Community Fellow, Sarah Stierch

I’m pleased to announce Sarah Stierch has been awarded a Wikimedia Community Fellowship for 2012.  Sarah’s fellowship is intended to support her commitment to encouraging women’s participation in Wikimedia projects.

As a volunteer, Sarah moderates Wikimedia’s gender gap mailing list, has done outreach to hundreds of editors in order to conduct a survey of women in Wikimedia, and curates a scoop.it collection of media related to women and Wikimedia.  She also serves on the advisory board for the Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization that supports women in open-culture communities like Wikipedia.  Sarah has been an editor on English Wikipedia since 2004, and has been active in GLAM-Wiki projects since 2009.  An art historian by training, Sarah was a 2011 Wikipedian-in-Residence at the Archives of American Art in Washington D.C., organizes edit-a-thons on art-related topics, and is in the process of finishing her master’s degree in museum studies at George Washington University.

Her experience working with female editors in the community and enthusiasm for outreach makes Sarah a great candidate for what we hope will be the first of several fellowships focused on the gender gap.  Sarah’s initial project will be a new-editor support pilot where she’ll build a team of volunteers to actively reach out to promising new editors (particularly women) to offer help, mentorship and peer support, encouraging them to continue editing and become more integrated into the Wikipedia community.

Congratulations, Sarah, the Wikimedia Foundation looks forward to partnering with you!

And, as a reminder, we’re still looking for more fellows to join Sarah in 2012.  The deadline to apply for this round is January 15th, please contact fellows at wikimedia dot org with any questions.

Siko Bouterse, Head of Community Fellowships

This is the last in my series of introductory posts about Wikimedia Platform Engineering, focusing on the MediaWiki Core group.  This group is responsible for our sites’ stability, security, performance and architectural cleanliness.  This ends up translating into a lot of code review, along with infrastructure projects like disk-backed object cache, heterogeneous deployment, continuous integration, and performance-related work.  While it’s not a prerequisite, everyone on this team started off as a volunteer developer.  The whole engineering organization has some level of responsibility for our code review process, but this group has more of a primary responsibility for it than most groups.  We have an open position in this group.

(more…)

Wikimedia Community Fellows are spearheading community projects, undertaking research, and piloting new models for engagement to help scale and increase sustainability of volunteer work in the Wikimedia movement.

For example…

Liam Wyatt’s Cultural Partnerships Fellowship has built enthusiasm, awareness, and working models for cultural institutions around the world to partner with Wikipedians in producing open-access, freely-reusable content for the public. Liam piloted the Wikipedian in Residence program at the British Museum in 2010, and so far there have been 10 other Wikipedian in Residencies across the globe. The GLAMCamp gatherings that Liam introduced are providing opportunities for volunteers to come together in person to strategize, document, develop tools, share best practices and forward the GLAM movement. Liam’s 1 year fellowship wraps up this month, and he will be missed, but GLAM projects meanwhile continue to grow!

Jon Harald Søby‘s Translation Fellowship is modeling new ways to engage with volunteer translators, and as a result this year’s fundraiser has almost 1400 active translators with 500 translations completed in 112 languages to date. (For comparison, thats already over 1000 more translators and 30 more languages than last year, and Jon’s not done yet!).

We’re recruiting

Want to be like Jon and Liam? The Wikimedia Foundation is now seeking fellowship applicants and project ideas for Spring 2012 Fellowships! Submissions are encouraged to focus on the theme of improving editor retention and increasing participation in Wikimedia Projects. The deadline to apply is January 15^th, 2012.

If you’d like to work with the Wikimedia Foundation on projects to boost participation and retention, or know someone who should be recommended for a fellowship, or if you’ve got ideas for a fellowship project WMF could support, we’d like to hear from you! Please visit the Fellowships Program page for more information.

Siko Bouterse, Head of Community Fellowships

I’m thrilled to welcome Sumana Harihareswara to WMF Engineering!  Sumana will be filling the role of Volunteer Development Coordinator.  We interviewed many great candidates for the role, but decided the role would be best served by WMF continuing to work with Sumana on a contract basis.  She’ll be working from her home in New York.Sumana started in a part-time capacity back in March coordinating our participation in Google Summer of Code, as well as helping plan WMF’s participation in the Berlin Developer meeting happening later this month.  Starting after the Berlin Developer meeting, she’ll be dedicating her working time to Foundation issues.

In addition to the specific initiative above, she’ll be recruiting and encouraging volunteers more generally.  In the near term, she’ll be evangelizing movement priorities within the development community, and working toward matching interested volunteers and organizations to important movement work.  She’ll be working with Bugmeister Mark Hershberger on bug triage and finding volunteers to test and fix MediaWiki.  She’ll also gather some baseline metrics about our volunteer and corporate communities to measure our progress against.  And she’ll be coordinating WMF development work in other open source communities as appropriate.  Her Open Source Bridge talk last year (“ The Second Step: HOWTO encourage open source work at for-profits”) is particularly relevant to this last task.

Sumana is currently an active contributor in the GNOME community, as a writer and editor for GNOME Journal, and recently led the marketing effort for GNOME 3.0.  She is also a blogger at GeekFeminism, and a longtime participant in open source communities.  She has worked at the GNOME Foundation, QuestionCopyright.org, Collabora, Fog Creek Software, and Salon.com, and contributed to the AltLaw, Empathy, Miro, and Zeitgeist open source projects.  She’s written a weekly newspaper column and has performed (and taught) stand-up comedy.

Sumana intends on communicating with the MediaWiki and Wikimedia communities in many ways: via IRC and mailing lists, conference calls, and frequent visits to WMF headquarters from New York City and to relevant conferences, both MediaWiki-related and not.  For example, she’ll be speaking again this year at Open Source Bridge, giving a talk titled “Learn Tech Management in 45 Minutes”.

If you’re interested in learning more, or dropping a comment on her talk page, Sumana’s user page on MediaWiki.org has much more information.

Welcome, Sumana!

–Rob Lanphier, Engineering Programs Manager for General Engineering

Wikimedia fellow, Liam Wyatt

Following in quick succession from the recent announcements of fellowships for both Achal Prabhala and Lennart Guldbransson I am pleased to announce our sixth fellow, Liam Wyatt, based in Sydney. During this one year project Liam will be working to build the capacity of the Wikimedia community to undertake partnerships with cultural institutions – known as GLAMs [Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums] a term he popularized.

Liam has been a board member of the Australian Wikimedia chapter and was a longtime panelist on the Wikipedia Weekly podcast. He is a Wikipedia historian, having won the university medal for his 2008 thesis ‘the academic lineage of Wikipedia.’ The focus of his Wikipedia work for the last two years has been the GLAM sector – he was the convener of the GLAM-WIKI conferences in Canberra and London and last July became the world’s first “Wikipedian in Residence” at the British Museum (previous blog entry).

Several different types of collaboration with the cultural sector have been successfully run with institutions across the world over the last few years – including multimedia content donations, “backstage pass” tours, residencies, and editing and photography events. These collaborations increase the quality and reliability of Wikipedia and also meet the goals of the GLAM institutions: to share their expertise with a wide audience – especially for those that do not have a web presences of their own.

The priorities for Liam’s fellowship include building communication channels so the existing community of Wikimedians working with GLAMs can better share their knowledge; applying learnings from the university “campus ambassador” system to create a global network of Wikimedia GLAM ambassadors; creating clear how-to documentation for common GLAM project with real-world case studies to match; and improving the metrics tools available to measure the usage of GLAM content.

If you would like to join in any aspect of the cultural partnerships initiative please visit the project pages at glamwiki.org. If you represent a cultural institution and want to engage in a project please write to glam@wikimedia.org.

Daniel Phelps
Human Resources

I’m pleased to announce Achal Prabhala as our latest Wikimedia Foundation fellow.

Achal is a writer and researcher in Bangalore who has participated as a volunteer in the Wikimedia movement in India and globally for years, and as a member of the Foundation’s advisory board.

Achal will be conducting field research in rural South Africa and India with Wikipedians and non-Wikipedians across three languages to explore ways to compensate for the gap in published/printed sources in many local languages.

From Achal:

Even if every single person in the south with Internet access wanted to become an active editor on Wikipedia, there is still a problem that we are going to run up against. It’s a problem that bedevils everyone working in local languages in Asia and Africa, and it’s something we have no control over: the lack of published scholarly resources in these languages.

For Wikipedias in languages of the south, citations are not difficult to find when the articles being added are translations. However, since we all want the sphere of knowledge to be universally expanded – and not merely transferred from the north to the south – we are forced to confront two specific problems with finding citations for important local subject matter: (i) Published resources may simply not exist. (ii) Even when published scholarly resources exist, they may be limited or inaccessible and thus effectively rendered invisible to Wikipedians.

To put it another way, it’s possible that the sum of published scholarly work from Europe is somewhat close to the sum of ‘European’ knowledge, and that the sum of accessible, published scholarly work in many Asian and African languages is nowhere close to the corresponding body of knowledge that circulates among speakers of those languages.

Despite these problems, Tamil Wikipedia has about 25,000 articles, Malayalam Wikipedia has about 15,000, and Northern Sotho Wikipedia has about 600. In all these language Wikipedias, there are articles – especially when concerning subjects that are specific to a particular people or place where the language is spoken – which lack citations, because there are simply no or not enough published resources to refer to.

The scope of the project is to investigate how one might compensate for the lack of traditional citations; how an alternative means of citation may be constructed; and how this may be feasibly and easily deployed – and improved – by Wikipedians in the future.

I’m looking forward to seeing fascinating and useful results from Achal’s project.

– Zack Exley, Chief Community Officer

Lennart Guldbrandsson with Wikimedia Foundation's Head of Outreach Frank Schulenburg

Today it is my pleasure to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation has a new fellow, Lennart Guldbrandsson. He is the fourth fellow, after Steven Walling, Victoria Doronina and Maryana Pinchuk. During his fellowship, Lennart will work on two projects: the Bookshelf Project and the Account Creation Improvement Project.

A long-time Wikipedian from Sweden, Lennart has been on our radar for some time now. He founded and became the first chair of the second largest Wikimedia chapters, Wikimedia Sverige, wrote one of the first books about Wikipedia, and has written several of the Wikipedia instructional videos. Lately, we hired him to work with the Bookshelf Project, as he has many years of experience as a writer and writing teacher. After studies at Uppsala and Gothenburg, where he now lives, he has his own writing company. He is active on several wikis under the user name Hannibal.

Lennart’s work with the Bookshelf Project will focus on getting the educational materials translated into many more languages as well as helping chapters and individuals dissemination the materials effectively on a global scale. See some examples of the Bookshelf materials here.

The other part of the fellowship is to make it easier for newcomers to create their accounts on Wikipedia – and facilitate their first steps after they have created the account. A short explanation for why that’s important is here.

The idea is that both these projects should be as engaging and transparent as possible. Lennart will post reports regularly, and try to get your feedback from time to time, and generally be reminding you of the existence of these projects.

For both of these projects, Lennart wants you to know that he will need help. You are welcome to sign up here for the Bookshelf Project or here for Account Creation. Or you can send an email to lennart@wikimedia.org.

- Zack Exley, Community Department