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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Inaugural Quarto news, in brief :
Finished HTML newsletters are available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, and Chinese. We have good partial translations in Arabic and Korean, and the founder's letter was also translated into Dutch, Kannada, and Finnish. Please distribute links to the appropriate newsletter when explaining Wikimedia in other languages.
Finished newsletters online : http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Quarto Partial newsletter translations : see the language-list at the top of http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WQ/1/En:
REMINDERS: * There is a separate low-traffic mailing list for people interested in working on the newsletter (quarto-l) and another for translation of this and other project-wide content (translators-l)
* There are sign-up lists for people who want PDF or print versions of the newsletter http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WQ
* We interviewed Larry Lessig and Brad Fitzpatrick for the second newsletter. Who to interview next is still up in the air. Please add to the list of suggested interviewees here : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia Quarto/Interviews
* Letters to the editor and content submissions (of clever images, quotes, or articles about local projects) can be sent to : newsletter@wikimedia.org
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Aurevilly did some magnificent work on the cover, and produced something both beautiful and easy to internationalize, capturing the joyful spirit of this past year. It still gives me pleasure every time I see it, and that is probably how I will always remember The Year Before The Year Of The Wiki. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Image:Newsletter_1_Cover_FR_800px.png
I was also regularly surprised by the enthusiastic body of translators, who invested more time into the newsletter production than anyone else. Aphaia in particular has devoted herself to translation and helping others do the same, and is now helping with much of the development of the second newsletter. Most recently, hpnadig has hacked out a Kannada translation of the first newsletter, and is excited about using it to teach people in India about Wikipedia.
More recently, the number of active translators for Translation of the Week has grown to include 30 languages; I hope there will be letters, project reports, and other content submissions from each of those languages in the future.
Glad tidings to all, +sj+
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org