Our CTO Brion Vibber offered a fascinating post on the Foundation’s Tech Blog today, highlighting the incredible traffic spike and related problems caused by the news of singer Michael Jackson’s reported death.

Expect the tech blog to be updated as other server developments unfold, and of course the Wikipedia article to go through some fascinating evolution and discussion.

Jay Walsh, Communications

Today we’re excited to announce a very generous in-kind sponsorship from Amsterdam-based data center provider Evoswitch.  This sponsorship, valued at over 300,000 euros has allowed the Foundation to house a large new bank of caching servers in a highly central location in Europe.  Not only does this provide us with a long-term solution for delivering faster and better traffic in Europe and beyond, it also means that Wikimedia servers are taking advantage of cutting edge green power technology provided by Evoswitch.

Evoswitch operates a leading, 100% carbon neutral data center.  Free culture, global access to free information, and sustainable, green data centers: it’s a tremendous mission-supporting partnership.  We’d like to thank the great folks at Evoswitch for working with us to support our mission and for helping millions of internet users gain access to our projects.

Jay Walsh, Communications

Today Google is announcing the release of Google Translator Toolkit, a new application that extends their well known translation tool, Google Translate.  The Tool kit may change the way Wikipedia grows in other languages (from Google’s announcement today):

At Google, we consider translation a key part of making information universally accessible to everyone around the world. While we think Google Translate, our automatic translation system, is pretty neat, sometimes machine translation could use a human touch. Yesterday, we launched Google Translator Toolkit, a powerful but easy-to-use editor that enables translators to bring that human touch to machine translation.

Google Translator Toolkit allows users to help the system learn adaptively – and it has built-in functionality that will allow rapid translation of pages from Wikipedia.  Readers can correct mistakes, add context, and generally improve the translator’s ability to provide stronger first drafts of translations. This is a tremendous step towards free culture and the expansion of free knowledge on behalf of Google.

Volunteers at Effat University in Saudi Arabia have been working with Google to translate over 100,000 words into from the English Wikipedia into Arabic to help build the Toolkit and pave the way for further translations of Wikipedia content, a strong showcase for the Toolkit (more from Google):

These articles were among most widely searched articles throughout the Middle East, and they were either previously unavailable in Arabic or they were short relative to the English article. We are now reviewing and posting these top articles back to Wikipedia, in order help to make Wikipedia even more useful in Arabic. As Saudi Arabia’s HRH Princess Lolowah Al-Faisal said, Effat worked with Google “to solve the problem of making a huge amount of online information available to Arabic speakers, all over the world.”

You can try out the toolkit here.  Google has also posted a video to provide a quick tutorial. We look forward to seeing even more active translation within Wikipedia and beyond over the coming months.

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

The usability team has been translating the usability study into a new design and software for the last four weeks. The current focus is to implement easy improvement to overall usage of Wikipedia with the focus of editing interface in the next three months. The proposed skin by the usability team, Vector, will have streamlined tab layout, so that users will not lose the state of reading or editing whether in articles or in discussion pages.

Another usability improvement we are working on is the action-grouped toolbar, which hides the overwhelming number of tool icons which are not being used by novice users, but they are available for power users in the expanded mode. Lots of clutters will be removed from the editing interface.

You can see some of design mock-ups from our project page. Some of these proposed design concepts will be staged at the prototype environments this month and for any future improvements. (The action-based tool bar will not be seen on prototypes till June 8.)

If all goes well, these new features will be available from a user preference configuration early July. In the subsequent release in August, additional navigation aids are in the plan. We will be sharing the product feature at our project page in coming weeks. We look forward to your feedback.

Naoko Komura
The Wikipedia Usability Team

The Wikipedia Usability Initiative has extended the application deadline for the Software Developer position till May 30th. We are recruiting two candidates for this position. Both local applicants to the San Francisco Bay Area and remote applicants are encouraged to apply. Please help spread the word.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Software_Developer_(project)

Naoko Komura
Wikipedia Usability Initiative

Some readers of the blog who subscribe via RSS may not be seeing the latest posts on the Wikimedia Blog. We switched servers recently and it may have affected how the feeds reach your reader.

You can re-subscribe to RSS feeds with the links on the left-hand menu bar, or visit http://blog.wikimedia.org/feed/

Thanks – happy reading!

Jay Walsh, Communications

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.

So you want to run a top-10 web site? Now’s your chance…

We’re now hiring for a full-time system administrator to help monitor, maintain, and document the 400+ Linux/Unix servers that operate Wikipedia and its sister projects. This position will be based at our San Francisco headquarters, but will work closely with our remote staff and volunteers.

Currently, system administration tasks are spread over our other tech staff and volunteers, who have to split their time with software development, data center management, and network planning. A full-time system administrator will let us be more responsive to site issues when they happen, and more importantly be more proactive about planning for and averting problems before they affect the folks back home.

We’ve got operating systems to upgrade, configurations to document, software installations to automate, and a lot of service data that needs to be monitored and digested… if you think you’ve got the chops for it, send us your CV by the end of January!

Brion Vibber
CTO, Wikimedia Foundation

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<