FYI
--
Nurunnaby Chowdhury Hasive
Sent from my iPhone
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Matthew Roth" <mroth(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Aug 8, 2013 3:48 PM
Subject: [Wikimedia Announcements] [PRESS RELEASE] Wikimedia Foundation
2013-14 Board of Trustees announcement
To: <press-release(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc:
(This press release is also available online:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/WMF_Board_Election_Augu…
)
Wikimedia Foundation announces 2013-14 Board of Trustees and elected
officers at Wikimania in Hong Kong
Hong Kong -- August 8, 2013 -- The Wikimedia Foundation today announced
recent additions and elected officers for the 2013-14 Board of Trustees.
Every year at Wikimania, the annual gathering of Wikimedia contributors
from around the world, the Wikimedia Foundation Board appoints its officers
for the coming year. This year's appointments were announced in Hong Kong,
where more than 1000 conference attendees came from nearly 90 countries.
This year, Jan-Bart de Vreede was appointed Chair of the Board and Phoebe
Ayers was appointed Vice Chair. De Vreede works at Kennisnet, the Dutch
public educational organization that supports primary, secondary and
vocational institutions in the effective use of IT in education.
"I am honored to have been chosen to chair the Board in the coming year"
said de Vreede. "I want to thank Kat Walsh for her service on the Board and
for the year she served as Chair during a critical stage of the
organization's development. We look forward to hearing her wise voice as
she continues to engage with our projects, community and mission."
"This is an exciting year and I look forward to using my energy to ensure a
successful transition of our Executive Director and to helping our newer
board members to be able to contribute in the best possible ways to our
mission," de Vreede said. "The next twelve months promise to be significant
for the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia movement and I'm excited to
have the opportunity to lead the Board."
There are 10 seats on the Wikimedia Foundation Board and according to its
bylaws, three members are elected by the Wikimedia community, two are
selected by the Wikimedia chapters, the Founder seat is held by Jimmy
Wales, and four members are appointed by the Board itself to provide
additional, specific expertise.
The Board expressed its great thanks to former Board Chair Kat Walsh.
Walsh, a long-term participant in the Wikimedia projects, has been a member
of the Wikimedia Foundation Board since June 2007. Her leadership has
strengthened and nurtured the growth of the worldwide Wikimedia movement.
"It's been a pleasure to serve on the Wikimedia Board for nearly 7 years
and as Chair over the past 12 months," said Kat Walsh. "During my time as
Chair, the Wikimedia Foundation has worked with the global Wikimedia
community to introduce the simplified editing interface, VisualEditor, and
to support the growth of the Wikipedia Zero program to give free access to
our sites on mobile, helping us reach our goals of increased reach and
participation worldwide. We've also begun an innovative, volunteer-led
grantmaking program to ensure sustainability for our movement and our
projects. Our Board has diversified and strengthened over the past years,
reflecting the diversity and strength of our community and enabling our
colleagues to accomplish remarkable things; I am proud of what we have been
able to do."
The Wikimedia Foundation is happy to welcome its newest member of the
Board, Maria Sefidari, a Computer Science Ph.D candidate at Universidad Rey
Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain. She has been an active Wikimedian since
March, 2006 and is a founding member and former Vice President of Wikimedia
Espana, the Wikimedia chapter in the country. She has served as a member of
the Affiliations Committee and the Individual Engagement Grants committee.
She lives and works in Madrid, Spain.
The Wikimedia Foundation is also happy to welcome Phoebe Ayers and Samuel
Klein back to the Board as the other two members elected by the volunteer
Wikimedia community. Ayers is a reference, instruction and collections
librarian at the University of California, Davis, specializing in computer
science, physics and engineering information resources. Klein is a
long-time Wikipedian and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and
Society at Harvard University.
Every two years the worldwide contributor community elects Board members
from among its peers to participate on the Board and help steer the
Wikimedia Foundation as it fulfills its mission to "empower and engage
people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a
free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and
globally."
In collaboration with a network of chapters, the Wikimedia Foundation
provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for
the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other
endeavors that serve the mission. The Wikimedia Foundation will make and
keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of
charge, in perpetuity.
The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees for 2013-2014:
*Jan-Bart de Vreede, Board Chair
*Phoebe Ayers, Vice Chair
*Jimmy Wales, Founder
*Maria Sefidari
*Samuel Klein
*Alice Wiegand
*Patricio Lorente
*Bishakha Datta
*Ana Toni
*Stu West
About Wikimania
http://wikimania.org
Wikimania 2013 is being held in Hong Kong, where more than 1000 Wikipedia
contributors, Wikimedia advocates, researchers and educators from roughly
90 countries are in attendance. The previous Wikimanias were held in
Frankfurt, Germany (2005), Cambridge, USA (2006), Taipei, Taiwan (2007),
Alexandria, Egypt (2008), Buenos Aires, Argentina (2009), Gdańsk, Poland
(2010), Haifa, Israel (2011), and Washington DC (2012).
About the Wikimedia Foundation
http://wikimediafoundation.orghttp://blog.wikimedia.org
The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that operates
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore Media Metrix,
Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation
receive 500 million unique visitors per month, making them the fifth-most
popular web property world-wide (comScore, June 2013). Available in 285
languages, Wikipedia contains more than 28 million articles contributed by
a global volunteer community of roughly 80,000 people. Based in San
Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3)
charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants.
Press contact
Jay Walsh
Senior Director, Communications
Wikimedia Foundation
Tel. +1 415-860-8166
jwalsh(a)wikimedia.org
(To be unsubscribed from the Wikimedia Foundation press release list, reply
to this email with "unsubscribe" in the subject line)
_______________________________________________
Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately
directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia
community. For more information about Wikimedia-l:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
_______________________________________________
WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list
WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
FYI...
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: CherianTinu Abraham <tinucherian(a)gmail.com>
Date: 7 August 2013 20:01
Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Press]: Techcrunch : "India’s Indigenous
Languages Drive Wikipedia’s Growth"
To: "Discussion list on Indian language projects of Wikimedia." <
wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, wmin-members(a)googlegroups.com
*Techcrunch : "India’s Indigenous Languages Drive Wikipedia’s Growth"*
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/06/indian-languages-drive-wikipedia-growth/
*Despite accommodating the world’s second largest English-speaking
population behind the United States, it is India’s indigenous language
speakers that are creating and consuming the content that is driving
Wikipedia’s growth on the subcontinent.
The Wikimedia Foundation last year issued a $440,000 grant to the
Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), which, along with
the local Wikimedia chapter, has trained almost 2,500 Indians how to edit
and create content in their local languages.
While the country’s official languages are Hindi and English (when the
country earned its independence in 1947, the states couldn’t agree to be
represented by a single local tongue) there are over a thousand recognised
dialects, and 22 official languages spoken by over a million people.
Last September, CIS targeted ten tongues — Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati,
Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi and Telugu — and started
working with India’s Wikimedia chapter, responsible for coordinating the
local volunteer efforts, to boost the amount of local language content
being created on a range of websites including, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and
WikiCommons.
CIS said that between September 2012 and April 2013 the number of page
views increased by almost four million. Additionally:
- 13,400 articles were added in the top four languages, Tamil, Malayalam,
Kannada and Hindi.
- Page views on the 25,000 Bengali entries grew by 1.4 million to about 4
million.
- There were consistently over 100 active Malyayam Wikipedia editors.
While each community used the platform for a different purpose there were
three themes that cut across the different languages: cinema, places, and
local personalities.
The training attracted people from all walks of life.
Tamil grandfather Sengai Podhuvan didn’t even know how to switch on a
computer before the training, but the 78-year old has become one of the
site’s biggest contributors; a blind man now edits Hindi Wikipedia entries;
and Sujarta, a Chennai stay-at-home mum, who doesn’t speak English, now
edits the Telugu Wikipedia between the hours of 11am and 3pm, when most
housewives, who, like herself, did not go to university, are usually
watching India’s colourful soap operas.
While the program has had an impact, director T. Vishnu Vardhan admitted
there were some ominous findings. After CIS stopped supporting the Assamese
Wikipedia in January 2013, the 20 active editors all but left the site.
“The decline over the last three months also alerts us to the possibility
of building dependencies on the program, which is a concern that we need to
address going forward,” Vishnu said. ”We need to ensure this community and
new people are sustained, that we engage them keep and them interested by
showing them the excitement of being part of open knowledge building.”
Ultimately, Vardhan hopes this capacity building exercise will spark a
self-fulfilling cycle of local Wikipedia content production and
consumption. These reach of these tools is growing as last month, mobile
operator Aircel and Wikimedia India announced that subscribers could freely
access m.wikipedia.org, available in 19 Indian languages, from their mobile
phones.
“Everyone is now Googling stuff but what if an ordinary Urdu-speaking guy
sitting in Lucknow, using a smartphone, wants to learn about Delhi? Where
is the content? While the majority of the population understands bits and
pieces of English they’re not fluent in writing or reading and still need
to access information in their mother tongue. This is where I personally
see a huge potential for Indian language Wikipedias,” Vardhan said.*
Regards
Tinu Cherian
Important Note : Non-commercial reproduction for informative purposes only.
The publisher ( Techcrunch ) of the above news article owns the copyrights
of the article / content. All copyrights are duly acknowledged.
_______________________________________________
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
Wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
--
Belayet Hossain
http://www.facebook.com/bellayethttp://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:bellayethttp://twitter.com/bellayethttp://bellayet.wordpress.com (Bangla)
Knowledge is universal
...so share it.
Dear All,
I am planning an event for Wikipedians or Wikimedians on the occasion of
Ramadan month. How is that, if we can arrange an Iftar for the Wikipedians?
I think that will be nice meetups for All of us, as well as great occasion
to discuss the future plans and arrangements about the Wikimedia Movement
in Bangladesh.
Please let me know your views, ideas and suggestions about the event.
Regards,
Belayet
--
Belayet Hossain
http://www.facebook.com/bellayethttp://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:bellayethttp://twitter.com/bellayethttp://bellayet.wordpress.com (Bangla)
Knowledge is universal
...so share it.