In January, 92 participants gathered in San Francisco to learn about Wikimedia technology and to build things in our first Bay Area hackathon.

After a kickoff speech by Foundation VP of Engineering Erik Möller (video), we led tutorials on the MediaWiki web API, customizing wikis with JavaScript user scripts and Gadgets, and building the Wikipedia Android app.  (We recorded each training; click those links for how-to guides and videos.)  We asked the participants to self-organize into teams and work on projects.  After their demonstration showcase, judges awarded a few prizes to the best demos.

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Last Saturday, Maryana Pinchuk and I had the pleasure of hosting the first San Francisco meetup of Wikimedians in 2012. The Wikimedia community hosts meetups for Wikipedians and editors of our other projects all around the world. Thankfully these self-organized meetups are usually regular enough that they don’t require a blog post to herald their occurrence. But considering the rarity of a bonafide San Francisco meetup that includes community members, the Board of Trustees, and staff, we’d like to share a short recap of the event:

• We had a fantastic turnout! With about 40 attendees, Saturday was one of the largest San Francisco meetups ever, other than the 10th Anniversary’s “West Coast WikiCon” and our recent San Francisco Hackathon. (We’d particularly like to thank Wikimedia Foundation Community Department colleagues Karyn Gladstone, Siko Bouterse, and Bryony Jones for their organizational help!)
• Many of the attendees were community members (about 20 folks), but we also included the Board of Trustees and several staff from the Tech and Community Departments.
• We were thrilled to have not just English Wikipedians, but editors of Wiktionary, Wikisource, as well as Portuguese and German Wikipedia. The San Francisco Bay Area is known for having a diverse community with a huge range of interests, so we hope future meetups can continue to include people from many Wikimedia projects.

Though the Northern California community, including the Wikimedia Foundation, has periodically held great large-scale events, such as conferences and hackathons, the success of Saturday’s meetup encourages us to hold more regular, open-format meetups in the near future. Let us know if you’d like to get involved!

Steven Walling
Community Organizer, Wikimedia Foundation

(Photos from Wikimedia Commons)

This March, the Community Department will be heading to Brazil to talk with supporters of Wikimedia’s mission. Our aim is to better understand how Portuguese-speaking editors and donors, many of whom are located in Brazil, view Wikipedia and the projects, in order to better tailor the fundraiser and all our programs to them.

First up, Maryana Pinchuk and I will be holding four meetups with active editors, in order to talk with them about what makes Portuguese Wikipedia unique. They are in…

• Rio de Janeiro
• São Paulo
• Curitiba
• Natal

Our colleagues in Global Development and at Wikimedia Brasil are working hard on several initiatives to reach out to new editors in the country. The Wikimedia Engineering team also has a number of large scale projects, such as the Visual Editor, that will deeply impact Portuguese Wikipedia.

The purpose of our visit is to gain a deeper understanding of the Brazilian Wikipedian community and to start a dialog with them about improvements they would like to see in Portuguese Wikipedia – something that we hope can be of assistance to everyone here at the Foundation. (To that end, Wikimedia Storyteller Victor Grigas will also be at the meetups, in order to interview interested Wikimedians one-on-one about the project and their perspective on it.)

In addition to editor meetups, Megan Hernandez will also be holding several donor focus groups in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Last year’s fundraising vastly improved on our ability to support donations from around the globe, but we still have work to do to optimize the localization and donor experience for readers in different countries.

If you’re an editor interested in joining, there’s still plenty of time to sign up for the meetup near you. We’ll be reporting back on our visit and discussions with the community, so look for a follow-up post come mid-March.

Obrigado!

Steven Walling
Community Organizer, Wikimedia Foundation

Yesterday, we wrapped up our visit to Tunisia, which comes as part of our Arabic language initiative that WMF launched earlier in October 2011 with the Doha convening. Our initial outreach activities mainly rely on meetings with the small Wikipedia community scattered in Arabic speaking countries and exploring the possibilities of expansion of those communities, by connecting them to like-minded groups/communities that can help facilitate on ground activities and workshops in their geographies. Our first stop in this tour was Tunisia. Our first day included a lecture that was hosted by the national school of engineering. A Wikimedia staff and two Arabic Wikipedia volunteers (Ciphers and OsamaK) were part of the lecture organized by WMF on open licenses, free acess to knowledge and the use of Wikipedia in education. It was a good chance to answer questions and misconceptions related to the use of Wikipedia in education and the general status of the Arabic Wikipedia. It was also a great opportunity to meet with students of open source clubs who will form a starting point of Wikipedia clubs in their schools. Tunisia has an internet penetration of nearly 35%; with 3.5 million people having access to the internet, the country contributes 1.4% of Arabic Wikipedia content, which comes as the 3rd most viewed language after French and English. The current numbers aren’t high, however, with regard to support of open source policies (such as opengov) and the expansion of open source and open content activities that have grown recently (thanks to the revolution!), it looks like Tunisia has a good potential to increment Wikipedia contributors on Arabic and other languages, especially on mobile, which has 105.5% penetration rate.

Our visit was promising on many levels: In addition to kicking off the start of Wikipedia awareness activities in universities and other independent spaces (thanks to Nawat that agreed to host Wikipedia workshops), and helping connect current editors with new enthusiasts, we also met with the managers of the national library of Tunisia and agreed on a numbers of steps, including releasing the collection of digitized old books, periodicals, postcards and magazines to Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons, adopting a system on all their public computers that displays Wikipedia as the default search option, and on a longer term, release all their collection of digitized Arabic books (nearly 3000) to be used as sources for Wikipedia articles. In line with adding content to Commons, we also met with a consultant to the president for cultural affairs who is excited about releasing the presidential photography collection under a CC license, however, still pending digitization of the material themselves.

Wikimedia’s visit was recognized by Radio Maliss, which interviewed our WMF staff (interview is in Arabic)

Tunisia came first in our tour, and it was a good start with lots of promising steps that need our follow up, which we will keep you updated with. Coming up next will be Jordan then Algeria, please drop us a line if you will be there. :-)

 

Moushira Elamrawy
Global Development Team

Barry Newstead, Frank Schulenburg, Moushira Elamrawy and I (Sara Yap), traveled to the Middle East in October to meet with Wikipedians in the Arab world and begin the expansion of the Wikipedia Education Program. Adel Iskandar, a professor at Georgetown University who taught in the U.S. Global Education Program pilot, joined the team to meet with professors and Wikipedians in Qatar, Egypt, and Jordan. These meetings will inform the planning of the Arabic Education Program, which will be launched in 2012. Over the course of a 14-day visit to Egypt, Jordan and Qatar, the Wikimedia team connected with local experts, university staff, student groups, and attendees at an Arabic Wikipedia Convening in Doha which was co-hosted by WMF together with the Qatar Computing Research Institute. The convening focused on ways to catalyze high quality growth of the Arabic Wikipedia across the Middle East and North Africa.

In collaboration with local participants, Wikimedia Foundation aims to develop the quality and quantity of contributions in Arabic Wikipedia. The trip to Egypt, Qatar, and Jordan was extremely valuable due to the large contribution of the faculty and students we connected with at the universities. To gain a better vision of how to launch the program, we conducted about 30 interviews with professors who teach at Ain Shams, Cairo University, American University of Cairo, University of Jordan, and Qatar University. Through the recommendations of personal contacts and faculty, we met with professors who may be a part of the Global Education Program pilot in MENA. Some learnings include:

• The amount of Arabic readership has increased post-Arab Revolution; people want to learn more about current news and global events, especially within the MENA (pronounced MEH-NA).
• People shared the need for an increase of content in Arabic. Most convincing was a brochure (created by LiAnna Davis and David Peters) that outlined the huge digital divide between the Arabic Wikipedia and other Wikipedia language versions. Some people indicated that they were ashamed by how small the Arabic Wikipedia is compared to e.g. the Portuguese Wikipedia (especially given the fact that so many more people speak Arabic).
• We need to begin with the Education Program with a small pilot and then reiterate.

Wikimedia Meetup in Cairo

With volunteers as the foundation of Wikimedia’s projects, the meetup in Egypt connected our team with the community. For the Wikipedia Education Program, we need a network of local volunteers to support the pilot program (either as Campus Ambassadors, or simply by agreeing not to revert edits automatically), and the willingness to continue on with the Wikimedia project at large. We hope to have more meetups in the region soon and would be interested to hear your thoughts on ideas for future events. Questions and comments from the attendees included:

• Who leads and verifies the corrections on Wikipedia?
• Many people don’t know that they can edit Wikipedia – can the Wikipedia “edit” button be larger?
• If the Global Education Program continues in the MENA region, it will be important to emphasize in the curriculum: how to cite, why students should reference work and be provided with the tools to do so.

The Global Education Program team aims to hire a local team, formalize contacts with professors, and finalize a list of professors and schools to recommend for the program. The Wikimedia team will return to the region in the next few months to conduct trainings for the Global Education Program at universities. The Wikimedia Global Development team would like to hear your thoughts on working in the Arab world, a promising region that we believe will play a significant role in increasing content on Wikipedia.

Mea Salama | مع السلام | With Peace,

Sara Yap, Catalyst Projects, Global Development

Arabic Convening References:

[1] Barry Newstead’s Slides from the Arabic Wikipedia Convening in Doha, Qatar
[2] Frank Schulenburg’s slides on the Global Education Program
[3] Wikipedian Cipher’s Slides on MENA Region Insights and Statistics
[4] Moushira Elamrawy’s Slides from the Arabic Wikipedia Convening

Earlier this month, about thirty MediaWiki developers and interested technologists gathered in New Orleans to learn and to work on Wikimedia’s technical infrastructure.  We made broad progress on the infrastructure of innovation at Wikimedia (notes).  Specifically:

• We are now much closer to officially opening the doors to Wikimedia Labs and giving far more people the ability to contribute to MediaWiki without having to set up and maintain their own development environments at home.  Wikimedia Labs will provide hosted, virtualized test and development sandboxes for new and experienced programmers and systems administrators.  Many developers got beta Labs accounts, we tested at a larger scale, and we fixed several bugs.
• Developers agreed to create a file backend abstraction layer to enable large-scale MediaWiki installations to use one of several storage systems to contain big collections of big media files.  (Wikimedia plans on using Swift, which is open source.) Microsoft’s Ben Lobaugh and SAIC’s DJ Bauch collaborated towards improving MediaWiki’s performance on Microsoft technologies as well.  Developers made architectural decisions, refactored some existing code, and improved documentation and tests for the SwiftMedia extension to MediaWiki.
• 

  Chad Horohoe teaching developers unit testing

  We now have a continuous integration server up and running.  This will continuously run tests checking on the latest new features and bugfixes that developers write, resulting in fewer bugs and faster development. Developers will need to write tests to reap the benefits, so Chad Horohoe taught a test-writing workshop.

• Max Semenik finished and demonstrated the first version of his API Query Sandbox.  This allows software developers anywhere to experiment with ways to automatically get data from Wikipedia or other sites that run MediaWiki, thus enabling wider and deeper reuse of Wikimedia content.
• Operations folks continued the Puppetization of our infrastructure: they completely reworked Varnish management in Puppet, and worked on Puppet configurations for SwiftMedia testing. This configuration management work will ensure that ops can move faster and more confidently in building and maintaining Wikimedia infrastructure. And Canonical’s Mark Mims and Kapil Thangavelu worked on improving methods for Wikimedia developers “to spin up stacks of services within the labs environment” using Juju (more details).
• 

  Brion Vibber leading developers into the "glorious Git future"

  Since the engineering department is planning a switch from Subversion to Git in the next few months, Brion taught nearly everyone there how Git works (slides, audio), and how we’ll be using Git in the future. This change in our source code repository and workflow will, we hope, enable more speed and flexibility in development, both for WMF developers and community contributors.
• We prioritized and addressed several open requests for the operations team and defect reports about the latest version of MediaWiki, 1.18, which had just been deployed across WMF sites.
• Roan found and fixed an issue that was spouting symbolic link errors into our Apache logs, so now it’ll be easier for us to see more dangerous errors in those logs.
• Google Summer of Code students Salvatore Ingala and Kevin Brown made progress on integrating their summers’ work into MediaWiki as used and deployed by others; Salvatore and WMF developer Roan Kattouw have a plan for getting his user scripts improvements reviewed and deployed, so they can benefit Wikimedia readers and editors.
• A volunteer came in on Friday night knowing nothing about developing for MediaWiki, and by the end of the weekend had a working development environment on her laptop and had some ideas about how to contribute.
• We had substantive conversations about the summer internship program and about third-party collaboration that will affect how we work in the future.

We also ate dinner together, walked Bourbon Street, and generally got to know colleagues we’d never met before.  I expect these relationships will bear fruit for years to come.

Thanks to Ryan Lane and Dana Isokawa for organizing the event with me, and thanks to Launch Pad New Orleans for providing the venue!

Our next developers’ event is a hackathon in Mumbai November 18-20 concentrating on internationalization, localization, and mobile work.  To find out about other upcoming Wikimedia technical events, check the meetings wiki page, and follow @MediaWikiMeet on Identi.ca or Twitter.

Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation

Yesterday was the last day of our first ever Arabic Wikipedia Convening which was which was held in Doha and kindly hosted by QCRI. For 3 days, Arabic Wikipedians, academics and technical specialists, shared their thoughts on improving the quality of articles, increasing the number of contributors and the different models of engaging Wikipedia in education.

This is probably the first time Arabic Wikipedians, who are scattered across the Middle East, get a change to meet in person. It was our pleasure meeting each of Ciphers, Abanima, Ahmad, OsamaK as well as Rami Tarawneh, who is among the early founders of Arabic Wikipedia. On the first day and after brief introductions, Rami told us the story behind how Arabic Wikipedia started; what were the challenges that faced the community during the early days and how Arabic Wikipedia policies changed along with time. For the rest of the day and for the following couple of days, the discussions revolved mainly around three main topics: Machine translations, education and outreach. We listened to the lessons learned from a machine translation project that was carried out in 2009 on Arabic Wikipedia and we had a presentation by Bala Jeyaraman, who gave us a detailed and impressive talk about a similar project that was finished last March on Tamil Wikipedia. Naren Datha, from WikiBhasha team, also gave a small talk about how their tool works. In addition to machine translation, Frank Schulenburg gave a brief introduction to how our global education program operates in different countries, then we listened to a success story by the coordinator of WikiArabi project. Our last day included discussions around possible online and offline outreach strategies that can leverage both the content and the number of contributors of Arabic Wikipedia, we were also introduced to Arabic Web Day initiative.

The discussion helped the community communicate on a personal level, and present its culture and aesthetic to enthusiasts who are considering using Wikipedia as a platform for enhancing Arabic web content, and to the QCRI team who are currently helping our Global Development department render a number of solid projects on the ground across MENA.

The global development team will leave the 80°F/27°C Doha in a couple of hours, heading to Amman for a one day visit to The University of Jordan, before we go to Egypt, for meetings with professors at Cairo University, and with the Arabic Wikipedia Community.

A year ago, Arabic Wikipedia was nearly 120k articles, with a community striving to start an action on the ground in different places, by applying a chapter model in different locations across the region. Our MENA catalyst project is now bringing new possibilities, growing a more solid vision, with feasible funding and a work-in-progress action plan.

We shall keep you posted with our next steps and research findings, meanwhile, wish us luck in our MENA endeavors, a region which is hot, in many different ways.

Salaam!
Moushira Elamrawy
Global Development Team

Barry Newstead and I (from the Foundation’s Global Development Department) had the thrill of going to visit our friends in Brazil over October 7-10: what an awesome country and community! We had two stops this time: Rio de Janeiro, to participate in an all-day event at the Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), and São Paulo, to participate in a community meet-up (WikiSampa10) and present at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP). The trip centered around two key themes from our end: research and university outreach.

Research regarding Portuguese Wikipedia
During the trip, we were able to present some preliminary analysis regarding the Portuguese Wikipedia (PT-WP) and brainstorm about some causes for its current state. PT-WP shows a high turnaround, with about 40% of editors in a given month
consisting of newcomers, and in addition scored lowest on the Wikipedia Editor Satisfaction Index” (for more information on the index, see past blog post).  Daniela Feijo – a researcher out of Porto Alegre, Brazil – has been working with WMF for the past month and lead the discussion on some preliminary thoughts regarding possible reasons for this.

Conversation is ongoing and following WikiSampa10, it continues on the PT-WP Village Pump. Moreover, research is ongoing and can be tracked on the Meta Wiki as well as PT-WP.

Beginnings of Global Education Program – Brazil
It has been clear that the youth of Brazil will be the catalysts for growth in the country at large, and we want Wikipedia to benefit from the passion and intelligence of this demographic as well! To that end, we are thrilled at the Education Program currently occurring at UNIRIO, which involves the incorporation of editing Wikipedia into the class syllabus for two different courses: Roman History and Multimedia Systems.

In addition to supporting the work of the currently ongoing courses, we were eager to present the idea to new schools, and we spent Monday afternoon under the hospitality of USP. We are excited about the potential of working with them in the future.

Further work
Though the work was pushed forward, there is still much to do! As mentioned above, we are pushing forward on the research and Education Program support, but the Brazilian community is working on some really cool initiatives themselves, including the development of a chapter and conducting an Editing Sprint! Stay tuned for the exciting things to come…

Wikimedia Foundation to Launch Arabic Catalyst

As many of you know, the Wikimedia movement strategy that was finalized in February 2011 re-emphasized the importance of Arabic Wikipedia to the achievement of the Wikimedia vision. The Wikimedia Foundation team has started in the past month to work on plans to support the growth of Arabic Wikipedia in the coming months and years. We want to learn about the region and the Arabic Wikipedia community and we would like to start some initiatives in the region to create new enthusiasm for Wikipedia and close the gap between Arabic Wikipedia and larger projects, such as English Wikipedia. There are close to 400 million people who speak Arabic and we want them included in our vision.

Our plans came in line with a common interest of Qatar Foundation’s computing research institute – QCRI team which was researching possible ways of supporting Arabic Wikipedia. They feel that the Arabic language community needs to have a great Wikipedia and they want to help us to build on your work in the community to attract new editors and try new approaches. We asked them to host a small working session with us, a group of leading contributors to Arabic Wikipedia and some outside advisors as a way for us to start making plans for the near future. We will be holding this working session in Doha on 20 and 21 October. While we will only have a few people there in person, we would like to hear your thoughts on the opportunities and challenges and have set up a space on Arabic Wikipedia; for discussion before, during and after the session. We will also capture notes to share the results of the discussion. We are excited to create the first of hopefully many opportunities for Arabic Wikipedians to get together in person.

Beyond the working session, the Wikimedia Foundation is in discussions with the Qatar Foundation the joint collaboration of a pilot and then a broader launch of our Global Education Program in the region. This initiative which has been launched in the United States and India presents a real opportunity to bring new forms of contributions to Arabic Wikipedia. We plan to support outreach activities you might want to plan locally as well as regional initiatives. We are taking another look at translation work reflecting on the experiences with Google’s translation work and experiences in other parts of the world. Finally, we want to hear from the community and like-minded groups about new and innovative ways to support the growth of the Arabic Wikipedia community.

This is bound to be a long journey together and we look forward to getting to know the Arabic Wikipedia community, to learning from you and to partnering with you to achieve our shared vision. We will have an IRC hour on Thursday, October 13 2011 at 20:00 UTC in #wikipedia-ar, to listen to the community suggestions and respond to any inquiries around the initiative. The conversation will be in English and Moushira will assist with translation if required.

Barry & Moushira

Barry is the Chief Global Development Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation based in San Francisco, USA. Moushira is a consultant to the Wikimedia Foundation based in Alexandria, Egypt.

 

 

Wiki Loves Monuments was a crazy idea: ask people to get out of their houses and take a picture of the cultural heritage around them, of monuments and buildings!
In September 2010, however, the idea proved far from crazy – 250 people participated in the Netherlands and submitted 12,500 photos. Last month, during the pan-European 2011 contest, we crushed that number.

In the past few months, volunteers throughout Europe have worked hard to organize this public photo contest in 18 countries throughout Europe – from Portugal to Estonia – and with great success. More than 5,000 people participated, submitting an amazing 165,000 photos– all available under a free license, and usable on Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia and other places on the internet. As a comparison, the current record for the largest photography competition according to the Guinness Book of World Records stands at 126,501 images.

This project has been a success in so many different ways already. Not only 5,000 people participated, but an estimated 4,000 of these are ‘new users’ to the Wikimedia projects and through this contest they made their very first contribution to Wikimedia as a registered user. Now it is up to the community to cherish and welcome these people and help them find their way on the projects, supporting them and encouraging them to further contributions.

In 14 cities, related ‘Wiki takes the City’ events have been organized, and two of those are most interesting. Thanks to Wiki takes Andorra (a very small country between Spain and France) and the work of Amical Viquipèdia, we have now over 1,000 images of Andorra’s cultural heritage – covering 100% of the listed buildings! And in Wiki takes Cologne the organizational skills of the German chapter and volunteers were once again proven; the event was highly successful with more than 70 participants.

 

Wiki Loves Monuments is not finished yet – it’s a continuous project, but the contest that ran through the month of September is now over. The national juries will deliberate in the coming month over the best photos from their countries, and submit 10 winners to an international jury by the end of October. By the beginning of December, the winners of the European contest will be announced, and the 2011 edition will come to an end. But the volunteers who have been working so hard on this will keep working to check, categorize and use the images in Wikipedia, write the articles, improve the monument lists and do all the other work that still lies ahead.

I would like for all of us to take a minute and thank all the people who have worked so hard to make Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 a success. Our partners on both the national and European level – cultural heritage organizations, chapters, sponsors and others – have worked hard to enable us to pull this off. But even more importantly, all the volunteers who have worked so hard to connect with the partners, create the monument lists, write background materials, write manuals, prepare contest rules, find jury members, find sponsors, prepare press releases, answer press enquiries, help with technical challenges, set up the wizards and banners, help the uploaders where necessary, check the incoming files and make sure that everything keeps on going – they deserve a big cheer and hug.

I really  hope this has not worn you out, and that you consider helping to organize and support this crazy idea again next year.

Lodewijk Gelauff – international coordinator of Wiki Loves Monuments