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SF from above

Public domain, from the USGS and NASA en:Landsat 7 program. Image shows San Francisco, California. Original found here courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The Wikimedia Foundation has a blog! This is the first of many posts and many years, so there’s no better time to talk about what this initiative is all about.
The staff of the Foundation have a lot to say to a lot of people. So who are you? We expect you are: active users and editors of the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, curious members of the media, other bloggers, our moms (hey Mom!), our neighbors, and our friends. In short, a lot of people who understand and support our mission: free knowledge!
The blog is a chance for us to engage in a less formal discussion, and to bring up the sorts of topics that may not fit in a press release, or are too interesting or timely to wait to tell you in person. We get lots of great news from other friends in the free knowledge world, and we want to share their good news as well as ours.
We also want to use this as a space to ask questions of the Wikimedia community, that includes those of you who may just be readers of the projects and those who contribute or edit actively. Comments are enabled (we’re still working out the kinks) so expect your voice to be heard. We know you’ll be nice and treat others well 🙂
We will also bring in guest contributors, and share news and views from our board members and prominent members of the community. Hopefully you will get a chance to understand how things work inside our offices in San Francisco and among our little staff family planted on both sides of the planet
So sign up, leave a comment, subscribe to our feeds and keep checking in.
Thanks!
Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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Awesome first post! Yay Wikimedia blog!

Awesome job folks!

Yay. 🙂

Sweet! Really looking forward to reading more posts!

But…is it a blog anyone can edit? 🙂

Congrats on starting this! Unfortunately, IE6 doesn’t display the right-column photo. 🙁

Goose 2.1 for the win! Is that an easter goose egg in the rss? Is it hatching the [[placeholder name]] post?
😉

Looks great team. Great work and looking forward to more posts in the future 😉

Excellent! I think that communication between the foundation and the community has really be improved over the last few months, and this is a great way to continue that. I think I speak for everyone when I say your work keeping us informed is appreciated.

Good luck to this new way to communicate.

{{welcome}} to blogosphere 🙂 Looking forward of reading more!

Congratulations!

You state: “We expect you are: active users and editors of the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, curious members of the media, other bloggers, our moms (hey Mom!), our neighbors, and our friends. In short, a lot of people who understand and support our mission: free knowledge!”
Does this suggest that those who don’t understand or support “free knowledge” (or at least the way your organization is mismanaging it) are NOT expected to participate here?

Very cool !
Now, let’s start with the basics… how do we post a new blog ? Who can post a blog ? How does the whole thing work ?
Ant

[…] Auch die Betreiberin der Mutter aller Web-2.0-Projekte, die Wikimedia Foundation, hat nun (endlich) ein Blog. Und es gibt sogar schon einen ersten Eintrag. […]

Translation for above post by WP-Blo[gck]: […] The sponsor of the mother of all Web-2.0 projects, the Wikimedia foundation, now (finally) has a blog too. And it even has its first entry […]

True we can’t have a WordPress blog where people can edit/improve/accent the posts… but it’s something we’re looking at. A blog-friendly mediawiki extension, here we come!

@Greg – that’s the goal, anyone who feels they have something useful to say on the subject will probably do so.
We do have comment rules of civility, being on-topic and no personal attacks (rules lifted directly from Wikback); there are a few of us moderating comments at present (so far none struck down).

Still missing an answer to my question 🙂
Ant

[…] man unter der Adresse http://diff.wikimedia.org/ Neuigkeiten aus dem Dunstkreis der Foundation. Zum Start wünschen wir ein gutes […]

Florence,
right now posts go through Jay to be copyedited, scheduled, and so forth. So I suggest you contact him directly if you want to write for the blog.
A larger issue is soliciting translations for the blog. WordPress doesn’t support multiple languages well, but we’re considering linking to translations on Meta.

Another Thing to edit 😀

I guess I don’t understand comment #13 . It’s been my experience that a criticism, if that’s what that is, can be a lot more helpful if a positive solution to the perceived problem is commensurately offered. ~~~~

Hail WMF! [suscribes to feed]

Thank you.

Excellent o/

Hope this really kicks off 🙂