We want to change that, and we need your help. That’s why Wikimedia is kicking off a new project, the Bookshelf Project, developed to extend the reach and improve the quality of Wikipedia articles by increasing participation. We’re designing the Bookshelf Project to create a core set of public outreach materials designed to recruit new, high-value Wikipedia contributors. The idea is that by increasing potential contributor awareness, fostering excitement, and providing the training tools new editors need to get started, we’ll draw many more new editors than we do today. And we believe recruiting new high-value contributors to Wikipedia will necessarily increase the usefulness and quality of our encyclopedia.

Now we already know that many Wikipedia readers have never thought about editing the encyclopedia – even though there’s lots of information available about how to do so. Our goal is to reach out to those editors more actively – both to make them feel welcome and give them a great set of starting tools. We hope to seed the knowledge and enthusiasm about contributing to Wikipedia in such a way that it propagates itself.

We have lots of good reasons to believe this dream is achievable. Here’s one reason: we know anecdotally how easy it can be to inspire someone to edit and to share knowledge about editing. For example, during recent user testing for the Usability project, we interviewed a woman who uses Wikipedia daily, mainly to help her daughter with homework. She is an avid fan but had never edited. During the testing, she edited for the first time and immediately became excited about the possibilities of sharing what she knows and loves with others. She understood and was eager to implement Wikipedia’s core tenets of neutrality and verifiability. And she was eager to go home, share her excitement and recruit others to the effort.

Now, we can’t do one-on-one interviews with every possible new editor. But stories like this one suggest that we can leverage our experience with a few editors in ways that will benefit many more potential contributors. And that is the essence of the Bookshelf materials we plan to develop with your help.

We also plan to tap educational resources, since we know Wikipedia is a fact of life in many educational situations, usually as a reference tool. The Bookshelf Project will support additional educational applications by providing model lesson plans to show secondary school teachers and university professors how they can use writing, editing and collaboration in Wikipedia as core curriculum activities. In developing the Bookshelf Educational materials, we will work with subject matter experts to ensure the materials are relevant and applicable.

The Bookshelf Project will include materials to help journalists and other communications professionals do their jobs more easily, including techniques and information to help them be sure the information they use and the copy they write is accurate and up to date.

The Bookshelf materials will be developed in English and will be designed for translation, adaptation and use by volunteers, chapters and educational institutions such as schools and universities. We will use our new Outreach Wiki for the Bookshelf Project. This will be our place to give updates on the project and to get community feedback. There are lots of opportunities to help out, from acting as subject matter experts, to reviewing, and translation and localization.

We look forward to working together with our community on this initiative. If you’ve been in any way successful as a Wikipedia editor, we would value your input and feedback. There’s more than one way to contribute to Wikipedia’s success, but one major way to contribute has to be in the recruiting and training of new editors. The more we do to bring new, talented editors on board, the more comprehensive, reliable, and useful Wikipedia will be.

Marlita Kahn
Project Manager, Bookshelf Project

Jeffrey and Jillian have put together a nice blog post that provides a detailed run-through on how they lovingly crafted the sign using their in-shop CNC robot and meticulous hand-painting.  It brings our new space together in an exciting way, and yes – if you walk right up, not only does it glow, but you can help piece together that magnificent globe.

We’ll have more news to share about the Wikipedia puzzle globe in the coming weeks, but for now we’re happy to be able to share the inside scoop on how this lovely sign came together.

Jay Walsh, Communications

Earlier today, English Wikinews adopted the usability beta as a default interface. The usability team is thrilled that en.wikinews community has reached the consensus to be the first adopter of the usability beta as default. We will continue enhancing the interface to simplify and make it easy to navigate and edit.  Our sincere appreciation goes to the entire en.wikinews community for embracing our work. It is a great day for the usability team. We feel blessed.

Naoko Komura on behalf of the entire usability team
Program Manager, Usability Initiative

It’s not far from the old home, but it’s almost three times as big and can very comfortably hold the 28 (and growing!) local Wikimedia Foundation staff. Our new offices at 149 New Montgomery, just south of Market street in San Francisco have very quickly become the new home base for the small group that keeps the Wikimedia Foundation alive and kicking.

Our new offices span the entire third floor of this grand old office building on the little New Montgomery street, immediately across from the impressive (though currently completely abandoned) Pacific Bell headquarters.  With exposed brick, funky (and practical!) earthquake reinforcement bracing, exposed duct work and miles of ethernet cables, and the biggest, brightest windows you could possible ask for – it now feels like Wikimedia has found a true home – and there’s still some room to expand!

We’ll spend the first few months feeling out the space, moving furniture around and figuring out the best way to arrange work groups.  For now our tech and usability team sits on the west side of the space while fundraising, strategy, legal, communications, and administration rest on the east side. We also have an unusually large rack-space room in the back of the office, which for the time being will host our email and file-servers… but who knows what the future will bring.

The show-stopper in our new space is a custom-built Wikipedia globe sign by our friends at Because We Can, a custom build shop in Oakland, CA.  They’re also building us some economical and high quality rolling white boards that we’ll roll around the space to dry-erase collaborate ourselves into oblivion.  We’ll have more to say about this stunning sign latter on this week, including some secret features.

Right now almost all Wikimedia staff have converged on this location, including our previously displaced usability team.  Several staff still work remotely, but everyone was in town last week for our recent all-staff meeting.

We hope to have some guests come by the office soon, and we’ll look forward to Wikipedians passing through who can sign our guest list and see how things work from the inside out.  For more photos check out the category on the Wikimedia Commons.  If you pass through, be sure to tag and add your own shots.

Jay Walsh
Communications

This is a community initiative, not an official new feature developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, so we make no guarantees of any kind for its operation. It does show how much bottom-up innovation is possible thanks to Wikimedia’s open APIs and scripting interfaces. We’re very happy that Google has built this alternative new way to search Wikipedia. Please provide feedback below, or to the Google Custom Search team here.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Building such a device is possible because, unlike most information on the web, Wikipedia content is freely licensed, allowing anyone to copy, modify, and re-use it for any purpose, including commercial uses. We’ve played with the device and given feedback during the development phase, but it’s not a Wikimedia Foundation product, and we make no guarantees of any kind for its operation.

The device showcases a great opportunity that free educational content creates: information from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects can be packed into self-contained devices, including purpose-built ones like the WikiReader, without requiring any kind of Internet connectivity. In other words, it is very much possible to get a copy of the most comprehensive encyclopedia in human history to every person on the planet who would benefit from it.

While this device is targeted at least initially at users in the developed world, the software running on the WikiReader is open source, so that other projects can re-use it in whole or in part. (Information about that will go up on their website soon.) We welcome it as a creative new distribution method for Wikipedia content. Congratulations to Om for launching this product; we wish them the best of luck in the marketplace.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Founded by Susan Crawford in 2006, One Web Day aims to highlight the critical importance of protecting the values and principles of an open, participatory web. From the official site:

OneWebDay was founded by Susan Crawford, cyberlaw scholar, former Board Member of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and current technology policy advisor to President Obama. According to Ms. Crawford, “Earth Day was the model when I founded OneWebDay in 2006. In 1969, one man asked the people to do what their elected representatives would not: take the future of the environment into their own hands.” Today, a worldwide citizens’ movement has put the environment front and center politically. According to Crawford, “peoples’ lives now are as dependent on the Internet as they are on the basics like roads, energy supplies and running water. We can no longer take that for granted, and we must advocate for the Internet politically and support its vitality personally.”

This is a cause any Wikimedian can appreciate and understand – they live it every day.  Millions of people access Wikipedia and the Foundation’s sister projects daily, and hundreds of thousands of small (or large) edits pile up thanks to the tireless work of editors and volunteers from all over the world.  By increasing the overall amount of high quality information, in hundreds of languages, Wikimedians are working to reduce the digital divide and provide high quality, free information.

Although editing Wikipedia or its sister projects can be easy, the act itself is nothing short of brave.  Millions around the world still cannot edit or access our projects. Thousands of volunteers are building language projects for their peers who are otherwise unable to author or contribute due to internet access barriers or due to political censorship.  And Wikipedians are never shy to tackle the toughest and most challenging topics in human history, not to mention the task of writing neutral, high quality information about emerging news.

On this One Web Day we are especially excited to recognize our enormous volunteer force, and the millions of other brave contributors to free knowledge around the world.  We thank them, and we’re looking forward to an infinite number of One Web Days in the future.

Jay Walsh
Communications

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.

Five years ago, Wikipedia celebrated its third anniversary by reaching one million total articles across 105 different languages. The Wikimedia Foundation was barely a year old and had a grand total of two employees.

Can you remember what it was like five years ago?

Would you have imagined that, five years later, English Wikipedia would have over three million articles?

Would you have imagined that Wikimedia sites would be the fifth most visited on the Internet?

Would you have imagined that there would be 10 different Wikimedia projects (including Wikipedia) in over 270 languages?

Would you have imagined that about 30 employees would be working at the Wikimedia Foundation, with 24 independent chapters all over the world?

Think about all of the amazing things we’ve accomplished in the last five years alone. Now imagine where we might be five years from now. Where should we go? How much closer can we get to our vision of the sum of all knowledge freely shareable by all people? And how can we get there?

These aren’t just interesting questions. They’re critical. If everyone who cares about Wikimedia — from the casual reader to active volunteers — could come to a shared understanding of where we want to go, we would have a much better chance of actually getting there.

Over the next year, we’ll be exploring these questions, and in true Wikimedia spirit, we are going to Be Bold in how we do it. Simply put, we are embarking on the biggest, most inclusive open strategic planning process ever.

We are asking everyone and anyone who cares about the future of Wikimedia to help collaboratively develop and write a five year strategic plan for the entire movement.

As you would expect, we have a wiki where this work will happen. But that won’t be the only way to participate. Blog your ideas. Share them on Identi.ca, Facebook, and Twitter. Host meetups, and share what happened. Or volunteer to get more deeply involved.

Because of the scope and ambition of this process, it will be a long, messy, thrilling journey. The process itself should be a fascinating story, and I and others will be telling that story regularly here on this blog.

One way or another, please participate! I’ll see many of you on the wiki!

Eugene Eric Kim,
Program Manager, Wikimedia Strategic Planning

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

And the 5,000,000th file?  Although it’s tough to pinpoint, contributors on Commons seem to have agreed that a digital scan (at right) of the 1838 Danish news paper Kjøbenhavnsposten, is the winner, uploaded by User:Saddhiyama.

Wikimedia UK, the international chapter based in the United Kingdom, marked the occasion with an announcement and other chapters and volunteers around the world are celebrating this major milestone.  News also came from the Dutch chapter.

Commons is made possible by the work of tens of thousands of contributors from around the world, in over 250 languages.  Contributors upload free or public domain images, enhance and improve older scanned files, provide detailed illustrations, and increasingly upload free video and sound files.

The Foundation is looking forward to expanding usability of the Commons projects, thanks in large part to a recent grant from the Ford Foundation.

Congratulations to the Commoners on the Commons!

Jay Walsh, Communications