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

The "Open Advice" book is available for free download, or purchase as print from lulu.com.

The Open Advice book, a collection of essays, stories and lessons learned by members of the Free Software community, is out!

The book was just announced at FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting, in Brussels over the week-end.

About 50 authors from many different projects of the free software community were brought together by Lydia Pintscher, the book’s editor, who started the project in early 2011.

A year and 380 pages later, the book is now available, and tries to provide an answer to the question: What’s the key thing you would have liked to know when you started contributing?

Authors answer that question for many topics, ranging from “Writing patches” to “Documentation for Novices”, to business models, conferences, translation, design, and more.

I contributed “Learn from your users”, a chapter on user experience and usability testing. You’ll also recognize other names from the Wikimedia community, like Evan Prodromou, Markus Krötzsch and Felipe Ortega.

You can learn more about the book and the authors on the book’s website.

All the content of the book is released under the same license as Wikipedia, the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.

Check it out! You can download the book for free as a PDF file, order a print from lulu.com if you prefer paper books, or fork the text on GitHub.

I hope you’ll like the book, and it’ll prove useful, whether you’re new to the world of software, or you’re a seasoned contributor already.

Guillaume Paumier
Technical Communications Manager