2011

1. Community

   Terms of use

   I am happy to announce that we have completed the most collaborative, interactive drafting of a proposed terms of use for any major website.   For more than 120 days, the Wikimedia community reviewed, drafted, and redrafted with more than 200 edits modifying the original proposal.  While accumulating 19,000 page views, community members offered comments, edits, and rewrites.  Complete or parti... Read more

2. Internationalization and localization

   The localisation team sprints into the new year..

   WebFonts is the first extension that gets user documentation served from MediaWiki.org. At the time of writing, the documentation has been written, it does serve people with help text about WebFonts and it is ready for translation. People looking for help will be served help in the language of their user interface if there is a translation. In a way it seems like a minor thing but consider; MediaW... Read more

3. Wikipedia

   Education program gets ready for Cairo pilot

   For about ten days in December, Frank Schulenburg, Moushira Elamrawy, and I met with various professors, students, and local Wikipedians in Cairo, Egypt. The initial Arabic Catalyst Project trip from October showed that there is potential in working with faculty members and students on improving the Arabic Wikipedia; this December trip made clear that there is a very high level of interest among ... Read more

4. Wikipedia

   Milwaukee brise soleil video featured thanks to student

   If you’ve been to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the last 10 years, chances are you’ve admired the Milwaukee Art Museum’s building, especially its brise soleil, whose wing-like span closes at night. But until recently, the Wikipedia article on the museum lacked a video of the brise soleil in action. Katy Lederer changed that in November. Katy is finishing up her final year of school... Read more

5. Highlights

   Wikimedia Research Newsletter, December 2011

   Vol: 1 • Issue: 6 • December 2011 [archives] Psychiatrists: Wikipedia better than Britannica; spell-checking Wikipedia; Wikipedians smart but fun; structured biological data With contributions by: Tbayer, DarTar and Jodi.a.schneider Contents 1 Mental health information on Wikipedia more accurate than Britannica and Kaplan & Sadock psychiatry textbook 2 Psychologists gauge impact of Wikiped... Read more

6. Fundraiser 2011

   Who is Asking You to Donate to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation?

   You might be asking yourself, “Who are those people in the banners on Wikipedia?  Why are they asking me to ‘please read an appeal?’”  They are members of the Wikipedia community and they believe strongly in the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation.  Some are employees of the Wikimedia Foundation and some are volunteers; editors, contributors, and users of Wikipedia without ... Read more

7. Global

   Grand Prix Wikimedia Brazil: racing towards a better Wikipedia

   (For the Portuguese version, please see the Wikimedia Brazil site.) It was during Wikimania 2011, in a small restaurant in Haifa, when the news was announced: the largest popular computer manufacturer in Brazil, Grupo Positivo, is interested in installing an offline Portuguese Wikipedia version in their products. All of us from Wikimedia Brazil who were present got excited because of the tremend... Read more

8. Community

   Announcing 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... Read more

9. Technology

   The MediaWiki Core group

   This is the last in my series of introductory posts about Wikimedia Platform Engineering, focusing on the MediaWiki Core group.  This group is responsible for our sites’ stability, security, performance and architectural cleanliness.  This ends up translating into a lot of code review, along with infrastructure projects like disk-backed object cache, heterogeneous deployment, continuous inte... Read more

10. Wikipedia

    A new way to contribute to Wikipedia

    We’re happy to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation has started testing a new version of the Article Feedback Tool, to engage readers to help improve Wikipedia — and to become editors over time. We’re very excited about this new development, and look forward to getting more people to contribute to Wikipedia as a result. Earlier this year, a first version of the Article Feedback Tool (�... Read more