Yesterday we activated the wiki-to-print feature (see our recent blog post) in six additional Wikipedia language editions: French, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Simple English. In these language editions, it’s now possible to make collections of Wikipedia articles, share them, download them as PDF and OpenDocument files, or order them as printed books. We specifically activated it in the Simple English edition (which is a version of Wikipedia written in simple terms for children and adults learning English) so that English language users can get a first good feel for the functionality in a Wikipedia environment (it’s been active in English Wikibooks for a while). We’re hoping for a roll-out in additional languages including English very soon; our main concern is scalability of the feature under the massive load of the English Wikipedia.

The feature has been quickly embraced where it has been activated. In the German Wikipedia, since our deployment on January 27, more than 1,000 custom selections have been created and saved. Our technology partner, PediaPress, has been highly responsive to the rapidly accumulating feedback, and many small and larger output issues have been fixed in the last two weeks. For the new deployments, there’s a central feedback page on Meta.

It will be interesting to see how this feature affects writing on Wikipedia. When people start to think about their contributions in the context of a book, having a consistent structure and style is even more important than when viewing separate Wikipedia articles in a browser. Beyond increasing the quality and reach of our content, we also hope that this technology will be valued by our existing volunteer community as a way to turn their contributions into something that can be touched, held, given away — and by new writers as a motivation to participate.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

(UPDATE 2/27: We’ve enabled it in the English Wikipedia for signed in users and are observing server load and user feedback. If you’re logged in, see the help page for more information on how to use the tool. As always, the PediaPress team is amazingly responsive to issues that people encounter, and we expect continued improvements to the PDF and print quality over the coming weeks and months. If all goes well, we plan to deploy it on all relevant projects for all users in March. Language support in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew and some other languages still needs to improve and we won’t enable it in languages that the tool can’t handle appropriately yet – code contributions are welcome!)

The task force of the usability team has experienced a significant growth lately. Our one-person-team was increased by the arrival of Trevor Parscal, who transferred from Brion Vibber’s team. Trevor brings in not only excellent technical knowledge and skills, but he has extensive experience working at a usability firm as an interface designer and developer. Trevor has very sharp eyes for details both in graphics and development.

A big Thank-You to those who are sharing the ideas and adding knowledge to the project page. Trevor had started evaluating editing extensions. The progress is posted here. If you know of good editing extensions or have one brewing on your hard drive, please let us know by adding it on the extension nomination page. We appreciate additional comments if extensions are compatible with MediaWiki 1.15alpha. The rating system will be available soon, so it will be fun to share that with you.

Stay tuned.

- Naoko

A printed book ordered through PediaPress.com

A few weeks ago, we rolled out a feature to allow users to generate PDF files, OpenDocument word processor files, and on-demand printed books in one of our smaller sister projects, Wikibooks. This same technology has now also been experimentally enabled on the German Wikipedia (thanks to Frank Schulenburg for creating a beautiful help page). Essentially, you can compile a wiki-book from any number of Wikipedia articles, download a PDF or OpenDocument version, or order a printed version from our technology partner, PediaPress. And if you like your book remixes, you can save them for others to use and share.

If you want to take your favorite Wikipedia articles with you on the go, or if you want to have a nicely formatted PDF version, or you want to edit them further in a word processor, this technology is for you. The reason this is being tested on the German Wikipedia, in case you were wondering, is that PediaPress is a German company, and they will be able to respond quickly to feedback directly from the German Wikipedia community. With more than 1.4 billion pageviews a month, the German Wikipedia is also the second most viewed language edition, right after English with 5.2 billion pageviews. We’ve dedicated some hardware to this feature, and testing it on the German Wikipedia will give us a good idea how it behaves under high traffic characteristics.

It should go without saying that all the code developed through this partnership is open source. In other words, if you want to set up your own wiki with PDF support, OpenDocument support, or connectivity to the PediaPress on-demand printing service, you can install the Collection Extension and enable it on your wiki. When we say free, we mean it.

If all goes well, this feature will become available in all Wikimedia projects where it makes sense. This technology has been developed with the generous support of the Commonwealth of Learning and the Open Society Institute.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

PS: In unrelated tech news, our CTO Brion Vibber has blogged about the AbuseFilter extension, an important tool whose development we’re supporting, which will help Wikipedians to deal more effectively with spam, vandalism, and other destructive user behavior. And if you haven’t seen it, also note his recent post about the Drafts feature that’s being tested, and which should help against accidental loss of edits.

Mozilla has awarded a grant of $100,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation to help coordinate improvements to the development of Ogg Theora and related open video technologies. Mozilla and Wikimedia share a strong commitment to open standards. Version 3.1 of the Mozilla Firefox web browser will include built-in support to play audio and video in the open source Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora formats. All audio and video in Wikipedia is stored in these formats. Mike Shaver, VP of Engineering at Mozilla has blogged about this great news, as has Chris Blizzard, Director of Evangelism for Mozilla.

Open standards for audio and video are important because they can be used by anyone for any purpose without royalties, and can be inspected and improved by an open community. Today, video and audio on the web are dominated by proprietary technologies, most frequently patent-encumbered codecs wrapped into closed-source player widgets. Wikimedia and Mozilla want to help to build a web where video and audio are first class citizens: easy to use and manipulate by anyone, without compulsory royalty schemes or other barriers to participation.

The $100,000 grant will be used to support the work of long-time contributors to the Ogg Theora/Vorbis codebase and related tools, such as libraries for network seeking. The improvements will be made over a 6 month period.

Erik Möller,
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

I hope you all had started the year 2009 with a positive note. I have a lot to be hopeful for 2009, but the most exciting thing for me is to launch the long-waited the Wikipedia Usability Initiative. This initiative became reality by the grant from the late Frank Stanton (the president of CBS between 1946 and 1971) through the Stanton Foundation.

The purpose of this initiative is to reduce the barriers for new users in editing Wikipedia and boost the participation in editing Wikipedia. I am currently focusing on bringing in talented minds.  On the space front, we had outgrown our current space in the South of Market area of San Francisco, and we were in search of space specifically for this project. I am happy to announce that Wikia has agreed to sublease two of their conference rooms to the Wikimedia Foundation for the project duration (Jan’09-Mar’10). Daniel collected a dozen bids for the space in SOMA, and Wikia matched the best offer. Wikia is only two blocks away from the office of the Wikimedia Foundation, so having a satellite office so close by works great for us.

Wikia has been doing intensive work on the usability front and making the code available to public, so I look forward to collaborating with the Wikia technical and product teams to exchange ideas and learn from their work. The Wikpedia Usability Initiative page where we can exchange ideas and share the status is up. I look forward to your ideas there.

May the force be with us,

Naoko Komura

Program Manager<

Earlier today we announced a wonderful grant from the Stanton Foundation – $890K that will help us fund a team of developers and a project manager to examine and ultimately improve usability for the wiki editing interface for Wikipedia and all of Wikimedia’s projects.  Further – the improvements are going to be available to anyone running the MediaWiki software, which means all wikis can share in the changes.

This is great news for those who may have approached Wikipedia with some trepidation in the past, uncomfortable with the technical demands that basic editing may present.  It’s our hope that with these improvements we’ll be able to attract new people with new information, perspectives, and knowledge into Wikipedia and other collaborative projects.

The first steps will start through the new year, as the team is formed and current usage barriers are examined.  Expect to see changes to the editing interface over the coming months. We’ll be happy to spread the news about the improvements as they become available.

We’ve also put together a basic Q&A for the project.  Please take a look and feel free to add any of your questions or comments below.

Thanks!

Jay Walsh<

Not one, but two new books to add to your library this month.  Earlier in September we were pleased to see How Wikipedia Works (published by No Starch Press), authored by prominent Wikipedians Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates.

Today another title has hit shelves, with significant contributions from our own CTO (and MediaWiki wunderkind) Brion Vibber, O’Reilly’s MediaWiki, authored by Daniel J. Barrett.

Congratulations to all the authors!

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications<

Please join me in welcoming two of our new tech folks who started this week in our San Francisco office, Trevor Parscal and Ariel Glenn.

Trevor has done various web development as well as being involved in the D development community (neat!), and will be poking around at MediaWiki stuff and misc scripting development.

Ariel is a longtime Wikipedian and Wiktionarian, and has been working on bot tools and some experimental MediaWiki extensions in the past. Ariel will be doing general MediaWiki/extension development as well as local IT support in our San Francisco office.

Trevor and Ariel will both be helping us to tidy up a lot of backlog in miscellaneous bug fixes and feature requests, as well as pitching in on development for ongoing strategic goals.

Brion Vibber,
CTO

Wikimedia’s in-house tech staff has always been assisted by a fantastic volunteer infrastructure, from which most of us have been hired over the last few years. That relationship with our community also involves maintaining some important projects via contract positions…

Erik Zachte will be maintaining and improving our site statistics — integrating new page view counts and other valuable data in with the traditional edit stats he’s maintained for some time.

Aaron Schulz is working on Flagged Revisions, improvements to the CheckUser system, and many other tasks on editing and administrative workflow.

David McCabe is coming back to polish up his LiquidThreads project for us, a more flexible way to manage discussion pages which could be a big help especially for those large, ongoing forum-style pages like the Village Pumps.

We also get some great help from David Strauss who’s been getting our fundraising data integrated more solidly into a CiviCRM system, which is replacing the multiple different versions of custom-rolled fundraising databases we’ve gone through in the past.

Brion Vibber

Chief Technical Officer

It’s tech hiring season again at Wikimedia!

• Software Developer/IT Support
• Software Developer
• System Administrator

We’re looking for at least some people to be here at our San Francisco office, but remote development and system administration is also available (especially making sure we’ve got stronger timezone coverage for our sysadmins).

So all you out there who’ve been toiling in secret on your wikis and websites o’ doom, but always secretly (or not so secretly) wanted to work for Wikipedia — send yourself in to jobs at wikimedia.org.

Brion VIBBER

Chief Technical Officer<