- Wikimedia-CM - lists.wikimedia.org

Recognition of Wikimedia Tool Developers Group
by Alangi Derick 27 May '17

27 May '17

Hi everyone! I'm very happy to announce that the Affiliations Committee has recognized the Wikimedia Tool Developers Group [1] as a Wikimedia User Group. The group is international cooperative of developers who create freely-licensed tools for improving the Wikimedia projects. Please join me in congratulating the members of this new user group! Regards, Kirill Lokshin Chair, Affiliations Committee [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Tool_Developers_Group

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Successful Scholarship Application
by Alangi Derick 27 May '17

27 May '17

FYI, I am forwarding this here as I believe it would be useful for future Wikimania applicant. Regards, Isaac (*who has never received a wikimanian scholarship or apply for one this year)* ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Deryck Chan <deryckchan(a)gmail.com> Date: Wed, May 24, 2017 at 5:59 AM Subject: [Wikimania-l] Successful scholarship applications To: "Wikimania general list (open subscription)" < wikimania-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> It's good that we're discussing the hurdle for someone to get their first scholarship to participate in Wikimania. In addition to the suggestions in the other thread, I'd like to lead an initiative to help future applicants who want their first-ever Wikimania scholarship. As a successful Wikimania 2017 scholarship applicant, I'm publishing on-wiki all my answers to the scholarship application form, except personal information: https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Deryck_Chan/Sc holarship_application I encourage all other successful scholarship applicants to do the same. If you kept a draft of your application form, redact any personally identifiable information and publish it on wikimania2017wiki. This will help future scholarship applicants get a feeling of what the reviewers are looking for. Deryck

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Congratulations to accepted candidates or Google Summer of Code 2017 & Outreachy Round 14
by Alangi Derick 17 May '17

17 May '17

Hello, Please join me in welcoming Wikimedia's accepted candidates for Google Summer of Code 2017 and Outreachy Round 14! Google Summer of Code 2017 1. Alexander Jones, Texas, United States, Implement Thanks support in Pywikibot <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T161426> - John Mark Vandenberg 2. Amrit Sreekumar, Kerela, India, Improvements to ProofreadPage Extension and Wikisource <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T161111> - Yann Forget, Tpt 3. Feroz Ahmad, New Delhi, India, Add a "hierarchy" type to the Cargo extension <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T161609> - Yaron Koren, Nischayn22 4. Harjot Singh Bhatia, New Delhi, India, Adding Data storage feature and upgrading Quiz extension <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T160257> - Marielle Volz, Sam Reed 5. Harsh Shah, India, Build a similar to @NYPLEmoji bot for Commons images - Dereckson, Ariel 6. Keerthana S, India, Automatic editing suggestions and feedbacks for articles in Wiki Ed Dashboard <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T160840> - Sage Ross, Jonathan Morgan 7. Sejal Khatri, India, Provide enhanced usability for Wikimedia Programs & Events Dashboard managed by Wiki Education foundation < https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T161929> - Sage Ross, Jonathan Morgan 8. Siddhartha Sarkar, India, Single Image Batch Upload < https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T161670> - Basvb Outreachy Round 14 1. Ela Opper, Tel Aviv, Israel, "Remind me of this article in X days" MediaWiki notification <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T161823> - Matthew Flaschen and Moriel Schottlender 2. Medha Bansal, New Delhi, India, WikiEduDashboard: Allow Programs & Events Dashboard to make automatic edits on connected wikis < https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T161568>- Jonathan Morgan, Sage Ross 3. Sonali Gupta, Rajasthan, India, Document process for creating new Zotero translator and getting it live in production < https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T161191> - Marielle Volz We would like to encourage accepted candidates to introduce themselves on this thread, share with us where they are coming from and give a brief overview of the project they will be working on. We’re so proud of the contributions they have made so far to our community, and we look forward to having a wonderful time working with them over the summer! Also, a huge shout-out to the project mentors for their enthusiasm and commitment! Thank you to Sumit and Anna for coordinating this round along with me! Best, Srishti

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Wikimedia REST API hits v1.0
by Alangi Derick 06 Apr '17

06 Apr '17

It is official: The Wikimedia REST API <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/REST_API>, your scalable and fresh source of Wikimedia content and data in machine-readable formats, is now ready for full production use. The 1.0 release means that you can now fully rely on the stability guarantees set out in the API versioning policy <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API_versioning>. Read more about the stability levels, use cases, as well as technical background on how the REST API integrates with our caching layers in our blog post: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/04/06/wikimedia-rest-api/ We are looking forward to your feedback at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:REST_API, or here on-list. This release was made possible by the hard work of many. First of all, the Services team <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Services> (Marko Obrovac, Petr Pchelko and Eric Evans), created the general API proxy and storage functionality, and curated the API documentation <https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/>. The actual end points are co-designed with, and largely backed, by services developed by the following WMF teams: Editing (Parsing <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsing> and citoid <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Citoid>), Reading <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading> (Infrastructure <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Reading_Infrastructure_team> and Web <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web>), and Analytics <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics>. Volunteer Moritz Schubotz and the MathJax <https://www.mathjax.org/> community contributed the math end points, and the PDF end point is powered by the open source electron-render-service <https://github.com/msokk/electron-render-service> project. Finally, the WMF techops team <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technical_Operations> runs the excellent caching infrastructure that makes this API scale so well, and have helped with many aspects from hardware procurement to firewalling. Thank you all for your hard work! We are looking forward to continuing to work with you all on making this API an even better platform for building user experiences, services, and tools. Cheers, Gabriel and the Services team

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CREDIT showcase, Wednesday, 5-April-2017
by Alangi Derick 02 Apr '17

02 Apr '17

Hi! I'd like to welcome you to join us at the CREDIT showcase next week, Wednesday, 5-April-2017 at 1800 UTC / 1100 Pacific Time. We'd like to see your demos, whether they're rough works in progress or polished production material, or even just a telling of something you've been studying recently. For more information on the upcoming event, as well as recordings of previous events, please visit the following page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/CREDIT_showcase And if you'd like to share the news about the upcoming CREDIT showcase, here's some suggested verbiage. Thanks! *Hi <FNAME>* *I hope all is well with you! I wanted to let you know about CREDIT, a monthly demo series that we’re running to showcase open source tech projects from Wikimedia’s Community, Reading, Editing, Discovery, Infrastructure and Technology teams. * *CREDIT is open to the public, and we welcome questions and discussion. The next CREDIT will be held on April 5th at 11am PT / 2pm ET / 18:00 UTC. * *There’s more info on MediaWiki, and on Etherpad, which is where we take notes and ask questions. You can also ask questions on IRC in the Freenode chatroom #wikimedia-office (web-based access here). Links to video will become available at these locations shortly before the event.* *Please feel free to pass this information along to any interested folks. Our projects tend to focus on areas that might be of interest to folks working across the open source tech community: language detection, numerical sort, large data visualizations, maps, and all sorts of other things.* *If you have any questions, please let me know! Thanks, and I hope to see you at CREDIT.* *YOURNAME*

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Wiki Indaba - Letter to Katherine (L2K)
by Alangi Derick 02 Apr '17

02 Apr '17

Dear Katherine, I hope this email finds you well. As resolved from the recent Wiki Indaba 2017 in Accra, Ghana please find attached the L2K.[1] This letter consists of the feedback collected from participants on two sets of questions (explained further in the letter). The organizers of Indaba analysed this data on behalf of the African conference participants. We would also like to take the opportunity to appreciate Wikimedia Foundation support including Asaf Bartov and Kacie Harold from Community Engagement, Jack Rabah from the Global Reach Team, and Zack McCune from the Communications Team. See you soon at our next Wiki Indaba in Tunisia. Best, - Felix Nartey [1] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiIndaba_conference_ 2017/Letter_to_Katherine_(L2K)

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Introducing the MediaWiki Platform Team!
by Alangi Derick 02 Apr '17

02 Apr '17

Hello everyone, I am pleased to share with you the news about the formation of the latest team in the Technology department, the MediaWiki Platform team![1] The MediaWiki Platform team will be tasked with leading maintenance and improvements related to the core MediaWiki platform codebase. That includes encouraging future development of the MediaWiki platform and addressing the technical debt that has accumulated during the 15-year history of MediaWiki. MediaWiki is an amazing, powerful, and complex open-source software platform. The number and variety of extensions, and the wide variety of communities who have adopted MediaWiki as their method for knowledge collection and dissemination, are a testament to its strength as a software platform. Like any significant codebase with a long development history, there are remnants of design choices and experiments that are no longer in use, and some areas of code are in need of modernization. However, at its core is a large amount of highly functional, secure, performant code, capable of supporting a robust platform through the use of extensions and hooks. There is also a great amount of flexibility to adapt to new requirements. This team will have a more focused purpose than the previous MediaWiki Core team.[2]. While the previous team was at times spread too thin, many areas are now covered by dedicated teams like Security and Performance. The new MediaWiki Platform team will center their efforts on the core codebase. The team will also have a dedicated Product Manager who will be creating the platform roadmap in collaboration with the team, the Architecture Committee and the MediaWiki user community. Specific goals for this team are to: * Assist and encourage development of features for MediaWiki by providing developers with a strong core. * Undertake feature development work which is primarily architectural in nature. * Facilitate the development and publication of MediaWiki's roadmap to assist coordination between internal and external users. * Maintain and promote guidelines and standards for the MediaWiki core. I am thrilled that Tim Starling has agreed to lead the team, reporting directly to me. He will be joined by Brion Vibber, Kunal Mehta and Brad Jorsch. The team officially launches on Monday April 3, and will complete the hiring and onboarding of additional team members in the coming months. Their initial workplan will include core support for multi content revisions for the Structured Data on Commons project and will be discussed in more detail during the upcoming consultation for the Wikimedia Foundation 2017-2018 annual plan. I am excited by this latest evolution in the structure of the Foundation's Engineering group. We will continue to learn from our collective knowledge and expertise, and make adjustments to our composition and plans. I appreciate the input provided by many in the community that helped inform this decision. I also want to thank the members of the Wikimedia Foundation's Product, Technology, and Community Engagement departments who were involved in this process. In particular, I would like to thank Toby Negrin, Adam Baso, and Trevor Parscal - whose support was critical in bringing this plan together. Join me in welcoming and celebrating our new team! Victoria

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Hardware Donation Program
by Alangi Derick 17 Mar '17

17 Mar '17

Dear Wikimedians, The Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce a small new program called the Hardware Donation Program. In a word, it is a program designed to donate depreciated (but fully working) hardware from the WMF office to community members who would put it to good use. The program, including instructions on how to apply, is described on Meta, here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hardware_donation_program Please read the information carefully. I especially encourage you to pay attention to the program's design considerations, which determine most of the decisions we'll be making. We currently have approximately 20 laptops ready to be donated. Applications are welcome. The upcoming Wikimedia Conference in Berlin (in about two weeks) would be an excellent opportunity to deliver some of those laptops in person to approved applications, so if you think you might be interested, I'd encourage you to apply as soon as possible. Please also help spread the word about this program, by forwarding this e-mail to other Wikimedia lists you're on, and posting the link to the program page on village pumps and *community* (not public) social media channels or other communication forms you use. Special thanks to User:Anntinomy from Wikimedia Ukraine, who had the idea of asking about possible donation of older machines from WMF, and inspired this program. Mini-FAQ: Q: Why are you doing this? A: WMF's Office IT determines a lifetime for work machines, and regularly replaces older machines. This creates a stock of older, working machines, that are available for donation. We can donate them locally to San Francisco charities, but figure that if we can find low-cost ways to deliver them to our own community members, that's so much better. Q: Am I eligible? A: Read the fine program documentation. Q: If I'm eligible, am I guaranteed a donated laptop? A: no. Q: Once these 20 laptops are donated, will there be others? A: yes, eventually. Q: How can you ensure people would use the machines for Wikimedia purposes? A: We can't. We'll be making a good-effort assessment of the likelihood of Wikimedia use, and make a decision to donate (or not) the equipment. Once donated, the equipment no longer belongs to WMF. We encourage, but can't enforce, reporting on impact achieved using the equipment. Q: I need a few laptops for my event in two weeks! Can I get them through this program? A: No. Read the fine program documentation. Q: I'm really happy about this! A: So are we! :) Q: I'm really angry about this! A: So it goes. Q: I have more questions! A: Hit 'Reply'. :) Cheers, Asaf

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Launch of #16WikiWomen
by Alangi Derick 01 Mar '17

01 Mar '17

Calling all African Wikimedians In the run up to International Women’s Day on the 8th March, Wiki Loves Women is launching the on-Wikipedia translation drive #16WikiWomen <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/16_African_Women_Translate-a-thon?>. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/16_African_Women_Translate-a-thon The idea is for Wikipedians to take 16 days to make translate the Wikipedia biographies on 16 notable African women, into at least 16 languages (African or international languages). The articles to be translated will be the biographies of African women. The list of language can be, but is not limited to: - International languages: Arabic, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, German - African languages: Akan, Afrikaans, Igbo, Hausa, Wolof, Tswana, Zulu, Xhosa, Shona, Swahili, Yoruba, Sudanese, Amharic, Tsonga, Ewe, Sesotho, Chichewa, etc. The list of the 16 women biographies that will be translated are: 1. Malouma <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Malouma>, a Mauritanian singer, songwriter and politician 2. Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Nozizwe_Madlala-Routledge>, a South African politician. The best initial version is in French w:fr:Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fr:Nozizwe_Madlala-Routledge> 3. Cri-Zelda Brits <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Cri-Zelda_Brits>, a South African cricketer 4. Anna Tibaijuka <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Anna_Tibaijuka>, a Tanzanian politician and former under-secretary-general of the United Nations 5. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Funmilayo_Ransome-Kuti>, a Nigerian women’s rights activist 6. Flora Nwapa <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Flora_Nwapa>, a Nigerian author who writes predominantly in Igbo 7. Samia Yusuf Omar <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Samia_Yusuf_Omar>, Sprinter from Somalia 8. Maggie Laubser <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Maggie_Laubser>, a South African painter 9. Fatima Massaquoi <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Fatima_Massaquoi>, a pioneering educator from Liberia 10. Frances Ames <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Frances_Ames>, a South African neurologist, psychiatrist, and human rights activist 11. Asmaa Mahfouz <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Asmaa_Mahfouz>, a Egyptian activist. The best version is currently in Arabic : w:ar:Asmaa Mahfouz <https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asmaa_Mahfouz> 12. Yaa Asantewaa <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Yaa_Asantewaa>, the legendary former Queen Mother of Ghana 13. Fatou Bensouda <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Fatou_Bensouda>, a Gambian lawyer 14. Martha Karua <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Martha_Karua>, a Kenyan politician 15. Chinwendu Ihezuo <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Chinwendu_Ihezuo>, a Nigerian professional footballer 16. Nassima Saifi <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Nassima_Saifi>, a Paralympian athlete from Algeria Please jump in ! We REALLY NEED YOUR HELP to get as many of these inspiring women onto Africa’s language Wikipedias as possible. They are our role models and it would be magnificent if they were accessible to the next generation of women and men across the continent. If you wish to participate, please feel free to add your name and any comments here : https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/16_African_Women_ Translate-a-thon/participants Results will be tracked on this page : https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/16_African_Women_Translate-a-thon/tracking Thanks so much!! Let us know what you think and if you have any questions!! warmest Isla *Isla Haddow-Flood* Co-project Manager Username: Islahaddow

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Wikimedia is participating in Google Summer of Code 2017. Interested in being a mentor?
by Alangi Derick 01 Mar '17

01 Mar '17

Wikimedia got accepted among the 201 organizations in the Google Sumer of Code (GSOC) 2017 <https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/>! We are trying to make it easier for prospective students to choose a project idea and get started. And, so we are considering to showcase a bunch of project ideas on the MediaWiki GSOC page itself: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2017. Help us by mentoring a project from here: - Check out the tasks in the '*Missing Mentors*' and '*Almost Ready to be Mentored*' column on Possible-Tech-Projects <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/possible-tech-projects/> workboard. - Check out the ''*Wishlist 11-30 (needs owner)*" and *"Wishlist 31-50 (needs owner)"* column on the Community-Wishlist-Survey-2016 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/2420/> workboard. - Any portion of your project, which needs some support, would be a 2-3 month long project for a beginner and overall a good learning experience. If you are interested in mentoring a project, add " *Outreach-Programs-Projects*" and "*Google-Summer-of-Code (2017)*" tag to the corresponding task on Phabricator. We will follow up with you from there. If you are looking for design, and documentation related projects to mentor, we are participating in the Outreachy <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreachy/Round_14> program as well in parallel to GSOC. Add "*Outreach-Programs-Projects*" and "*Outreachy (Round-14)*" tag to a task you are interested in mentoring. Email me if you've any questions, happy to help!! Cheers, Srishti

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