Over the last few weeks Huffington Post readers have been asked to select a variety of ‘game changers of the year’ in categories ranging from entertainment, philanthropy, eco, and media.  We were very pleased to see our own Executive Director Sue Gardner nominated as one of the Post’s ‘game changers’ of the year – and as of today we’ve learned that Sue came out on top – she is the chosen game changer of the year in media!  Way to go, Sue!

How Sue is changing the game, according to the Huffington Post:

Taking the people’s online encyclopedia to the next level. Drawing on the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission of bringing free knowledge to everybody, executive director Gardner is overseeing a strategic plan to broaden access to Wikipedia’s vast storehouse of information. Her battle plan: making Wikipedia easier to use and available to more people worldwide. Expansion takes money, but it helps to be one of the Web’s five most-trafficked sites. In the depths of the recession, the foundation raised $3 million in ten days, completely covering its 2009 operating budget.

We couldn’t agree more! Thanks to the poll voters and Huffington Post readers for putting our Foundation’s leader at the top of the game. And voters, take your love for Wikipedia and make a donation to Wikipedia and the Foundation during our annual campaign!

Jay Walsh, Communications

Today, I’m excited to announce the kick-off of Wikimedia’s annual fundraising campaign.

Lots of people love Wikipedia, but surprisingly few know it’s run by a non-profit, the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation has just one purpose: to support the free and open sharing of knowledge. We don’t sell information and we don’t accept advertising.  Your donation is what makes Wikipedia possible.

When Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia in 2001, it was just an experiment. Nobody imagined Wikipedia would really succeed — least of all, probably, Jimmy.  He just thought it would be interesting to try.

But now, fewer than 10 years later, the number of people who use Wikipedia has grown to 330 million.  Students, teachers, tourists, entrepreneurs, parents, job-hunters, retired people, doctors, artists, engineers — everywhere around the world.  We use Wikipedia because it’s free, it’s convenient, and it gives us the information we’re looking for.  It’s always there when we want it.

This fundraising campaign offers Wikipedia readers the opportunity to celebrate Wikipedia and protect it for the future — for yourself, and for everyone else.

I’m aiming this year to raise 7.5 million dollars, up from five million last year.  That money will go towards technology and people — the servers and bandwidth required to operate the site, and the staff of 30 people who keep it running. You can find more information about how the money is spent, here.

There are some changes in the campaign this year.

• For the first time, you can give through your cellphone.  Just text WIKI to 25383 to make a ten dollar donation that’ll be charged to your phone bill. Currently this will only work for US cellphones, but in future we’ll expand it beyond the US.
• There are also buttons and badges you can put on your own site to encourage your friends to donate.
• Now you can donate via credit card, without having to enter the PayPal site. (For some people, the PayPal branding has been a deterrent — they thought they might need to join PayPal to donate.) To give easily without joining PayPal, using your VISA, Mastercard, American Express or Discover card, go here.

You can stay up-to-date on the campaign by checking back here at the Wikimedia Foundation blog, where Wikimedia’s Head of Community Gifts Rand Montoya will be giving regular updates.  On Identi.ca and Twitter, you can look for, and use yourself, @wikipedia and @wikimedia.

Thank you so much for using Wikipedia.

Since 2001, people around the world have joined together to create the greatest collection of shared knowledge in human history.  We are united by our love of knowledge, by our sense of curiosity and discovery, and by the understanding that we know more together than any one of us could possibly know alone.  Please donate to support Wikipedia, and everything it stands for.

Sue Gardner
Executive Director

Here’s a brief update on the status of our recently launched usability improvements.

Since the launch of the beta invitation to the first set of usability improvements on August 6th, about 173,000 people tried out the beta and about 134,000 people continue to use the beta as of September 12th.

Beta retention rate is interpreted roughly 77%. These numbers are aggregation of all Wikimedia projects in all available languages. If we look at the retention rate by project or by language, the number varies significantly. For example, the beta retention rate of English Wikipedia is 82% and Spanish Wikipedia is 80%, while the beta struggles to retain beta trial users of the language communities such as Japanese and Korean at the retention rate of 59% and 54% respectively.

We are reviewing the survey feedback and trying to isolate specific issues of languages whose retention rate is below average. If you are curious about how the beta opt-in and opt-out look like at daily or weekly basis, you can visit the preference statistics page. Here is the example link to English Wikpedia. Just change the language prefix or project name to get to the project of your preference.

Naoko Komura
Program Manager
Wikipedia Usability Initiative

The open source movement is not only about software and knowledge base creation. There are active movements in user interface design as well. tango! is one of the neatest projects in design collaborative world, contributing in the creation of open source software such as Open Office and Ubuntu. We, the usability team, also benefit from such open source design projects which allow us to reuse their icons by modifying to meet our needs. For example the icon on the right is the new reference tool icon which can be found in the enhanced toolbar. It is the reuse of Gnome Desktop icons from Wikimedia Commons.

The first set of usability enhancements, new tab layout, enhanced toolbar, and reorganized search page, are now available in MediaWiki projects except for right-to-left language wikis such as Arabic and Hebrew. The support for right-to-left languages should be available in a few weeks, so just hang in there. We welcome you to try out the usability enhancements by going into your preferences and enable ‘Vector’ and the enhanced toolbar from Appearance and Editing menus.

I hope you find the new interface easy to interact. Let us know your feedback in the discussion page of the most recent release page.

Naoko Komura
Program Manager, Usability Initiative

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

Last week the blog family of Wikimedia was expanded with the addition of the Wikimedia Technical Blog.  Fairly self-explanatory in its naming, the Technical blog will explore all matters software, hardware, and infrastructure relating to Wikimedia.  That includes the servers and capacity that deliver Wikipedia to hundreds of millions of users around the world every month, not to mention the open-source wiki platform MediaWiki.

Helming the blog will be our own tech team, headed by our CTO Brion Vibber, alongside the pool of volunteers who work on the code and keep our systems humming along.

The Technical Blog is also part of Planet Wikimedia, the RSS blog aggregator for all blogs Wikimedia related – a must-subscribe if wiki is your thing.

Happy blogging to the technical team!

Jay Walsh, Communications<

The first in a new set of features which help build consensus and collect “popular opinion” has been rolled-out on usability.wikimedia.org, the workspace for the WP Usability initiative. The ratings tag is part of the new and under-development CommunityVoice extension, allowing an editor to place a ratings scale anywhere in a wiki page, and then users can give 1-5 star ratings. Each ratings scale has a category and title attribute which will later be used by the ratings list tag, displaying top-rated titles in a category. Anyone can view the current rating, however if you are logged in you may also vote.

So head over to usability.wikimedia.org to see it in action and let your voice be heard.

Trevor Parscal, Software developer

Today the USA Network announced that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been chosen for their debut recognition award, Character Approved.  Jimmy is one of seven recipients – all of which are recognized figures in the arts, philanthropy, food, architecture, and technology.  The USA Network (a US-based cable TV operation) will run the spots featuring Jimmy and the other recipients over the next few weeks.  Jimmy’s videos can also be found on the award’s web portal.

And even more excellent, the recognition comes with a $10,000USD gift for a charity of the recipients choice.  Jimmy has chosen to share this gift with the non-profit project that started it all.  A big thanks to Jimmy.

Jay Walsh, Communications<

I’m very happy to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation is now opening hiring for the Wikipedia Usability Initiative!

Realized by a grant from the Stanton Foundation, the goal of this initiative is to measurably increase the usability of Wikipedia for new contributors by improving the underlying software on the basis of user behavioral studies, thereby reducing barriers to public participation.

We have three positions open, all local in San Francisco. See the linked pages for details and how to submit your CV:

• Interaction Designer

• Senior Software Developer

• Software Developer

The new team will be lead by project manager Naoko Komura, who was very helpful in organizing localization and translations for our recent fundraiser, and will coordinate closely with me and the rest of Wikimedia’s core developers. Also joining the project will be Wikimedia staff developer Trevor Parscal.

As always, all of Wikimedia’s software development is open-source, and we expect to be able to roll improvements into the live Wikipedia environment and general MediaWiki releases over the course of the project.

Brion Vibber
CTO, Wikimedia Foundation