Today, the Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce a new opportunity for Wikipedians to reach out to scholars at one of the world’s most prestigious educational institutions. We’re seeking an experienced Wikipedia editor for a one year, full time fellowship based at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Located at the Harvard campus in Cambridge Massachusetts, this Wikipedian will have a unique role facilitating collaboration between the faculty, staff, and fellows at the Center and the Wikipedia volunteer community, with the aim of improving the quality of encyclopedia articles.

The Belfer Center is a focal point for research on international security and policy related to science, technology and the environment. It is also part of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. While some experience with the subject matter is preferred, the goal of this fellowship is for a Wikipedian to help unlock the expertise at the Center and see that it is shared with the world. While English Wikipedia alone may have nearly four million articles, the depth and quality of our coverage of international affairs and policy — such as on global nuclear security — is not well known. What we do know is that we are still a long way from Wikipedia’s goal of the “sum of all human knowledge,” and that having a liaison to work with experts and volunteers will do much to improve the free encyclopedia.

This position is funded by a generous grant from the Stanton Foundation. This philanthropic institution has supported both the Belfer Center and the Wikimedia Foundation in the past. Apply now!

Siko Bouterse, Head of Community Fellowships Program, Wikimedia Foundation

Community Fellow Peter Coombe, CC-BY-SA

It is my great pleasure to introduce our newest Wikimedia Community Fellow of 2012, Peter Coombe! As a Wikimedia Community Fellow, Pete will be working with the community to improve help documentation on English Wikipedia. He’ll be leading a 6 month effort and taking a data-driven approach to reorganize and rewrite key help pages in order to make them more usable for new and experienced editors alike.

Like the encyclopedia itself, Wikipedia’s help documentation has grown organically over the years. Wikipedians have produced a great deal of useful documentation, but today’s help system has a vast number of pages that range from introductions addressing beginner needs to highly advanced technical documentation. Some pages are written in a clear style and some are not, and the path to find information on any given topic can be baffling, particularly to new editors. Pete feels that improving the main help landing page and other key help pages could have significant benefits for editor retention, and we agree.

Pete comes to the fellowships program with an impressive Wikipedia and academic resume. He’s been editing English Wikipedia as The wub since 2005, he’s an admin with over 75,000 global edits, and an active member of Wikimedia UK. Pete volunteered on the Social Media Team in the 2010 Fundraiser, and worked as a Production Coordinator in 2011. He’s also got a B.A. and M. Sci. with honors in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge.

But what really piqued our interest at the Wikimedia Community Fellowship Program is Pete’s experience breaking down complex topics into clear written information. He’s participated twice in a program at Cambridge to create online teaching and learning modules on materials science and engineering topics. In his projects, Pete introduced users to atomic force microscopy and raman spectroscopy. He’s also worked at The Helpful Book Company, publishing books that teach senior citizens how to use computers.

Pete’s talent for making the complex seem simple, combined with his experience A/B testing in the fundraiser and 7 years editing Wikipedia, make him a great fit for his fellowship project. To follow his work or get involved in the redesign project, please visit his project page. Welcome, Pete – the Wikimedia Foundation is looking forward to partnering with you to make help more accessible for all!

More Spring 2012 Fellows will be announced in the coming weeks – we can’t wait for you to meet them!

Siko Bouterse, Head of Community Fellowships

Community Fellow, Sarah Stierch

I’m pleased to announce Sarah Stierch has been awarded a Wikimedia Community Fellowship for 2012.  Sarah’s fellowship is intended to support her commitment to encouraging women’s participation in Wikimedia projects.

As a volunteer, Sarah moderates Wikimedia’s gender gap mailing list, has done outreach to hundreds of editors in order to conduct a survey of women in Wikimedia, and curates a scoop.it collection of media related to women and Wikimedia.  She also serves on the advisory board for the Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization that supports women in open-culture communities like Wikipedia.  Sarah has been an editor on English Wikipedia since 2004, and has been active in GLAM-Wiki projects since 2009.  An art historian by training, Sarah was a 2011 Wikipedian-in-Residence at the Archives of American Art in Washington D.C., organizes edit-a-thons on art-related topics, and is in the process of finishing her master’s degree in museum studies at George Washington University.

Her experience working with female editors in the community and enthusiasm for outreach makes Sarah a great candidate for what we hope will be the first of several fellowships focused on the gender gap.  Sarah’s initial project will be a new-editor support pilot where she’ll build a team of volunteers to actively reach out to promising new editors (particularly women) to offer help, mentorship and peer support, encouraging them to continue editing and become more integrated into the Wikipedia community.

Congratulations, Sarah, the Wikimedia Foundation looks forward to partnering with you!

And, as a reminder, we’re still looking for more fellows to join Sarah in 2012.  The deadline to apply for this round is January 15th, please contact fellows at wikimedia dot org with any questions.

Siko Bouterse, Head of Community Fellowships

Community Fellow, Jon Harald Søby

Our fellowships program is growing, and I’m pleased to announce Jon Harald Søby as our newest Community Fellow.  Jon brings 6 years of experience in the Wikimedia community to his fellowship: he is an active editor, translator and vandal fighter for several Wikimedia projects, an admin and bureaucrat for Norwegian Wikipedia, and in the past has also been a steward, board member for Wikimedia Norge, member of the election committee for Wikimedia Norge and Wikimedia Sverige, and OTRS volunteer.

Language and localization are a major area of interest for Jon. Not only does he help translate the MediaWiki interface and extensions, he’s also a founding member of the Language Committee and is finishing up a BA degree in Linguistics from Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He has traveled widely and is always thinking from a global perspective. All of this makes Jon a great fit for his fellowship project, which is focused on piloting a new model for volunteer translations in the 2011 Fundraiser. (Full disclosure: Jon started working with WMF earlier this summer as a Fundraiser Production Coordinator, but we just had to make him a Community Fellow when we saw how much potential there was for this project!).

Jon’s fellowship will run until February 2012. His project priorities include recruiting and coordinating more translators for more languages, building pages and processes that make it easier for new volunteers to get started, and improving systems for producing high-quality translations. To learn more about the project or volunteer to help, please visit the 2011 Fundraiser Translations page and sign up to be a translator.

Siko Bouterse
Head of Community Fellowships

From Afrikaans to Zazaki, there are currently over 270 autonomous language-based Wikimedia projects, not including the numerous sister projects like Wikiversity, Wikibooks, and Wikimedia Commons. Each of these sites was built word by word, article by article, over a span of up to ten years — and yet their unique histories remain buried in archived discussion threads and the memories of a few veteran editors. What makes some of these projects flourish and others stagnate? How have different communities of editors overcome cultural, social, and technological obstacles to create the most up-to-date online reference materials in the world? What lessons can communities of editors learn from each other in order to make every project as productive and successful as it can be?

As fellows in the Community Department, Victoria Doronina and I have been working on a pilot study of the Russian Wikipedia community (available on Meta in both English and Russian: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/RuWiki_History). Now I’m pleased to pass the torch to other aspiring wiki- historians. I’m looking for multilingual graduate students to participate in a summer fellowship program aimed at writing the histories of the many of the many Wikimedia communities. Together, we can produce nuanced, captivating narratives of the people behind the projects, narratives that capture the triumphs, failures, and daily struggles of the editors working to make the dream of globally shared knowledge a reality.

Good faith collaboration is the driving force behind Wikipedia, and in this spirit, the Community Department is interested in creating an intellectual collaboration between the Wikipedian and academic worlds. The summer fellowship will begin with a three-day conference, workshop, and crash course in and crash course in our culture, intended to acquaint non-Wikimedians with the basic technology/terminology. Each academic researcher will be paired with an active editor of the appropriate project, who will act as his/her guide to the social fabric of the community. After the conference, the graduate student/Wikimedian teams will continue to work together, either remotely or in person, on the historical narrative of their respective Wikipedia project. Graduate students will be encouraged to spend the summer in the language community they are researching, with grants available to finance travel and living expenses.

Composing a wiki-history requires rethinking traditional approaches to historiography, and one of the tasks of this fellowship will be to explore and develop these new methodologies from the ground up. If you are a graduate student with a creative, adventurous spirit and a passion for collaborative culture, or an experienced editor with a thorough knowledge of his/her community, please visit the fellowship page on Meta or get in touch with me for more details!

Maryana Pinchuk, Community Fellow

I’m pleased to announce Achal Prabhala as our latest Wikimedia Foundation fellow.

Achal is a writer and researcher in Bangalore who has participated as a volunteer in the Wikimedia movement in India and globally for years, and as a member of the Foundation’s advisory board.

Achal will be conducting field research in rural South Africa and India with Wikipedians and non-Wikipedians across three languages to explore ways to compensate for the gap in published/printed sources in many local languages.

From Achal:

Even if every single person in the south with Internet access wanted to become an active editor on Wikipedia, there is still a problem that we are going to run up against. It’s a problem that bedevils everyone working in local languages in Asia and Africa, and it’s something we have no control over: the lack of published scholarly resources in these languages.

For Wikipedias in languages of the south, citations are not difficult to find when the articles being added are translations. However, since we all want the sphere of knowledge to be universally expanded – and not merely transferred from the north to the south – we are forced to confront two specific problems with finding citations for important local subject matter: (i) Published resources may simply not exist. (ii) Even when published scholarly resources exist, they may be limited or inaccessible and thus effectively rendered invisible to Wikipedians.

To put it another way, it’s possible that the sum of published scholarly work from Europe is somewhat close to the sum of ‘European’ knowledge, and that the sum of accessible, published scholarly work in many Asian and African languages is nowhere close to the corresponding body of knowledge that circulates among speakers of those languages.

Despite these problems, Tamil Wikipedia has about 25,000 articles, Malayalam Wikipedia has about 15,000, and Northern Sotho Wikipedia has about 600. In all these language Wikipedias, there are articles – especially when concerning subjects that are specific to a particular people or place where the language is spoken – which lack citations, because there are simply no or not enough published resources to refer to.

The scope of the project is to investigate how one might compensate for the lack of traditional citations; how an alternative means of citation may be constructed; and how this may be feasibly and easily deployed – and improved – by Wikipedians in the future.

I’m looking forward to seeing fascinating and useful results from Achal’s project.

– Zack Exley, Chief Community Officer

Lennart Guldbrandsson with Wikimedia Foundation's Head of Outreach Frank Schulenburg

Today it is my pleasure to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation has a new fellow, Lennart Guldbrandsson. He is the fourth fellow, after Steven Walling, Victoria Doronina and Maryana Pinchuk. During his fellowship, Lennart will work on two projects: the Bookshelf Project and the Account Creation Improvement Project.

A long-time Wikipedian from Sweden, Lennart has been on our radar for some time now. He founded and became the first chair of the second largest Wikimedia chapters, Wikimedia Sverige, wrote one of the first books about Wikipedia, and has written several of the Wikipedia instructional videos. Lately, we hired him to work with the Bookshelf Project, as he has many years of experience as a writer and writing teacher. After studies at Uppsala and Gothenburg, where he now lives, he has his own writing company. He is active on several wikis under the user name Hannibal.

Lennart’s work with the Bookshelf Project will focus on getting the educational materials translated into many more languages as well as helping chapters and individuals dissemination the materials effectively on a global scale. See some examples of the Bookshelf materials here.

The other part of the fellowship is to make it easier for newcomers to create their accounts on Wikipedia – and facilitate their first steps after they have created the account. A short explanation for why that’s important is here.

The idea is that both these projects should be as engaging and transparent as possible. Lennart will post reports regularly, and try to get your feedback from time to time, and generally be reminding you of the existence of these projects.

For both of these projects, Lennart wants you to know that he will need help. You are welcome to sign up here for the Bookshelf Project or here for Account Creation. Or you can send an email to lennart@wikimedia.org.

- Zack Exley, Community Department

Today I am pleased to announce the Wikimedia Foundation Community Fellows program, a project of the Foundation’s Community Department. This program is partly something the Foundation has been considering for a long time and partly an outgrowth of the recent Community Department open hiring call. In reading through the nearly 2,000 submissions to the open call, we realized that there are far more qualified members of the Wikimedia community than we can ever hire at one time. We also realized that the most promising submissions came from people who were interested in working on specific problems or opportunities in the movement rather than looking for permanent staff positions.

Therefore, the Fellows program is intended to create an environment where individuals and teams can concentrate full-time on important problems and opportunities in Wikimedia projects and the movement as a whole. Fellows will lead intensive, time-limited projects focused on key areas of risk and opportunity — projects that require the support of the Foundation to succeed.

We are currently looking for Fellows among those who have already answered the open hiring call and we will also be posting a form for submitting new Fellowship applications soon. In addition to Wikimedia volunteers, we would like to engage outside academics and professionals who have expertise that could benefit our projects.

Each Fellowship will have its own objectives that require a unique skill set. The length of the Fellowships at the Wikimedia Foundation will vary from weeks to as long as a year, depending on the requirements of the project. A handful of Fellows may eventually join the Foundation staff permanently. However, the purpose of the program is to take charge of vital work that may not require a long-term position but which volunteers have not previously dealt with successfully.

Along with introducing what will be a continuing Wikimedia Foundation program, we’d like to welcome the first Fellow in the Community Department: Steven Walling. Steven represents exactly what we’d hoped to attract through this process: talented Wikimedians who have a knack for crafting clear theories about how Wikimedia communities operate and how they can be supported. Steven’s previous experience as a freelance writer, blogger, and community manager make him an excellent choice to pilot this program. Steven is beginning a year-long Fellowship, during which he will work on multiple projects. He will be blogging about his projects as he continues.

We are deeply excited about the possibilities for the Wikimedia Foundation Fellowship program. Bringing in talented individuals who have specific projects in mind will allow us all to ask questions and solve problems that were previously out of reach for either volunteers or staff. I hope you’ll join us in welcoming Steven and more new Wikimedia Foundation Fellows as they are announced.

Zack Exley,
Chief Community Officer