Hi all,
I'd like to say a few words regarding our brand new newsletter.
For those who missed the fun, many contributors have been working in the past few weeks on our first global newsletter.
Please, see http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Quarto/0409/En.
This is the english version, but 5 versions are already finished * english * french * japanese * polish * chinese
and several others are near completion and hopefully will be done in the next few days/weeks : Ar: De: Es: Fi: It: and Sv:
The newsletter idea was several times mentionned last summer on meta. In particular, Angela and I thought it could be sent to members of the Foundation. A few weeks ago Jimbo also mentionned he would like to find a way to better communicate his thoughts and points of view to the whole community. He pointed out that his communication was limited by the language barrier.
I then suggested we do a quarterly letter to inform people of Jimbo and the board thoughts and activities, as well as report what has been going on in the global community.
Improving the communication within the community and increasing the visibility of the Foundation activity to contributors, to readers and to donators is very important. I think this newsletter is one of those steps in this direction.
We also wished that this first quaterly letter coincide both with the 1.000.000 Wikipedia articles announcement and the 1st trimester of activity of Angela and I. But the problem was very very short delays !!! And naturally a huge amount of work to provide. Not only huge, but definitly requiring a lot of coordination.
I asked Sj if he could be the coordinator of the newsletter. I was sure he would do a very good job and I knew he would love it ;-)
I am extremely glad I did ask him, and he accepted, because I think Sj made a wonderful job and I would really like to issue a special thank you note to him for making this dream come true. I think he has been devoting many hours on it, with optimism and cheerful mood. A hand of iron in velvet gloves. I hope he is very proud because he should be :-)
This newsletter has been set up in an incredible short time (resulting in a few overlappings between writing and translating, sorry about that). Its great design was made by Villy, who probably also dedicated a month wikipedia-time on it. Dozens of different people have been contributing to its content; dozen of editors from many different languages have been contributing to its translation. We had a very nice and interesting interview from Ward. Many editors also helped proofreading, typo correcting, frame fixing etc... May they all be thanked.
5 versions are currently final, and have been transferred to the wikimediafoundation website and will be advertised on the local projects. There is still some work on them to do. More editors are still working on the other versions and I guess we will end up withabout 10 fully translated versions which is really great. Next steps will be to have all of them adequately set on the foundation website, made visible on projects, and slowly to work on a pdf or print version.
In all cases, I hope all those who worked on it had pleasure to do so, and feel proud of the result. I really thank all of you; it gave me a very warm feeling to see we could so well and so quickly build up such a common project (of course, I should not feel surprised by this, but... still... even after nearly 3 years on wikipedia, I am still regularly amazed :-)). I think it was an important thing to do, and among other reasons, I think it was a great way to have editors from many languages working together on a common global project. I also hope it will help smaller projects to feel more involved and drain more people to get interested in meta activities.
There are some flaws in the letter naturally, I hope readers will forgive us. There will be some feedback both on the letter or on its editorial organisation, or on the content itself to provide. Please do not hesitate to give us your feedback. Perhaps on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Quarto#Feedback, so we can have an even better letter in 3 months.
Anthere
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