Dear all,
The next WMF metrics and activities will take place on Thursday, June
6, 2013 at 6:00 PM UTC (11 AM PDT). The IRC channel is
#wikimedia-office on irc.freenode.net and the meeting will be
broadcast as a live YouTube stream.
The current structure of the meeting is:
* Review of key metrics including the monthly report card, but also
specialized reports and analytics* Review of financials* Welcoming
recent hires* Brief presentations on recent projects, with a focus on
highest priority initiatives* Update and Q&A with the Executive
Director, if available
Please review https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings
for further information about how to participate.
We'll post the video recording publicly after the meeting.
Thank you, Praveena
--
Praveena Maharaj
Executive Assistant to the VP of Engineering and Product Development
+1 (415) 839 6885 ext. 6689
www.wikimedia.org
Hello,
The WMF Board has recognized Amical Wikimedia as the first Wikimedia
Thematic Organization. Please join me in celebrating their work and
success!
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF_Resolutions/Recognition_of_Amical_Wikime…
This group was founded in 2008 as Associació Amical Viquipèdia,
focused on Catalan language and culture. You may know them from the
regular reports they have published to this list and to Meta for
years. They have organized dozens of successful cultural projects,
including public events, research, GLAM initiatives, and content
liberation.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Amical_Wikimedia#Activities
After first applying to become a chapter four years ago, Amical
members later helped the Movement Roles working group develop new
models for affiliation, and were the first to apply to be a thematic
organization. Gomà and Arnaugir, the founder and current chair of
Amical, attended the Milan conference and shared their projects and
their future plans. An in-person meeting there helped to resolve the
remaining bureaucratic steps in the process of becoming a thematic
organization.
Thank you to everyone from AffCom and Amical who have been involved
throughout this process, particularly Bence and Bishakha for their
guidance since the first movement roles discussions, and Gomà and
María for their facilitation.
Regards,
Sam, on behalf of the Board
== About Thematic Organizations ==
Thematic Organizations are one of the new affiliation models created
last year, to recognize organizations that have consistently done
interesting work with partners and in outreach, both online and
offline. They are meant to be well-established and persistent
organizations, focused on a common theme.
The review and approval process for Thematic Organizations is similar
to that for chapters. A list of groups considering becoming thematic
orgs can be found on Meta.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Thematic_organizationshttp://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_affiliation_models/Thematic_Organi…
--
Samuel Klein w:user:sj @metasj +1 617 529 4266
Hello!
I have started a proposal for a new wiki project: WikiLang (meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiLang). It is about endangered languages and language documentation/decipherment. It is a very important step in order to save our linguistic diversity which is ongoing faster than the extinction of animals. Most of our languages are highly endangered and there are pessimistic estimations that by 2100 90% of them will be extinct. So, please support the project and vote for it and/or give your feedback! (I for myself belong to a language minority and I can tell how important this is.) Thanks a lot!
Kevin
FYI :)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 9:17 AM
Subject: Welcome to Ken Snider, Wikimedia Operations
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hello all,
I’m delighted to announce that Ken Snider is joining the Wikimedia
operations team. He will start as an international contractor working
remotely from Toronto, Canada on June 10, and will be visiting SF in
the week of June 17. We’re currently in the process of seeking work
authorization in the United States in the Director of TechOps
position.
CT has graciously agreed to support the ops leadership transition
full-time through June, and part-time through July. We’ll be starting
the handover while Ken is working remotely.
A bit more about Ken: Ken was apparently genetically predisposed to
become a sysadmin since he joined one of Canada’s first large ISPs,
Primus, straight out of school in 1997 and helped build their
infrastructure til 2001. He then joined a startup called OpenCOLA in
2001 which was co-founded by Cory Doctorow and developed early P2P
precursors to tools like BitTorrent and Steam. It’s best known today
for the development of an open source (GPL’d) cola recipe which is
still in use (more than 150,000 cans sold if Wikipedia is to be
believed).
Ken got involved in one of Cory’s pet projects, BoingBoing.net which
some of you may have heard of ;-), and has been their sysadmin since
2003. After a stint from 2001-2005 at DataWire, Ken became Director of
Tech Ops at Federated Media, a role he held from 2005-2012.
Federated Media is an ad network that was founded to support high
traffic blogs and sites that want to stay independent of large
publishers, with a network that supports more than 1B requests/day.
One of the unusual challenges at FM was that the company grew through
acquisitions of various blogging and publishing networks. This led to
the challenge of integrating very heterogeneous operations and
engineering infrastructure, including multiple geographically
distributed ops teams and data-center locations. As DTO, Ken led these
efforts, such as OS standardization, development of a unified
deployment infrastructure, etc. Ken also ensured that the operations
group partnered effectively with the various engineering teams
developing site features and enhancements.
I want to again take this opportunity to thank CT Woo for his tireless
operations leadership since December 2010. I’d also like to thank
everyone who’s participated in the Director of TechOps search process.
Please join me in welcoming Ken to the Wikimedia Foundation and the
community. :-)
All best,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
_______________________________________________
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
_______________________________________________
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WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
Lydia Pintscher, 06/06/2013 11:14:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm happy to let you know that Yandex, an internet company from
> Russia, made a donation of 150000 Euro to Wikimedia Deutschland for
> further development of the core of Wikidata. It's great to see more
> companies stepping up in not only using Wikidata but actively
> supporting its development.
> The official press release is at
> https://www.wikimedia.de/wiki/Pressemitteilungen/PM_06_13_Wikidata_Yandex
Wow! I hope in the future they're also interested in collaborating on an
open source translation memory project: we already use their machine
translation service in Translate (enabled on translatewiki.net but not
Wikimedia projects).
Nemo
Hello,
The Universal Language Selector (ULS)[1] provides a flexible way to
configure and deliver language settings like interface language,
fonts, and input methods (keyboard mappings). It combines the features
of two earlier Mediawiki extensions Narayam[2] and WebFonts[3]. From
June 11, 2013 on, ULS will be made available to all Wikimedia wikis in
5 phases[4].
# Phase 1: In the first phase, ULS will replace the Narayam and
WebFonts extensions on 84 wikis[5]. User preferences from the replaced
extensions will not be preserved. Affected communities will be
informed by the Wikimedia Language Engineering team of the upcoming
change.
# Phase 2: In the 5 weeks that follow, ULS will be deployed on
Wikipedias in size 11-20,
# Phase 3: All projects without language versions
# Phase 4: English language Wikipedia
# Phase 5: All other wikis
The ULS can be visible in two ways:
1. In the sidebar for wikis with language versions, like Wikipedia, or
2. In the personal toolbar at the top of wiki pages for wikis without
language versions, like Wikimedia Commons and Meta-Wiki.
Based on the geographic location of users, the initial set of language
preferences is presented. Users can set the input methods and fonts to
that they want to use. Logged-in users can also change the language
for the MediaWiki menu items.
ULS is already available on several Wikimedia wikis like Wikimedia
Commons[6] and Meta-Wiki[7]. The beta installation of English
Wikipedia on Wikimedia Labs[8] shows what will be available as the
look and feel. A cog icon is present in the “Languages” section of the
sidebar menu. Clicking the cog icon opens the Language settings panel
that can be used to set the display and input settings.
Please have a look at the Universal Language Selector feature
description[9] or the Frequently Asked Questions[10] for more detailed
information.
Thank you.
regards
Runa
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Narayam
[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WebFonts
[4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UniversalLanguageSelector/Deployment/Planning
[5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UniversalLanguageSelector/Deployment/Plannin…
[6] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
[7] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
[8] http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/
[9] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector
[10] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Universal_Language_Selector/FAQ
--
Language Engineering - Outreach and QA Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Runab_WMF
Hello, all.
I've just posted an announcement by legal on Meta (
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikivoyage/Logo_announcement) about the
Wikivoyage logo - unfortunately, we are going to have to choose a new one.
To save you all from having to click on the link, I'll reproduce the
announcement at the bottom of my email.
Sometime in the next couple of weeks, we will need to launch a contest for
the new Wikivoyage logo, but first I'm hoping to get feedback and
assistance in making the best process for that possible. We had been
considering ways to optimize logo selection by the community, with the idea
that we would have plenty of time to talk about the process before needing
it. Unfortunately, we now need something quite quickly. Accordingly, I'd be
really grateful for feedback on the process, which has been posted here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Logo_contest_procedure
You can read a little more about it here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Logo_contest_procedure
I hope you will share your questions, comments and suggestions there.
Thanks.
Maggie
****
As many of you know, the community held a contest to design and decide upon
the new logo that would come to represent Wikivoyage, the latest open and
collaborative project to be hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. After
review of quite a few fantastic entries and much debate, the logo below was
decided upon by community consensus: [omitted; see linked discussion]
Unfortunately, both the Foundation and several members of the community
discovered that the eventually chosen logo bore a striking resemblance to
the World Trade Organization (“WTO”) logo: [omitted; see linked discussion]
At that time, the Foundation reviewed the two logos and believed that,
while some risk existed, there were significant enough differences between
the designs and the markets the two organizations occupied for both logos
to co-exist.
Since then, the Foundation has received a cease-and-desist letter from the
WTO, requesting that we change the logo. While we wish that the WTO agreed
with our assessment that the two logos contain substantial differences and
could co-exist, we understand their concern. We still believe that there
are some significant differences between the Wikivoyage logo and the WTO,
however, such arguments are not guaranteed to win if we were to legally
oppose this request because there are also some substantial similarities.
With this in mind, as well as the fact that the Wikivoyage logo is still
relatively new and has not had a chance to build significant brand
recognition yet, we believe the better solution is to hold a new community
contest for a new logo.
We believe that the community is the best body to decide what logo should
represent their hard work and hope that interested community members will
take this opportunity to once again showcase their creativity and talent by
submitting designs. The WTO has been very understanding of the Wikimedia
movement’s values and need for community consensus and has agreed to grant
us ample time to develop a new logo through community processes. (Please
see the proposed Logo contest
procedure<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Logo_contest_procedure>.)
That said, we hope to begin the process of community consultation and input
in the next few days so that the new logo can be in place by the end of
July. With that, we look forward to seeing new designs!
Michelle Paulson <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Mpaulson_(WMF)>
Legal and Community Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation
--
Maggie Dennis
Senior Community Advocate
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Hi everyone,
Per our blog post last month,[1] we've been testing redesigns for account
creation and login across the projects. We've been doing so on an opt-in
basis, but we've dealt with any major bugs and translations are complete
for quite a few languages.
Starting tomorrow and barring any last minute hiccups, we're going to start
rolling out the new designs. Right now we're limiting it to about 30
projects, including the following...
- Wikipedia in 21 languages, including English, German, French, Italian,
Polish, Dutch, Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, Korean, Czech, Swedish, and others.
- In English: Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wiktionary,
and Wikiquote.
- Wikimedia Commons
- Wikidata
- Meta
- MediaWiki .org
There are still local customizations that will need to be made in many of
these, but they are the kind of thing that doesn't require a developer to
do, just edits to the wiki. Look for announcements soon on your local
Village Pump equivalent for more info, or check out our
testing documentation.[2] I'll be around to help any of these wikis that
don't have an admin handy to make requested changes.
The remaining projects we have held off on because there are localizations
still to be completed (on translatewiki) or there are problems with
localizations already finished. Since the work of localizations is never
100% complete however, we are putting out a hard *deadline of June 5th*,
after which we'll be turning on the forms for all projects, in all
languages. If you're interested in learning more about which wikis in
particular need help, please email me off-list or get in touch via my user
talk page anywhere.
Please speak up if you have any questions. You can still try these new
forms on any Wikimedia project via the method mentioned in the two links
below...
1. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/25/try-new-login-accountcreation/
2. mediawiki.org/wiki/Account_creation_user_experience/Testing
--
Steven Walling
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
P.S. Sorry if there are odd linebreaks in this message. Has anyone figured
out how to avoid this in Gmail?