We may be fifth by Comscore data, but as Comscore discards data from
Public computers such as Internet Cafes that 365 million unique
visitors per month significantly understates our reach. It may
overstate our rank if there are sites that are disproportionately
popular amongst surfers who use Internet cafes, I suspect it skews
things geographically, and that some of our non-English versions will
be more impacted by this than EN wiki. One of the things I noticed in
Buenos Aires was that there seemed to be far more Internet cafes than
in London - presumably this is a matter of economics and it would be
unfortunate if we underrated the importance of some of our language
versions simply because their readers were more likely to use internet
cafes.
WereSpielChequers
>
> Message: 9
> Date: Sat, 09 Apr 2011 10:45:57 +0200
> From: "Federico Leva (Nemo)" <nemowiki(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Outdated manual
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID: <4DA01CC5.80009(a)gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Milos Rancic, 09/04/2011 10:14:
>> [1] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org
>
> We've been using comScore data for years, now:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Stu/comScore_data_on_Wikimedia
> Alexa is not a reliable source.
>
> Nemo
>
>
> End of foundation-l Digest, Vol 85, Issue 16
> ********************************************
>
I am glad to announce that we've got new project: Wikinews in Greek [1].
It is 31st language edition of Wikinews. (Database hasn't been imported
yet.)
[1] http://el.wikinews.org/
Hi All,
We would like to take this opportunity to announce the new Wikimedia Education list. During the past Wikimania conferences we seen incredible examples of educational use of Wikimedia Projects or Content. During the recent chapter conference in Berlin we saw some more. These are often not related to a specific project and often have subject matter which involves a different audience than the other general mailing lists. Thats why we decided to start a new mailing list which will hopefully foster creative discussion on the topic at hand.
So what would we like to discuss on this list:
* Educational use of Wikimedia content or projects
* Best practices
* Educational Licensing
* Educational Outreach
* Other Open Educational Resource Projects
* Anything else that is education related :)
Everyone is welcome to post to the list. You can subscribe to the list at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education .The list will be moderated by Cormaggio, Jan-Bart and Louriepieterse.
Hope to see you there!
Cormaggio, Jan-Bart and Lourie
PS: Small disclaimer: although Jan-Bart is a member of the Board of Trustees, this is not an offical WMF initiative, but a community initiative.
This visualization - 'A History of the World in 100 Seconds' - is
fascinating. And instructive. (The missing byline is that it's a history
of the world according to Wikipedia). Apologies for cross-posting and/or
if you've seen it before - it seems to have been made about 2 months ago.
From the makers: "Many wikipedia articles have coordinates. Many have
references to historic events. Me (@godawful) and Tom Martin
(@heychinaski) cross referenced the two to create a dynamic
visualization of Wikipedia's view of world history. Watch as empires
fall, wars break out and continents are discovered.
This won "Best Visualization" at Matt Patterson's History Hackday in
January, 2011. To make it, we parsed an xml dump of all wikipedia
articles (30Gb) and pulled out 424,000 articles with coordinates and
35,000 references to events. Cross referencing these produced 15,500
events with locations. Then we mapped them over time."
On the video's vimeo page, there are a whole lot of interesting comments
- like this one: "so cool! really incredible how euro-centric it is. i
wonder what it would look like if events were weighted by their
appearance in the non-english wikipedias?"
More here: http://africasacountry.com/2011/04/06/a-history-of-the-world/
And here: http://vimeo.com/19088241
Cheers,
Achal
Jan Kucera (Kozuch) wrote:
> why is the Foundation so passive??? I have been since almost 5 years with
> various Wikimedia projects and I can really see NO PROGRESS from the side of
> the Foundation but more employees, 2 new blogs, new Vector skin and maybe
> MediaWiki performance tweaks. My participation declined radically, because I
> can not feel any real support from the foundation. It is not 2006 anymore.
> Look at what other websites have done in 5 years and you realize they have
> undergone major redesigns. And as someone wrote here lately Wikipedia still
> seems so 2005. This is OK for an encyclopedia, but unfortunately the way
> volunteers work is stuck in 2005 too...
It's a volunteer community: you can improve the sites at will. I agree that
a lot of the software development in the past year or two has been rather
boring. MediaWiki 1.17 was largely a lot of "fixes under the hood" and it
took way too long to go live. On the Wikimedia side of things, it's been
roughly the same: new datacenter, better ops support, etc. This isn't
exciting work, but it does hopefully make it more likely that, going
forward, other people can spend their time focusing on software feature
development and code review rather than constantly battling to keep the site
up. Or something like that.
A lot of the projects that Wikimedia is investing in today are small and
focused on particular needs of the Wikimedia Foundation, not the Wikimedia
community. One example might be an article feedback tool that's largely
focused on ensuring that Wikimedia fulfills its Public Policy grant
requirements rather than actually being a useful tool for rating and
evaluating articles. (Imagine if you could find the most fascinating
articles, similar to ted.com's system; now look at what Wikimedia has
implemented.) Another example might be an UploadWizard that is focused on
ensuring that Wikimedia fulfills its Multimedia grant requirements rather
than actually being fully developed and ready for use by Wikimedia Commons.
These examples are off the top of my head, but anyone paying attention can
see the trend fairly clearly, I think. The return of Brion as Lead Software
Architect may change some of this, but only time will tell.
> Sophisticated decision mechanism simply does not exist on a community level,
> and those on Foundation level are of little importance. Is it really that hard
> to launch an ideas bank (at ideas.wikimedia.org for example) to boil down what
> the community really needs instead of letting volunteers have endless
> discussions in wiki-style? Will someone finally realize that wiki is not the
> holy-grail of "collaboration" and maybe other tools are needed too?
There were some ideas thrown around about this at some point, though I don't
remember by whom or where. Other large organizations use systems like this
(e.g., Starbucks and KDE or Debian, as I recall). They generally implement
software such as Pligg and the like. It's certainly possible to install
similar software on Wikimedia's servers, but there are large challenges to
overcome such as language barriers and concerns about a pure voting system
that discards rational argument and debate.
If you want something like this, work toward making it happen. Write a
proposal at Meta, investigate options for implementations, file bugs in
Bugzilla, talk to Wikimedia Foundation staff, etc. Rambling e-mails to
foundation-l, while sometimes stress-relieving, don't tend to actually
accomplish much. A little more free advice: if you can convince the
Wikimedia Foundation that your idea/project/proposal is related to
"usability," "fundraising," the "gender gap," or "engaging new users,"
you're much more likely to get attention for it.
MZMcBride
[sorry for cross-posting]
Hello everyone.
Wikimedia Italia is proud to announce you the release of the new WikiGuide,
a video tutorial dedicated to Wikisource.
The video, directed by Christian Biasco and produced by WMI, is a seven
minutes long presentation of Wikisource projects,
aimed to introduce new users into the complex mechanisms of the digital
library.
This is the third WikiGuide available, after the first on Wikipedia and the
second on Commons.
The video is available on Commons at the URL
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Italia_-_WikiGuida_3_-_Wik…
and on Youtube too (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR0g5ACaC-g): it is
released in CC-BY-SA.
Italian subs are already available online (both on Youtube and Commons) and
English subs are being traslated at the moment.
We'll post again as soon as we have them (for further translations and
internationationalization).
Best regards,
Andrea Zanni / Aubrey
--
Board Wikimedia Italia
http://www.wikimedia.it
Hoi,
I am really happy to announce that the first Toolserver tools can now be
localised at translatewiki.net. Thanks to the hard work of Krinkle the first
tools make use of the "Intuition" messaging framework. People who know
Toolserver, will know that there are many useful tools that help understand,
manage, experience Wikimedia projects.
With these first Toolserver tools available now for a few hours, the first
localisations have been added and the first languages have already complete
localisations at twn. The messages will become available at least at the
same rate as the MediaWiki messages (typically every day) so localisation is
an extremely effective way of making Toolserver an environment that is
accessible to people who speak your language.
Thanks,
GerardM
https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translating:Toolserverhttp://toolserver.org/~krinkle/TsIntuition/#tab-about
Hi!
Another quick note on the Movement Communications Manager posting that we
are hoping to fill at WMF. We have a number of applicants, but very, very
few are from the Wikimedia community. We would really love to fill this role
with a strong Wikimedian, so if you are interested or know someone who may
be interested, please apply or reach out to Jay Walsh or myself.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Movement_Communications_Ma…
Note: If location is an issue, we could be flexible.
Best,
Barry
--
Barry Newstead
Chief Global Development Officer
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi, just a ping to anybody interested in Wikipedia AND mobile:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Projects
Interested? Join the #wikimedia-mobile IRC channel and/or the mobile-l
mailing list - https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
Below you have the message sent to mobile-l announcing the new
activities. See you there!
-------- Forwarded Message --------
To: mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: Mobile projects: contributors wanted
Date: Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:02:27 -0700
No feedback so far.... Did anybody receive this message?
Now mobile users interested in languages can help filling the data of
this table:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Projects/Language_support
On Mon, 2011-04-04 at 17:02 -0700, Quim Gil wrote:
> Hi!
>
> If you are in this list you probably want to know about
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Projects - which is the landing
> page for all mobile projects now. Please watch, edit, expand...
> Discussion is good in the Talk pages or here. Consider also joining the
> #wikimedia-mobile IRC channel.
>
> There are different areas increasingly connected where feedback and
> contributions are welcome:
>
> - Mobile gateway <---> Mobile browsers. If you are working / interested
> in a specific mobie browser you can help testing, filing bugs, proposing
> improvements...
>
> - Mobile gateway + Wikimedia API <---> Mobile apps. Help listing what is
> available for your preferred platform, contribute to the official
> Wikipedia app and community projects. Get involved in the soon-to-start
> discussion about the tactical steps to get the best coverage across
> different platforms (e.g. relying on HTML5/CSS/Javascript + minimal
> adaptations).
>
> - Localization: making sure that all of the above works not only in
> English and the main "commercial" languages but also in all languages
> and scripts with Wikimedia content.
>
>
> Who is interested? In which area would you like to start contributing?
>
> It would be great if over time people interested in specific browsers,
> platforms or languages would work together, becoming the natural landing
> place for newcomers. This would also help the maintainers of those
> browsers and platforms to work better with the Wikimedia community.
>
> --
> Quim
>
> PS & one time disclaimer: I work at Nokia as open source advocate and I
> have got some time to contribute to Wikimedia mobile projects.
> Basically, Nokia is interested in improving the support of Wikipedia and
> related projects in their mobile devices, but most of the homework to be
> done is actually useful for any mobile platform. I'm here just like any
> other contributor, aiming to get Wikimedia beauty and usefulness to all
> mobile users.