Wikimedia Commons’ four-millionth image ‘View of Masca at sunset,’ public domain from the Wikimedia Commons)

Last week the folks at Wikimedia Commons were very pleased to announce the milestone of four million images on Wikimedia Commons, the Wikimedia site that hosts the vast majority of image, sound, and video data for the Wikimedia projects.

The four millionth file is a public domain image of the “view near Masca in sunset,” uploaded by user:Kallerna. Masca is a small mountain village in the Canary Islands.

The Wikimedia Commons was launched in September 2004 to act as a central repository for the thousands of images that were being uploaded to a very-quickly growing Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Commons is most certainly now one of the largest repositories of freely licensed media files on the web.

A huge congratulations to the dedicated volunteers at the Commons, and to the tens of thousands of contributors.

Check out the hundreds of other amazing featured images on the Commons.

Jay Walsh, Communications

Wikipedian Nadine Stark and master brewer Bernd Kirsch tapping the keg. (Photo: Martina Nolte, CCBYSA from the Wikimedia Commons)

Germany’s first Open-Source-Beer received its premiere last weekend in Hannover. During CeBIT, the world’s largest computer expo, around 30 Wikipedians from all parts of the country met at the “HBX” brewery and tasted the new composition, called “HannoverWikiRed” after its red color.

In the run-up to the event at the brewery, the Wikipedians went on a guided tour through Hannover and shot hundreds of photos to illustrate articles on Wikipedia’s German language version. “The meetup has been a big success,” Wikipedian Nadine Stark, the organizer of the event stated. “We not only had a lot of fun at the brewery, but also improved Wikipedia’s content.”

At Stark’s suggestion, the HBX brewery published HannoverWikiRed under the Creative-Commons-by-SA licence 3.0. This allows anyone to brew the dark malty beer on their own, provided that the original author is given credit and –if altered– the result is distributed under the same, similar or a compatible license. The recipe of HannoverWikiRed can be found on the brewery’s homepage.

Frank Schulenburg, Head of Public Outreach<

We’re excited to release ‘Inside Wikimedia‘ -  our first video showcasing the people, projects, and the environment of the Wikimedia Foundation.  It’s short, but you can get a sense of who is behind the Foundation and what exactly we do on a day to day basis.  All of this video was shot on-location in our San Francisco offices.

Of course it’s a CC-BY-SA 3.0 work (with free music from Jamendo!), so feel free to remix and distribute far and wide.  The video is available in the formats below, and is hosted on Wikimedia Commons and on the Internet Archive.  We’re working on localized versions with alternate language subtitles as well.  Appreciate any comments or feedback.

Via…

Internet Archive (Quicktime, highres, 1GB) (MPEG4, 9MB) (OGG, 9MB)
Wikimedia Commons (OGG, 9MB) (OGG, 106MB)
Vimeo, and YouTube

Jay Walsh, Communications<

Yesterday we activated the wiki-to-print feature (see our recent blog post) in six additional Wikipedia language editions: French, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Simple English. In these language editions, it’s now possible to make collections of Wikipedia articles, share them, download them as PDF and OpenDocument files, or order them as printed books. We specifically activated it in the Simple English edition (which is a version of Wikipedia written in simple terms for children and adults learning English) so that English language users can get a first good feel for the functionality in a Wikipedia environment (it’s been active in English Wikibooks for a while). We’re hoping for a roll-out in additional languages including English very soon; our main concern is scalability of the feature under the massive load of the English Wikipedia.

The feature has been quickly embraced where it has been activated. In the German Wikipedia, since our deployment on January 27, more than 1,000 custom selections have been created and saved. Our technology partner, PediaPress, has been highly responsive to the rapidly accumulating feedback, and many small and larger output issues have been fixed in the last two weeks. For the new deployments, there’s a central feedback page on Meta.

It will be interesting to see how this feature affects writing on Wikipedia. When people start to think about their contributions in the context of a book, having a consistent structure and style is even more important than when viewing separate Wikipedia articles in a browser. Beyond increasing the quality and reach of our content, we also hope that this technology will be valued by our existing volunteer community as a way to turn their contributions into something that can be touched, held, given away — and by new writers as a motivation to participate.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

(UPDATE 2/27: We’ve enabled it in the English Wikipedia for signed in users and are observing server load and user feedback. If you’re logged in, see the help page for more information on how to use the tool. As always, the PediaPress team is amazingly responsive to issues that people encounter, and we expect continued improvements to the PDF and print quality over the coming weeks and months. If all goes well, we plan to deploy it on all relevant projects for all users in March. Language support in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew and some other languages still needs to improve and we won’t enable it in languages that the tool can’t handle appropriately yet – code contributions are welcome!)

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

Earlier today we posted a job description for a Communications intern at the Wikimedia Foundation.  This is a great opportunity for someone studying in a communications related field (marketing, communications, public relations, journalism – or others) to get extraordinary hands-on experience.  We have an enormous amount of work on our plate.  Handling the communications needs of a global organization with hundreds of millions of users around the world is no simple task.

If you’re interested and up for the hard work, send along your resume and some recent samples of your writing work.  The internship could last anywhere from 3 to 6 months, with some flexibility. We can also support school credit if it fits within your program.  For now we’re primarily looking for someone to work with us in our San Francisco offices, but as this is a rotating opportunity we may look at other options in the future.

Join the team that supports Wikipedia and its huge sister projects.  Help us help our volunteers make the internet a better place!

Jay Walsh, Communications<

The task force of the usability team has experienced a significant growth lately. Our one-person-team was increased by the arrival of Trevor Parscal, who transferred from Brion Vibber’s team. Trevor brings in not only excellent technical knowledge and skills, but he has extensive experience working at a usability firm as an interface designer and developer. Trevor has very sharp eyes for details both in graphics and development.

A big Thank-You to those who are sharing the ideas and adding knowledge to the project page. Trevor had started evaluating editing extensions. The progress is posted here. If you know of good editing extensions or have one brewing on your hard drive, please let us know by adding it on the extension nomination page. We appreciate additional comments if extensions are compatible with MediaWiki 1.15alpha. The rating system will be available soon, so it will be fun to share that with you.

Stay tuned.

- Naoko

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<

Yesterday we discovered that WikiHow, a wiki neighbor of ours that provides user-generated ‘how-to’ info has hit the admirable 50,000 article milestone.

WikiHow provides their content freely in a creative commons license, they publish in multiple languages, and they run MediaWiki, the same open-source software that powers Wikipedia and thousands of other wikis around the world.  They’ve also been a hugely generous financial sponsor of previous Wikimania conferences.

Congrats to WikiHow and their dedicated volunteers.  Here’s to 50K more how-to articles!

Jay Walsh, Communications<

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