2009

1. Wikipedia

   German Language Wikipedia Celebrates 1 Million Articles

   We’re excited to report that this weekend, the German language edition of Wikipedia reached an exciting milestone: one million articles! The article was created by user: JFKCom at 11:33am UTC, December 27, 2009, covering the living biography of American horticulturist and author, Ernie Wasson. The new article has already been edited over 200 times by scores of contributors within the first f... Read more

2. Community

   Annual Fundraiser: our best day ever

   Hey All– First and foremost, a big thank you to all our donors, community, and supporters for all the time & money given to this Annual Fundraiser.  The Wikimedia Foundation would not exist without the support and goodwill of our community. We have some more statistics and information to share with everyone about the great success of this year’s fundraiser. As you all can see, our... Read more

3. Technology

   Priyanka Dhanda joins Wikimedia tech team

   I’m very pleased to welcome Priyanka Dhanda to the Wikimedia Foundation as Code Maintenance Engineer. Priyanka joins us from SourceForge Inc., where she worked since 2002 as a software developer and also was involved in operations, working on most pieces of the infrastructure, and integrating third party software with the SourceForge platform (including MediaWiki). Priyanka holds a Master... Read more

4. Technology

   LiquidThreads almost ready to deploy

   Hi all, With the Foundation’s support, I’ve spent the last few months churning away at LiquidThreads, a new discussion system that is proposed for use on Wikimedia projects. Essentially, it’s an attempt to marry the radical openness of the wiki paradigm with the usability and practicality of a forum-like system. As the name implies, LiquidThreads is designed to allow any user to ... Read more

5. Community

   Annual Fundraiser: Checking Banner Results

   Hey All– We’ve been tracking a huge amount of data during this year’s fundraiser so we can better understand which messages work well and which don’t.  We have two sets of banners that we set each day to run on all Wikipedia languages.  Set one is the English version; set two is all non-English versions. We have two sets because we want our banners to run globally only if... Read more

6. Technology

   Mobile Homepage in your Language!

   Setting up mobile home pages for different languages is a very important part of my job here at Wikimedia. The English mobile home page has been setup for a while and it is based on CSS selectors. A couple other languages, (like Spanish) were easy to implement CSS solutions for and therefore I had gone ahead and created mobile home pages with the help of those communities. However, I am only one m... Read more

7. Technology

   How is the usability beta doing?

   Thank you for your feedback and comments about the usability beta through the survey and via the usability project wiki. The usability beta initially started off with the new skin called Vector and the toolbar (release nickname: Acai) in early July and it was enhanced with the navigable table of contents within the editing box and dialogues for links, tables, and search & replace (release nick... Read more

8. Community

   The Annual Fundraiser: How did we do in November?

   Hey All– This is my first post regarding 2009 Annual Fundraiser.  It’s been an interesting first three weeks — we’ve had some real success, and we’ve learned what was less successful.  With a huge goal this year, we were very ambitious with our plans: 1) Host our own credit card payment processing.  We felt that many of our donors preferred to use credit cards dire... Read more

9. Technology

   Beyond Text: Report from the Multimedia Usability Meeting in Paris

   What’s Wikimedia Commons? Expanding our collective knowledge requires not just text, but contemporary and historical photographs, paintings, maps, figures, video footage, spoken text, animations — in short, multimedia. With more than 5.5 million freely usable media files, Wikimedia Commons is a vast repository of such content. It was founded in 2004 to be the central clearinghouse and ... Read more

10. Wikipedia

    Wikipedia’s Volunteer Story

    What’s happening to Wikipedia’s volunteer community? Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages”. The article is a comprehensive description of the challenges and opportunities facing the Wikipedia community. Among other things, it describes recent research findings regarding the number of Wikipedia editors. A quote from the artic... Read more