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.

We’re extremely pleased to be sharing the news that the 5th annual Wikimedia on-line fundraising campaign in support of Wikipedia and our sister projects has burst past its $6million USD goal.  Today we issued a press release, and later today we should have some further correspondence to share.

We will aslo be rotating the site banners on Wikipedia and the other projects later today to point to a new thank you note from Jimmy Wales.

This is a great day for Wikipedia, and for the more than 125,000 supports of the project.  You’ve helped us raise over $6.2million – and we’re still seeing donations come in.  Thank you for showing extraordinary support, and for helping to sustain and grow Wikipedia.

Happy New Year!  What a great way to kick it off.

Jay Walsh, Communications<

Today marked the single most active fundraising day since the beginning of our campaign, and maybe in the history of fundraising at Wikimedia. People have come out in great numbers, and with a great total: Over $283K USD was raised in one day, from 8,186 donations!  That’s up from 800 contributions yesterday – or an 892% increase in the number of donations  (see the green spike):

Why the jump? It can very likely be attributed to the intro of our banner inviting users to read a donation appeal letter from founder Jimmy Wales:

This is a tremendous gesture from all the supporters of Wikipedia from around the world. A huge thanks to all of you – here’s to a few more days like today so we can keep pushing for our $6million goal!

Jay Walsh, Communications<

In December 2007, the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation formally decided to ask the Free Software Foundation, which administers the GNU Free Documentation License under which Wikipedia is distributed, to release a new version of the license which will allow Wikimedia to switch its content to the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license (CC-BY-SA). The underlying motivation of this change is that CC-BY-SA is an easier-to-use license granting the same essential freedoms as the GFDL. It is also more widely used by other educational projects, and switching the license would allow Wikimedia wikis to freely share content with those projects.

We’re very pleased that the Free Software Foundation has today released version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License which implements this requested change. Next, the Wikimedia Foundation will organize a community wide referendum to decide whether existing GFDL wikis should be made availabe under the terms of the CC-BY-SA license.

We are deeply grateful to the Free Software Foundation for making this change. I’ve posted a more in-depth summary of what it means on the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list, and an energetic discussion on the topic has already begun. We will post more details on this topic soon.

See also:

• Free Software Foundation FAQ on the FDL 1.3 release
• Creative Commons blog entry on the FDL 1.3 by CC VP Mike Linksvayer
• Blog entry on the FDL 1.3 by Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig

Erik Möller
Deputy Director<

Yesterday .ORG, the public interest registry, announced the major milestone of seven million officially registered .org domains across the web.  Wikipedia was featured in the press release as one of the major organizations hosted as a .org.

In fact Wikimedia houses .org sites for all of its projects, as well as wikimedia.org, the website of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Jimbo Wales perhaps said it best:

“We can’t imagine Wikipedia as a .com — .ORG is a core part of our identity,” says Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia and member of the Board of Trustees of The Wikimedia Foundation. “.ORG is available to anyone in the world, and it is a great way for an organization to signal an ambition to be inclusive and global.”

Congratulations to .ORG and the millions of sites in the family.

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications<

Haisan Station, the three millionth image, uploaded by Wikimedian Mailer Diablo, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

It’s always a pleasure watching when projects of the Wikimedia Foundation reach milestones.  Three of Wikimedia’s projects have now achieved new and wonderful numbers.

The Hungarian Wikipedia, celebrated 5 years on 8 July 2008 with its 100,000 article, Erdődi Simon, an entry about a Catholic Bishop in the medieval times.  This makes the Hungarian project the 21st Wikipedia with over 100,000 articles.

The Japanese Wikipedia has also achieved a remarkable milestone by being host to 500,000 articles, on June 25, 2008, with one of the following articles: フランク・ラザフォード (Frank Rutherford)、‎国際チャレンジデー (International Challenge Day)、‎ウエストバージニアの水運 (West Virginia Waterways)、南阿蘇鉄道MT-2000形気動車 (Motorized Rail MT-2000), articles which were created at the same moment the project achieved the milestone.  This adds Japanese to the list of 5 Wikipedias with over half a million articles (the other four are English, German, French and Polish).

I’m especially pleased to announce that Wikimedia Commons has uploaded 3 million files, as of July 16, 2008.  The three-millionth file is a photo of a subway station in Taipei, uploaded by Singapore Wikimedian Mailer Diablo, especially interesting as the millionth file uploaded in November 2006 was also a Wikimedian in Singapore, Terence Ong.

Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator<

(contributed by Kizu Naoko [user:Aphaia] from the Foundation Communications Committee)

On 25th June, around 12:36 UTC (21:36 in the Japan Standard Time), Japanese Wikipedia has reached its 500,000 article milestone and has become the first non-European and non-Latin script Wikipedia to pass
over this milestone. The exact 500,000th article is unknown but is very likely one of the following:

フランク・ラザフォード (Frank Rutherford),

国際チャレンジデー (International Challenge Day),

ウエストバージニアの水運 (West Virginia Waterways) or

南阿蘇鉄道MT-2000形気動車 (South Aso Rail Line MT-2000 Diesel Engine).

While this wiki was set up in mid 2001 already, its activities began substantially years later, late 2002, and has steadily been growing. Now it is the 5th biggest Wikipedia and still one of fastest growing Wikimedia projects. In Japan, where the most Japanese speakers dwell, Japanese Wikipedia is known as one of major online references. In 2007  2.7 million people in Japan, roughly over 20% of the whole population of the nation, used Wikipedia from their home, and the number of users has steadily growing since 2005 when the first research was done,  CNET Japan reports.

With a degree of friendly rivalry, the Japanese Wikipedia chases sibling project, Polish Wikipedia, which is 4th largest and reached half a million articles in May. Both projects continue to show steady growth.

The Polish Wikipedia is 9th of the most popular sites in Poland (April 2008). New stats (look on the graph):

http://www.webinside.pl/news/5001

Every day volunteers write ~300 new articles, with average size 1,5 kb

pl wiki (the Polish Wikipedia) has 340 featured articles and more than 200 good articles.

In the beginning of 2008 the Polish Wikipedia started schools and university projects. The first 4 ended with good results (interview with prof. Czachorowski – Polish entomologist, who started 2 projects).

01.07. 2008 will be started new initiative “Holidays with Wikipedia” Wikipedians will work for better quality and they will invite (by sitenotice) readers to collaboration.

—

Congratulations to the Polish and Japanese Wikipedia editors!  May the friendly rivalry continue, and here’s to doubling this milestone in the next few years.<

The voting in the 2008 elections for the Board of Trustees is currently being held through June 22.  This summer’s election is to fill the seat currently held by Board Chairperson Florence Devouard.   This is the first Trustee election to take place under the Board restructuring approved by the board in April 2008.

Why are we having board elections?  The Wikimedia Foundation is a unique entity in the fact that our projects are managed by a great number of people around the world, volunteers who create and edit the content on the Wikipedia sites and our other projects like Wikinews and Wikimedia Commons.  The volunteers are members of related project communities from which members have agglomerated to form a meta-community of individuals interested in the Wikimedia Foundation and having a voice to participate in determining how Wikimedia fulfill its mission both short-term and in the years to come.

Who is eligible to vote?  The 2008 Board Election Committee has provided guidelines as to which members of the community are eligible to vote in the election.  It effectively covers anyone who is presently active on at least one Wikimedia project, has a history with some edit contributions.

Is Florence Devouard running again?  It saddens me to say that Florence has chosen to pursue other endeavors in lieu of returning to her position as Chairperson of the Wikimedia Foundation.  Florence has overseen the board during a period of rapid growth and maturity of the Wikimedia Foundation and left a legacy that will be difficult for subsequent board to follow.

Is the candidate running for board chairperson?  Although Florence is vacating the position, the election is only for a board seat.  The board then determines among them who they want to perform the duties of Chair.

Who is running for office?  Candidate presentations are located here.  Each candidate for board has provided personal details and a statement as to how they believe they can benefit the Wikimedia Foundation.  There is also a question and answer section where community members have asked candidates a number of questions pertaining to how they see their roles as board members.

Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator<

El Señor Presidente is the 2,000th featured article on the English Wikipedia. Featured articles are considered the best Wikipedia has to offer, and are selected through a collaborative peer review and editing process, coordinated on a page called “Featured Article Candidates”, under application of the featured article criteria. From the article:

El Señor Presidente (The President) is a 1946 novel by Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan writer and diplomat Miguel Ángel Asturias. A landmark text in Latin American literature, El Señor Presidente explores the nature of political dictatorship and its effects on society. Asturias also makes early use of a literary technique that would come to be known as magic realism. One of the most notable works of the dictator novel genre, El Señor Presidente developed from an earlier Asturias short story, written to protest social injustice in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in the author’s home town.

This article is particularly interesting in that it has largely been developed as part of a university project by professor Jon Beasley-Murray, who asked his student to write Wikipedia articles as a course assignment. Wikinews has a fascinating interview with Beasley-Murray and two participating students.

Erik Moeller, Deputy Director<