Following up on the success of last Fall’s Wiki Takes Manhattan, the project goes National with Wikipedia Loves Art, taking place all month.  As you can find on its page on Wikipedia:

Wikipedia Loves Art is a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest among museums and cultural institutions worldwide, and aimed at illustrating Wikipedia articles. The event is planned to run for the whole month of February 2009. Although there are planned events at each location, you can go on your own at any time during the month.

The event opened up last Sunday at London’s  Victoria and Albert Museum, and is coordinated by the Brooklyn Museum, with the participation of the V & A, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Jewish Museum (New York), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Historical Society, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Taft Museum of Art. There are totally 15 different museums and cultural institutions participating.
Fred Benenson of  Creative Commons spoke with Jimmy Wales about the event, and produced this quick video where Jimmy explains how excited he is about the event.

For details, and to see if a museum near you is participating, see the Wikipedia page devoted to the event.

Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator<

I’m delighted to tell you that John Broughton’s book “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual” has been made available for free on the English language Wikipedia. O’Reilly Media announced this the other day. This is terrific news and will not only enable Wikipedia users around the world to read John’s book but also to edit it.

John first contributed to Wikipedia in August 2005 and his biggest accomplishment so far was the writing of the Editor’s index to Wikipedia, a comprehensive list of reference pages and links to useful information and tools for Wikipedia editors.

“Wikipedia: The Missing Manual” teaches new users how to contribute to Wikipedia and gives practical advice on how to collaborate with others to improve the free encyclopedia’s content. The book has first been published at O’Reilly’s in January 2008 and can now be found on Wikipedia’s help pages.

Please join me in thanking John for this great gift!

Frank Schulenburg
Head of Public Outreach

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.

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<

Eight years ago today Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia.  It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. Wikipedia has become one of the senior sites on the web, growing from a top 1000 site shortly after its creation to the fourth most visited site on the web in the last few months.

And on its eighth birthday Wikipedia exists in 265 languages and well over 10million articles – with thousands and thousands of active editors.

This morning Jimmy conducted an interview on CBC Radio’s “Q” – a national morning show broadcast across Canada and on Sirius satellite radio.  The interview will be ported to podcast a bit later today.  Take a listen to hear the founder recount the history of one of the greatest projects on the web.

Congratulations to all the volunteers who have built Wikipedia from a grand idea to a truly grand project.  Here’s to many more years!

Jay Walsh, Communications

<

Wow.

It’s been a nice few weeks in fundraising for Wikimedia Foundation.  Our users have demonstrated overwhelming support for our projects and our mission.

We’ve more than passed our initial fundraising goal of $6 million (though you are still encouraged to make a donation…bolstering our reserves in preparation for the years ahead is always welcome) with over 130,000 people making a statement for open and free information.

I love being able to say that.  Thank our donors again for their support.

That said, we’ll be taking down the site notices/banners today at 4pm PST.  We’ll be sending out some news next week (approaching the 8th anniversary of Wikipedia) with some new geographic breakdown data about giving.

-Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving<

Video tutorials are often more beginner-friendly than text based online help pages. Wikimedia is therefore producing a number of videos demonstrating the basics of Wikipedia editing and increasing the public understanding of Wikipedia and Wikimedia.

On 19 November 2008 the shooting of the very first Wikipedia video tutorials took place. They will deal with two very basic questions:

* How do I edit Wikipedia?
* Why does Wikipedia work even though anyone can edit it?

To give you a look behind the scenes we produced a short 3 minute making-of video that can be watched online:

* on Wikimedia Commons (11.7 MB, better quality)
* on Wikimedia Commons (6.2 MB, lower quality)

and also

* on Vimeo
* on blip.tv
* on YouTube

Currently, the two video tutorials are in the process of post-production (assembling the film, adding visual effects etc.) and we hope that they will be online soon.  We’re also working on a portal space where the tutorials will be hosted for the long-term, and of course you’ll be able to find them here on the Wikimedia blog.

Frank Schulenburg
Head of Public Outreach<

Today we’re very pleased to announce that Neeru Khosla will be joining the Wikimedia Advisory Board. Neeru is co-founder of CK-12, a non-profit based in Palo Alto, California which is pioneering the concept of “open source textbooks.”

The Advisory Board provides help and advice to the Wikimedia Foundation on a range of topics and issues, predominantly in the education, technology, philanthropic, and legal fields. Neeru will be adding to the broad range of experiences and skills reflected in the Board. Welcome, Neeru!

Jay Walsh, Communications

This afternoon the Wikimedia Foundation announced that the Internet Watch Foundation has taken Wikipedia off of the United Kingdom internet ‘blacklist.’  We’re very pleased with this development, and happy that editing and viewing in the United Kingdom is returning to normal.

We’d like to thank the thousands of Wikipedia supporters who have spoken out about this situation or taken the time to contact us with their concerns.  We’re thankful as well to the IWF for acting quickly to resolve the block.

—

This weekend has seen quite a bit of coverage of an unfortunate situation for Wikipedia users in the United Kingdom.  The Internet Watch Foundation, a UK-based self-regulatory body, has taken action to block access to specific Wikipedia content in the UK, and in turn has caused a major issue for the UK Wikipedia community.  The censoring has dramatically affected the way UK traffic is handled by Wikipedia, and in short, about 95% of the UK is barred from editing Wikipedia.

This is particularly bad news for the entire Wikipedia project and the millions of users from around the world who visit Wikipedia every day.  On the English Wikipedia alone edits and contributions from the UK account for at least 25% of overall editing activity.

The Wikimedia Foundation has distributed this statement to the press and internally among its global community of volunteers to explain the situation and the reasons behind the blocks in the UK.  We’ve also prepared a series of Questions and Answers.

We are hopeful that discussions with the IWF will continue, and that all actions and measures against Wikipedia in the UK will be suspended.  Please share your support for Wikipedia and let others know how you feel about this situation.

Thanks,

Jay Walsh, Communications<

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<