OpenMoko (Om), a company that previously created an open source smartphone, has just launched The WikiReader, a dedicated reader device with an offline copy of the entire English Wikipedia (without images) stored on a small chip. With two AAA batteries, the WikiReader will run for several months, as it’s been optimized for low power consumption. The device has a simple LCD touchscreen and three buttons for searching, viewing random pages, and looking up previously viewed pages.

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

Today is One Web Day!

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

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

Hot on the heels of the recent milestone of 3,000,000 articles on English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons has just lodged its own major milestone: passing the 5,000,000 binary mark.  Wikimedia Commons is the vast image, video, sound, illustration (and more) repository of works that can be freely reused by anyone, and perhaps most notably to users is the space where all of Wikipedia’s images are stored.  Few would dispute that Wikimedia Commons is the largest single collection of freely reusable images on the internet.

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

One of the wonderful characteristics of Wikimedia’s wikis, including Wikipedia, is that every change ever made to a page is recorded, back to the very first version (compare, for example, the first version of the article about chess with the most recent version of the same article). This characteristic also makes it possible to assign quality assessments to specific versions, thereby giving our readers greater transparency about the perceived current or past quality of an article.

A very powerful software feature called Flagged Revisions makes it possible to systematize such quality assessments.  It’s been in production use in many of our wikis for more than a year now, including the second-largest Wikipedia, the German language edition. Fundamentally it’s a very flexible feature, and different project communities (the German Wikipedia, the English Wikibooks, etc.) can come up with configurations that suit their needs. By means of our public issue tracker, they can then request from the Wikimedia Foundation that such configurations be turned on.

Even though we’ve made no official announcements about this, you may have seen media reports that Flagged Revisions will soon be enabled in the English Wikipedia. Indeed, there is a specific proposal that was developed by the English Wikipedia community, entitled Flagged protection and patrolled revisions. It’s a very thoughtful proposal that attempts to balance the desire for higher quality, and more systematic assessment thereof, with the immediacy of Wikipedia as it exists today, and was supported by a large majority of interested Wikipedia editors. The idea behind this proposal is to allow regular contributors to systematize a first, basic assessment of all edits by new contributors. However, this assessment will be purely for informational purposes to the reader: a reader will see whether or not the version of an article they look at has been patrolled, and if not, whether a prior patrolled version is available.

Only in a small percentage of cases, we would require changes to be patrolled before becoming the default view for readers. The proposal is to do so initially in the case of articles at high risk of vandalism, including high risk biographies of living people, where false information can do the most serious harm to an individual.

A popular media narrative of this proposal (in the cases where it has been reported roughly correctly to begin with) is that it represents a “clamping down” on Wikipedia’s open editing process. That is nonsense. It is presently the case that many high-risk articles are completely uneditable by new contributors, which is referred to as page protection. For example, as a completely new user, you are not able to alter the article about Barack Obama. These kinds of protections of high-risk articles have been common for many years now. If the proposed model works as intended, it will actually allow us to open up many articles for editing which are currently protected from being edited. Edits will have to be patrolled, which is clearly a step up from edits not being possible at all.

It is true that some implementations of Flagged Revisions are more conservative than that. Any edit in the German Wikipedia by a new or unregistered user has to be patrolled before becoming visible to readers. This is definitely not the case in the proposed English Wikipedia configuration. We believe in letting our communities experiment with different approaches in an attempt to find the right balance.

A test wiki for the English Wikipedia configuration has just been set up in the Wikimedia Labs, and we’ll be importing articles from Wikipedia soon and make a broad call for testing. It’s important for us to get this right – we want to make sure that we don’t make Wikipedia harder to use, for our readers or our editors, in the process of deploying this functionality. That said, we hope to be able to deploy Flagged Revisions in production use on the English Wikipedia within 2-3 months.

From Wikimania in lovely Buenos Aires,
Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

[UPDATE 8/26] This post originally said that all biographies of living people would be “flagged protected”. This is not correct. The current proposal is for for articles that are currently under normal mechanisms of protection (where new and unregistered users cannot edit) to be eligible for the new protection model, which allows for more open editing. I apologize for the confusion; thanks to Sage Ross for the quick correction.

Wikimania starts this week!  Today we reminded everyone about this year’s Wikimania here in Buenos Aires.  Most of the staff and Board are here in the city, as well as hundreds of project volunteers and stakeholders.  The local organizing crew and Wikimedia Argentina are doing a great job.

Follow the events of the conference on twitter and identi.ca, and keep an eye on the Wikipedia Weekly podcasts.  Hopefully we’ll have time to blog about events as they unfold at Wikimania.

We also want to thank all of our sponsors this year.  Without them we couldn’t pull events like this together: Telefonica, Terra, Speedy, The Richard Lounsbery Foundation, Answers.com, Kaltura, Wikimedia Deutschland, The Government of the City of Buenos Aires, Open Society Institute, wikiHow, Wikia, and Banco Credicoop.  Thank you!

More as the event unfolds…

Jay Walsh, Communications

Beate Eriksen, a Norwegian film-maker and actress, can add another unique claim to her personal history.  Today her newly-minted English Wikipedia article was counted as the three-millionth article created on Wikipedia.  The article was created by user:Lampman at 04:04 UTC, August 17, 2009.  Barnstars (a form of digital recognition bestowed by Wikipedians to Wikipedians) have been flowing in for Lampman since the achievement was announced.

Since its creation the article has already been edited 48 times to include several info boxes, references, and categorization.

English Wikipedia still holds the title for most articles over any other language edition of Wikipedia, but others are seeing impressive growth.  German Wikipedia will shortly push through its first 1,000,000 articles and French won’t be far behind. Currently at just over 13.7 million articles in all languages, we expect to reach 14,000,000 before the end of 2009. Our stats guru Erik Zachte maintains dozens of stats queries in one place that illustrate the growth of projects, trends in editing and participation, and analyses of our traffic.

Congrats to the thousands of Wikipedians who have contributed their time, edit by edit (roughly 326,832,295 since day one), over the past eight years to help English Wikipedia reach this incredible milestone.  Your work has made the web more amazing for hundreds of millions of users around the world. Thank you!

Jay Walsh, Communications

Leading up to the first-ever Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) Wiki in Australia this week, we’re pleased to share news from Wikimedia Netherlands about an exciting new partnership with their beloved Tropenmuseum, one of the largest museums in the country.  Their upcoming exhibition “Art of Survival, Maroon Culture of Surinam” will involve the uploading of over 2100 high quality images to the Wikimedia Commons.

Congrats to the volunteer organizers and the Tropenmuseum!

More from a release sent by the Netherlands chapter and the Tropenmuseum:

Tropenmuseum and Wikimedia collaborate on an exhibition
The Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and Wikimedia Netherlands will join hands to present an
exhibition Art of Survival about Maroon culture of Suriname. As part of this collaboration, the
museum will make approximately 2100 pictures available through Wikimedia Commons, the shared
image repository used for Wikipedia and related projects.

By involving multiple language editions of Wikipedia at the exhibition, the Tropenmuseum reaches
out to new audiences and invites them to add to the available information on the subject in the
online encyclopaedias. The Tropenmuseum will incorporate valuable contributions into its
exhibition when it becomes available through Wikipedia.

“The exhibition is about Maroon culture, and we hope that the exhibition and Wikipedia together
will provide audiences with information about the Maroon, their culture, and their history -
particularly in the languages of the countries where the Maroon live” says Susanne Ton of the
Tropenmuseum. “Of particular interest will be the contributions in the English, Dutch, Sranang,
French, and Spanish Wikipedias.”

“It is a novelty that a museum collaborates with an Internet community in this way”, says Gerard
Meijssen, who as a Wikimedia volunteer played a major role in the realisation of this partnership.
“Extraordinary information will be made available about the Maroon and it will be really interesting
to learn what extra material will become available through the Wikipedias.

“Cultural institutions, not only in the Netherlands but in the whole world, are becoming more and
more aware of the possibilities offered by the Wikimedia projects to give their collection a bigger
audience”, says José Spierts, chair of Wikimedia Netherlands. “We are really happy that the
Tropenmuseum is willing to play such a pioneering role and we hope that this example will be
followed by more initiatives aimed at making our cultural heritage generally available”. The
Tropenmuseum and Wikimedia Netherlands worked previously together in “Wiki Loves Art /NL”.
Forty-five museums opened their doors to volunteer photographers to make parts of their
collections available through Wikipedia.

The exhibition “Art of survival: Maroon culture in Suriname” will be on display at the
Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam from November 6, 2009 to May 9, 2010.

About Wikimedia Nederland
http://www.wmnederland.nl
Wikimedia Nederland supports within the Netherlands the activities and goals of the Wikimedia
Foundation – the non-profit organization which hosts Wikipedia and sister projects. Wikimedia aims
to make the sum of human knowledge available to every single person on the planet. To reach that
goal, Wikimedia cooperates with the volunteers on the Wikimedia projects (such as Wikipedia) and
by organising all kinds of activities and events.

About the Tropenmuseum
http://www.tropenmuseum.nl
The Tropenmuseum is part of the Royal Tropics Institute and presents, researches, and promotes the
exchange of knowledge between cultures. The museum pursues cultural exchange through
exhibitions, collections, expertise, publications, its historic building, and educational and other
activities. The museum is innovative in its choice of themes and presentation. It offers an
experience to a broad and diverse public, helps the appreciation of a cultural diversity, is
internationally active in culture and development, and fulfills an important educational role.
Digital image restoration is one of the many ways that volunteers contribute to the exhibition. This
digital restauration by Lise Broer of a picture of Granman Jankoeso of the Saramakaner Maroon
and his captains is an example.
———————————————————————
For more information:
* José Spierts, chair Wikimedia Nederland, +31 (0)6 50512514, josewmnederland.nl
* Anna Brolsma, Public Relations Tropenmuseum, tel. +31 (0)20 568 8422, a.brolsmakit.nl

Hopefully by now you’ve had a chance to try the new skin ‘Vector‘ that the Usability Team has implemented as part of our first release, also known as Acai!  If you haven’t yet, we invite you to check it out by going to Appearance > Skin in your preferences and selecting ‘Vector’.  As you play with the new skin and enhanced toolbar, the Usability Team is looking forward to our next release – codename Babaco – the next alphabetical tropical fruit in what we expect to be a delicious series.

We hope to continue adding features to enhance the editing process – including but not limited to further toolbar enhancements; dialogs for the creation of links, tables, and references; and tools to aid in navigation of article content during editing.  Our research, design, and development depends on feedback from users, community members, and interested parties like you.  We invite you to take a look at our work and if you have any opinions, praise, concerns, or criticism, please let us know here.  We look forward to hearing from you!

Parul Vora, Wikimedia Usability Initiative