This should give you a good idea about what we can do within the scope of this project. Wikimedia Commons , the multimedia repository shared by Wikipedia and all other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, has been a wonderful success story, having grown to more than 4.5 million educational, freely usable media files since its inception in 2004. But the combination of the complexity of free content licensing and the integration of Commons into the experience of contributing to a project like Wikipedia or Wikibooks can make for a very daunting experience for new contributors.

We want to begin to change that, and make sure that everyone who has useful educational media to share can do so easily. As part of our partnership with Kaltura, Michael Dale has already done some great work on external repository searches and transfers, and on integration of uploading into the editing interface, so we’re hoping to build on top of this to really get the workflow for licensing/upload/review/embedding of media files nailed.

We’ve also been having initial discussions with some of the Wikimedia chapters about possible models for working together on the execution of this project. For example, we want to make sure that we can facilitate fruitful face-to-face meetings with Commons practitioners, and there is plenty of technical work to be done that can be decentralized and shared. Exciting projects like Wikimedia Germany’s investment in multilingual search (German link; see Google Translation) are already underway, so hopefully over the next year, we’ll see lots of useful activity culminating in genuine improvements for Commons and beyond.

Big thanks to Sara Crouse and Naoko Komura for their work on this grant proposal, and of course we’re enormously grateful to the Ford Foundation for funding it. Wikimedia Commons deserves to grow to many more millions of free educational media files, and hopefully this strategic investment will help us to get there.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

A few other Wikimedia wikis and projects have followed in a bottom-up manner, but today we standardized the site language to ensure that all our projects in all languages reflect the new terms (see this message for some more internals about the process). Want to translate text from the Italian to the Spanish Wikipedia? Both are CC-BY-SA. Use content from Wiktionary? It’s CC-BY-SA. A textbook from the French Wikibooks? CC-BY-SA.

Perhaps the most significant reason to choose CC-BY-SA as our primary content license was to be compatible with many of the other admirable endeavors out there to share and develop free knowledge: projects like Citizendium (CC-BY-SA), Google Knol (a mix of CC licenses, including CC-BY and CC-BY-SA), WikiEducator (CC-BY-SA), the Encylcopedia of Earth (CC-BY-SA), the Encyclopedia of the Cosmos (CC-BY-SA), the Encyclopedia of Life (a mix of CC licenses), and many others. These communities have come up with their own rules of engagement, their own models for sharing and aggregating knowledge, but they’re committed to the free dissemination of information. Now this information can flow freely to and from Wikimedia projects, without unnecessary legal boundaries.

This is beginning to happen. A group of English Wikipedia volunteers have created a WikiProject Citizendium Porting, for example, to ensure that high quality information developed by the Citizendium community can be made available through Wikipedia as well, with proper attribution.

The world of free knowledge doesn’t end with Wikipedia, and it shouldn’t. Indeed, license compatibility is just one part of a functioning, decentralized free knowledge ecosystem. Incidentally, with the exception of Google Knol and EOL, all of the aforementioned projects use MediaWiki, the open source collaboration software developed and maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation – so, we are well-positioned to help further develop this ecosystem of knowledge in the future.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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

How would you make this button better?

We have begun exploring ideas for enhancing the visibility of a donate button, not only within Wikipedia and the Wikimedia main template, but also on every page of every Wikimedia project. We hope that enhancement will enable us to better informing our public that we are dependent on their donations as we promote the free and open knowledge movement.

As we saw in the last fundraiser, different messages and visual styles had different outcomes: different levels of gifts, origin of donors, and frequency of donations.  We expect that a small change to the Wikimedia design template will result in a big returns in donations — increasing funds we use to keep the Wikimedia movement alive and growing.  We expect that in return for a bit of enhanced visibility, we will see a daily increase of up to 20% in donations.

Working with the same designer that worked on last year’s donation page, we have culled his 30+ button ideas into 6 that represent some of the better designs.

We have posted several design options for your comments and input.

Design is only half of this change… words are equally important.   We are also looking for input on messaging on the donate button and on most Wikimedia articles.  What are the simplest words we can use? Can the text be easily translated into dozens of languages? We need text that will communicate that we are a non-profit and and express the importance of donations in keeping our projects active.

Join the discussions on our donation upgrades page and catch a glimpse of the upcoming improvements to our community fundraising efforts!

Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving

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

For those of our readers who are interested in CiviCRM and are in the Bay Area, we’ve also started to organize regular user meetups. The first one had a great turn out and we’d love for both developers and users of CiviCRM to attend the next one on August 4th at 6pm.

Tomasz Finc, Software Developer

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 Board also announced that our current chair, Michael Snow, has been re-appointed to his post.  Both posts run until July 2010. More details from Jan-Bart’s note to the Foundation-l mailing list below.

In April 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation gave the chapters a role in the board member selection process, by asking them to select candidates to fill two of the Trustees seats.

The Wikimedia chapters have selected Arne Klempert as a new candidate. In agreement with the board, they have decided to propose Michael Snow as their second candidate, with the intent of confirming his position on the Board of Trustees as occupying one of the chapters selected Board seats. The chapters are glad that both candidates have accepted their selection and hope that the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation will be able to formalize this as soon as possible. The selection of those candidates comes after many heated but fruitful discussions and represents the chapters’ will to introduce novelty and ensure continuity in the board of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Arne Klempert is Head of Digital Communications at IFOK, a German consulting firm. He is one of the founders of the German chapter. He was involved in the development of Wikimedia Deutschland first as vice-chair and then as Executive Director, until September 2008.

Michael Snow has served on the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation since December 2007, and was chosen in July 2008 to be its chair. Michael is a lawyer and has been involved in Wikimedia for many years as Head of the Wikimedia Communications Committee and creator of the Wikipedia Signpost, amongst other roles.

The chapters are confident that this selection brings quality, diversity and stability to the board of the Wikimedia Foundation, and that both candidates will capably handle the responsibilities of being Trustees. Both candidates are selected to fill a term that ends in July 2010.

Please join me in welcoming Arne to the board and congratulating Michael on his re-appointment. On behalf of the board I would like to thank all those involved in facilitating the process and making these appointments possible.

Jan-Bart de Vreede
Vice Chair Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

Congratulations to both Arne and Michael, and to the chapters for putting forth their first Board appointments.

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

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

Yesterday on the Wikimedia Commons discussion mailing list. the winners of the 2008 Picture of the Year Competition were announced.  Every year Wikimedians vote on the thousands of newly posted, free (under a creative commons, GFD, or public domain license) images to choose winners from hundreds of distinct categories.

This year’s winner is a cc-by-sa 2.0 shot, ‘Horses on Bianditz mountain.’ by Mikel Ortega, with touch-ups by user Richard Bartz.  The runners-up can be found on the results page.

Congratulations to the photographers (and re-touchers!) for their extraordinary contributions, and to the organizing committee.

The Wikimedia Commons contains over 4million freely reusable images.  All of the images in Wikipedia and the Foundation’s other projects live in the Commons.  Like Wikipedia, anyone can participate by uploading images, editing content, categorizing media, and generally making the project better.

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications