forrester, Roan Kattouw, Rob Moen, Subramanya Sastry, Brion Vibber, Gabriel Wicke, Christian Williams.

Free Wikipedia poster from Orange in Kampala

Over the last few months, we have written several blog posts about the launch of our mobile partnerships to provide access to Wikipedia without incurring data charges, so I thought it would be a good idea now to describe what one of these partners is doing to promote our common program. Orange Uganda is a great example.

Orange Uganda was the first Orange affiliate to launch the free access program we announced together in January. Since April 4, Orange customers in Uganda have been able to access Wikipedia on their mobile phones without accruing any data fees. Our shared philosophy is that this should remove barriers to knowledge access, giving people who previously may not have been able to access Wikipedia the opportunity to do so now.

This raises an interesting challenge in itself, though: how do you communicate the offer of free knowledge to the masses, many of them who have never used Wikipedia before and may not know what it is? Businesses deal with marketing products and services all the time, but promoting the availability of knowledge without cost is a creative endeavor that we need to pursue together with our mobile partners.

Orange’s approach in Uganda has been through an “upgrade your knowledge” campaign that is blanketed throughout the country. They’ve put up over 100,000 flyers, 100 street pole posters (pictured), and noticeboards at 11 universities. In addition, they’ve even run radio ads. All this helps get the word out about free knowledge, and for many people in Uganda, it may be the first time they’ve heard of Wikipedia. In an ideal scenario, someone who doesn’t have internet access at home may see one of these messages, turn on their phone’s browser, and look up their first Wikipedia article.

We’re planning to do similar outreach with a number of our current and future partners. If you’re in one of these countries and you come across any of these materials, let us know, or snap a picture and send it to us. Also, tell us your ideas – how would you market free knowledge on mobile?

Amit Kapoor, Senior Manager, Mobile Partnerships

A new MediaWiki extension released today on the English Wikipedia will streamline course pages for professors, students, and Ambassadors participating in the Wikipedia Education Program.

Course pages are key sources of information about students editing Wikipedia articles for class, including who is teaching, mentoring, and signed up for the course, as well as what articles each student is working on. Previously, professors, students, and Wikipedia Ambassadors compiled this information by hand, and course pages were often missing key information. With the new MediaWiki extension, simply known as “Education Program“, a database-style functionality will control the entire course page setup and editing, leading to greater transparency about the program and its participants.

The Education Program MediaWiki extension:

• Helps identify which users are participating the Wikipedia Education Program
• Keeps the course listings up-to-date, automatically archiving finished classes
• Streamlines campus and online ambassador profiles
• Makes it easier for students to list themselves and their articles on their course page
• Shows instructors what students have been editing
• Enables easier searching for a course by university or term
• Adds several new user access levels with permissions related to the extension
• Adds specialized “Course” and “Institution” namespaces

The code is the handiwork of developer Jeroen De Dauw. Several volunteers from the community kindly helped test the extension, which will be in use on the English Wikipedia beginning in the fall 2012 term. The extension can be added to other language Wikipedias once it has been translated into those languages.

Rob Schnautz, Wikipedia Education Program Online Communications Contractor

'You can also write on Wikipedia' - Facebook group for newbies

Social media is part of our reality. It is estimated that in India alone, the current number of 2 million Indians on social networking sites will grow by a factor of 36 in the next three years. Social media outreach can be a powerful tool, if used prudently, and we decided apply it to the task of encouraging Wikipedia participation in India.

The India Program started a pilot in March to using social media for outreach – and the initial indicators are encouraging. The seed for this was sown when we tried to stay in touch with the hundreds of people who had attended various outreach sessions across the country since January 2012. We sent them email or talk page messages offering help, but got only a handful of responses. But when we asked them if they’d like to join a Facebook group, the response was tremendous – and the “You Can Edit Wikipedia” page on Facebook now has 400 members.

Historically, “physical” outreach has been the primary mode of Wikipedia outreach, but it requires more time and effort on the part of existing editors, such as when they go to colleges or meetups and tell interested people about Wikipedia.  Social media outreach requires significantly lower volunteer time and effort, and offers much more flexibility.

Screenshot of conversation with a new editor making his first edit

After talking to existing editors who were active in outreach or on social media as well as observing community Facebook groups, we identified tips on how this initiative could be best conducted. This was fleshed out into a 20 point guide, intended to provide structure in what can be a chaotic environment.

It suggests to get new editors to complete 5 basic tasks: create a user page, correct a spelling mistake, add a reference, improve content and leave a talk page message. All this is done using articles about a “fun” topic, based on existing policies but explaining them in simple terms.

So, what are the learnings reflected in this guide? Earlier, for most community Facebook groups, members would post links to articles they edited or images they added without an explanation or a call to action. Members were informing things but weren’t asking questions. Similarly, there was very little interaction between experienced and new editors. The activity on the group was irregular.
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Tina Loo, a history professor at the University of British Columbia, recently incorporated Wikipedia in her North American environmental history class (HIST 396), the first history class in the Wikimedia Foundation’s Canada Education Program, which promotes editing and improving Wikipedia articles as part of educational curricula. The 60 students in her class worked in teams to expand existing Wikipedia articles and start new ones. In total, they worked on thirteen articles, all based on subjects in Canadian environmental history.

Though Loo said that she was “attracted by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales’ philosophy of making knowledge accessible (at least to those who have an internet connection),” she had a more personal reason to participate in the program.

For the past two years, a pile of unclaimed HIST 396 term papers has accumulated in the corner of my office, evidence of my failure to engage students adequately. It was as if the energy and anxiety that went into these fifteen- to eighteen-page tomes dissipated completely when they were handed in. The authors of these abandoned papers didn’t, it seems, care how their ideas and arguments resonated with their audience: me. Increasingly, it seemed ridiculous to have students spend time doing something they weren’t interested in and for me to spend time doing something they weren’t interested in, namely writing comments.

As part of the Wikipedia Education Program, Loo took advantage of the resources developed and provided by the Foundation. She also availed herself of several Campus Ambassadors who were graduate students at UBC. They volunteered to help her as she taught her students how to edit Wikipedia and how to navigate the principles and practices that guide the Wikipedia community of editors. In addition, three Online Ambassadors – “The Interior,” “Wetman,” and “maclean” – assisted Loo from a distance, a fact that struck her as remarkable.

They’re members of the Wikipedia community, expert editors who volunteered to help my students and me with writing articles because they just happened to be interested in the subject matter. Beyond their handles and what each said about themselves on their Wikipedia “Talk” pages, I have no idea who they are. Their names materialized on my Wikipedia assignment syllabus within hours of me putting it up.

For Loo’s students, the experience was novel, and it compelled them to consider that the product of their studies would be seen by more than just their teacher, or their parents.

The public nature of Wikipedia, and the fact students felt they were contributing to something that would live on after the class was over made the task of writing an entry exhilarating and intimidating at the same time. The self-consciousness that came from writing something that wasn’t just for me, a TA, or, at most, the other students in the class, translated into a level of care about both the form and content of their writing that I don’t always see.

The students soon discovered that it wasn’t just the prospect that their “term papers” would be read by thousands or tens of thousands of people around the world, but they would also scrutinized by Wikipedians, who are exacting in their standards.

When Wikipedians like these took issue with what they wrote, the students couldn’t just be self-conscious: they also had to respond. Learning how to explain why they had written what they had, to defend it respectfully, and to modify it in light of valid criticism was incredibly valuable. I was impressed with how the students stood up for themselves, especially given that not all community members abided by the first rule of Wikipedia: “Don’t bite the newbies!”

Though Loo detailed some of the less civil comments, she also found a number of Wikipedia editors came to the defense of her students and encouraged them to improve their work. She said that it would be impossible to replicate the kinds and degree of questions that her students received from Wikipedia editors, giving them a remarkable experience with peer review. It also gave them a better insight into how knowledge is developed.

In the end, the value of the Wikipedia assignment lies in giving students first hand experience in constructing knowledge. Writing the articles showed them how it’s made; that it changes over time, and it does so in part as a result of competition and cooperation. Knowledge is a compromise, willing and grudging. It’s the outcome of exercising power and it is powerful.

Tina Loo is a History Professor at the University of British Columbia. Read the extended account of her experience on Niche. Readers interested in the particulars of Loo’s class can find more information at the Wikipedia assignment syllabus for HIST 396.

Wiktionary, the online dictionary that anyone can edit, is now available as a mobile app for Android in Google Play (formerly Android Market). With the official Wiktionary App, you can:

• Read Wiktionary in over 150 languages
• Share pages with friends
• Listen to word pronunciations
• Save your favorite pages
• Read the Word of the Day
• … and more!

Expanding the reach of Wikimedia projects on Android is an important contribution to spreading free knowledge globally. And this is a great example of the motto, “Fork our code, reach millions, and help educate the world!”

A volunteer development effort, the Wiktionary App was developed in collaboration with Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects. Four Canadian undergraduate Computer Science students built the app as volunteers, using the code of the existing Wikipedia App, and adding additional features for Wiktionary.

Like the Wikipedia App before it, the Wiktionary App is committed to Open Web technologies. It is built using the open source framework PhoneGap, and uses HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript. The code is completely open source, and available on GitHub. Anyone can get involved – by submitting code, adding translations on Translatewiki, or by becoming a contributor to Wiktionary.

We’re excited to release this app and get Wiktionary into the hands of more mobile users. We hope you are as excited as we are!

Patrick Hayes, Volunteer

Wikimedia Commons is an important resource for photos and media used on Wikipedia and various sister projects. But it is also an amazing store of images that can be freely used in so many other applications, personal or professional, provided you adhere to the prescriptions in the free licenses used on the media.

We thought it would be a useful exercise to pick a theme and see how many interesting images we could find that fit the theme. We chose to center this photo essay on “greetings.” We were delighted to find with the initial search queries of “welcome” and “greeting,” that the subject yielded such a diverse range of images. We sought to expand the search by thinking more broadly about the myriad types of greetings around the world. After reading the article on Wikipedia, a greeting is an act of communication in which human beings (as well as members of the animal kingdom) intentionally make their presence known to each other.

After searching for “greeting” we tried “waving,” “hug,” “kiss,” “haka,” peace sign” and several other search terms. Photos on Commons are sorted into many different categories. So if you already found an image related to the theme you are interested in, it can be useful to click on the categories which appear at the bottom of the image page, below the metadata, to find other images on the same topic. As an example for our search, here is the category for hand waving. If you know a useful category that is missing in the image, you can help Commons by adding it yourself – click “edit” and follow these instructions.

The following gallery shows some of our favorite results, which we’ve selected for the array of greetings they illustrate.

Jordon Hu, Communications Intern
With assistance from Matthew Roth, Global Communications Manager, and Commons contributor InverseHypercube

A Nepalese man demonstrating the "hand wave"

Wedding of Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden, and Daniel Westling; Cortège at Slottsbacken

Churchill waves to crowds in Whitehall on the day he broadcast to the nation that the war with Germany had been won, 8 May 1945

Tennis player Simone Bolelli waves to the audience at the 2012 French Open

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