Hello,
After many months of work by over 100 individuals around the organization and movement, the Wikimedia Foundation's new website soft launched this week!
You can check it out for yourself here (you may need to clear your browser's cache): https://wikimediafoundation.org/
So what comes next?
Throughout this week, the Communications department and core website team will be doing final tweaks and quality assurance testing in preparations for translations.
Over the coming weeks we will be working with affiliates and contributors around the world to make the site in available in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Russian, and Spanish - in addition to the English version soft launched today. Once the translations are completed, we will be doing a more public announcement regarding the new website and begin more formally implementing usage of it.
Additionally, we will be holding office hours in the coming weeks.
What about the old website?
The old website (aka Foundation Wiki) will be given new life in the coming weeks as the Wikimedia Foundation Governance Wiki - where it will continue to house important documentation for the Wikimedia Foundation like policies, board resolutions and minutes, legal documents, etc. Additional information on the changes coming to that wiki and the plans for migrating archived content to Meta-Wiki will be available in the coming weeks.
What else should I know?
There is a lot of great things about this new website we are excited to share with all of you! More information about office hours will available in the coming weeks. Until then, we encourage you to take a look and contact me directly if you find any bugs, typos, or have any comments.
Thank you!
The Communications department greatly appreciates all of the discussions, work, and patience everyone has put into this gigantic undertaking. We are very close to the finish line, and today marks a significant step which was only possible with the help of the 100+ people involved.
On behalf of the Communications department and core website team (Heather, Zack, Katherine, Mel, and Greg),
-greg
-------
Gregory Varnum
Communications Strategist
Wikimedia Foundation
gvarnum(a)wikimedia.org
Pronouns: He/Him/His
Hello everyone,
I'm a newcomer here so apologies if this is not the best place to post this
(any advice on where I should be going would be much appreciated - many
thanks).
Anyway I there's a small discrepancy on the Wikimedia search results page.
- The 'View' links at the bottom of the page are all multiples of 10 - e.g
20, 50, 100
- The actual number of returned results all appear to be multiples of 10
- The /reported/ numbers of returned results are all ((some multiple of
10)+1)
So for example I carry out a search, and I see the first twenty results. At
the bottom of the page it says 'next 20,' etc.
However at the top right of the page it says 'Results 1-21" which is 21
results.
If I view the next 20 results, I see 20 results, but the top right of the
page says 'Results 21-41" which is 21 results again, and so on.
Apologies if this has already been brought up!
Best wishes,
Mick.
*What's making you happy this week?*
Dear Wikimedians,
With great pleasure, dedication and team effort, Punjabi Wikimedians User
Group brings you something that will definitely bring a smile to your face!
Launched on the occasion of 72nd Independence day of India, we present you
Wikipedia animation movie: Punjabi Wikipedia Tales - A Trip to Lahore!
What's the wait! Grab your popcorn and enjoy this delicious movie we cooked
with a delight! Thank You New Readers Team from WMF who helped in making
this possible in the first place!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SANTzQkC3-o
Cheers!
(P.s. Please don't forget to share it on social media channels! )
Rupika Sharma
Co-Founder
Punjabi Wikimedians
Project Lead
Awareness Campaign Punjabi Wikipedia
Hi everyone,
In our movement we have a lot of different people, including people with a
different neurodiversity.
Then it can happen that with events organised by the Wikimedia movement,
there are people that get sensory overloads. it basically means that the
input through the senses gets too much at some point. This can result in an
emotional outburst, an instant heavy headache/migraine attack, or in my
case I go (almost) completely blank.
It is really hard to complain how it is like to people who have no
experiences with it.
I think however that we need as inclusive movement to be more aware of the
huge amount of varieties of people and there needs. For that reason I like
to share a thread on Twitter with you how a user I know well has
experienced it herself.
Read at: https://twitter.com/dodocurieux/status/1029743772584865792
Thank you!
Romaine
*What's making you happy this week?*
Dear Wikimedians,
With great pleasure, dedication and team effort, Punjabi Wikimedians User
Group brings you something that will definitely bring a smile to your face!
On the occasion of 71st independence day of India, we present you Wikipedia
animation movie: Punjabi Wikipedia Tales - A Trip to Lahore!
What's the wait! Grab your popcorn and enjoy this delicious movie we cooked
with a delight! Thank You New Readers Team from WMF who helped in making
this possible in the first place!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SANTzQkC3-o
Cheers!
Rupika Sharma
Co-Founder
Punjabi Wikimedians
Project Lead
Awareness Campaign Punjabi Wikipedia
To North American Wikimedians and others potentially attending,
Friendly reminder that proposal submissions and scholarship applications
for WikiConference North America 2018 are due tomorrow, August 15!
WikiConference North America is taking place in Columbus, Ohio, U.S., from
October 18-21. Our host is the Ohio State University Libraries, which
provides a great opportunity to work with local libraries and cultural
institutions.
Thursday consists of our hackathon, Wikidata activities, and more to come.
Friday will be our Culture Crawl and intro reception, which take place in
various cultural institutions in downtown Columbus. Saturday and Sunday
will be our conventional programming days made up of content contributed by
you, the community.
Scholarship applications are open to Wikimedians who live in North America
and actively contribute to a Wikimedia project. Scholarship awards are $500
USD. The Wiki Education Foundation is also providing their own scholarships
for presenters participating in the academic peer review option.
https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2018/Scholarships
<https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2018/Scholarships>
For submissions, we are looking forward to seeing proposals for
presentations, workshops, roundtables, panels, and more. We also have an
academic peer review track this year. Don't be afraid to submit your idea -
the conference is a great, welcoming opportunity to present on your
projects, local activities, research, or anything else you are passionate
about.
https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2018/Submissions
We have also started working on an Accommodations guide, so you can begin
to plan for the event:
https://wikiconference.org/wiki/2018/Accommodation
Thank you,
Kevin Payravi
SuperHamster on Wikimedia
Hello everyone,
The executive leadership team, on behalf of the Foundation, would like to issue a statement of unequivocal support for the Code of Conduct[1] and the community-led Code of Conduct Committee. We believe that the development and implementation of the Code are vital in ensuring the healthy functioning of our technical communities and spaces. The Code of Conduct was created to address obstacles and occasionally very problematic personal communications that limit participation and cause real harm to community members and staff. In engaging in this work we are setting the tone for the ways we collaborate in tech. We are saying that treating others badly is not welcome in our communities. And we are joining an important movement in the tech industry to address these problems in a way that supports self-governance consistent with our values.
This initiative is critical in continuing the amazing work of our projects and ensuring that they continue to flourish in delivering on the critical vision of being the essential infrastructure of free knowledge now and forever.
Toby, Maggie, Eileen, Heather, Lisa, Katherine, Jaime, Joady, and Victoria
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Code_of_Conduct>
Hi,
I have been looking for social networking service that would be fair: not abusing personal data, funded by community, respecting privacy, accepting anonymity, free/libre/ open source etc. Haven’t found many. The Diaspora* Project[1] is not moving forward very fast and the Mastodon[2] is more a microblogging service rather than a social network service.
Would it make sense for Wikimedia movement to build its own social network service?
In the "2017 Movement strategy” we state: “By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge”. If we consider discussions and information shared on social network services to be “knowledge”, I think we should have a role in here too.
We have 33 million registered users and fulfil all the requirements of being a “fair service”. A minimum list of features to make Wikimedia Social would be:
(1) Status updates
(2) Comments
(3) Likes
(4)Groups
maybe:
(5) Events
I am pretty sure that by integrating this to other Wikimedia services (Commons etc.) we could achieve something awesome.
- Teemu
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)
Hi Everyone,
The next Wikimedia Research Showcase will be live-streamed Wednesday,
August 13 2018 at 11:30 AM (PDT) 18:30 UTC.
YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGPMS4YGDMk
As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. And,
you can watch our past research showcases here.
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#Upcoming_Showcase>
Hope to see you there!
This month's presentations is:
*Quicksilver: Training an ML system to generate draft Wikipedia articles
and Wikidata entries simultaneously*
John Bohannon and Vedant Dharnidharka, Primer
The automatic generation and updating of Wikipedia articles is usually
approached as a multi-document summarization task: Given a set of source
documents containing information about an entity, summarize the entity.
Purely sequence-to-sequence neural models can pull that off, but getting
enough data to train them is a challenge. Wikipedia articles and their
reference documents can be used for training, as was recently done
<https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.10198> by a team at Google AI. But how do you
find new source documents for new entities? And besides having humans read
all of the source documents, how do you fact-check the output? What is
needed is a self-updating knowledge base that learns jointly with a
summarization model, keeping track of data provenance. Lucky for us, the
world’s most comprehensive public encyclopedia is tightly coupled with
Wikidata, the world’s most comprehensive public knowledge base. We have
built a system called Quicksilver uses them both.
Editing via a mailing list is clearly not ideal. I was going to add the missing r to “do not add you own bio”, trivial compared to the licensing issue that Andy mentioned, and typical of the minor edits that I do on Wikipedia and other wikis. But there doesn't seem to be an edit button on www.wikimediafoundation.org. I fear it isn’t a proper wiki. Phabricator may suit some, but in my experience it is not a wiki and definitely not a place that anyone who isn't a programmer would be comfortable returning to.
Can we migrate that site to mediawiki? Or at least in the short term set up an area on Meta for people to propose changes to it?
During the process of fixing the Visual Editor there were project areas setup on Wikipedia for liaison between the Foundation and the community, that worked and bridged some of the gulf between the volunteer community and the Foundation. If the Foundation wants to use phabricator and wordpress to keep a distance between it and the volunteer community it would make sense to maintain such embassies or monitor this list. I hope no one wants to return to the bad old days of a few years ago when the Foundation appeared to be more responsive to criticism on badsites than from the volunteer community.
~~~~
On 11 August 2018 at 23:19, a b <cheeseyapacman(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 12, 2018 at 5:50 AM, Andy Mabbett <andy(a)pigsonthewing.org.uk>
> wrote:
[Two outstanding issues with the new website]
> Please file the relevant tasks in phabricator to enable better tracking of
> issues compared to on the mailing list:
Thank you; no.
--
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk