It’s a great day to download Firefox 3 and edit your favorite wiki!

Earlier today a small consortium of wiki-developers, including our own Brion Vibber here at the Foundation, put the finishing touches on the Universal Edit Button.  With this little Firefox 3 extension users will be able to click one button, located conveniently in the Firefox address bar, to instantly access the ‘edit’ page for an increasing number of participating wikis, including Wikipedia.  A MediaWiki extension has been created so other wiki operators can implement the button into their own site.

At this time the button is exclusively available on FireFox (get help with the install), but there’s no reason we shouldn’t expect to see similar functionality in other browsers down the road.  Further proof that that the web is quickly shifting to become an ‘edit this page’ kind of place.  The power of public collaboration at work!

The Universal Edit Button was first discussed at the 2007 Recent Changes Camp, and again explored at the recent Recent Changes Camp in Palo Alto.  The button is a great example of the product of open-source collaboration and the mutual commitment of wiki developers to foster a community of interoperability and interconnectedness.

Here’s to the new age of the edit-powered web!

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Quite a bit of discussion lately on planet wikimedia (a lovely aggregator of dozens of wiki-focussed blogs) about something called SUL - that’s Single User Login if you’re not the sort of person who doesn’t find yourself logging into a Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource, or similar Wikimedia project account.

Although any human on the planet can edit a Wikimedia project without an account, the majority of editors take advantage of user accounts on all of the projects to keep track of their edits, share background about their interests, and to communicate with other Wikimedia volunteers. On English Wikipedia alone there are over 7,000,000 separate registered user accounts.

And although lots of editors spend the majority of their time in one project, say Wikipedia, there are thousands of other editors who dabble in other Wikimedia projects several public and internal planning wikis.

Obviously this presents one unfortunate problem - a dozen separate user accounts on each project. Hence, SUL! Project volunteers can now follow a process that migrates all of their individual accounts into one master account for all the projects. new volunteers will be able to take advantage of this as well, using one unique username and password for all of their cross-project work.

Volunteer developers and staff developers began rolling the system out over the last few months for select users, and as of today it’s open to anyone and everyone with multiple accounts across the projects.

Although this might not have a dramatic impact on your own wiki experience, rest-assured that it will ultimately make the lives of all our multi-project editors much, much easier. Bravo to the team for a job well done.

Get hooked up with SUL here - follow the discussion and check out what others are saying as well.

J. Walsh, Head of Communications

Wikipedia fans and Google maps users may have heard recently that Google has unveiled a handsome new feature for its ubiquitous mapping system.

Alongside the familiar ’satellite’ and ‘terrain’ viewing options for maps, you can know click on ‘more’ then click the Wikipedia check box. In a flash the big serif W you know and love blankets mother earth, offering thousands of links to articles with geographic coordinates.

A great feature, and another novel way to explore the depths of Wikipedia’s millions and millions of articles.

J. Walsh, Head of Communications

Many, many people know that the software the powers Wikipedia is called MediaWiki, and it is in fact an open-source software that anyone can use. What is not known however, is that the Wikimedia Foundation is now also using open-source software for our telephone system. This last weekend, we rolled out our Asterisk 1.4 installation. Asterisk is an open-source software managed by Digium. By utilizing open-source software to power our telephone system, the Foundation is taking another step in the direction of free and open software use.

Rob Halsell, IT Manager & Systems Administrator

This is not a very exciting title for a post, granted, but this little file contains quite a bit of power, especially on the Wikimedia websites. The little lines of command found in this file tell us what pages should not be included when search engines like Google or Yahoo! spider Wikimedia content.

Many of the commands in robots.txt are there for technical reasons. For example, we do not want search engines to index dynamically-generated pages, such as the Search page, because this would put too much of a load on our servers.

However, we have also included some discussion pages in robots.txt. The issue here is not so much article content but rather all the bickering, flamewars, and name-calling that we often find on discussion pages.

Consider this one aspect: Search engines are used constantly by employers hunting for information about prospective employees. Imagine a candidate being rejected because of an unanswered late entry to a year-and-a-half old conversation telling Joe Q. Lastnamehere that he is a liar and con man and his authority is fraudulent. You may believe that such an employer would be legally wrong to base a hiring decision on such a frail source, but people make these sorts of decisions all the time by using search engines.

Robots.txt already keeps search engines from spidering several types of discussion, including page deletion discussions on several wikis. By excluding those pages from search engines, we can keep the discussion on-wiki without broadcasting “non-notable” or “spammer” on every search. This has dramatically reduced the number of complaints our OTRS volunteers have received about these discussions.

As some of our users have discovered, though, there is another hazard of search engines: user discussion pages. These pages often contain users’ real names, and often call those people “vandals” or “plagiarists” or “biased”. These can be as bad as deletion discussions, if not worse.

All projects should be aware of the potential hazards of not including these pages in spidering. It may be time to coordinate your language namespaces so that you may be able to prevent any hazardous issues resulting from non-mainspace discussions about people. You can request that the developers add items to the robots.txt file by filing a bug at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org.

Very truly yours,
Cary Bass, Volunteer Coordinator